[Boston-editorial] feature on Gentrification in JP

Pete Stidman pstidman at yahoo.com
Tue Apr 5 15:31:18 PDT 2005


Whoa- hold on there Matt.  Thanks for not taking this down.  
 
If you notice in the comments there is someone who explains the context that was originally left out.  I think maybe because you are not living in JP you do not know how HUGE this thing is for people there.  (for emphasis)  It's really huge.  really really.  biggest thing pulling groups together in that area right now.  5 comments in one hour should tell you something.  and the date is urgent.  this maybe last chance saloon for it.  If you took it down or if we took it down, it would really ruin us in alot of peoples eyes.  if we didn't put it up same thing.  
 
Second- The guy in question is a public figure.  He is bidding on a public project.  He is fair game for this sort of thing.  If you are bidding on public property people get to know who you are and they get a way to contact you.  
 
Were not talking about some dope grinding away on a PC in a closet.  Were talking about a multi-millionaire developer who affects the lives of tens of thousands of people everytime he moves.  
 
Please don't touch this thing.  
 
and please, relax a little.  These are our friends.
 
-pete
 
 


Matthew Williams <mw21 at mindspring.com> wrote:
Hello all --

I'm writing because I'm concerned about the most recent posting Pete 
centered: http://boston.indymedia.org/feature/display/34778/index.php 

One concern is that it's just an announcement--as one reader complains, 
there's not really a lot of context. If it were an announcement with 
more information, I would be cool with centering it, but as it is now, 
it's not a news article and it's not commentary. I think we've agreed 
in the past we don't want to center announcements because that involves 
picking and choosing which campaigns to support.

If that was the only issue, I probably wouldn't be posting this though.

My bigger issue is that we've centered something that includes 
someone's home phone number and urges people to call him. Yes, it urges 
people to be cordial, but we know perfectly well plenty of people won't 
be cordial. It's one thing if this sort of announcement is in the 
newswire--it's another if it's in the features column, which at least 
implies we support such actions. I have no interest in getting into a 
debate if such actions are appropriate, but I'm concerned about what 
the possible consequences are if it seems like we're endorsing a call 
to action which might result in someone being verbally harassed. Is 
that really a position we want to put ourselves in?

I'd also point out that when people have posted Flipside's personal 
information in the past, we've hidden it. The situation is somewhat 
dangerous, since the developer represents a threat to the community and 
Flipside is a relatively harmless (if annoying) crank, but still I 
would think that indicates we agree that we're not eager to publish 
people's personal information without their permission, regardless of 
what we think of them.

-- Matt

_______________________________________________
Boston-editorial mailing list
Boston-editorial at lists.indymedia.org
http://lists.indymedia.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-editorial

		
---------------------------------
Do you Yahoo!?
 Take Yahoo! Mail with you! Get it on your mobile phone.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.indymedia.org/pipermail/boston-editorial/attachments/20050405/ac1d374e/attachment.html


More information about the Boston-editorial mailing list