The St. Augustine Record is restoring its reputation by eliminating the toxic, online comments by the Anonymice, frustrated KKK members and their ilk, spreading lies and hatred and Lashon hora.
The Record today has a column by Publisher Delinda Fogel, where she invites reader participation on an editorial board, and as subject matter experts. She reaffirms that anonymous comments are being abolished. Good news.
Meanwhile, a few of the Anonymice rant. I have enjoyed reading their rather revealing cant on the subject. It seems that no one (other than the late Maureen Ortagus and me) ever commented on the Record's websites using their real names. Women feared posting due to misogyny, but one of the Anonymice has admitted he won't post his sexist opinions any longer (women belong in the kitchen, he writes) because his wife would kill him.
One anonymous commenter posits that if names are posted, posters will be "retaliated agains, e.g., by "employers" for commenting. That's a possibility, in a town where one anonymous business owner, a "Talk of the Town" poster, very publicly posted s/he would fire his or her employees if they talked about forming a union. On the other hand, we need to invoke and update laws against discrimination to make sure that such retaliation is detected, deterred and remedied. As a Compassionate City, we need to how our disapproval of unenlightened employers who would retaliate against employees.
Sociologists write about such devious methods of social control -- I've seen it used with devastating effectiveness in nuclear weapons plant company towns, where workers are afraid to raise concerns. Sociologists write artcles and books about such terroristic tactics of the powerful to maintain their power. So did Stetson Kennedy. Here, the main aim and purpose of anonymous comments is to intimidate progressives and deter First Amendment protected activity. Calling it "free speech" is the "Theater of the Absurd," as the Record has grown to realize.
Quite a few of the anonymous commenters are threatening never to post again if they have to use their real names to post. The Record does not allow anonymouous or fake-name letters to the editor. Publishing anonymous comments attacking protected activity is intimidating, as when (for years) the KKK and its ilk used free bandwith to create a "free fire zone," like in Vietnam, abusing the Record's former Talk of the Town and other local websites, anonymously attacking environmentalists, the homeless, Hispanics, Roman Catholics, Jews, African-Americans, and GLBT people (ironically attacking the very people who founded St. Augustine on September 8, 1565 and had the first Thankgsgiving here).
For years, haters and special interests (including politicians, police and other government officials) used anonymous posts to chill, coerce and intimidate First Amendment protected activity, e.g., working for Environmental Justice and Civil Rights.
Their mean drivel was intended to divide and conquer and to drive away anyone who night ever speak in a public meeting or write a etter to teh editor. Some of their wickedly written thoughts admitted as much, stating that people spoke out on local issues without "being invited." Invited? The "invitation" is in our Constitution, Bill of Rights and Declaration of Independence.
My father machine-gunned Nazis on two continents during Wor;d War II in order to help preserve, protect and defend those rights. No Anonymice will deter me from exercising those rights.
The Anonymice are kind of flattering, in a way, devoting so much energy to heckling those of us who speak our minds. They're insecure hick hacks.
We all wear their scorn as a badge of honor.
Their comments were as illiterate as they were insensitive. I remember once reading that in response to a serious public policy issue that I was "crazy, fat and stupid." For the record: I am not fat!
Our City of St. Augusine is, in Mayor Boles' words, "America's most diverse city and our first divers city." Here in Rainbow City USA, we are good people and there is no overwhelmig desire for anonymous hatred. I know of no one who supportst it.
I reckon that most of the Anonymice might not even live or work in St. Augustine, but live out in Klan Country. They might be writing from under a rock in some KKK Konklave or Klavern in another County, in Live Oak or Palatka or Hastings, Florida, or at some barbed-wire booby-trapped booby-hatch enclave in the Carolinas. Or maybe they are rejected cast members from "One Fell Over the Cuckoo's Nest."
The haters do not reflect our community values here in St. Augustine. They do not show true "Southern hospitality." They are the "Unwelcome Wagon," the People of the Lie, people who hate nearly everyone who is not a White Anglo-Saxon Protesting KKK member (like the two guys who picketed the Obama Inauguration celebration in our Slave Market Square in 2009 -- there were 1000 of us and two of them).
If biogts want to post on the Record's website, let them post under their real names, rather than hiding under an electronic Internet KKK hood of Anonymice anonymity.
The heckler's veto is deeply offensive. It ends soon. Having persisted here for decades, the heckler's veto threat to civility and democracy finally ends on November 3, 2013 at the St. Augustine Record. Good riddance to bad rubbish. Let the hyenas rage.
The heckler's veto is finally being elimnated.
Three cheers for the St. Augustine Record in seeing the light under its new Publisher, Delinda Fogel.
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