Yesterday, the St. Augustine Record printed an article about websites no longer permiting anonymous coments. Today, after an agonizing reappraisal, the Record announced that it is joining the trend.
Effective November 3, 2013, abusive "Anonymice" will be banned from the St. Augustine Record website. From that day forward, readers will have to subscribe and use their real names.
Great news. For too long, anonymous comments on local websites, including the Record, were used to make murder threats, threats of violence, threats of blacklisting, threats of unionbusting, threats of Gay-bashing, threats to run people out of town, threats of every kind. Personal privacy was invaded. Lies were told. Lashon hara was dished out. All of it was anonymous, by the Anonymice.
For too long, anonymous Anonymice comments were used to chill, coerce and restrain protected activity.
For too long, hick hacks used NICs to attack critics of misfeasance, malfeasance and nonfeasance, waste, fraud, abuse, pollution, no-bid contracts, racism, sexism and homophobia.
The hick hacks and their NICs will evidently be doing it up until the deadline, because today's printed Record thoughtlessly reprints a couple of their most recent angry attacks, without their NICs without their misspellings and without their revealing middle-of-the-night time stamps.
Favored with Anonymice attacks in today's print version of the record: Commissioner Leanna Freeman and I (anonymously told to "dummy up") and B.J. Kalaidi.
I wear the Anonymice' scorn as a badge of honor.
I can't speak for Commissioner Freeman or Ms. Kalaidi.
These sorry Anonymice commenters were once treated as Vox Populi by politicians, but then they finally realized they were Vox Rex -- the voice of hick hacks and the KKK, e.g., angry at our revealing the former City Manager's illegal dumping and angry in opposition to our local Gay Pride group asking to place Rainbow Flags on our Bridge of Lions (32 pages of homophobic hatred on Talk of the Town 2005-2006).
As LBJ said, "We SHALL overcome." We have. On June 7, 2005, United Sates District Judge Henry Lee Adams, Jr. ordered the Rainbow Flags to fly. The Rainbow flags are likely coming back, and we've passed a Fair Housing ordinance in the City of St. Augustine covering sexual orientation, and St. Augustine has become a compassionae City, the first in Florida and the twentieth on this planet.
Thanks to the Record for appreciating today that anonymous murder threats against government officials and citizens are no way to run a newspaper.
Thanks to the law firm of Holland & Knight for presumably giving good legal advice, leading the Record to abandon its defense of the indefensible -- death threats July 24, 2013 at 6 AM, directed against our City officals over not canceling Mumford & Sons. The poster should have been arrested for incitement of a crime -- stating that the City officials should be "lined up and shot" in the Slave Market Square.
Let the Anonymice rant and rave in their KKK Klaverns.
They no longer have a forum in the St. Augustine Record for anonymous threatening hate speech. This will help make St. Augustine a more democratic and civilized place.
Three cheers for the St. Augustine Record.
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