blue trane's Journal: Anonymized at kuro5hin

My donnalee account was anonymized at kuro5hin. I feel wronged. A guy attacked me, because in his own words he wanted to "troll me off the site", because he didn't "like me very much." (See the irc log where he said this at http://pastie.org/3347977/wrap.) So I defended myself, matching him post for post. He started it, as he admitted; I responded tit-for-tat. Why did I get banned?

In fact why did he get banned? Best would have been to let us sort it out ourselves. If others didn't want to see it, there is a greasemonkey script that hides users. Censorship should be at the client, not the server.

In #kuro5hin.org, a guy with the nick "av" said that no one cared who started it. Why not? I was attacked, and defended myself. The same libertarians that uphold the right to self-defense as a natural right blame me for exercising it.

"av" also said I had fallen into a trap. What was the trap? To respond tit-for-tat? Tit-for-tat has been shown to be the winning strategy in the iterated prisoner's dilemma. Why shouldn't I be able to use it to defend myself?

What was the way out of the trap? To ask that my attacker/harasser (he posted my phone number online, and I received close to 100 txt msgs in the space of a few minutes!) be banned, of course. To go the secret, back-door route and email rusty and try to connect with him so that he would like me and do me a favor and censor the other guy. That's what they wanted me to do, I think. That's what they do, that's the standard way of dealing with harassment.

But I have never been one to take a public fight private, to /msg ops on irc for example. I do not want to 'connect' with authority figures. I do not want to get anyone banned; I prefer to fight my own battles, with words.