In Praise -- and Defense -- of Jack White

[Bill Miller]

Gosh

Let us hope you are also using the word "bullied" as a metaphor for perhaps "moderated"

Andy,

The most ridiculous part of all of this is that these select few individuals who find it appropriate to use 'F' words and other swear words on a forum known to be used by under-aged students whose parents may still carry at the very least a slight standard of morality in determining what is and what is not appropriate for their children to hear and read ..... these same people would not dare go into a church or a court of law and try and pull this nonsense. Do these same people ever wonder why the comic strips in the daily press will substitute letters with symbols when trying to make it appear that their cartoon character is cutting loose with some graphic expletives rather than just spelling them out???

It's a sad day when those who claim to be intelligent enough to want to learn the truth about JFK's assassination are showing the world that they aren't even smart enough to know why using some words on a public forum seen by minors is wrong.

Bill Miller

[Guest]

Gosh

Let us hope you are also using the word "bullied" as a metaphor for perhaps "moderated"

Andy,

The most ridiculous part of all of this is that these select few individuals who find it appropriate to use 'F' words and other swear words on a forum known to be used by under-aged students whose parents may still carry at the very least a slight standard of morality in determining what is and what is not appropriate for their children to hear and read ..... these same people would not dare go into a church or a court of law and try and pull this nonsense. Do these same people ever wonder why the comic strips in the daily press will substitute letters with symbols when trying to make it appear that their cartoon character is cutting loose with some graphic expletives rather than just spelling them out???

It's a sad day when those who claim to be intelligent enough to want to learn the truth about JFK's assassination are showing the world that they aren't even smart enough to know why using some words on a public forum seen by minors is wrong.

Bill Miller

It is worrying isn't it.

In the beginning I used this forum extensively with my students. Unfortunately it is becoming increasingly difficult to do so.

Incidentally I have had to delete Mr Drago's latest abberation for exactly this reason.

[Terry Mauro]

I just received this e-mail from Jack and I thought his friends here might be interested in reading it ... I am posting this with his permission .

Duane...Thanks for all your help.

Yesterday about this time, our nephew Mark Cannon was killed

in Afghanistan in Bush's war. Partly responsible are those

on the forum who fight exposure of the official 911 story. The irony

is that Mark was a compassionate Navy medic who was there to save

lives. Thanks.

Jack

PS...I am now totally blocked from posting on the forum.

****************************************************************

"The irony is that Mark was a compassionate Navy medic who was there to save

lives."

My belated and heartfelt condolences go out to Jack White and his family for the horrendous loss of Mark. Dying in the line of duty while trying to save the lives of those unwittingly caught up in a war of deceit and mendacity. A war, in which the military service recruitment T.V. commercials would like you to believe, promise jobs to these servicemen whose prospects of such show little in the way of actual realization once off the battlefield and out of the militarized zones.

Oh, what a tangled web we weave in the name of the United States, overseas...

Thank you, Duane.

[Ashton Gray]

I admit I find this quite amazing.

On this point, we are in consummate agreement. It will be a fleeting, if shining, moment...

Jack was taken to task over ONE particular claim. It was stated over and over that admitting error in this one claim had no effect on his other studies or claims. Each time Jack said that we (because more than one forum member posted images in response to this) were not following the conditions correctly, we ensured that the photographs were taken under the conditions he specified. he changed the condition, and we produced new images.

Each time it was shown that Jack was wrong. He was given several opportunities to admit this error - and prove that his famous quote was indeed true. He chose not to, despite the overwhelming evidence that he was wrong in this particular claim.

You know, I've been around a lot of rhetorical blocks in my too-many years, but I have to say that this stands among the most specious, sophistic apologias I've had the bad fortune to meet. And that alone is "quite amazing."

The wonder is that such a gossamer gown would be worn to strut a such misshapen wretch of an argument. It would be obvious to even the most obtuse that if you had, in fact, successfully "shown that Jack was wrong," you would not have wasted a single syllable trying to get Jack to "admit" anything.

Speaking in your own defense, you indict and convict yourself by confession of attacking the man instead of trying to seek and demonstrate truth. You lay your own motives embarrassingly bare.

You should recuse yourself as a "moderator" of anything.

Jack's little martyr performance is not going to stop me from doing my job as a moderator.

Principles should.

Ashton Gray

[Ashton Gray]

So, Jack will be back... .

Good. It's disappointing to see how his detractors have used his absence and this thread as an opportunity to denigrate him.

I praise him for his work, which has advanced investigation and analysis immeasurably on several important fronts. His work has invited and inspired generations to inspect and question "official" lines of propaganda. No matter how many detractors he has, they will never measure up to a thousandth of the people who have been motivated by his work and independent thinking.

That is his legacy, and it will outlive his every critic.

Ashton Gray

[Ashton Gray]

I have been a member of this forum for a number of years and used to

contribute to it regularly. After all, it's the "Education Forum", and I

am an educator. Over the past few months, however, I've done so less and

less. I check in now and then and encounter little gems like John S's

recent posting about Karl Brandt and the Nuremberg Trials, but more and

more, I find that there is little to interest me, and little, indeed,

that can even loosely be seen as being "educational". Mr White is quite

correct in claiming that the forum has been taken over -- but not by

imaginary "agents provocateurs". It's been taken over by people with

little or no interest in education but rather a rather morbid obsession

with conspiracy theories. I'm quite happy to believe that there was

something a bit odd about the investigation into JFK's assassination.

Perhaps there was even a conspiracy. But the conspiracies which have

been alluded to here over the past couple of years included:

No one ever went to the Moon

Darwin was a hoax

Hurricane Katerina was caused by a secret government program to divert

bad weather to black areas Various 1960s pop singers were assassinated

in a darkly hidden government conspiracy Someone is spraying deadly

chemicals over parts of the USA The tsunami was in fact caused by an

atomic device planted on the seabed by Mossad agents

911 was clearly a CIA/FBI plot

The recent terror attack in Scotland was the work of a secret government

agency etc, etc

I shouldn't care to interpret your lamentations too broadly, so please correct me if I'm in error, but the only conclusion I can infer from your disquisition is that you prefer that this education forum restrict itself to discussion of the official government conspiracy theories, e.g.:

A beturbaned cripple holed up in a cave half a world away exercised uncanny powers of control and financing that were entirely invisible to all the governments and intelligence agencies of the world, and thereby induced 19 suicide terrorists to carry out a complex and ingenious, if heinous, plot to hijack four American passenger planes at the same time—using box cutters—to attack and destroy the largest and most important centers of commerce in the largest city of the most powerful nation in the world, and also (while you're up) to launch an attack on the very military headquarters of the most powerful nation in the world, situated in the most heavily protected city in the world. According to this government-generated conspiracy theory, three steel-framed buildings accommodatingly pancaked as a result of fire—the only such buildings in history ever to have accomplished such a feat.

So is it, in fact, your position that conspiracy theories are fine to discuss, but only if they are the ones that were generated by a properly constituted government, and that mere citizens should not question such comical and outré fictions, but, contrariwise, limit their discussion to praise and confirmation of those official conspiracy theories?

Ashton Gray

Edited October 8, 2007 by Ashton Gray

[Bill Miller]

I praise him for his work, which has advanced investigation and analysis immeasurably on several important fronts. His work has invited and inspired generations to inspect and question "official" lines of propaganda.

I don't think that it was Jack's work that he was moderated for. I wonder why that point keeps getting lost even after it has been repeatedly said over and over again.

Bill Miller

[Mike Tribe]

I have been a member of this forum for a number of years and used to

contribute to it regularly. After all, it's the "Education Forum", and I

am an educator. Over the past few months, however, I've done so less and

less. I check in now and then and encounter little gems like John S's

recent posting about Karl Brandt and the Nuremberg Trials, but more and

more, I find that there is little to interest me, and little, indeed,

that can even loosely be seen as being "educational". Mr White is quite

correct in claiming that the forum has been taken over -- but not by

imaginary "agents provocateurs". It's been taken over by people with

little or no interest in education but rather a rather morbid obsession

with conspiracy theories. I'm quite happy to believe that there was

something a bit odd about the investigation into JFK's assassination.

Perhaps there was even a conspiracy. But the conspiracies which have

been alluded to here over the past couple of years included:

No one ever went to the Moon

Darwin was a hoax

Hurricane Katerina was caused by a secret government program to divert

bad weather to black areas Various 1960s pop singers were assassinated

in a darkly hidden government conspiracy Someone is spraying deadly

chemicals over parts of the USA The tsunami was in fact caused by an

atomic device planted on the seabed by Mossad agents

911 was clearly a CIA/FBI plot

The recent terror attack in Scotland was the work of a secret government

agency etc, etc

I shouldn't care to interpret your lamentations too broadly, so please correct me if I'm in error, but the only conclusion I can infer from your disquisition is that you prefer that this education forum restrict itself to discussion of the official government conspiracy theories, e.g.:

A beturbaned cripple holed up in a cave half a world away exercised uncanny powers of control and financing that were entirely invisible to all the governments and intelligence agencies of the world, and thereby induced 19 suicide terrorists to carry out a complex and ingenious, if heinous, plot to hijack four American passenger planes at the same time—using box cutters—to attack and destroy the largest and most important centers of commerce in the largest city of the most powerful nation in the world, and also (while you're up) to launch an attack on the very military headquarters of the most powerful nation in the world, situated in the most heavily protected city in the world. According to this government-generated conspiracy theory, three steel-framed buildings accommodatingly pancaked as a result of fire—the only such buildings in history ever to have accomplished such a feat.

So is it, in fact, your position that conspiracy theories are fine to discuss, but only if they are the ones that were generated by a properly constituted government, and that mere citizens should not question such comical and outré fictions, but, contrariwise, limit their discussion to praise and confirmation of those official conspiracy theories?

Ashton Gray

I'm afraid you misunderstood the general drift of what I was trying to communicate. My "position", as you put it, is that there should be far less domination of the forum by ANY conspiracy theories, government-sponsored or otherwise. It is abundantly clear that such matters are absorbingly interesting to some, and may even be a legitimate subject for research. However, they are of very limited interest to most educators. At this point, I'm obviously leaving myself open to a strom of abuse from gentlemen such as Mr Drago to the effect that I'm obviously deficient as a teacher in that I don't re-write the entire curriculum to base it solely on the various conspiracies which have dominated the forum over recent years. But the fact remains that most educators are much more interested in the Battle of the Somme, the Nuremberg Trials, Citizenship Education, and so on, than we are in "chem trails" or "faked photos".

As Andy noted in a previous thread, it has become increasingly difficult for teachers to recommend signing up to the forum to students or academic colleagues. Newcomers who DO sign up are immediately exposed to what can best be described as paranoid ravings about "agents provocateurs", "CIA agents", etc, etc.

BTW, I have found it very, very difficult to post anything to the forum for the past month. My original post on this subject I had to pass on to an administrator to post for me. Unlike others, though, I put this down to the bloodymindedness of cyberspace rather than to a conspiracy by conspiracists to silence me...

[Ron Ecker]

As Andy noted in a previous thread, it has become increasingly difficult for teachers to recommend signing up to the forum to students or academic colleagues. Newcomers who DO sign up are immediately exposed to what can best be described as paranoid ravings about "agents provocateurs", "CIA agents", etc, etc.

I don't quite understand this. I assume that you are referring to the Political Conspiracies section of the Education Forum with your references to "chem trails," "fake photos," and "paranoid ravings" about CIA agents etc. Isn't the PC section just one small part of the Education Forum? How do whatever ravings may be posted there make it "increasingly difficult" for teachers to recommend the Education Forum to students and colleagues? How are those signing up "immediately exposed" to the PC section, unless they are directed there or somehow happen to know about it?

Let me suggest a simple solution. Warn students and colleagues that there is one section of the forum, having to do with Political Conspiracies, that you would recommend they ignore because in your opinion it's nonsense. You can then recommend the Education Forum to all with a clear conscience.

BTW, I have found it very, very difficult to post anything to the forum for the past month. My original post on this subject I had to pass on to an administrator to post for me. Unlike others, though, I put this down to the bloodymindedness of cyberspace rather than to a conspiracy by conspiracists to silence me...

It's my understanding that part of the software and posting problems experienced by members have to do with the fact that the Education Forum has to deal with attacks by hackers. It has been completely shut down on more than one occasion.

It might not be a conspiracy to silence you in particular, but I think it's a good bet that this recurrent hacking is a conspiracy aimed at silencing the JFK Assassination section of the forum. You might suggest to your students and colleagues that this is one section of the forum that just might be worth checking out, as it may be on to something.

[Guest]

It's my understanding that part of the software and posting problems experienced by members have to do with the fact that the Education Forum has to deal with attacks by hackers. It has been completely shut down on more than one occasion.

It might not be a conspiracy to silence you in particular, but I think it's a good bet that this recurrent hacking is a conspiracy aimed at silencing the JFK Assassination section of the forum. You might suggest to your students and colleagues that this is one section of the forum that just might be worth checking out, as it may be on to something.

As the person best placed to comment I feel I ought to put the record straight. The current technical problems are more to do with the forum being clogged up with massive amounts of member uploads - uploads which John and I are trying to sort through and get under control.

It is true that this forum has been the victim of malicious hacking in the past but it is clear that on no occasion has this had anything to do with the JFK section or its work. Far more menacing than the CIA in fact have proved disgruntled history teachers, LGF (a billious right wing weblog), rival providers and just plain old spammers trying to make a fast buck.... sorry if this does fit peoples vision of the importance of what they are doing but that's just the way it is.

I would agree however that there is some good stuff in the JFK section which may help students with their work. I can only imagine however that serious researchers are pulling their hair out about some of the nonsense which has been going on here.

A great deal of the general conspiracy stuff which clutters up this forum is, as Mike points out, of no educational value whatsoever.

[Tim Gratz]

Andy wrote:

I can only imagine however that serious researchers are pulling their hair out about some of the nonsense which has been going on here.

Heck, some are probably bald by now! Excellent observation, Andy!

Edited October 8, 2007 by Tim Gratz

[John Simkin]

Andy Walker and I set this forum up in December 2003. The original idea was that it would provide a home for educators and students to debate issues. The use of the term home is significant. It was a place where you invited people to have friendly discussions. We expected people to behave as if they were invited guests. Of course, we were aware that discussions would always result in disagreements. However, we thought that people would be able to behave in the same way that they do in university seminars. That is why we insisted in people’s right of freedom of speech. After all, one of the reasons we had been booted off another education forum for expressing opinions that were different from the administrator. We hoped to show students that people could hold very different opinions but could discuss these issues in an academic way. In fact, we planned to use the forum to illustrate how the past is interpreted in different ways (this is part of the UK’s national curriculum for history).

For the first few months we had no problem at all with running the forum in the way we envisaged. Then we had people applying to join the forum who were not teachers or young students. They claimed that they were life-long students who were interested in education and history. They were admitted and behaved in the appropriate manner of a mature student at university. The system continued to work well and the only problem we had during this period was with an extreme right-wing pro-Jewish group based in America (they objected to what they considered to be pro-Arab comments posted on the forum). Their membership was deleted but they continued to cause us problems and made several attempts to bring the forum down. We also had trouble with a Holocaust denier who posted photographs of Andy and myself on his own forum and encouraged supporters to cause as trouble.

However, over time, we did attract other strange individuals who were quick to abuse other members. It seems they had more experience of the Jerry Springer show that a university seminar room. In an attempt to bring an end to this we began to insist that members posted a photograph as an avatar and added a link to their biography in their signature. It was hoped that this would both humanize and validate people’s postings. This seemed to work for a while but it seemed that certain members were determined to abuse other members. When Andy, I and the moderators attempt to control these people, we are then abused. We try putting them on moderation but as soon as they are off, they return to this unacceptable behaviour.

These people tend to work in pairs. When they are told off about their comments, they always say, well the other one started it. As we have told you so many times before retaliation is no defence. If someone abuses you, contact a moderator and they will deal with it.

Although moderators attempt to deal with all these problems, it is an impossible task. As a result, visitors to our forum are provided with a constant stream of abusive arguments.

I have tried for sometime to persuade leading historians, researchers and journalists to join this forum. As you know, I have persuaded a significant number to participate. However, an increasing number have rejected the offer because of the behaviour of some members of the forum. This situation cannot be allowed to continue.

We are not alone in suffering from the problem. For example, I posted Chris Dolmar’s email about the problems he has had with running the American Town Hall forum. He has found the only solution to these people he describes as trolls is something he calls “instant death”: His forum rules includes the following: “Obviously abusive disruption tactics exhibited here (Of which the Admins/Mods here ARE All Too familiar with) will not be tolerated and will simply result in the banning of the offending member(s). Any member(s) banned for violations of the aforementioned guidelines or the Forum Code of Conduct listed below will not be reinstated. While forum members recognize the code of conduct, trolls don't. Once again; To the trolls: - be assured of the instant death policy.”

It has become clear over the last few months that the main offenders are members of other forums. One even went as far as to urge other members to boycott our forum. Others have urged to starting up of rival forums. It seems that their disruptive behaviour is more than just an expression of being psychologically disturbed.

This forum gets a large number of page impressions. One of the reasons for this is that the Spartacus website creates deep links into the forum. Spartacus has over 6 million visitors a month. This is why authors and researchers are keen to make use of the forum. That has obviously created a great deal of jealousy amongst those who run less-popular forums.

I am happy for members of other organizations to use our forum to publicize their activities. For example, the conferences that are taking place in November. However, I will not allow members to try and discredit this forum by their disruptive behaviour.

After a long talk on the phone yesterday, Andy and I have decided to bring in a tougher moderation policy. We will no longer tolerate trolls on this forum. We will initially place these offenders on moderation. After 25 moderated postings we will consider reinstating them. If they are readmitted, any further bad behaviour will result in the deletion of their membership.

It has been drawn to my attention that some members have resorted to posting comments about the way Andy and I run this forum. This includes one member who has followed the example of the Holocaust denier of posting a photograph of me on his own forum and encouraged supporters to cause trouble. His membership has been deleted.

Also, some members have removed the link in their signature to their biography. Others are lacking a photograph. You have a week to correct this. If you do not do so, you will be placed on moderation and your posts will not become visible until you abide by membership rules.

[Tim Gratz]

John wrote:

I have tried for sometime to persuade leading historians, researchers and journalists to join this forum. As you know, I have persuaded a significant number to participate. However, an increasing number have rejected the offer because of the behaviour of some members of the forum. This situation cannot be allowed to continue.

John, I suspect that in addition to the bickering leading journalists and responsible historians would be put off by some of the wackier theories being suggested. e.g. that Greer shot JFK and Jackie never bothered to tell anyone about it. But I do not have a good suggestion how to weed out the chaff without censorship of ideas.

[Ashton Gray]

I have been a member of this forum for a number of years and used to

contribute to it regularly. After all, it's the "Education Forum", and I

am an educator. Over the past few months, however, I've done so less and

less. I check in now and then and encounter little gems like John S's

recent posting about Karl Brandt and the Nuremberg Trials, but more and

more, I find that there is little to interest me, and little, indeed,

that can even loosely be seen as being "educational". Mr White is quite

correct in claiming that the forum has been taken over -- but not by

imaginary "agents provocateurs". It's been taken over by people with

little or no interest in education but rather a rather morbid obsession

with conspiracy theories. I'm quite happy to believe that there was

something a bit odd about the investigation into JFK's assassination.

Perhaps there was even a conspiracy. But the conspiracies which have

been alluded to here over the past couple of years included:

No one ever went to the Moon

Darwin was a hoax

Hurricane Katerina was caused by a secret government program to divert

bad weather to black areas Various 1960s pop singers were assassinated

in a darkly hidden government conspiracy Someone is spraying deadly

chemicals over parts of the USA The tsunami was in fact caused by an

atomic device planted on the seabed by Mossad agents

911 was clearly a CIA/FBI plot

The recent terror attack in Scotland was the work of a secret government

agency etc, etc

I shouldn't care to interpret your lamentations too broadly, so please correct me if I'm in error, but the only conclusion I can infer from your disquisition is that you prefer that this education forum restrict itself to discussion of the official government conspiracy theories, e.g.:

A beturbaned cripple holed up in a cave half a world away exercised uncanny powers of control and financing that were entirely invisible to all the governments and intelligence agencies of the world, and thereby induced 19 suicide terrorists to carry out a complex and ingenious, if heinous, plot to hijack four American passenger planes at the same time—using box cutters—to attack and destroy the largest and most important centers of commerce in the largest city of the most powerful nation in the world, and also (while you're up) to launch an attack on the very military headquarters of the most powerful nation in the world, situated in the most heavily protected city in the world. According to this government-generated conspiracy theory, three steel-framed buildings accommodatingly pancaked as a result of fire—the only such buildings in history ever to have accomplished such a feat.

So is it, in fact, your position that conspiracy theories are fine to discuss, but only if they are the ones that were generated by a properly constituted government, and that mere citizens should not question such comical and outré fictions, but, contrariwise, limit their discussion to praise and confirmation of those official conspiracy theories?

Ashton Gray

I'm afraid you misunderstood the general drift of what I was trying to communicate. My "position", as you put it, is that there should be far less domination of the forum by ANY conspiracy theories, government-sponsored or otherwise. It is abundantly clear that such matters are absorbingly interesting to some, and may even be a legitimate subject for research. However, they are of very limited interest to most educators. At this point, I'm obviously leaving myself open to a strom of abuse from gentlemen such as Mr Drago to the effect that I'm obviously deficient as a teacher in that I don't re-write the entire curriculum to base it solely on the various conspiracies which have dominated the forum over recent years. But the fact remains that most educators are much more interested in the Battle of the Somme, the Nuremberg Trials, Citizenship Education, and so on, than we are in "chem trails" or "faked photos".

All right. I understand that from a teaching standpoint, and there should be not a zephyr of abuse, much less a full-fledged storm, about it.

It does seem to me, though, that Mssrs. Simkin and Walker have done a yeomanlike job of providing a wealth of forum sections and sub-forums where nary a conspiracy rears its hideous head, that they have broken the sections down into perfectly logical groupings, and that they, in their wisdom, have exhibited all due diligence in titling this section "Controversial Issues in History."

Now, short of putting beneath that title in red 72-point type, "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here," I can't seem to conjure up what more they could have done to inculcate in those of delicate and scholarly sensibilities an understanding that we are dealing herein with issues that have not been shaped and molded by the oh-so-creative hands of "historians" and baked in enough classrooms to become hand-painted ceramic figurines to be put up on the dusty knick-knack shelves of the History Department.

BTW, I have found it very, very difficult to post anything to the forum for the past month. My original post on this subject I had to pass on to an administrator to post for me.

Yes, there are technical issues with the way the board has been set up, which have affected more than a few people. The failure or refusal to acknowledge and take effective steps to deal with those certainly has played a part in creating situations like the one that gave rise to this thread.

Ashton

Edited October 8, 2007 by Ashton Gray

[Jack White]

"We will no longer tolerate trolls on this forum."...John Simkin

Let's see.