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Announcement :: Protest Activity |
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4th of JULY Parade******Mission Accomplished******* |
Current rating: 0 |
by jan kruse
Email: jandurl (nospam) insightbb.com (unverified!) |
04 Jul 2006
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AWARE marches in the *Freedom Celebration* July 4th Parade!
This year the parade theme was: "Broadcasting our Freedoms"!
The parade was a good opportunity to let the public know
that township residents in Urbana/Champaign will be able
to vote November 7 to *Bring the Troops home Now*!
And to *Impeach Bush/Cheney*!
Our theme was defending the Constitution against the White House! |
 4th of JULY Parade******MIssion Accomplished******* |
 4th of JULY Parade******MIssion Accomplished******* |
Many participants Joined AWARE on July 4th in the *Freedom Celebration* Parade!
Friends and strangers alike joined AWARE to march this year. Folks on bikes, on foot, on crutches and even in a wheel chair join the parade and the chants. Some even joining the AWARE group from the crowd that had come to watch.
The chant of "What do we want" was responded to with "Troops HOME NOW!" And The question: "What does democracy look like?" was responded to with "This is what Democracy looks like!"
It was a great opportunity to express our *Freedom of Speech* and call for Bush/Cheney to be Impeached and that the US needs to get out of Iraq!
The AWARE goal was to begin to inform the public that on November 7 voters can vote YES in township Referendums: Out of Iraq and to IMPEACH the war mongers!
Today, AWARE was able to get that message out in the Freedom Celebration July 4th Parade!
Mission Accomplished!
www.anti-war.net |
This work is in the public domain. |
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Re: 4th of JULY Parade******Mission Accomplished******* |
by Carol
cawh (nospam) tds.net (unverified) |
Current rating: 0
04 Jul 2006
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Your entry in the parade was wonderful. Your message is so patriotic. Keep up your important work. I hope next year I can be there to march with you. Thanks, AWARE! |
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Re: 4th of JULY Parade******Mission Accomplished******* |
by Lucero
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
05 Jul 2006
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I see that the ucimc.org website celebrates its "freedom" this 4th of July by deleting comments that are critical of the AWARE float. This is what "democracy" looks like. |
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Re: 4th of JULY Parade******Mission Accomplished******* |
by wayward
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
05 Jul 2006
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Sorry, Phil. The "Lucero" post has been restored. As far as UCIMC's "censorship", our biggest problem is actually the spambots, not the trolls. There are only three human users whose posts are automatically deleted, and Jack Ryan's one of them. He's basically an annoying "Protest Warrior" type who likes to wind people up. I can't understand why anyone would care what he thinks, but the personal attacks made him irritating enough to merit a ban.
Anyhow, he was busily spraying the board last night (using a bunch of different aliases), and we probably mistook the "Lucero" thing as yet another JR troll. Sorry about that. |
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Concerns About Editing? Use imc-web@ucimc.org |
by ML
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
05 Jul 2006
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First, a slight correction to wayward's count. There are actually four banned personalities here, all with distinct patterns of posting. Just for the record, they are, in order, Bobby Meade, DAN, JR, and Anna. Only the last three have made recent posts.
Like most discussion boards, concerns about editing at UC IMC should be addressed to the editors and not generally hashed out on-line, as such discussions are typically considered off-topic.
More specifically in this case, a long-established tactic of trolling is to make as big a stink about editing as publicly possible. He who shall not be named here is no exception to this rule. And this person is also known to steal the identities of other legitimate users.
But another issue with IMC is that we have a comittment to open publishing, thus we make a practice of not recording IP addresses or other identifying info of posters, which would otherwise make it very easy to identify and screen out abusive users. When we make decisions to ban trolls, it is actually one that bans a pattern of behavior. Obviously, the troll can merely change their behavior in order continue to post and we really don't care. What is important is that a pattern of behavior that has been judged abusive goes away. And it does.
Granted, the system is not perfect, but it both preserves anonymity -- a fundamental principle of Indymedia -- as well as deals with a pattern of repeated abuse. True, in a handful of cases -- I believe this is the third one regarding this troll's pattern in the roughly two years since they were banned -- a mistake can be made and a legitimate post could be accidentally hidden. However, in each case, the mistake was quickly corrected when called to our attention. In the meantime, literally thousands of abusive posts by a rather obsessed troll do not appear.
Let's consider the atmosphere of the website if we simply decided to allow trolls free reign again. In this case, since it was an article written by a member of AWARE, a feature, and one that was critical of US policy in Iraq, we can be certain that a certain troll will -- quite uselessly -- post repeated obonoxious, racist, sexist, and generally pointless to encouraging any real dialogue or discussion -- which is why he got the boot in the first place.
In this case, by the time you made your comment, this amounted to 14 hidden comments in less than 24 hours.
Also please note that in nearly every case, after such a comment is sent to the Deleted file, another comment will usually be generated by the editor that hid the troll comment. There are 6 of those posts here before your comment, so yes, there are 20 posts here that have gone to the Delted files, where they are not publicly visible. It is these additional, empty posts that you are seeing in the Hidden files section, which is publicly visible. Due to a glitch in our now very long in the tooth version of the server software, when a comment is Deleted -- as in these cases -- it is not really hidden until someone else makes a comment below it.
This then often results in people engaging in writing what they think is a comment that will generate a serious dialogue, only to see the comment they respond to -- which has already been hidden, but not yet gone away -- magically disappear when their comment to it is posted. To avoid having this happen, the editor thus needs to post after a deleted comment what is essentially an empty comment in order to really hide it.
I generally take care of troll issues and only found out this evening that one of the other editors was not aware of this requirement when hiding troll droppings. This has no doubt resulted in some comments deleted as the troll's mysteriously disappearing after you commented on them. It also results in what appear to be literally thousands of empty comments in the Hidden files from the cleaing up required after troll comments that went to the Deleted files. It is more work to handle things in this way, but we do it to maintain adherence to Indymedia principles while not making it a comfortable place for trolls.
One sure way to eliminate this Hidden-but-not-quite-invisible-yet troll comment problem would be to simply completely purge all such comments. But then the very rare mistake coould not be corrected.
I can assure you that thoughtful critical comments are still found here, but the numerous short and snippy gratuitous insults and cheap shots posted by the troll are not. I would be more than happy to go over in detail with you offline the ways in which troll comments are sorted from those that are not. While not perfect, the methods employed attain an accuracy of better than 99.99% in practice.
Finally, like many things that are a part of the existing consensus at UC IMC, they typically have long histories that newer members may not be aware of. I have only touched on a little of the whole story here, but I don't have time to go over it all in print right now. It is also the case with the rather cranky version of software we use, that the whole process if not as transparent and obvious as we'd wish it to be due to the limitations of the software.
However, the place to have discussions about website editing is on the imc-web (at) ucimc.org list.
In the meantime, without further adieu I return us now to the discussion about the AWARE 4th of July float. |
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Re: 4th of JULY Parade******Mission Accomplished******* |
by Ricky Baldwin
baldwinricky (nospam) yahoo.com (unverified) |
Current rating: 0
07 Jul 2006
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Great pictures, folks!!! And great work!!!
Sorry I wasn't around to help more when you were putting it together, but you obviously didn't need me :-)
Congratulations on a job well done. |
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Re: 4th of JULY Parade******Mission Accomplished******* |
by Lucero
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
14 Jul 2006
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No explanation needed. I just think it interesting that the hard won rights for an independent media seem to only apply to those that agree with you. |
