Indy Media Watch

I've removed the ability of users to post anything except for comments (and those may get turned off shortly too).
...
This site is taking up too much of my time and psychic energy. It's time for me to make a clean break and move on to other things. Whatever else it may be this site is no longer an Indymedia because we are no longer allowing open publishing.

Just thought I'd stop by and see how things are going here.

Answer, after minutes and minutes of waiting for the pages to load even with almost no users, it turns out that it's still a joke.

As far as any person could reasonably determine, there are only four people posting on the site who aren't actually the editors. And of those four, half of them, Jordan Thornton ("pilgrim") and Robodranath ("roboroborobo", "Y2J") are plainly four-star headcases who see Zionist agents behind every door and under every bed, who wonder why praising "Main Kampf" or posting Holocaust denial propaganda should bother anyone.

Then there are the many many nyms of Ytzhak/Nour12, the one-man megaphone for Oxymoronic Fundamentalism-Marxism. Ytzhak apparently thinks his job is to flood the newswire; at the moment of writing, of the last ten posts, eight are his. He's certainly not here for any form of interpersonal dialogue; comment to one of his posts, and he'll just delete his post and then repost it, making your comment go away unanswered. It's a cowardly, infantile thing. He does it a lot.

Notice that, like Pilgrim and Roboroborobo, Ytzhak doesn't have any trouble with posting overtly antisemitic Holocaust denial material. See here, for example.

"As a clue to what we are saying, for many years when Poland was under Soviet domination, the Auschwitz Museum there showed a plaque which reminded visitors that "Four Million Jews" had been assasinated there until 1945, thus fueling two-thirds of the Six Million Myth. However, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the ensuing liberation of Poland, that plaque was discreetly removed and replaced by a new one saying that "1.500.000 people " had died there. Where are the Holocaust's Six Million then?"

Got that? "Six Million Myth."

See the response? You can't? That's because Ytzhak did his usual trick for stamping out dissent; he deleted his post and then reposted it.

Now, here's the question -- why does Vancouver Indymedia allow Ytzhak to flood the newswire with this kind of garbage with impunity? Maybe the answer has something to do with this: "Agent Humble" Scott Nelson is also Scott Braithwaite-Nelson (google him); Ytzhak is also Lawrence Ytzhak Braithwaite (you can buy his novel on Amazon for a penny at http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1555835546).

Braithwaite. Braithwaite. What a coincidence!

Anyway, it looks like he's in on the nepotism clause, and that's why different editorial rules apply to him than to anyone else.

And why doesn't overtly antisemitic material get removed? Why, because "Agent Humble" Scott Nelson simply doesn't mind having antisemitic material on his site, as long as -- in the spirit of free speech -- Jews get a chance to complain about it. So that activists who post at VanIndy see their stuff side by side with stuff from a guy who thinks "Mein Kampf" is peachy keen. One from column A, one from column B.
What activist _wouldn't_ want to appear on such a site?

So, when you add it all together, what have you got? Antisemitism- defending editors, three cranks -- one of them enjoying the advantages of nepotism -- and then mj. That's the sum total of Vancouver
Indymedia.

For more background on how this came to pass, see here.

Permalink # posted by Dan @ 5:26 PM | |