Have we covered Kurt Greenbaum of the STL P-D here yet?

If I read that correctly, it sounded like Greenbaum simply had the place where the poster was posting from alerted of the vulgarity he was posting. At that point, that place's IT department went into overdrive to find the poster and when confronted, the poster resigned. What the IT department did in searching for the poster was out of Greenbaum's control, and unless I'm missing something, it was the poster's choice to resign.

I'm all for internet vigilante justice. I think the woman behind the Myspace suicide deserves every nasty thing written about her online and then some. But this just doesn't do it for me. Seems like Greenbaum's getting ripped disproportionate to his role in this. Yes, the appropriate action was to delete the offending posts, and if the posts bothered him that much, have the poster's IP address blocked from the site or at least from posting comments. The general reaction to this just seems over the top though.

 

Sorry, Ben, but you made a blanket indictment of all plains-staters and/or those who vote a straight Republican ticket as prissy busybodies worthy of universal scorn. That may not have been your intention, but that's the way it read.

 

That's what I read.

 

It's not about defending the school employee.

It's about ripping someone who decided to try getting someone fired.

Inexcusable.

 

It's merely an opinion that he tried to get the guy fired -- not a fact. The only fact is that he called the school.

 

What the FUCK do you think the guy was trying to accomplish by calling the school?

Holy fucking Christ.

 

Greenbaum could have been simply trying to get the guy to quit posting 'pussy' on the comments section, not necessarily get him fired. And picking nits, the guy wasn't fired, he resigned -- granted, I don't know if it was under pressure, or if he was confronted about it and in his embarrassment, quit, maybe even against the school's wishes for all I know. But for all Greenbaum knew, the poster's boss could have confronted the poster and said, "Hey, we got a call from the Post-Dispatch about the comments you're posting. Stop it. Now."

That does violate the P-D policy of not revealing the names of posters. And it's a dumb way to handle the situation anyway given that the IP address could have just been blocked, solving the problem. But I just can't muster the indignation for this that I can for, say, the Myspace suicide woman, who deserves every nasty thing to happen to her for the rest of her life, or the videos that pop up occasionally of cops blatantly harassing people. The Myspace woman is a 10 on my indignation meter, the cops anywhere from 6-9, this... a 2 or 3, tops.

 

You seem a little too emotionally involved in this one.