* Yale Daily News Removes Abusive Speech

Letter to the Editor
Yale Daily News

Dear Editor:

For a year or so now as an alumnus (M. Div. ’80) I have been bantering with posters on your board in reaction to a variety of articles published in YDN.

Most of the time my comments have either been ignored or trivialized, which is fine with me. Validation is not my goal.

Today, however, one of your posters (#2 in response to “Spate of Murders Alarms City”) crossed the line with me with his/her comment “Hurry up and croak you washed up mistake.”

Wishing for the death of another person is abusive. It is also disturbing. Your "comment moderation policy" excludes abusive speech.

I believe you owe me an apology.

Paul D. Keane
M.Div.’80

NOTE:

Editor Paul Needham e-mailed me an apology and removed #2's post from the comment board.



Dear Mr. Keane:
Thanks for your note. I'm sorry that the comment you mentioned was posted; that was a technical error, and the comment has now been removed. Thanks again for writing and for reading the News so closely!
My best,
Paul Needham
Editor in Chief





I have mixed feelings about the removal.

I wonder if it should not have stayed in place in its bald indignity with my reply below. Unfortunately, I did not save it to copy and paste here. (Note #3 became # 2 after the removal of the original abusive #2 which now makes my references below to # 2 confusing.)


Spate of murders alarms city
Community fears recent shootings may be related; police mount major raid
Share By Colin Ross
Staff Reporter
Published Wednesday, January 13, 2010

Early Tuesday morning, 45 New Haven police officers and detectives raided dozens of locations across the predominantly black Dixwell and Newhallville neighborhoods. The operation was carefully planned: In the preceding days, New Haven police detectives met with agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation to identify as many targets as possible.
The officers were determined to find the criminals who have murdered at least seven city residents since October — many of them execution-style, with a gunshot to the front or back of the head. The most recent murder occurred Jan. 3, when a...

#1 By Town/Ghetto 5:46a.m. on January 13, 2010

I lived on the border between the ghetto and Yale (Elm and Howe Streets) when I attended Yale and have written several times in my blog at the anger Yale generates in the New Haven community.

So, let me get this straight, now:

We have an institution with a 17 BILLION (not million) dollar endowment, whose main plant is shaped like medieval palaces facing INWARD away from the community, and three blocks away in the Dixwell Avenue area we have a racial ghetto.

Now, naivete of naivete, someone is surprised that the offensive architectural dichotomy (Yale's palaces are like an upraised middle finger of an elite shoved in the face of the dispossessed) generates envy and crime?!

And now, further shock, when the truth of Macbeth is verfied:Blood will have blood they say.

Criminals released from prison (which is a a notoriously racist punishment mill) return to exact retribution on their informers.

"I am in blood stepp'd in so far that to return were as tedious as to go o'er."

Yale will someday have students who are afraid to walk New Haven streets.

I was myself mugged in the parking lot of St. Thomas Moore Church at night when I attended Yale 1976-80. My wallet was taken. It had one dollar in it.

Paul Keane
M.Div.'80


#2 By anonymous 3:19p.m. on January 13, 2010


I think the first poster totally missed the point of the article. Well, maybe not totally. Yes, there is some resentment in New Haven for Yale BUT Black men are killing THEMSELVES...they're not running into the campus and shooting students. This highlights a very sad trend in the Black community of violence against one's own--and yes, it puts Yalies in danger but AGAIN they are not the targets of these crimes. I hope I've been clear...


#3 By Disturbing 4:12p.m. on January 13, 2010

ghet·to (gět'ō)
n. pl. ghet·tos or ghet·toes

A usually poor section of a city inhabited primarily by people of the same race, religion, or social background, often because of discrimination.

# 2 My grandmother lived in New Haven's ghetto on one side of the Green at Elm and State Streets for 20 years from 1940-65 in a third floor walk-up with no hot water.

I lived in New Haven's ghetto on the other side of the Green on Howe Street for 8 years from 1977-85 in an apartment building which had as part of its HUD charter that 80% of the residents must be classified as "poor".

The previous definition fits for both of us despite current politically correct censorship.

UU has nothing to do with me.

The intense anger in #2's post and the wish that a human being might die are disturbing.

PK