well, mr anonymous contributor (or is it ayouze? - these postings seem to be funnily linked): you have nicely laid bare the weaknesses of what imcuk tried to achieve with the ongoing editorial policy.

pity only that you think you need defamatory language for this, and that you have hijacked the open posting system instead of asking the collective at least ONCE directly. i know this as i am one of the imcuk'ers, even though i'm writing this on personal terms. your hijacking of the wire is EXACTLY the reason why i personally think editing the wire is important. i'm definitely not interested in your way of dealing with this whole censorship issue. it seems that you are now bombarding the wire with tests to see where imcuk ideologically stands. i can't formulate a policy for imcuk and i'm not even interested in it. i am more interested in a 'life' report of an action than in endless ideological rants about how bad capitalism is. concerning your paranoia with imcuk'ers being in the swp, or at least blairistas (i didn't really understand from your postings what you actually think is worse): i can assure you that in the imcuk group i don't know of a single person who has any party book, and neither sympathies for any of these crap organisations. and we were all disgusted that livingston suddenly denounced the M1 protests to save himself a few votes.

but it seems you are successful in your tactics of forcing us to accept your monologues - i personally think your postings should stay as long as we haven't got a discussion forum yet on the site, even if i think that your methods are revolting. but not everybody in our collective agrees with this - the imcuk group is a far more fluid collective than you think. we are in discussions, and nothing is final here.

i have to admit that in our aim to focus on reports we haven't provided you with an alternative to discuss, and we have been inconsistent in how things were formulated on the site. i wish we had an open posting system for discussions as well: then we could easier argue to have the other wire focussed on reports.

similarly, it was probably an error to remove the link to the story admin page, browse to  http://uk.indymedia.org/display.php3?led=y. the link is restored now (don't panic yet, it's not just in this posting but prominently in the 'editorial guidelines'.) the reason was that the majority of us thought it was a possible security risk, and we removed it without realising that we robbed ourselves of a great level of transparency. the email group we set up doesn't really work, true. but i still think we should in the end come up with a page where everybody can see at a glance what has been removed from the top level, without seeing a password field.

but i DO think that it's OK to remove postings. why should the 'blair's third way' posting appear on the prague and the belgian site? o my god, yeah, because lots of reformists on the continent see in this crypto-thatcherite a figure to follow. i agree. but why then not actually posting an item which makes that issue more country-specific? i think the main reason that this happened is mr ayouze's frustration. i honestly think that postings should have some regional or local context. similarly: why should a smokey bear picnic APPEAL for 13 august be posted on the atlanta site ON 13 august? I think that's crap, and an abuse of the trust the indymedia's have by opening a lot of sites for open posting.

in disgust,

andi

See reply under 'Kafka-esque' heading.
All our articles were legitimate and relevant. none were gratuitious or false, and we are extremely diappointed in you.

what is all this crap about ken the swp and labor party?

forget them. it's not where it's at.