Actually, I have just been informed that tipharet is M. Verbitsky. I didn't understand that. That being the case, given what I have been told about his comments, I have to retract my statement that "he sounds like a real nut". From what I understand of Verbitsky's writing in LiveJournal, it sounds as if it is, yes, quite provocative, but not "nutty" by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, it seems to me that Verbitsky has been a pivotal player in this whole development, and is an important voice in the Russian LJ (now NPJ?) community.

The person I *thought* I was talking about is someone else -- the original poster of the "Kill a NATO person" comment. I don't know the name. As I understand Verbitsky (tipharet) was repeating this text from the previous person (whose name I don't know). Now, I have not read his journal either (the person whose name I don't know) -- I can barely read Russian -- but all the rest of my comments stand.

I think that there is a very important place in this world for provocateurs, who seek to test every boundary and offend every sensibility. This is actually a very critical function in a healthy society. You may think that testing limits is simply about "being difficult" or trying to get attention in some simplistic way, but I don't agree. Testing limits is how we decide whether those limits are legitimate. Their legitimacy for a particular society may change over time, so they need to be tested frequently. Testing limits is how we discover whether what we *think* are the limits are really the ones in force. Sometimes we find that the actual rules in play are very different from those that are proclaimed, and this is important information that can largely be determined only by testing the limits.

Think of it. This is how the law functions as well. We don't really know what a law means until it is tested. Laws are very often written badly, or are as written detrimental to society in whole or in part, but until we have actual cases to test them, we don't know whether they really work. A good society of law needs to know whether its laws actually work. This is an *essential* feature of democracy.

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Thanks.
I just wanted to point out that I corrected
the slogan a bit when I joined the action: from
"Kill NATO-er" (which might constitute "hate speech"
or not) to "kill NATO", which is a purely political
statement.

The distinction was lost on Abuse Team, of course,
since they are not Russian speakers, in fact
they (apparently) use some translator program,
which mangles the meaning quite badly.
The rest is history.

All the best
Misha

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