wrote in message
ps.com...
Sad, isn't it?

Certainly you folks could find a non-felon whose sexual preferences run
to consenting *adults* to undermine USCF on your behalf....

Sir, as someone immune to any sense of what role they are playing in this
scenario, I think you are rather more interested in this subject than is
Sloan himself. You will have noted a certain resistance to view things your
way by Parr and self, and in the same indifferent attention to what we have
actually written, prefer to imagine and suspect.

For myself, I see that you reserve your opinion to discussing any standard
of behavior with me, any 'ethic', as we say, either now or when you held a
USCF office. Also for myself, and should I have to guess about this, absent
any comment of your own, I would think your reason for not voting for any
standard is that you might not obtain to it yourself.

Instead you take a symptom, and suggest that by eradicating it you will have
solved something. How naive! Naive in both a personal sense, and also to
what rather more serious people take as real threats to women and children
in this country.

So while you are content to suppose away like this; (which includes some
supposition that I know what is on Sloan's site or have some reason to visit
it, distinct from being able to assess his character [and yours!] from very
available behaviors practically everywhere else,) I wonder how sincere you
actually are?

If it were me writing this way, I would want his work to be illegal,
therefore prosecuting it under the law of the land, and I would also want
his past behavior assessed in context - that it, that he stole his own
daughter from a situation he, rightly or wrongly, thought unhealthy.
Assuming the very worst in that case, that her situation did not warrant
legal rebuke; even so, Sloan suffered the penalty already.

NOW - I am not in the personal habit of renting 100 porn videos at the local
video outlet and then, having 'absorbed' such material, and on an on-going
basis to 'keep in touch with contemporary debauchery', renting a new one
every day - for the purposes of then setting up a picket outside the store
so that people who perhaps don't know what's going on in there can then be
aware that while they might be getting Sound of Music out yet again, the
story also has titles like 'bad-barby and the beach-bums.'

In fact, despite my own regret that this material is available over the
counter, my own enthusiasm to repress it might actually advertise the very
thing I most dislike, and even more, people will think I am a prig, since it
is not illegal to sell soft-porn or even hard-porn anywhere in any town in
the United States of America - and the same junk is on late-night TV.

Of course, I could go to the school board and say we should not allow the
proprietors of these stores to sit on committees that have to do with
perpetuating negative and repressive stereo types, based on immature male
adolescent fantasies enacted by grown-ups, and also that we should refuse
money for scholarships from the cable company who show the same soft-porn,
combined with a bit of schadenfreude treatment of women and children.

I would expect a lively constitutional debate - where freedom of speech
would contend with security of those offended. In fact I did sit on a local
board in this county which discussed such affairs, and which had directly to
do with those who prey on children, with drugs sex and varieties of
allurements to get some control over them.

But if USCF were to conduct this conversation [and I asked them to] then I
imagine that they would have issued some sort of standard; a public
statement which supercedes the law of the land, which is the /lowest/ level
of socially acceptable behavior, and instead adopt an ethical basis which
would represent the /optimal/ standard of behavior.

And I did just this! Including sending materials to the board and also
discussing it for more than an hour on the phone with the Ex. Dir.

AFAIK, you did nothing, even though at the time you ran a USCF committee.
USCF also did nothing to avert any perceived or real current embarrassments.
They did not even /acknowledge/ my complaints to them!

Instead you wish to eliminate a symptom of juvenilia, and by scapegoating
only that, absolved yourself from any effort or even culpability in a
certain kind of obsessionalism which reminds me of quite literal witch-hunts
in Elizabethan times, as if the witches were utterly evil, and those who
wished to burn them alive were jolly saint-like people.

I am stating that 'your issue' is a societal one, and a resentment of
laissez-faire in public mores. If you are sincere in anything you write that
has to benefit those currently insulted, then I would encourage a deeper to
those who /actually/ affront women and children, who are very very often,
not obvious persons at all, and the result of removing surface symptoms is
to drive an issue back underground

- RATHER THAN -

the more apposite response of stating that these affronts are not only
substantial in our society, but they are on the increase, and increasingly
devious - and therefore, we need to adopt higher than minimum standards in
our institutions for those who would have anything to do with
administrations of women and children. This has already happened in women's
prisons in the USA, which still rank very high in the world - and the
Christian Science Monitor made the very unwelcome report that Amnesty
International put USA into the same list as, eg, the Kalmyk republik and
Iraq.

We cannot change the law of the land, but we can control those would join
our institutions to require a standard of our liking. During your tenure at
USCF you did nothing to air such a standard, and neither was the board at
all responsive to the issue.

That then, is my challenge, otherwise you certainly do not speak for those
concerned for affronts to women and children in chess - since when you could
do something, you did not. My challenge is to be less trite, and attend to
what needs be done, and as a basis of any standard I suggest that the
perspective of those most offended constituencies are the primary ones -
which means at the very least consulting with them to assess the extent of
the issues, as well as listening to their own sense of remedies. This, I
submit, would be sincere, and nothing less is other than hot air.

Phil Innes
Vermont