Free speech, bad laws, and a gathering storm...
That topic on the USCF Forum has just been Locked by Tim Sawmiller.
Remember that the topic started with debates over the practice by Mr.
Sawmiller of massively deleting postings by forum members.
Here are the last two postings by Brian Mottershead:
The FIDE documents that Rodney is talking about are the photos of the
certificates framed on the apartment wall at her father's place (or
was it somewhere else?) They were for the 1st Melody Amber Blitz and
Rapid World Women's Championships, staged in the early 1990's. The
certificates have the FIDE logo on them, and there is an illegible
signature embossed with what seems to have been a FIDE seal. Nobody
has uncovered any FIDE document which mentions these Melody Amber
tournaments and it is impossible to know what the FIDE seal on these
certificates means. Lots of tournaments call themselves the something-
or-other World Championship, so that means nothing. On the other hand,
most of them don't hand out diplomas that have the FIDE seal on them.
So who knows?
It would help if somebody could find some record of the tournaments.
The Melody Amber events were never repeated, so Polgar can claim that
she is still the Melody Amber Blitz and Rapid World Women's Champion,
I guess. In contrast, the Melody Blindfold and Rapid tournament in
Monaco, which also started the same year, has been held every year
since, and has become a classic tournament. (Nobody thinks that one is
a World Championship.)
These two Melody Amber tournaments, out of the four "World Women's
Championships" Polgar claims, seem very debatable to me. There also
are a few questions about the under-16 championship. Be all that as it
may be, and putting the best possible light on all these tournaments,
it is completely reasonable to question whether it is misleading/false
to claim "four-times World Women's Champion" when three of the four
were not what people generally consider to be *the* overall World
Women's Championship but, at best, specialized championships or youth
championships.
Rodney is entitled to his opinion on all these matters. Other people,
including Sam Sloan, are entitled to their opinions. What seems
extremely dubious to me is for Rodney to insist that his view
represents the indisputable facts and that any other view is so
absolutely false and scurrilous that it must be suppressed as an
unsubstantiated personal attack, using his powers as a moderator.
Brian Mottershead
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