FWIW, loads of my comments were deleted by administrators at the time.

I was away for a couple of months while the incident took place and when I returned I actually used your user page to reconstruct most of the missing conversation (with blanks filled from other user pages and an alternate source). Yours was particularly useful because of how prolific you were with quoting those to whom you were replying. I still have ten pages of your user comments stored on my harddrive somewhere. :)

Yes, the acts in question can easily be denoted by the terms "blackmail" and "censorship." And your final sentence is certainly true as well.

To avoid being called a cult, to avoid being a cult, and to avoid doing bad things generally, we should stop the definition debate and focus on whether people's behavior has been appropriate. If connotation conundrums keep you quarreling about terms, pick variables (e.g. "what EY did"=E and "what WFG precommitted to doing, and in fact did"=G) and keep talking.

Right. Bottle. Genie.

There is still a moral sense in which if, after careful thought, I decided that that material should not have been posted, then any posts which resulted solely from my post are in a sense a violation of my desire to not have posted it. Especially if said posts operate under the illusion that my original post was censored rather than retracted.

But in reality such ideas tend to propagate like the imp of the perverse: a gnawing desire to know what the "censored" material is, even if everyone who knows what it is has subsequently decided that they wished they didn't! E.g both me and Nesov have been persuaded (once fully filled in) that this is really nasty stuff and shouldn't be let out. (correct me if I am wrong).

This "imp of the perverse" property is actually part of the reason why the original post is harmful. In a sense, this is an idea-virus which makes people who don't yet have it want to have it, but as soon as they have been exposed to it, they (belatedly) realize they really didn't want to know about it or spread it.

Sigh.