A Threat

Please go to Peoria Pundit to read about threats sent to Jeanette Johnson after she organized Maxime's funeral. Please see comments that follow her post.

Last night I posted to the Peoria Pundit. It was deleted by Bill Dennis who runs the Pundit. Bill deleted another post of mine a while back that talked about connections between people and OSF.

The deleted post is below. A number of anonomyous commenters attacked today after reading this post:

The Anonymous Blogger

My concerns that I have posted on the Peoria Pundit have been the discrimination against Haitian kids who have not been allowed back to OSF for surgery, and what I believe is an ambulance and paramedic monopoly in Peoria. I don’t think I should blog or comment about important subjects like these unless I sign my name. Putting down one's name increases credibility. In my opinion, pseudonyms don’t work.

Disputes arise when an anonymous blogger includes damaging comments against a company. When an employee blogs against their company, there are limits to what companies can do to find out what employees are blogging against them. However, the company can sue the ISP to determine the blogger identity.

The Peoria Pundit has many anonymous commenters and an anonymous author or two.

Commenters and bloggers can be anonymous for multiple reasons. One can only speculate why someone wants to remain anonymous with their comments. Reasons to remain anonymous are many including fear of publicity, distraction to one’s professional career, ability to lie, denounce, spin, and write anything without answering for it.

I doubt many of the Pundit commenters would be so impolite and abusive if they had to sign their names. I think many of these commenters have a big knowledge base, but anonymous bloggers never have to admit they are wrong. Transparency is not out in the open. And bloggers and commenters seem to have some synergistic parasitic relationships with each other that push their aggression over the top.

Bill Dennis has to walk the fine line between demanding civility and honesty, and has to deal with overt dishonesty, spin, libel, etc. In my opinion, the Peoria Pundit blog is frequently not civil. And many potential commenters are driven away by a handful of commenters. I don’t think people who occasionally comment, even anonymously, like to be attacked by the attackers on this site.

I can understand anonymous bloggers or commenters in a country where their lives are in danger if they blog or comment openly (about their government, for example). But what are these people afraid of in Peoria? Their jobs and reputations mainly, and whether their kids get scholarships…

As opposed to a big company going after a blogging employee, can a member of the public ask a big company like OSF to identify an employee or someone using osfhealthcare.org in their anonymous comments?

An anonymous commenter on the Pundit, “Tony” has responded to many of my posts regarding EMS in Peoria, and in my opinion, he spins the truth a lot in OSF’s favor. He definitely has the inside look at this topic. His uses words like “conspiracy” in a taunting manner and doesn’t answer questions about OSF. I have asked him who he is so we could put his comments into perspective about why he did not feel obstacles were being thrown up to the PFD by PAEMSS or OSF regarding their ability to upgrade, and whether he thought their was conflict of interest at OSF, which he doesn’t seem to want to answer.

He doesn’t answer questions about Sue Wozniak’s comments regarding Dr. George Hevesy and Hevesy’s salary from AMT. (He actually confused the topic by referring to an old AMT website.) Ms. Wozniak is Chief Operating Officer at OSF and a Board Member of AMT. Tony avoids this topic as much as possible for some reason. He knows he could be tracked by OSF’s geeks. But is he even worried?

I doubt it.

When I address the issues of EMS in Peoria and discrimination against Haitian Hearts kids, two of whom we have buried, Tony and a couple of his anonymous colleagues have tried to turn me into the problem, which seems to get quite old in their myriad of abuse. Tony laughed at my suggestion that he is well connected. (I think I have to quit using the word “connected” regarding OSF, because Bill had to delete a comment regarding that in the past by an unhappy reader that put on some pressure and made me the problem again.)

However, even though Tony guffaws at the chance he is well connected, he has sent a comment or two from osfhealthcare.org. His IP 204.238.189.254 gnat-cfh.osfhealthcare.org. I think this is from the library at the Center for Health at OSF. But I am no geek and don’t know for sure. I am sure the tech support system at OSF Corporate does know. But will the tech support track this and tell me?

The reason that tech support at OSF should track this is that this is one of the OSF Mission Statements—“open and honest communication”. Tony’s communication is not open and frequently not factual. Does OSF have a responsibility to me or the general public based on their premise of “open and honest communication” to identify Tony. Tony has said some pretty abusive and biased things as an employee of OSF or a “well connected” friend of OSF. Will OSF break another of their OSF Mission Statements?

I don’t mean to pick on “Tony” but when he sends his comments from OSF, he becomes an easy target for me to at least assume he has connections with OSF, which quite likely colors many of his comments the last couple of months regarding Haitian Hearts and EMS in Peoria.

Tony, if you don’t work at OSF, or are “well connected” with them, please accept my apologies. But when we don’t know you or what motivates you, how are we supposed to know about your credibility and the honesty of your anonymous comments?

John A. Carroll, M.D.
www.peoriasmedialmafia.com
www.dyinginhaiti.blogspot.com