On Fri, Mar 21, 2003 at 02:04:41PM -0800, Philip Hart <philiph at SLAC.Stanford.EDU> wrote: > On Fri, 21 Mar 2003, Matthew Hunter wrote: > > On Fri, Mar 21, 2003 at 01:19:31PM -0500, Richard Congdon <richard at pikachu.harvard.edu> wrote: > > > > > Really? I was told that Hungarians invented beer, and > > > > > that they make the best beer in the world. Hmm ... I think > > > > > the same guy said they invented sex, Whiskey, and some other > > > > > stuff too, now that I think of it.... > > > > Will you people *stop* listening to Al Gore ? > > > I know it's off topic, but given current events, I can't resist. Al Gore, > > > who except for a judicial coup might well be president, would not be the > > > cause of so many deaths just to please his oil industry buddies. > > > Furthermore, if you are alluding the alleged remark of his that he created > > > the internet, it simply isn't true that he said that. Yes, he has a > > > tendency to exaggerate, but what he said was that he was very important in > > > getting the internet (nee DARPA net) commercialized. (I wish I had a URL > > > handy, so that you could read his words.) > > Didn't we just go over this? > I think you're risking an inquiry after the health of your tapeworm here. Not at all. "We" is the collective list body in this case. > > Making this kind of remark in an inappropriate forum only pisses > > off people who *really* do care about the issues and want to > > respond... but feel they cannot because of the forum. It's sort > > of like saying "Your mother wears army boots" from behind an > > army; not terribly fair and certainly not conducive to useful > > discussion. > Just to be clear - when you wrote "this kind of remark" in the singular, > you meant that the original Gore slander was fine but the reply wasn't? "this kind of remark" is a singular TYPE of remark, but a type is inherently plural -- it encompasses both remarks. The second set of remarks went quite a ways beyond the first, though; the difference between a wink-wink-nudge-nudge joke at someone's expense and a pseudo-diatribe. > I'm a bit unhappy about the imposition of an "if people care about it we > can't mention it (well, except for discussions of G*d)" doctrine but I > won't object as long as it's even-handed and not applied to discussion > directly related to the Vladiad. I've just spent a few minutes deleting > the discussion of Belgian beers, a few minutes I could have spent sleeping > or doing something useful, and I feel dumb for replying to the original > Gore remark, the kind of Jay Leno comment a wiser person would have just > ignored. Exactly. > I think this forum can stand a little politics on occasion, > especially of the "suggest you read this" type, which the second remark > above failed but at least attempted to do, and which my previous reply > didn't do. Anyway, as this forum in my view belongs both to the people > who read it and to SKZB, I for one would welcome hearing his political > views on occasion, especially since we seemed blessed to live in > interesting times. I don't mind political discussion at all, but it's inconsistent with the health and good nature of a mailing list devoted to a different topic. People get angry by all the off-topic discussions and leave; others get angry and engage in flame wars, which is generally bad for the list. Not to mention, no one likes being "preached at" -- which is what the two recent examples have been. When you use a mailing list devoted to some other forum as a soapbox for your political views, secure in the knowledge that people will be reluctant to dispute the points because the whole discussion would be off topic, you are breeding frustration and hostility. The alternative leads to the list being taken over by political discussions and having much lower signal-to-noise for Brust's writing, which is also undesirable. As I've noted in the past, a separate list for off-topic discussions spawned from the original list manages to obtain the best of both worlds. I'd be glad to set one up if there's interest, as I have done so for other similar lists. -- Matthew Hunter (matthew at infodancer.org) Public Key: http://matthew.infodancer.org/public_key.txt Homepage: http://matthew.infodancer.org/index.jsp Politics: http://www.triggerfinger.org/index.jsp