Re: It all comes out in the Carwash

Lee Daniel Crocker (lcrocker@calweb.com)
Mon, 10 Mar 1997 00:11:34 -0800 (PST)


> Is it rude to put people in my mail filter? I have 17 extropians in there
> so far and the quality of the list just keeps improving! Tee hee!

It's certainly not rude to do so, but it's not necessarily a good thing.
I don't want to rehash my old thread on the value of rudeness and the
intellectual pathology of taking offense, but I have to say that he is
absolutely correct that /ideas/ stand on their own merit; to put value
on the originator of ideas is a fundamental mistake of epitemology.
He has expressed some valuable ideas here, albeit in a course manner,
and is likely to express more in the future, and I for one wouldn't
want to miss them. Even those with whom I have severe disagreements,
like our Mr. de Lyser, are valuable to me, because they give me insight
into the kinds of arguments used in favor of dangerous ideas like
democracy, and help me prepare better arguments against them.

One should know something about a speaker to better interpret odd use
of language or cultural background, but once ideas are expressed and
understood, they /must not/ be judged by their source, only by their
objective value. Our esteemed Mr. Carwash has some interesting ideas,
and my mind is not so fragile that I allow his brashness to interfere
with my making use of them.

My mail program sorts mail from the 25 or so mailing lists I'm on
into separate folders, so when I read mail I read all ExI mail at one
time. I have not found a kill file necessary or useful for this list,
or indeed for any of the lists to which I subscribe. The only things
I filter out at all are known unsolicited commercial spam sites, and
those I block at the IP address level, not because of any particular
person's idea, but because the ISP as a whole does not enforce terms
of service that prevent real economic loss for me, so I choose not to
accept any packets from those ISPs.

-- 
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee@piclab.com>
<http://www.piclab.com/lcrocker.html>