RE: flame wars

From: Harvey Newstrom (mail@HarveyNewstrom.com)
Date: Thu Jul 17 2003 - 08:30:22 MDT

  • Next message: Anders Sandberg: "Fun papers"

    Spike wrote,
    > Is that why we did that? I was wondering.

    Specifically, I made the mistake of encouraging people to take arguments
    off-list to the moderator as the list rules require. Unfortunately, I
    didn't realize that we no longer had a moderator and that the list rules
    were not being enforced or followed. Trying to follow the list rules
    made things worse as people tried to make official complaints with
    nobody to accept them. As far as I know, none of the complaints were
    ever addressed.

    > Curious, tho, we have had several flamefests
    > way worse than the one that broke out in May
    > and June. I need to check it however, for
    > I was having a lot of computer problems then
    > and much of my email was being automatically
    > deleted, so I mighta missed it.

    This latest one was a lot more personal and spilled over into the real
    world. I am not going to rehash it or go into details again. However,
    previous flame-wars were more about people's ideas or actions on the
    list. The latest flame-wars included accusations of real-world
    activities off-list regarding suspected support of different sides of
    the War on Iraq. There also were vague accusations against ExI as an
    organization and against its officers for some sort of ill-defined
    political misconduct. We also saw reports of off-list discussions,
    rumors and activities beyond the on-list discussion. We have never seen
    this level of coordination before, with this number of concurrent
    targets, nor this amount of off-list activity before. This truly was
    something new for our list.

    > Perhaps the flamewar was it, but it might just
    > be the times. Dynamic and practical optimism
    > has been more difficult in the last couple years,
    > has it not?

    The real-world problems have been over the last few years. The list
    problems have just occurred in the last few months. Also, other
    transhumanist lists are not facing the same problem even though they
    consist of similar people in a similar world.

    -- 
    Harvey Newstrom, CISM, CISSP, IAM, IBMCP, GSEC
    Certified InfoSec Manager, Certified IS Security Pro, NSA-certified
    InfoSec Assessor, IBM-certified Security Consultant, SANS-cert GSEC
    <HarveyNewstrom.com> <Newstaff.com>
    


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