RE: flame wars

From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Fri Jul 18 2003 - 00:31:08 MDT

  • Next message: Lee Corbin: "RE: A vision"

    Mike Lorrey writes

    > --- Harvey Newstrom <mail@HarveyNewstrom.com> wrote:
    >
    > > 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.
    >
    > Exactly WHAT list was this on? I seem to have missed this alleged
    > episode entirely.

    What Harvey is referring to by "this level of coordination"
    etc., is an incident that resulted from his complaining to
    the then-current list monitor of personal attacks. His
    story

    > > Seriously, I don't think the list has yet recovered from the latest
    > > flame-war and series of personal attacks that caused ExI to start
    > > moderating again.

    fails to mention his key role. The "monitoring" only occurred
    following his own complaint. The list moderator, in a clumsily
    worded effort, then literally told some list participants "not
    to reply" (period) to those that they were fighting with.

    Some of those who received such notices emailed me, and asked
    "what gives?", asking, in effect, "is it fair that I have been
    told not to reply?" I then began a dialog with the list moderator
    about what the moderator had said. The situation was not cleared
    up, in my opinion, until a (new) list moderator made it perfectly
    clear that one may reply all one wishes to any post or poster,
    simply that (of course, per the list rules) one may not engage
    in personal attacks. So this is what is meant, I infer, by
    "this [unprecedented] level of coordination... this amount of
    off-list activity".

    So, Mike, I don't think that it was really a big deal, though
    taxing for those of us worrying that finally after all these
    years maybe speech on the Extropian list would not be free.
    But free it has remained, not surprisingly.

    Lee



    This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Jul 18 2003 - 00:44:09 MDT