Re: hard working individuals

David C Lawrence (tale@uunet.uu.net)
Wed, 25 Nov 92 00:28:51 -0500

Chuq said:
> Surprised the hell out of me. I walked out onto the stage after handing out
> flamethrowers and screamed "burn me!" and got applause. You never know what
> usenet is going to do. Wehn you think you understand it, rationality breaks
> out, at least temporarily.

A similar experience just happened to me with regard to the proposal
to create a soc.religion.islam.ahmadiyya newsgroup. The cultural
background of it lends all to well to outright warring, and I wanted
to be very careful about trying to get everyone through it with as few
problems as possible.

... then I made a very unfortunate error and posted the wrong call for
votes. A reasonably detailed summary of the events was posted to
news.announce.newgroups after running it by the people involved. The
thing that I found most ironic about the aftermath was that I got six
messages which all expressed exactly this sentiment, quoted from one
of them: "Nice posting on a very confused topic. I figure that there
is so much flammage on the topic, you should get at least one compliment."
The count of articles or mail messages I got which flamed me
following that posting: none.

I could write an awful lot about the net.politics I get to see on a
daily basis; some of it is the same-old, same-old that many of the
people on this list have managed to walk away from, but there is often
a new surprise in the changing world of USENET. I've only recently
become aware of how much stress it was adding to my life, and I'll be
doing all that I can to alleviate it. Part of that involves not
writing right now "an awful lot about the net.politics I get to see ..."

David

This page last updated on: Jul 1 09:16