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administrivia: anatomy of an unnecessary flame war

first of all, i reviewed the whole exchange between sax and bossert; the
conclusion i came to is that neither has a particularly exceptional
understanding of certain issues about "getting along" in an electronic
forum. i don't recall when they joined the list, so they may or may not
have a good excuse based on only having been here a little while.

be that as it may, i know that gary bossert is an excellent driver, but
am not aquainted with him personally other than an occasional email
exchange or two.  i don't know kenneth sax at all, really.

what i saw in reviewing the exchange is that, first of all, the language
and tone escalated unnecessarily; everybody needs to learn to chill out
or take some valium or something.  there is a natural tendency in
electronic exchanges to overreact; for some reason we tend to do this in
such forums.  it is important sometimes to just step back and say
"should i really write this this way?".  gary refered to kenneth as
"lying"; this wasn't really justified as all it would take for kenneth
to have written what he wrote is to answer articles before he'd read the
entire digest (which is another issue: it is good to try and read
everything in a digest before replying to any of it, for various
reasons.)

second of all, there was a distinct failure to recognize the manner in
which people read and respond to articles; the network has time delays;
your articles reach the digest and get stored on disk until critical
mass (30,000 characters of accumulated messages, to be exact) is
reached, at which point a digest is automatically assembled by majordomo
and shipped to the world, which is no doubt eagerly awaiting it.  as a
result, things cross paths that might have been written differently if
the authors had seen each others postings first.

this whole flame war would have been avoided simply enough if people had
just thought before they posted -- and that's what i recommend to all of
you.

i don't really want to be seen as beating up on either Kenneth or Gary
here; but both of them reacted in hasty ways, which made things worse
than they needed to be.

richard
- -- 
		           Not Insane! in '96
                  George Leroy Tirebiter for President
                         One Organism: One Vote