While I was getting a flood of hate mail over my controversial choice
of soc.culture.israel as the group in which I would post my request to
take Fred Cherry's thread out of soc.culture.israel, Mr. Cherry was being
resourcefully non-cooperative. His excuse was that he was merely
responding to his critics in the forum in which they criticised him. So,
still futily hoping to put an end to this mess, I decided to try to get
both sides to leave.
First, I merely asked both sides for their cooperation. Much finger
pointing and cries of "him first", followed by e-mail. Oy. This was
getting nowhere. By now, it must have struck you that Fred takes himself
awfully seriously and by then, I had noticed this, too. Yelling at him
would merely feed his martyr complex, but mocking him ... it was worth a
try, especially as his opposition seemed equally unable to handle
teasing.
This lead to my introducing the concept of backspamming. Kind of like
verbal chemotherapy for the cancer that a spam thread will be in a
newsgroup. One drops posts into the thread - nowhere but the thread - that
are off topic for the thread, though not necessarily for the group. One
might hijack the thread and take it in a new direction, more interesting
for your group and frustratingly uninteresting for the intruders, who
might give up and depart out of sheer frustration.
In this case, though, where someone's (Fred's) ego needed deflating, I
decided to go for sheer absurdity and dumped the contents of
alt.ensign.wesley.die.die.die into his thread. At that point, had he tried
to continue arguing about anything serious in that thread, he just would
have looked silly - er, I mean sillier. Sure enough, as long as this was
going on - all too briefly - it did shut Mr. Cherry up. Let us note that
screaming at him and threatening him have never produced this result, in
all of the years that each of the two have been tried.
Question : Aren't you just adding to the screen
clutter by doing this?
Answer : click here
You can't argue with success, right? Well, apparently, some felt
otherwise. But that's OK, right, because it's not an emotional issue, just
a disagreement over which choice of tactics would be the most effective in
achieving a mutually desired goal - the removal of the offending thread?
Wrong again. Mail by the ton started to arrive from people who were
"offended" by this .... difference of opinion. What else could one call
it? Loud demands that my account be suspended (and calls for mass
mailing directed toward me until this happened) as my former sysop has
mentioned in some of the links on another file.
The line often heard is that we needn't worry about the idea of
putting free speech to a majority vote, because few would cut off
another's freedom of expression lightly - the other person would have to
be really offensive. But in the calm that the distance of time allows,
look at this and ask yourself how much variance from the consensus
position was considered acceptable here. The problem is, that no matter
how narrow the range of existing opinions is, there will always be someone
whose opinions differ from those of his neighbors more than most. As the
desire to impose conformity is indulged and the expectation of such grows
stronger, the range of "acceptable" opinions will narrow until it becomes
vanishingly thin. True discussion will cease and no peace will be won, as
someone will always be there to be made into the latest scapegoat.
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One small story to be offered among a great many of just how little
tolerance there really has been out there in the undermedicated America
of the 1990s. Peace and love, my ass. So, a real question is : why is
Usenet like this? What
went wrong with Usenet, in general?
Oh, and don't forget to take
the Cherry Challenge!
