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From: alien@cpoint.UUCP (Alien Wells)
Newsgroups: news.groups
Subject: Re: .aquaria
Message-ID: <2696@cpoint.UUCP>
Date: 20 Oct 89 14:30:00 GMT
References: <20983@gryphon.COM> <4732@ncar.ucar.edu> <2688@cpoint.UUCP> <8348@medusa.cs.purdue.edu>
Reply-To: alien@cpoint.UUCP (Alien Wells)
Organization: Clearpoint Research Corp., Hopkinton Mass.
Lines: 62

In article <8348@medusa.cs.purdue.edu> bee@cs.purdue.edu (Zaphod Beeblebrox) writes:
>IMHO, those qualify as the types of articles he is deriding.  What a dimwit.
>
>Tantrums?  What, pray tell, do you call your articles?  I certainly
>respect the opinion of Greg Woods a lot more than yours.

Actually, I consider the 'debate' in news.groups to be a perfect example of 
what I fear from a mainstream distribution in rec.  Flaming begets flaming, 
and once the heat is turned up, any voice of reason is lost in the din.  It
can be fun for a while, but it pales quickly (which is why the 'professional'
flamers change goups so often).

I would also point out that what looks like a flame depends a lot on what your
point of view is.  People are a lot more forgiving of postings that agree with
them.  PS:  'What a dimwit' certainly qualifies your posting ...

As for myself, I will agree that I've been turning the temperature up, but 
after 2 weeks of being bombarded by pompous, deriding BS by the likes of Chuq,
I'm not in a mood to be gracious.  If you had followed the threads to the
beginning, you would have seen that I was originally in the rec. camp.  Unlike
a lot of others, I actually paid attention to what the opposition was saying
and spent a good amount of time thinking about it, and ended up changing my
mind.  Had the early sci. proponents flamed me as viciously as the rec.
proponents flamed me after I switched, I probably would never have changed
my mind.

And to answer your implied question, alt.aquaria has less flaming (virtually
none) than any group I've seen, anyone that flames gets condemned - even by 
people who agree with his position - about his lack of ettiquette, and I am not 
interested in seeing a rec.aquaria.flames - either in name or in content.

>We hear so much from the .aquaria folks about "you don't know what's
>in our group; don't tell us where our group should go in the
>hierarchy".  My response to that is: "You don't know a damned thing
>about the net hierarchy; quit telling us where groups belong in it."

I was not aware that Usenet protocol had appointed some group of people
(yourself included, apparently) to decide what name each group should have.
I will grant you that I am net.naive, but I had thought that the proper
protocol was to publicly announce a discussion period with a proposed name,
have the discussion, and then call a vote.  I thought that Richard stacked
the deck against sci. by including rec.pets in the distribution of his
proposal and call for votes (as you have seen, most aquarists do not 
consider themselves to own pets), but I thought that was a touch of class
on his part.

Now, if you had simply informed us two weeks ago that we were violating
Usenet protocol, and that we should be going throught the officially 
appointed name bureaucracy instead of proposing a name ourselves (quotes
of the appropriate documents would be most convincing) you would have 
saved us all a lot of bother.

So - what happens now?  I assume that any vote currently in progress is
invalidated since we didn't go through the appropriate naming committee.
It is clear that you are a member, can you tell us who the other members
are?  How do we submit a formal request to the committee?  When can we 
expect to get the benefit of your official wisdom?
-- 
--------|	You've got the political savvy
Alien   |		of a hangnail.
--------|   					- John Meneghini
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