Xref: utzoo news.groups:14784 talk.religion.newage:4947 Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!cs.utexas.edu!ut-emx!walt.cc.utexas.edu!olorin From: olorin@walt.cc.utexas.edu (Dave Weinstein) Newsgroups: news.groups,talk.religion.newage Subject: Re: Poll results on newsgroup name Summary: This is *not* an attempt to rename talk.religion.newage Message-ID: <21192@ut-emx.UUCP> Date: 20 Nov 89 17:19:04 GMT References: <982@mit-amt.MEDIA.MIT.EDU> <50495@oliveb.olivetti.com> <1989Nov10.023949.17957@uokmax.ecn.uoknor.edu> <20752@ut-emx.UUCP> <21086@ut-emx.UUCP> <9020@hoptoad.uucp> Sender: news@ut-emx.UUCP Reply-To: olorin@walt.cc.utexas.edu (Dave Weinstein) Followup-To: news.groups Organization: The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas Lines: 90 In article <9020@hoptoad.uucp> tim@hoptoad.UUCP (Tim Maroney) writes: #It is ridiculous to call a poll decisive when, of 30 votes, no opinion #came close to achieving a majority, only a weak plurality (10 votes). I can only count the opinions of those people who chose to vote in the poll. This is no more ridiculous than a few hundred people deciding whether or not a group should be created, when the vast majority of the people on the net didn't even care enough to vote (and that is not a criticism of the voting mechanism...just a comparison). #The decision to rename talk.religion.newage is probably a good one. That may or may not be so. This is not a proposal to *rename* the group talk.religion.newage, this is a proposal for the creation of a more specific group in addition to talk.religion.newage. #When the newage mailing list was created years ago, by me, "new age" #was taken as a broader and more inclusive term. Since then, it has #come to mean only a single thread in the network of esoteric mystical #systems, and as such, many potential participants have come to feel #alienated by it. But it would be foolish to replace this with another #term which has the same problem, such as "pagan", a term which hardly #embraces the eclectic group of esotericists which the original group #was aimed at. It smacks of intolerance, a desire by one group to be #heard at the expense of all others. Not at the expense of anything. Talk.religion.newage will continue to exist. However, there does seem to be enough interest to merit a moderated newsgroup for the discussion of the pagan issues. Whether or not the new newsgroup "embraces the eclectic group of esotericists which the original group was aimed at" is _irrelevent_, this is a seperate newsgroup. The reason for moderation (as has been said before) is to keep the preaching out of the newsgroup. #What is even more ridiculous is that *all* the proposed alternatives, #pagan, neopagan, earth, wicca, and nature, are terms co-opted by this #same group, terms which explicitly exclude the sorts of wide-ranging #interests we had on the original mailing list, such as Freemasonry, Sri #Aurobindo, Thelema, Buddhism, and so forth (as well as Neo-Paganism, of #course). The people behind this attempted act of exclusion do not #even pretend to want a wide, eclectic group; they want to hear #Neo-Paganism and nothing else. Amazing. We have a case where a large portion of the discussion of a newsgroup is being carried out by people with a set of interests which are a subset of the charter of the group. They decide to create an additional newsgroup to carry that discussion, and that is a problem?? Or has the idea that sufficient traffic in an existing newsgroup is viable grounds for a new newsgroup been washed away? #So, as the founder of the talk.religion.newage group, I protest very #strongly the attempt to narrow its scope to Neo-Paganism exclusively. #However, I do understand and respect the idea of renaming it to some #term which more accurately reflects the originally inclusive intent of #the group. I suggest that any of the following would be good #alternatives (ranked in the order of my preferences, from best to #worst): # #talk.religion.magic #talk.religion.esoteric #talk.religion.eclectic #talk.religion.occult #talk.religion.ritual #talk.religion.mystical One more time... this is not ANY SORT OF AN ATTEMPT to rename the newsgroup talk.religion.newage. It is not any sort of an attempt to in any way restrict its charter. It is an attempt to create a new newsgroup with a more specific charter. #But in any case, let's hear the end of this nonsense about ten votes #out of tens of thousands of people on the network defining the proper #direction of discussion. And so should we also end the nonsense of hundreds of votes out of tens of thousands of people on the network defining the proper creation of newsgroups? Please be consistent. #-- #Tim Maroney, Mac Software Consultant, sun!hoptoad!tim, tim@toad.com --Dave (Side note: I will be out of contact from tomorrow morning until sometime Sunday evening...so responses will be delayed) --- Dave Weinstein olorin@walt.cc.utexas.edu GEnie: OLORIN 9036 N. Lamar #274 Home: (512) 339-4407 Work: Don't Call Austin, TX 78753 Disclaimer: No one listens to me anyway.