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From: rrizzo@bbncca.ARPA (Ron Rizzo)
Newsgroups: net.motss
Subject: Re: Notes on Last Few Submissions
Message-ID: <841@bbncca.ARPA>
Date: Fri, 13-Jul-84 10:19:16 EDT
Article-I.D.: bbncca.841
Posted: Fri Jul 13 10:19:16 1984
Date-Received: Sat, 14-Jul-84 01:33:43 EDT
References: <824@bbncca.ARPA> <926@cornell.UUCP>
Organization: Bolt, Beranek and Newman, Cambridge, Ma.
Lines: 58

Here's another piece of garbage from me: G. Taylor's pathname is so long
I despair of reaching him by personal mail.  Excuse me, folks, while I
tediously flame....

dear G,

>> "...a terrific resentment of anyoneholding a moral claim over you."

> Yow, what a wierd charge to level at one's opponents after opening
> your posting with the old "SHUT UP" laid-to-rest-once-and-for-all.

My "charge" wasn't a shutup ploy; it may have been an ad hominem attack
(or "personal attack" in Usenet parlance) but it didn't try to masque-
rade as a bit of rational argument.  It was whatever it was, blatantly.
Even as an ad hominem remark, it didn't occur in the middle of an argu-
ment to make the argument "work", but was presented as my own impression
of what psychologically lies behind the appeal of "individual rights" for
a lot of people.  Of course it shows my own political bias and it's an
unsupported opinion.  There's been no lack of that on the net from ALL
of us; it only becomes a problem when mere opinion is stated as fact or
"attacks" or "shutups" disguise themselves as arguments.  Maybe it's not
nice to personally criticize others; so, I'm not nice....

If anything, my message tried to get some discussion of the "individual
rights" movement started.

Pardonnez-moi, but I find your reaction curious:  your two messages
messages on Boswell (thank you for the compliments) weren't distin-
guished by serious discussion of his book (I find it hard to believe
you even skimmed it), but were littered with arbitrary opinions and
facile arguments attributed to Boswell:

>....come to think of it the whole Gnostic thing happened right in
>in the middle of the collapse of the Roman Empire.  I bet it was
>only a reaction to that.

The second message culminates in the ridiculous ad hominem charge,
baldly stated with no attempt to support it*, that

>[Boswell's] chucked out everything in the documents of the early
>church that doesn't implicitly or explicitly support practicing
>homosexuality as the remnant of a crusty batch of old Judaic poops
>cluttering up the cosmopolitan early church.

If this is serious criticism, give me Jerry Falwell's rant any day:
at least his "praise" isn't back-handed.

Maybe you should start taking some of your own advice, G.


	      "Don't fire 'til you see the whites of their eyes!"

        					Ron Rizzo


*Unless you consider a quickie quiz administered to relig profs on
a cross-campus trot sufficient rebuttal to 10 years of research in 
a half-dozen languages in archives in Europe & the Middle East.