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From: mcb@styx.UUCP (Michael C. Berch)
Newsgroups: news.misc
Subject: Re: Abuses of the net
Message-ID: <21023@styx.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 20-Nov-86 13:04:04 EST
Article-I.D.: styx.21023
Posted: Thu Nov 20 13:04:04 1986
Date-Received: Thu, 20-Nov-86 22:59:18 EST
References: <225@mind.UUCP>
Reply-To: mcb@styx.UUCP (Michael C. Berch)
Organization: Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, Livermore CA
Lines: 47

In article <225@mind.UUCP> harnad@mind.UUCP (Stevan Harnad) writes:
> Someone using the following name, userid and institution
> 	"rathmann@brahms.berkeley.EDU (Really Michael Ellis)
>  	 Organization: 2-3:30PM, tuesdays and thursdays"
> wrote to sci.lang:
> 
> >    you have shit-for-brains... This is all horse manure...
> >    you are blowing your hot air out the wrong orifice...
> >    Paperboy wanted to handle Fecal Heights and surrounding vicinity...
> >    get her ass up here... don't waste your foul breath telling me...
> >    male chauvinist pricks... but THEY sure as hell left THEIR crap all
> >    over the place... go shove where the sun doesn't shine... Utter crap.
> 
> I find it astonishing that such an obviously disturbed individual has
> access to an account at brahms.berkeley.EDU, let alone the news net.
> If the net is to evolve into the respectable forum many of us hope it
> will become, there must be a way of blocking this sort of misuse. Not
> all groups can be moderated, but the unmoderated ones should still
> ensure that serious consequences overtake this sort of abuse. A copy of this
> will be sent to the system administrator at berkeley.EDU. I hope
> other net news users will also bring some collective pressure to bear
> on this sort of behavior. (Apologies to any of the above-named if
> someone else has been clandestinely misusing their names and accounts,
> but then they will no doubt want to be alerted so they can change passwords.)

Sigh. The quoted material looked sort of odd there for a while, until
I realized that Mr. Harnad had merely abstracted the parts that he
didn't like out of an interesting, lengthy article of 122 lines about
gender distinctions in natural languages. I then noticed that the
person to whom the the quoted remarks were directed were in fact Mr.
Harnad himself, who seemed to be getting the worse of the argument.
Hardly a disinterested observer.

Mr. Harnad also apparently failed to notice that at least two of the
objectionable fragments above, "Paperboy wanted to handle Fecal
Heights..." and "get her ass up here" were not statements of
rathmann@brahms but were in fact quoted example material meant to
illustrate gender distinctions in utterances.

rathmann@brahms's rhetoric of argumentation is not a style I
personally practice, and Mr. Harnad is certainly entitled to complain 
to anyone he wishes, including the Usenet administrator at Berkeley,
but it all seems rather a tempest in a teapot, no?

Michael C. Berch
ARPA: mcb@lll-tis-b.arpa
UUCP: ...!lll-lcc!styx!mcb   ...!lll-crg!styx!mcb  ...!ihnp4!styx!mcb