Xref: utzoo news.groups:18174 soc.culture.indian:24408 Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!pt.cs.cmu.edu!andrew.cmu.edu!sa1z+ From: sa1z+@andrew.cmu.edu (Sudheer Apte) Newsgroups: news.groups,soc.culture.indian Subject: Re: talk.politics.south-asia: CALL FOR DISCUSSION Message-ID: Date: 25 Feb 90 15:23:22 GMT References: <5231@brazos.Rice.edu> <0ZtK56e00WB90MQJJ8@andrew.cmu.edu>, <22527@unix.cis.pitt.edu> Organization: Civil Engineering, Carnegie Mellon, Pittsburgh, PA Lines: 48 In-Reply-To: <22527@unix.cis.pitt.edu> srinath@unix.cis.pitt.edu (Srinath Viswanathan) writes: > In article <0ZtK56e00WB90MQJJ8@andrew.cmu.edu> sa1z+@andrew.cmu.edu > (Sudheer Apte) writes: > >The idea is to *separate* political debates from the rest, because > >political debates > >1) tend to be especially acrimonious, > >2) are disliked by a good subset of s.c.i.-ers, > > I would venture to say that most of the acrimony has involved > Kashmir, which in turn has involved religion and in some sense culture, > since it seems about to spawn soc.culture.pakistan. Yes, and before Kashmir it was the elections, and before that it was the Nepal embargo, and before that it was the '71 war... in what sense are these topics "cultural" by any stretch of the imagination? We're not saying, "don't discuss these problems," or that they're not important---only that they deserve to be discussed on another newsgroup, not on s.c.i. You left out that part of my posting where I pointed out that the soc hierarchy is not meant for such debate, and that the talk tree is. Or are you denying that many s.c.i.-ers don't want to read long political debates? And that they are justified? And that those who want to will also be better served by their own group? > I am not at all sure that another group is warranted, a solution to > acrimony in s.c.i., or even that acrimony is such a bad thing. If > the passion that gives vent to the acrimony were tempered with a > little reason, we might one day have some understanding. This group is not meant to be a "solution" to acrimony! Quite the opposite---it will encourage people to debate these issues. Only the forum won't be s.c.i.: it will be our own newsgroup, a talk newsgroup, where heated debates have their place. I'd be the first to agree that acrimony is not a bad thing, especially, as you point out, if done with a little reason. What is bad is that plenty of uninterested people have to wade through it every day searching for a scrap of news or an interesting tidbit. And that the interested debators don't have their own newsgroup and are forced to use s.c.i. to reach their audience, and get flamed for doing it. I hope I've been able to explain the idea a little better. Do you think the charter needs to be modified to clarify this point? Thanks, Sudheer. ----------------- ...{harvard, uunet}!andrew.cmu.edu!sa1z sa1z%andrew@CMCCVB.BITNET