From: patrick@rio-grande.is.rice.edu (Patrick L Humphrey)
Newsgroups: talk.abortion,alt.abortion.inequity
Subject: Re: Apologies to Garvin, Keegan, clueless newbies, and Regard
Date: 29 Dec 92 16:25:08 GMT
Distribution: na
Organization: Rice University, Houston, Texas

In article <nyikos.725578290@milo.math.scarolina.edu> nyikos@math.scarolina.edu (Peter Nyikos) writes:

   Here I go again, trying to post this for the third time.  This time, I
   am taking the precaution of e-mailing copies to Adrienne and to Will
   Steeves, who has kindly offered to post things for me if my netserver
   misbehaves again.

   I have a number of apologies to make in this post.  Let me begin with
   the easiest one to make now (because I have already apologized for it, 
   but many networkers interested in seeing my apology may have missed it).

   This is to Susan Garvin for misattributing some things to her in a post.
   It was a follow-up of several hundred lines to a 500+ line post of hers,
   over 400 of which were actually a reproduction of an August post by 
   J. S. Greenfield.  I'd made up my mind to respond to it because I had with
   me a copy of then-Chief-Justice Burger's powerful *Thornburgh* dissent, 
   which was higly relevant to certain hotly debated points in the middle
   of this 500+ line post.

   I have already explained briefly how this happened in another follow-up 
   post to Susan, and since I don't want to make this post too long, I 
   won't add any more details to the account now (but I can if people are
   interested), and just say once more that I am sorry for all the confusion
   caused by my initial mistake and a number of subsequent posts before I
   realized what my error had been:

[excerpt deleted]

Congratulations!  You finally owned up to it, even though it took you FOUR
MONTHS, and you're still not being exactly contrite about it.  But it's a
start. 

   But now, on to something which has been confusing people for more than
   two months now.

   To Adrienne: 

   You and I have in the past had a reasonably civilized e-mail
   conversation, but when we get to talking on the net, we both get carried
   away by the presence of an audience into doing a lot of flamboyant things
   we wouldn't do without them.  For two months now, we've let a 
   tangled web develop from a rather simple mistake that could have been 
   corrected very simply in a one-on-one conversation.  

Correction:  YOU got carried away.  You might, for once, refrain from
dictating to Adrienne how she must feel.  Your apology, while much-deserved,
still looks awfully bogus from here, since it was YOUR inability to count
that led to YOU making charges that had no basis in reality in the first
place!  I don't think you're doing much good for your reputation by trying
to imply that Adrienne is as much to blame for your stupidity as you are.

   I propose we start to unravel this tangled net from the beginning.  Since
   I made the initial mistake, the dubious privilege of first apology falls
   to me.

   To all readers:

   Here I reproduce the post which set off the whole "attributions/forgery"
   flap that has been festering on talk.abortion and assorted other groups
   for almost two months.  I've set the Newsgroups line to the same two you
   see in the reproduced post below.
   It contains two errors.  See if you can spot them.  Solutions and apologies
   given after the reproduction:

[reproduced post deleted]

About goddamn time you finally got it straight, don't you think?  It's only
been nine weeks or so, now.

   Give up?  In chronological order, the first error was to somehow neglect to
   delete the > in front of the Suzanne Rini reference, making it look like it
   had been made by Adrienne, even though the subsequent lines, clearly from
   the Rini book, have no > in front of them.  Apparently I had deleted a
   whole line of text by Adrienne except for the  >  and typed on without
   hitting <return>.

And you managed to accomplish that all by yourself.  Don't imply that *any*
of it is Adrienne's fault, unless you really want to generate even more good
PR for your employers.

[more of PHoney's attempting to come up with an explanation that takes the
blame for his actions off him, deleted]

   A reader who knows how attributions work (a classification I've belonged to
   since mid-July, a week after stumbling onto USENET) will quickly realize
   that these >> lines belong with the > Beaver reference rather than the
   >> Regard reference.

Yeah, yeah, yeah...it took you a whole week with your PhD, while those of us
out here in the real world had it figured out in a few seconds -- and it
just took you better than two months to admit to even this much.  Real
sterling apology you're trying to not make, innit?

   Anyway, I hereby apologize to any clueless
   newbies who were confused by them, and to Adrienne for having to devote
   some time to setting the record straight for the benefit of these newbies.

This is classic -- don't even mention the malicious accusations YOU made of
Adrienne because of YOUR stupidity.  We ain't gonna forget that, PHoney.
She'll have her own piece to speak on this, of course, but from where I
stand, your apology's made in about as much good faith as any ever made by
your pal Darcy -- and one of those, with 85 cents, will get you downtown on
Metro.  In other words -- it's worthless.

   Now let's see whether Adrienne is ... er ... woman enough to apologize
   for something in her follow-up that was, if anything, even more likely 
   to confuse the same clueless newbies.

Cut the crap about the "clueless newbies" -- you obviously like having a few
of them around when it suits your purposes.  You just don't have the balls
of a gnat, which is about all that would be required to make a sincere
apology.  You're about as sincere as Joe Isuzu, in this one.

   If she does, she will find me most willing to continue to the next round
   of apologies, and the unraveling of the tangled web can then continue
   apace.

...and if she rightfully purees you to a pulp for the sleazy way you made
this "apology", what'll you do?  Start whining that you're the victim?

Remember what I said, pink boy -- you're going to be your own executioner,
on this net.  I'm having a good time sitting in the back row of the
audience, watching the show.

--PLH, besides, it's closer to the bathroom way back here...


--
Newsgroups: talk.abortion