From: bhoughto@sedona.intel.com (Blair P. Houghton)
Newsgroups: news.groups,sci.physics,alt.fan.dale-bass
Subject: Re: sci.physics.research: proposed panel of moderators
Date: 8 Jan 1993 21:14:09 GMT
Organization: Intel Corp., Chandler, Arizona
NNTP-Posting-Host: stealth.intel.com

In article <craigen.57.726498270@ace.acadiau.ca> craigen@ace.acadiau.ca (DOUGLAS CRAIGEN) writes:
>   Why do you always claim that he is religious?

Because he believes God can exist and that's faith in God
and that's all it takes.

>He stated many times in that debate that he was an atheist.

He stated only that it was folly to be an atheist, and that
anyone who tried to analyze religion scientifically was
barking up the tree of the forbidden fruit.

>Those who didn't follow this debate 
>(and who can blame them?) would not be aware that it consisted largely of 
>you and Dale insulting each other.

You comprehended none of it, apparently.  The insults were
merely a deserved aside on a tour of Physics, Theology,
Philosophy, and Archaeology.  The fact that I was doing
more of the insulting is merely a reflection of the fact
that I'm better at it and he's afraid to do it, being a
creature of small imagination, less courage, and no
tolerance and that he was being de facto insulting by
misinterpreting virtually everything I said.

>It finally came to an end with his announcement that he
>would stop, i.e. in the end he showed more committment to
>noise reduction than you did.

He ran away with his nose bloodied, screaming "I'm not gonna
play with you any more!" after three weeks of hundred-line
postings and you call that commitment?

>You are hardly in a position to take the 
>high moral ground here.

A clue you deserve:

1.  Fuck you.  This is a fucking conflict and I'll take any
fucking ground I want, you fucking moron.

A clue you don't deserve:

2.  I'm taking only the high amoral ground; I simply believe in
the evidence when I see it, not when I think it might exist.

The evidence is that Corky Bass is proactive in
crackpottery and lacking in comprehension (seems to be a
theme, this penchant for missing the point; perhaps it's
part of the Constitution and Bylaws of the alt.fan.dale-bass
club).

The comprehension is that he's unfit to judge the fitness
of the writings of others for posting to the net, in that
he's likely to reject those with which he disagrees citing
purely stylistic grounds and he's likely to pass those with
which we all disagree if he accepts them or thinks he can
refute them to his own aggrandizement.

I.e., a flame is not worthy of rejection merely because
it is a flame; and, one's own beliefs are not a sufficient
rationale for laudatory propagation of others' accidental
conformance to those beliefs.

Corky doesn't get this, and neither do you.

He's a despotic influence, not an objective one.  I don't
think the others could necessarily be perfectly objective,
but they haven't evidenced in the past that they are prone
to injecting their own subjective psychologies consistently
into their selection criteria for pronouncements on the net.

Moderation of free discussion in itself is a disastrous
occurrence; it eliminates from the discourse valuable clues
to the meaning and intent of ambiguous ideas, and all ideas
are ambiguous without a mathematical formalism (see a book
by R. Carnap,  _The_Logical_Syntax_of_Language_, 1937).
Objectivity is impossible without the creation of a set of
rules for objectivity, and the creation of the set of rules
is necessarily subjective (or, worse, political, which is
what will eventually occur here when someone puts together
a "charter" and the net "votes" on it).

In the end, in the absence of a legal conflict (someone's
rights are being sullied or someone's health and safety
are put at risk) the only policy worth implementing is
no policy.

In the beginning, however, we should endeavor not even to
create a policy which promises to be a contradiction of our
own interests.

				--Blair
				  "If you don't understand
				   this, then how did you
				   ever learn to read? and
				   why can't my computer
				   read even that poorly?"
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