Again, sorry about the profanity. It was uncalled for.
On Tue, 28 May 2002, Jon Gabriel wrote: > >hurting anybody, I don't think it's appropriate to pass judgement by trying > >to ban him, temporarily or otherwise. > > In starting the voting process, I pass no judgment whether he is being > offensive or not in terms of content. (I could care less about what Mark�s > actually saying anymore, since he�s been killfiled in my Hotmail box.) > > I *do* feel that arriving home after being away for three days and finding > 84 posts (and four more this morning) in my Junk Mail folder that have > little or no semantic content from one list member is excessive. And have > you looked at the digests from the past week? They�re nearly impossible to > follow unless you dissect them bit by bit. He is flooding the list with > garbage. How does Mark differ from the guy who repeatedly posted nothing > but curses to the list a couple of years ago? Speaking only for myself, there a fair amount of what Mark writes that I don't consider garbage. Maybe I just have a pathologically high tolerance for strangeness. > > I am not proposing that we turn Brin-L into a gated community. I do think > that we have a right to limit spammers and believe that Mark now qualifies. > He is clearly being disruptive. To that end, I think a good first step in > the process of defining what to do about this is to see where the majority > of the list stands in what to do with him. Ok, so hold a debate about whether Mark's posting frequency and posting content, combined, classify him as an incorrigible spammer. I don't think they do, although I understand his frequency might be a problem for digest readers. IMO Mark's case does not fall clearly into the category normally called "spammer" so I'm not comfortable with trying to ban him on those grounds. > In the past, when someone has disrupted the list we have banned them. If > you don�t think this case fits our _established precedent_, then suggest an > alternative way we can effectively deal with Mark�s disruptions. But please > don�t take potshots at me (like you do in the paragraph that follows) for > asking for a list consensus to do something we've done before. Such > behavior (and language,) is frankly ...unlike you. Sorry about the potshot, but in truth you have no idea what is or isn't like me...which is part of my point. It makes sense to hold a discussion about whether or not Mark is an incorrigible nuisance on the face of things (and that's all anyone is required to do, I think). It makes no sense, IMO, for any of us to pretend that we can see beyond the face of things and make any judgements about Mark's character based solely on a series of posts that, despite their strangeness, are clearly thought out and not the product of random derangement. Sure, we'll form our opinions. But IMO we shouldn't pretend that acting on those particular judgements provides a justification for banning Mark "for his own good" or some such nonsense. IF Mark needs banishing for our good, that's all the justification we need. But IMO such justification hasn't been demonstrated. OTOH, just this morning (see Mark's post, "The Law") in which he rather strongly hints that he's willing to say whatever he wants about whatever he wants until someone stops him...but IMO what he says rarely if ever needs stopping. Marvin Long Austin, Texas "Never flay a live Episiarch." -- Galactic Proverbs 7563:34(j)
