On Mon, 15 Jul 2002, Erik Reuter wrote: > > And it's not clever spam, either. I concur. > > I disagree. I think he should be able to post what he wants.
I admire your tolerance but regret to say I no longer share it. I'm sufficiently enamored of the "community" concept of Brin-L - as a goal if not as a given - that I'm willing to break an egg or two to make that omlette. I don't like Jeroen very much. His manners and tone have for years suggested to me that he sees others not as people but as cogs in the Brin-L machine. If they adhere to his concept of the guidelines and if they don't disagree too vehemently with his opinions, then the cogs are functioning properly. If someone objects to his beliefs or strays from his concept of the rules, then the cog is broken and must be beaten back into shape by whatever means necessary. When personal difficulties arise with another listmember the tactics of conciliation, self-explanation, self-examination, and other-examination are all but unknown from him. He's interested in whether he can win a cog over or whether he can defeat an errant cog, but he's not interested in knowing the cogs well enough to see them as people whom the rules (such as they are) are meant to serve and not vice versa. For instance: in this latest tiff between you, Erik, and Jeroen, there is an interesting contrast. Even though you have childishly and tiresomely baited him into a rage, you did so by paying attention to who he is and how he thinks. You actually had to look at him as a person before you could taunt him as a fool. In that there is a germ of respect. His response to you, however, is rule-based and mechanical. It's compulsive, inflexible, and not grounded in any attempt to react creatively to the truth of what's happening. That fact conveys more disregard than anything he's actually written. (Of course, he will disagree and say that he is defending his own rights and the common good, but the fact that he's incapable of seeing that the way to victory is by shutting up proves my point.) None of these faults disqualify Jeroen from being a listmember, nor do I want to seem him permanently expelled. I like the fact that he frequently tweaks American conceits, for instance, even when I disagree with him. But his character is ill suited to a listowner position in any list where many members want it to function like a community in some way, where the people as people are deemed more important than the management of the thread-making machinery. If one sees a mailing list as a source of interesting topics and little else, then the total tolerance rule might work. But it's at variance with my interests as I perceive them, so I can't buy into it in this instance. I have several interests of which I'm aware. Like many, I want to see Brin-L become a place of happy freewheeling discussion, the kind of place where we can talk about an online community without feeling shamefully naive for saying so. I'm also very frustrated that Jeroen is so clueless about people, about himself, and about how to function socially in this kind of setting, and I'm angry that he makes no attempt to learn from the people - including me but not just me - who have attempted to be peacemakers in the past. Although my habits tell me I should attempt to play the peacemaker role again, my common sense tells me that when a strategy fails multiple times, it's time to change the strategy. If I'm honest I'll also admit this: I want to see Jeroen suffer at the hands of irony. And that's why I'm saying what I actually think, which probably shocks all those I've told in the past to bite their tongues and take the high road. I can think of one or two perspectives from which all I've just written will seem like utter crap, but those are the risks. Caveat emptor, of course. Marvin Long Austin, Texas There ain't no Devil; there's just God when he's drunk. -- Tom Waits
