response 26 of 92:

Nov 5 23:16 UTC 1996

(FWIW, I lost my staff conference participation file when the disk overheated
for the first time, recreated it, and then lost it again when the disk died
(since the recreation was done after the bckup).  Note that I haven't accused
kerouac of having anything to do with it.)

response 28 of 92:

Nov 5 23:20 UTC 1996

well I;m sorry if thats the case, it just seems WAY too
conicidental that the only participaton file I lost was for
COOP.  My other confs are justfine.

response 30 of 92:

Nov 5 23:50 UTC 1996

But I wasnt on when it crashed.  I didnt know it crashed.

response 32 of 92:

Nov 6 09:27 UTC 1996

I lost my agora participation file twice when Grex's disk overheated.  :(


John -- The thing that's hard about ignoring Kerouac is that this *is* an open
system.  This means that new users who arrive in the co-op conference and see
Kerouac's crazy claims don't have any way of knowing that a lot of what he
says has little bearing on reality.  If co-op only ever had the same
participants, it would be a lot easier to ignore him.

Richard -- It was less than a year from the time Scott first logged on to
Grex to the time when he became chair of the board.  He said sensible
things, and other people responded positively.  That's the key to being
respected on Grex: demonstrate good sense.  You talk like there's some inner
circle clique that is completely inaccessible.  Truthfully, it's not that
hard to go from being brand new to being an "insider" around here.  But it
does require that you demonstrate good sense.

response 34 of 92:

Nov 6 15:45 UTC 1996

I agree with John's point:  If you are tempted to respond in heat, with anger
and little forethought, please consider passing and responding later?  I have
discovered that ti works wonders for me when I can manage it.  This is advice
for you, too, Richard.  It's entirely possible that if you even waited five
minutes when you are angry, you'd cool down enough that your response wouldn't
raise havok in the cf.  I know how it is for you.  I almost singlehandedly
killed, for a while, another cf back when I was newer to grex, because I
didn't wait to post when I was angry.  I completely alienated a very good
friend, with whom I had been dating for almost a year, and it took years to
get that friendship back.  Give it a shot, all of you.  It might work wonders.

response 36 of 92:

Nov 6 18:02 UTC 1996

I guess the thing that really gets to me about Richard is the constant
complaining, while he makes it very obvious that he doesn't have a clue about
the issues he is complaining about.  When we don't ignore the rest of our
users and do exactly what Richard wants us to do, Richard starts complaining
that it's not fair, and starts yelling and screaming about how everybody who
disagrees with him should be forced to resign.  Richard really comes off
sounding like a whiny two year old, with one big difference: we can easily
dismis the antics of two year olds as coming from two year olds who will grow
out of it.  Richard, as far as I know, is a lot older than that, and has shown
no sign of growing out of it.

I'm sure Richard doesn't see himself this way, but to a lot of people in this
conference, that's certainly the impression he gives.  I fully expect Richard
not to understand this, and to react to this either by complaining about me
saying this, or my not complaining, but pointing out over and over and over
again that he's not complaining.  Either way, he'll just prove my point.

Richard, now that most of us have decided that you aren't worth listening to,
you aren't going to change our minds by complaining more about that.  If you
can demonstrate that you have intelligent things to say, that you can
understand and deal with with people disagreeing with you, and that you know
when to be quiet or when to shut up, you may eventually get us to start taking
you seriously.  But, you've spent the last year or two demonstrating that you
are an annoying person who likes to whine a lot and has very little
constructive to say, so it's going to take some time to undo that.

response 38 of 92:

Nov 6 19:50 UTC 1996

venting to /dev/null (or its euivalent) is a practice that takes maturity.

response 40 of 92:

Nov 7 02:16 UTC 1996

Kerouac -- this item is for _logical_ discussion of ideas from all over grex,
and all those with a login are important.  You seem to be very ready to spout
off, and without quoting anyone, claim that they have unfairly judged you,
without making any specific references to what they have said.  People like
remmers have gone into items and reposted what was posted before to show
everyone what happened and to prove their point.  Logic rests on step-by-step
proofs, and you have yet to do one of those.

It has been pointed out and I will say it again that you seem to be the only
person that agrees with you.  I challenge you to bring in some other users,
maybe not even members, but users who get on grex to use party and/or email,
who agree with you that the BOD and staff control grex and do not let anyone
else have any say about what goes on here.  After that, look at all the items
in coop where various users have decided what the staff should do, not the
staff.

By reading your responses it appears that you type very fast without first
giving some thought to what you are typing.  Please, read other people's
responses, because they have logins, and their voices are just as important
as yours in how grex is/should be run.

I think it was Scott who told you, "Our members are not idiots".  Think about
that.  If we felt that the staff and BOD ran completely without regard to what
we thought and said, we probably wouldn't be members.  As it is, we like grex.
We like remmers, janc, and popcorn.  And we are proud to be members of the
system that they founded, and put so much time and effort into keeping up.

response 42 of 92:

Nov 7 07:23 UTC 1996

A useful principle of discussion of controversial topics in some forums is
that no one speaks twice until everyone wishing to speak has spoken. I
don't see how to apply it here, where we can't see who's hand is up, but
the general idea might be useful. That is, *wait* some decent time before
speaking to the question again. This self-restraint would diminish any one
person appearing a loud mouth. 

response 44 of 92:

Nov 7 11:39 UTC 1996

Re #42: That's what I do. With unmoderated conferencing, it
can't be anything but voluntary, of course.

response 46 of 92:

Nov 7 15:34 UTC 1996

This conference is not for, as Kerouac says, "debate".  When we talk national
politics in Agora we debate (and I much appreciate Richard's participation
there).  Clinton and Dole go on TV and debate.  At the end of a debate,
nothing is resolved, and only a limited number of viewpoints are aired.  (We
heard very little about the Green Party's platform during the Clinton/Dole
debate.)  That's not what this conferences is for.  The idea is to air lots
of different ideas and arguments, and see how many people chime in in support
and see if we can alter our ideas to win broader support.

When I entered the "Limiting Email" item, it was because I thought this was
an issue we needed to address.  I started out by describing three different
ideas (or were their two?  I forget) because I didn't want the discussion to
be about just one idea, but wanted to encourage people to come up with other
ideas.  I entered arguments both for and against the ideas I posted.  In later
responses, I suggested still orther ideas and added support to things other
people said earlier.  Last I heard the only thing that really seemed to have
broad support was locating heavy mail users and sending them mail asking them
to reconsider their usage.  Not everyone thought that was a useful idea, but
nobody thought it would do much harm.  Likely we will try to do more of that.

That's the kind of mode that most everyone here operates in.  It is *not* a
debate, even though it involves a lot of exchange of differing opinions.  It
requires a lot more *listening* then debating does.  Debaters just use the
other person's comments as a spring board for launching their own.

response 48 of 92:

Nov 7 18:35 UTC 1996

I don't think John outright said to ignore your responses, Kerouac.  I think
the basic statement was to ignore them if they upset us, just as we would
ignore another user's response if it ticked us off.

BTW -- I notice you apologized for your accusation in Agora (about the coop
file);  Why didn't you here?  Was your post in Agora about something that is
going on here a way to tattle on Valerie, Jan, etc?