edhall@randvax.UUCP (Ed Hall) (08/22/85)
There've been a whole lot of fightin' words exchanged here recently, raising the temperature even more of what is usually a pretty hot newsgroup. Some folks are acting like school-yard bullies, putting a chip on their shoulder and daring the net to knock it off. Others are getting into intellectual food-fights, trying to outmatch each other in terms of outrageous opinions. Still others are sitting on the sidelines trying to see who can be the most cynical about the whole mess. (It's ``The Net'' after all, ya know? Whadaya expect?) The latter are often bored versions of the amatuer critics that seem to hang about merely to find flaws in other arguments--rather than offer any substance of their own. (Hey, guess which catagory I've sometimes fallen into?) And, of course *everyone* has to be right and *everyone* has to have the last word. (I've no illusions that I will.) The light-to-heat ratio is at an all time low, with about the only current exception being a discussion of reading matter (though if it follows past trends this, too, will precipitate a shouting match after a while). Of course, I know what happens when people decide to say things like this on the net--they get pummeled and crowned ``Tin God of the Net'' by all those who get their yuks seeing just how much anarchy they can create. And now that we've a mushrooming ``turf'' fight developing, I suppose I'll get fried by some men for ``sticking up for the women'', and by some women who think I'm sticking up for them and thus implying that they somehow can't do it for themselves. Well, I'm not sticking up for anybody but myself. I happen to believe quite deeply that if we can humanize the relations between the sexes, we'll have done more for advancing civilization than we've accomplished since we came down from the trees. You may not share this belief, and I welcome any calm discussions upon it. But whatever your point of view, you aren't going to get very far if you insist upon an attitude of confrontation. If we've settled nothing else here, we've certainly empirically verified that. -Ed Hall decvax!randvax!edhall