joel@decwrl.UUCP (Joel McCormack) (11/09/85)
Dear net.music participants,
Yes, it is easy to bait Doug...he will reply to just about any article that
mentions him, Kate Bush, Madonna, Larry Palena, etc.
No, you are not going to convince him to change any of his opinions...he
thinks that the rest of the world would listen to Kate (or other "good"
musicians), if only they weren't constantly having their brain cells
destroyed by Madonna and other slime. If you happen to like Madonna, well,
your opinion hardly counts, as by this time you probably have so few brain
cells left it's hard to achieve sentience, much less expound intelligently on
things about which you obviously know nothing.
Yes, Doug is remarkably inconsistent, plays stupid semantic games to wiggle
out of tight spots, will always maintain that he needs no formal training
to determine what music is truly historically good, will continue to use the
same arguments over and over and crimson and clover.
No, you cannot simply ask him to show some restraint; he has gone as far as
temporarily changing his mail address to spite the person who posted the
"anti-Doug" filter.
For a little while he was fairly quiet; he had the "love-hounds" mailing list
to keep him occupied. But as people started disagreeing with his few (well,
few for Doug) postings to net.music, he replied to all of them, and is now
back to his former level of promiscuous postings.
I am guilty of occasionally taking jabs at Doug. He invariably misses the
point, and no one is the wiser. I would like to suggest that perhaps the
"quiet treatment" might work best to restore net.music to just that; today it
would be more aptly named net.doug or net.bush or net.flame, as many have
pointed out. If everyone who disagreed with Doug's opinions (me, Larry
Palena, Dave Blickstein, Bill Tomczak, Dick Dunn, and all the rest of you who
fit this description) just refrained from responding to Doug, maybe, just
maybe, Doug would quiet down on net.music, and go back to his love-hounds
mailing list.
(Though I'm sure Doug will quote me here:
> maybe, just maybe, Doug would quiet down
[Doug] No way, suckers, I'm going to post till I drop)
I believe in free speech and all that, but when sites are cut off from
newsgroups like net.music due to excessive amounts of traffic (someone has
to pay for those phone calls and that processing time), it's time for all of
us to behave more responsibly.
Yours for a higher information-density net,
--
- Joel McCormack {ihnp4 decvax ucbvax allegra}!decwrl!joel
joel@decwrl.arpa