From: Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)
Date: Fri Mar 01 2002 - 13:10:10 CST
Contained in your message were a number of technical and social points
about the purpose of a news standard that are interesting and quite likely
fodder for pertinant discussion. Unfortunately, your message was couched
in an extremely confrontational, aggressive, and derogatory tone. I think
that working together we could probably isolate the exact points at which
we disagree and our opinions begin to diverge, and that exercise would be
illuminating and even possibly useful for writing a standard, but
apparently I'd have to put up with a great deal of abuse in order to try
to do that.
I think that's a shame, because I think that the points that you raise are
probably worth discussing. However, I'm unwilling to discuss them with
you in this tone. If it were just an infrequent occurrence in the middle
of a heated discussion, I'd ignore it, but it's not.
If I had more free time to devote to the discussion, I'd go farther in
trying to filter out the tone and find the content, but right now I really
don't. That kind of filtering requires, for me, a great deal of time and
emotional energy that I don't have available for this topic. Perhaps
someone else with more free time, or for whom this sort of discussion is
easier, will be willing to go to that effort. Or maybe you'd be willing
to assume good will and reasonableness on the part of other members of the
working group, even if you disagree with them.
Until then, I'm choosing to bow out of this particular discussion.
-- Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>