[ale] as promised/threatened, an overly long post with probably nothing of real importance

[Tom Freeman]

On 05/03/2011 11:28 PM, Pete Hardie wrote:
> On Tue, May 3, 2011 at 23:03, Jim Kinney<jim.kinney at gmail.com>  wrote:
>    
>> For the past 10+ years ALE has been my extended family of geeks. The
>>
>> However, the aspect that concerns me the most is NO ONE COMPLAINED THAT I
>> ALONE SHUT DOWN THE LIST. I made a unilateral decision and EVERYONE on this
>> list just shrugged like sheep and went along. I got emails asking me to not
>> bail out but if I was going to they would step up. But not a single email
>> complaining that I took away their freedoms on this list. I expected 20-30
>> emails within minutes of the announcement of my action. That it never came
>> has indicated this is no longer the ALE from my memories but it is something
>> strange and far less satisfying.
>>      
> I take a slightly different tack on this - I think that we as ALE
> members know that any censorship of one list is hardly
> an affront to our collective speech - we can always create another
> list for whatever topic we feel needed.  Few of us are
> naive enough to think that this forum is the be-all and end-all of
> online discourse.  If the ale-list gets over-moderated, we can go
> elsewhere
> for our politics, and if we feel the need for Linux-related talk, we
> could create a new list.
>
> That said, I think we'd all prefer to keep this list, for no other
> reason that tradition and habit.
>
>
>    
I for one would also prefer the current list. Jim largely has the right 
of it IMHO. A large part of what has kept this list healthy has been the 
noninterference of the list maitainer. Of course, the big moderator 
switch _is_ kinda handy to kill intemperate threads...