Comments interspersed:
"Katheryn_Swynford" <katheryn_swynford@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:1125730293.445291.246280@g43g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
Dear Peter (Or Mr.Stewart, I'm uncertain of how you wish to be
addressed; sorry; you have not been rude to me and I do not wish to be
rude to you):
You can choose for yourself which of my names you prefer to use - Peter is
fine for me.
I am not attacking you personally, I only wish to address why I as a
nobody contributor have concerns:
I didn't think you were attacking me or anyone else. SGM isn't an
adversarial pursuit for me, despite the misrepresentations of others. I
insult people on specific points at issue when I think this is deserved, but
not capriciously or for fun.
You said:
"Equally, there are some who expend a good deal of time and effort
before finally seeing through the sham of Richardson's posturings about a
king's kinsman or some other similarly empty ploy to keep his name before
the
public. The Vernon rubbish of the past few days is a typical example of
his stupid & subversive work - it was never more than a piece of nonsense
to impress the unwary, but it took a lot of patience from Todd, Rosie,
Luke and others to unravel the tangled mess that developed & that was
stubbornly
maintained after the originator must have seen he had failed dismally.
A moderated newsgroup would have given up only a fraction of the
bandwidth, if any, to these and other such threads. They clog the SGM
archive,
making searches time-consuming & often unprofitable. " END QUOTE
First: what you say is that posts like the above-referenced would be
silenced, period.
No, I didn't say that at all - moderation is not "silencing": if a post is
rejected as inappropriate, it could be revised and resubmitted. The task of
moderators ought to be no different from (but less intensive than) the work
of an editor in deciding what does and does not go into a publication. The
author remains responsible for the facts & opinions contained in a post, and
is under no obligation to change these while the moderator is under no
obligation to publish them. The writer still has the option of sending
whatever is rejected to anyone else privately, if e-mail addresses are made
known in order to facilitate this.
My reply is that I, as one of the perhaps uninitiated, found the thread
enlightening. I, for one, except for any personal slights that may or
may not have been present, enjoyed reading the thread and following the
reasoning between two or more camps. This is what I _expect_ to read
(sans personal attacks, that is). This is why I post the occasional
post: not so much because I am convinced of such and such a thing, but
to see the opposite reasoned opinion.
If you thought the Vernon genealogy proposed by Richardson had merits worth
discussing, and that this was fit to command the attention of other
contributors to dispose of the rot for your entertainment or enlightenment,
then you have a different idea of the value of other people's time & effort
in relation to your own needs than most reasonable souls.
Secondly, I worry about the specification against 'specious logic': a
newbie (like me!) may well honestly commit such sins of logic, seeking
education. How can we be educated if we are censored at the front? (I
see myself here, prominantly, obviously).
You can see through most of Richardsons' ploys and nonsense without prior
knowledge, just by commonsense, and attention to the points (and the number
of points....) that he avoids answering. Logic is not a secret to be
unlocked on SGM: the principles are universal and some familiarity is easy
enough to acquire elsewhere.
Is this to be a forum of professionals, who would not make such errors
of logic, or will it be a forum for all, including those who may well
make such mistakes, hoping for correction?
The mistakes that all of us make will still be made - Todd Farmerie, for
instance, helpfully corrected a mistaken impression that I gave recently
about Zaida-Isabella. He did this without guile and without a personal
agenda, just for the sake of clarity and understanding. I welcome this and
could have had no legitimate objection to it even if Todd had sharpened his
remarks into a direct criticism, because I was wrong.
I am not assuming that you and others are here solely for the purpose
of educating the uninitiated. But honest seekers of truth would then
seek... where exactly? (just in case I'm about to receive _my_ walking
papers... @;-) )
I don't follow the question - if there is a moderated newsgroup somewhere
else, why could you not go there with any questions that you might otherwise
(or also) raise here?
I am not suggesting that this is a trivial, a priori, question. It is
a subject that I've seen raised on a few software development lists
that I'm on, and I've posted pretty much the same idea.
It really seems ( in the absence of other ideas ) to come down to this:
(1) a list for the erudite
(2) a (useless) list for everybody else.
Again, erudition has nothing to do with it. If people want to share their
findings in a specialised study only with the initiated, they can do so in
print. Most people come to SGM, and will to a moderated alternative, in
order to learn from less formal research and sometimes from serendipity.
There is plenty of "use" in posts from people whom nobody - not themselves
indeed - would consider "erudite" on the subject at hand, but whose thoguhts
& experience can be illuminating nonetheless. I don't see that SGM
participants can be so broadly categorised anyway - some may know a lot
about part of the field, and little about the rest.
Peter Stewart