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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Solon who wrote (65388)	11/2/2002 9:33:22 PM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 82486

You do impy in your words that I may be biased. I would not say "biased." As I said earlier, the incident did a lot of damage. From where I sit, it seems that virtually every discussion that's been had since then has been a proxy for the Poet-CH fight. People have interpreted each subject in the context of how it fits in with the elephant in the living room. I would not call that bias but rather elephant context. Idiotic nonsense from lawyers are clearly part of gamesmanship...<ggg> It may have been convenient and useful as an excuse and he may have spun it a bit to suite his "game," but I don't doubt that CH genuinely holds that view, more or less. It has been twisted and exaggerated during this recent discussion, but I think the underlying perspective of distinguishing the person from the alias persona for reason of on-line safety is reasonable and one likely to be endorsed by CH from what I know of him. He had expressed similar views in discussions of on-line safety well before this incident ever came up. It's not something he made up out of whole cloth specifically for this fight. Best I recall.

To: Solon who wrote (65388)	11/2/2002 11:10:21 PM
From: The Philosopher	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 82486

"What about his position that posters aren't real?" That is not his "position"...LOL!!! That is just phoney. Not true. Not real isn't necessarily the term I would use. Clearly there is a flesh and blood person (or else a computer that makes Deep Blue look like an amateur) benind each alias. (Or two or more people -- there is nothing to stop a pair or a group of people from sharing an alias.) But I do maintain that posters here, especially those who post under aliases, are self-created constructs. The constructs may be closer to or further from the real person behind the posts, depending on a number of factors, including how much imagination the real person has and how much they value their privacy. But one can create here--or at least can try to create here--any persona they want to try out. A shoe salesman can claim to be a college professor. A woman can pretend to be a man, and vice versa. An 18 year old can claim to be a retired Boeing engineer. Other posters have no way to verify whether they are what they say they are or not, unless they choose to volunteer 3d information about themselves, and even then it may be wrong -- for example, Rambi posts links to columns she has written, and I believe her, but I also realize that those columns could be written by someone totally different and Rambi is really just a wanna-be columnist who is pretending to be this person. Same with Christopher Hodgkin -- the poster using that name could actually be the Christopher Hodgkin who's a lawyer in Washington, or he could be a disgruntled opposing party who is using that name to try to discredit the real Christopher Hodgkin who still uses a typewriter and has no idea his name is being plastered all over the internet. It really is true that "on the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog." There have been plenty of stories of people pretending to be what they aren't -- high school kids pretenting to be big time investors, pedophile males pretending to be nice girls, etc. The point is, that nobody but the poster knows. The alias is a construct. And if someone is good, they can create and maintain for years a construct that has no connection at all with who they are in real 3d life. In that sense, no poster here is real. Not a phoney argument -- simple truth.