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Pastimes : SI Message Filtering - Pros and Cons -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: David Lawrence who wrote (219)	5/24/1998 9:26:00 AM
From: Jerry in Omaha	Respond to of 263

If I may butt-in here, the discussion so far seems two tracked; one track concerns the technical aspects of designing and implementing a filter with a perfectly integrated combination of desired functions. The other track concerns itself with the propriety of arbitrary individual ostracism in a medium fostering a social context. Homing in on the second track, Philip Slater, in Earthwalk, analyzes the relations of individuals to groups and groups to culture. Although I have major disagreements with certain aspects of Mr. Slater's assumptive premises I found the following to be pertinent to the discussion on this thread. Quoting from Earthwalk; "All groups need both to maintain structures and occasionally to alter them, to limit the (infinite) number of alternatives available at any moment and yet keep open possibilities that are not normally envisioned. These needs are inherently contradictory -- there has never been and never will be a permanent solution. "No living organism can survive without predictability, nor without flexibility. No group can survive without cohesion, nor without permeability. The continual renegotiation of these dilemmas is the foundation of social life. "Every viable organic entity must include an ordered base and an element of chaotic instability. These depend upon each other for their existence. There can be no swindlers if there is no trust. Yet trust would have no meaning without swindlers. To attempt the extermination of all swindling would be a gross error, as humanity has dimly recognized throughout most of history. On the other hand, to create an entire economy predicated on swindling, as we have done, is equally dangerous. One tries merely to keep the ratio low enough to permit predictability and high enough to prevent the population from lapsing into idiocy." IMHO the desire to extrude "waste" from any thread not only constitutes an obviously arbitrary value judgement made on a "useless" thread bolus but also suggests certain qualities of the individual poster-portal instigating the expulsion. The most efficient threads assimilate the arrogant with acceptance and respect therefore producing little or no "waste" to be eliminated. Bad people find acceptance and love so repugnant they soon eliminate themselves. Jerard P