Though I was US representative, and Dylan work is primarily in the US,
and my charter was to represent the Lisp camp, not the Dylan camp.  

 (1) necessarily a Usenet regular, so flamewars do not get much
attention; and
 (2) probably a Lisper and thus highly logical, so the inconsistency of
threatening someone with daily harrassment as a way of improving the
tone of an n.g. has naturally drawn some comment.

Reacting to such comment with allegations of conspiracy only enhances
our fascination with the messenger, who needs to heed their own message:
talk about Lisp, not personalities.

  Perhaps it has something to do with the amazingly irritating habit of
  fucks like that frog-eating vermin and possibly yourself to do nothing
  but annoy me, talk about me, flame me, etc?  You offer us _nothing_ of
  value whatsoever, destroy any there might be, and you have the _gall_ to
  complain about somebody else's contributions?  Fuck you.

  Just contribute intelligently and constructively on Common Lisp, you
  goddamn asswipes!  The more you pathetic losers whine, the less _worthy_
  you are of anybody's thoughts on anything.  Do not be surprised that you
  do not receive much useful input from people and communities _you_ choose
  to attack.  Might I remind you retards that I have done _none_ of you
  guys _anything_ at all and that there is _nothing_ I can do to prevent
  you specimens from going mental the way you do?  Shit-for-brains like
  that French fuck come out of the blue with _no_ constructive purpose
  whatsoever.  This is _unique_ to those who attack me.  This is why you
  scumbags are much less tolerated than anyone else ever will be.

  I would actually appreciate a moderated comp.lang.lisp.  It would keep
  the fucking retards out, and removing the source of irritation removes
  the reactions to the irritants.  People like you with the mental capacity
  of bird droppings do not understand their own role but blame someone else
  for their very own behavior.  This is why you are _serious_ irritants.

  This is _not_ a forum for your personal feelings about anybody else.
  That you insufferable idiots do not understand this is perhaps the root
  cause of your incessant need to bother the world with your coping
  problems.  If you cannot cope with the reality you live in, just go die,
  do not bother other people with it so they are forced to cope with you.

  And before you judge me yet again, take a good look at how this year has
  started.  If you think I get disappointed and hurt because yet another
  despicable asshole chose to stage a fight here with me, you are quite
  right.  If you think a reeking French moron inspires me to help you guys
  with anything and post insightful messages or share code with you, _do_
  think again.  _You_ are the problem.  _You_ keep coming back to attack me
  out of the blue for nothing in particular.  _You_ use this newsgroup as a
  sounding board for your _insane_ hatred of me.  Get the fuck out of here
  and think about what you are doing!  You have absolutely no business even
  _considering_ complaining about anybody else here or elsewhere.  The fact
  that you behave the way you do _validates_ and _approves_ my behavior for
  the whole next millennium.  If you really do not like what I do, THINK IT
  THROUGH, and find a way to inspire me to want to be helpful to you.  Do
  you do that?  No, you choose to attack, which is precisely what you think
  is _wrong_!  Instead, you tell me that it is correct and proper to attack
  you pricks for _your_ behavior.

  But worse, you are not even smart enough to make it part of a reasonably
  on-topic response that ties the reaction to a _specific_ action!  You are
  _only_ hateful terrorists on a mission from your deity to pillage and
  rape the community you invade, like throwbacks to a time of non-thinking
  cave-dwelling brutes, which you are and mistake everybody else for, too.
  I react to what people do in terms of clearly invalid logic, opinionated
  ignorance and the arrogance that goes with it, posting lies and other
  false information, insisting on destroying what other people do, etc, and
  I confine myself to precisely that which that person does.  When that
  person starts thinking (yes, it happens, but you would never notice it,
  because you _cannot_ think, and do not detect it when it happens), or
  simply goes away, so does my criticism.  You pussballs, however, attack
  _only_ the person, there is no way to appease you, and you do not quit.

  The sheer stupidity and amazing lack of intelligence displayed by those
  who attack me here reaches record lows for mankind.  Congratulations!  I
  do not think you can do better, quite unlike ever other person here that
  I have ever criticized for anything, and most of those improve.  The sick
  fucks who come to comp.lang.lisp only to attack me, or indeed anyone,
  prove to the whole planet that you are poster boys for abortion rights,
  and none of you ever "recover" from your deeply ingrained personality
  disorders that made you post your stenching filth in the first place.

  Go ahead, prove my point!

  Not to you, but you are part of the problem, not the solution, by your
  own admission.  Why does it surprise you that you do not get the point?

  About 1 in 20 people go _mental_ when criticized in an unexpected way.
  (I have the empirical data to support this number.  Trust me.)  They are
  probably psychologically _unable_ to deal with unexpected disagreement,
  since they usually come up with "you attack everyone you disagree with"
  (which is what they do, and nobody else).  Some people react hysterically
  to any experience of cognitive dissonance, and would rather die than have
  to change their mind on something they are not specifically prepared to.
  This is _very_ easy to detect when you know what to look for and it tells
  me that most of what else they believe is utter hogwash, as they have a
  real _effort_ to reject everything that could contradict their beliefs.
  That impression has to date _not_ been refuted by a single specimen of
  the non-thinking subhumans.  To think (specifically, to concentrate) or
  not is perhaps the only choice about which we have free will, but some
  people never actually make that choice -- they somehow manage not to die
  at a young age even while being wastes of space, parasites on society
  like a non-hunting member of predator flock.  The basic thinking skill
  that involves the ability to recognize _intellectually_ that some of
  one's tacit assumptions has been challenged, instead of reacting with the
  primitive emotion of fear, uncertainty, and doubt, is a _requirement_ for
  public discourse.  If you feel under attack because something you hold to
  be true is challenged or even potentially challenged, you should go hide
  in some dark basement and certainly not be out in public, where, unless
  you surround yourself with nincompoops who all agree with you and exhibit
  no shred of a new idea or a controversial opinion, you _will_ experience
  such challenges.  USENET in particular is a place where every single
  assumption you hold _will_ become challenged at one time or another.

  The other 19 will at the very least not react irrationally hostile to a
  challenge.  Admittedly, only 1 out of 4 react intellectually and will
  always be curious at first, while at least half the normal population
  will _disregard_ any contradictory information to their existing beliefs
  until they have heard it often enough, at which point they unthinkingly
  just adopt it as the new thing they do not recognize is being challenged.
  The remaining 1 out of 5 become _irritated_ by what they think is false
  information but only occasionally act on it.  The consequence of this is
  that a large number of people are only comfortable when people around
  them keep echoing what they all already believe, usually at several
  levels.  This is a waste of bandwidth on the Net (the stupid "me too"
  response is thankfully mostly gone, but it was so common from AOL users a
  few years ago that many people still write "AOL" when they mean "me too"
  in an electronic forum), but several people still hang around on the Net
  mostly to have their assumptions unchallenged because their idea of
  stability and safety and even _identity_ is that things do not change.
  These are polite, friendly people who communicate _nothing_: no new
  ideas, so no wrong ideas, no controversial opinions, so no mistakes,
  nothing worth saying, so nothing worth disagreeing with, either.  These
  are the small-town people who cannot handle the big city where people
  bump into eachother with controversial opinions and attitudes all the
  time.  If they have to have people around them agree with them, stay the
  hell off the Net -- they will get seriously bruised, not by other people,
  but by their own lack of ability to cope with unexpected disagreements
  with what they think is the only right answer.  Pathologically provincial
  people who are unable to come to terms with other people's opinions, but
  think they must enforce a single, right answer for everyone, do _not_
  belong in public fora.  When that "single, right answer" is either simply
  wrong or at least not the _only_ right answer, other people need to be
  able to know this.  This is when the nutballs crack open and all hell
  breaks loose.  You should be able to figure out how it happens and then
  to see if it actually does happen that way, now.

  If you take the time to be fair, and I suspect that you will never learn
  what this even _means_, you will see that the party that _first_ goes
  personal is _not_ me.  But because of shit-for-brains like yourself and
  that French parasite you have taken sides with, it is somehow OK to
  attack me.  I do not appreciate that.  This also happens because these 1
  in 20 are so _bad_ persons that they are so afraid of any criticism of
  their person that they immediately defend themselves when their _actions_
  or opinions are criticized -- since bad people recognize a threat, they
  think that everything I do is threaten bad people.  I do not, bad people
  find their way to attack me _all_ on their own.  These bad people do not
  even _understand_ that only their actions and opinions can be criticized
  -- and indeed they never make the discintion in what they criticize -- so
  they believe that just because they feel hurt, it must have been personal
  and since they are being criticized for not exercising their thinking
  skills, they react all emotionally, like those people who have so little
  blood supply to their brain they cannot think and feel at the same time.

  That pile of French dung, as well as several before him, accuse me of
  being so "predictable", but I think I create cognitive dissonance in
  pathologically provincial, utterly simple people -- people whose lives
  depend on a bunch of misguided assumptions _will_ defend themselves when
  they are faced with someone who considers no assumption worth protecting.
  Now, I do not speak unless I have something I think is worth saying,
  which _excludes_ platitudes and whatever people agree on.  If people
  already agree, there is absolutely no need to keep repeating it.  And in
  all likelihood, it is _false_ if everybody keep saying it, so as to
  convince themselves.  Therefore, what I say is usually controversial.  To
  some people, that makes me interesting.  To other people, a lethal threat
  to their personal identities.  But neither of these opinions are anybody
  else's business.  You choose to read what you choose to read.  Why so
  many of you fucking losers have to read what I post and work yourself up
  like cats in heat, and then ask _me_ not to post as opposed to they not
  reading what they do not like, I have not figured out.  I think it is
  because their sense of ethics is always concerned with what _other_
  people should do.  You know the kind -- so hypocritical two of them would
  give off enough hot air to balloon around the globe.

  I repeat, for the benefit your limited mental capacity: This is not a
  forum for venting your personal feelings about anyone.  Grow a clue, now,
  and _mature_.  If you have to see me as a symbol of cognitive dissonance,
  your learning to deal with me is what will make you a man, little runt.

  Now, if you keep being a stupid little turd with aspirations of becoming
  as big and stinky as that French sewer you admire so much, keep it to
  yourself.  Stink up your own place, do _not_ shit any more in public.
  That French septic tank is beyond hope and he will not recover, but you
  appear to have some remnants of a brain that could be recovered if you do
  not let yourself sink to his level.

Those who'd rather have wine instead of brandy. . .well, the St. Bernard
has other hikers to find and the winers will either acquire a taste for
brandy or starve.  Hell, presented correctly, a cheerful St. Bernard might
even convince a winer to grudgingly taste (just this once; wink, wink,
nudge,nudge) the brandy.

Or, more succinctly, if you're fightin' about something so trivial, you're
either already dead or your vigorously, wonderously alive.  Or, you've
perhaps discussing academic politics.

As I wrote this, I was reminded of the letter Lincoln wrote General Meade
after he squandered an opportunity to attack a General Lee trapped on a
swollen Potomac.

    My dear General,

    I do not believe you appreciate the magnitude of the misfortune
    involved in Lee's escape.  He was within our easy grasp, and to
    have closed upon him would, in conneciton with our other successes,
    have ended the war.  As it is, the ware will be prolonged
    indefinitely.  If you could not safely attack Lee last Monday, how
    can you possibly do so south of the riverm, when you can take with
    you very few--no more than two-thirds of the force you then had in
    hand?  It would be unreasonable to expect and I do not expect that
    you can now effect much.  Your golden opportunity is gone, and I
    am distressed immeasurably because of it.

Meade had nothing to say about the letter. . .'cause Lincoln never
mailed it.

Bet you _writing_ it helped him some though.

cheers,

I wish he would shut his foul mouth and only post his technical insights.  But
that's not the nature of usenet.  I have participated in plenty of
naggum-bashing threads but ultimately it does nothing but add to the pollution.
You're free to post your objections, as am I (and I do from time to time) but
that is all that is in your power.  Don't keep the flames going and don't
expect some virtual uprising that will somehow silence him for ever.

I have decided to only say anything when it seems likely his latest target
doesn't have the maturity or strength of character to take it in stride and to
make sure people realize he does not speak for everyone here (though this
should be obvious, for sociological reasons it needs to be said occasionally)

The only time I have ever eaten frogs' legs was in a Chinese
Restaurant in the Luxembourg.

FWIW :)

  You, too, seem to make the mistake of believing that I start these
  fights.  I do not.  If you take the time to be fair in your judgment,
  which you have not up to now, you will discover that I _am_ polite to
  people when pointing out factual errors, etc.  _This_ is what blows some
  people's mind if they were not specifically prepared to be wrong on that
  particular point.

  Do you consider the fact that you exhibit a severe case of prejudice as a
  problem?  If not, could you explain how you think to me and tell me how
  your response is possible unless you actually believe that I attack
  people out of the blue?  If you do believe that, what _facts_ could alter
  your "impression" when _fact_ did not enter into it to to begin with?

| I'm probably not invested enough, but I don't get why things often get
| so exercised on c.l.l.

  Precisely.

| Maybe I over-estimate the viability of the Common Lisp community or the
| specification, but I don't see how public fighting (and a fine scrap it
| was, eh, Seamus) over something like protects the Common Lisp community
| or the standard.

  Do you think fights in Congress, in the media, etc, over the wide-ranging
  anti-terrorist bills protects the freedom of Americans?  Have you seen
  how nasty those fights got?  I am a nice little puppy compared to those
  who have (in my view, rightfully) compared some of the measures to a
  giant step towards a police state, with "the only way to protect our
  freedom is to destroy it" as a line invoked several times.  These are not
  simple little things like programming languages, but policies that affect
  billions of people, ultimately, trillions of tax dollars, etc.

  Have you learned that an important war was fought in North America over
  the freedom of certain people?  Do you think they would have been better
  off if that war had not been fought?  Etc.

  We have a company among us who exhibits an extremely ambivalent attitude
  towards the standard, with at least one very vocal employee who spends
  his time writing code in a style that predates Common Lisp the Language
  from 1984, possibly even the start of that standardization effort,
  because he wrote a Lisp system even longer ago.  He argues that people
  should not use some parts of the standard and rejects code offered to him
  that does, because he has invented something else that he did not even
  publish either specification or source code to for _months_, even while
  publishing code using it.  Precisely what you allude to in your "why
  can't we all get along"-style first paragraph, _his_ attack on the users
  and creators of the standard alike in an obscure little piece grandiously
  entitled "Lisp Coding Standard" was simply _vicious_ and so hostile to
  those it was aimed at that they stopped working with him long before _he_
  erupted here on USENET accusing those who wanted the standard behavior to
  be "religious" and lots of worse things.  Calling people who made a
  standard on which his company bases its promise to deliver products to
  its customers _braindamaged_ tends to annoy people who more than anything
  want to feel good about giving them their their money and basing their
  own livelihood on that choices.  If you call a party you do not think
  exhibits any thnking ability "braindamaged" in a debate here, that is one
  thing, but doing so on a company-sponsored web page entitled "Lisp Coding
  Standard" and leaving no room for argument means that the company has
  sanctioned his attitude towards those customers who want standard
  behavior.  This is not only an insult to very smart people around the
  world, it is suicidal by a company that has up to now been profitable
  because of its high quality product and excellent customer support.  Add
  to the "braindamage" and "religion" that I expected much more and that my
  _disappointment_ with both company and person became very pronounced
  after this.  As opposed to previously betting several hundred thousand
  dollars of my own income and several million dollars of revenue at the
  company I worked for on their product, I find myself in doubt that
  recommending their product to others or entering new projects with them
  will be good for _me_.  How hard am I willing to fight for a company that
  has a senior scientist who has called me braindamaged and religious
  because I want that company to adhere to the specification that I went to
  them to purchase a product that conformed to?  Tell me, if you hired an
  architect to draw your dream house, and loved the result, and you went to
  a contracter who said he would build it, but when delivered, it was
  different in many important ways and the contractor's chief engineer
  called the design you loved and the contractor had agreed to build
  "braindamaged" and muttered "religious" when you protest that you had
  actually entered a working relationship based on the drawings, no matter
  what anyone's _personal_ feelings about the result would be, I am hard
  pressed to see any other result than a lawsuit that the contractor would
  lose because the contractor refused to back down.  The last part is
  probably more important than anything else.  What this exercise showed,
  was that the person _and_ the company in question is not trustworthy,
  that at any time in the future, one might find that "disagreement" over
  the specification will result in a similar failure to obtain a sensible
  result.  There is already so much legal work to get into licensing with
  them that it scares people off, but when you cannot even get binding
  agreement on the specification they are supposed to implement for you,
  the amount of legal involvement to use their product _skyrockets_.  Some
  people are so inexperienced with legal matters that they do not even
  understand that a standard is a legal document.  Serious disrespect for
  vital components of the legal instruments that control the interaction
  between companies is _really_ moronic, and the inability to _understand_
  that somebody is arguing about the legal framework of contracts one might
  enter with their company, even to the point where nobody in that company
  could find it worth their time to teach him, signals a fundamental
  disregard for the common legal structure of business transactions.  In
  other words, those who _want_ legal frameworks to function properly will
  not want to deal with this company.  Who is to tell which parts of an
  entered contract they will not secretely consider "braindamaged" and you
  "religious" for wanting to adhere to and when you push it, they will not
  back down from so you have to go to court after having paid them a god-
  awful lot of money and taking a huge and costly risk of failure.  But is
  this because they had a rogue programmer who had invented his own macro?
  No.  It is because he chose to be extremely stupid about how to market
  it, accidentally showing in the process his disrespect for the standard
  and those who wrote it and agreed to it, and not realizing how bad and
  stupid this was.  It was about the annoyingly silly macro for about two
  exchanges until the underlying and _real_ feelings about the standard
  emerged.  If you still think it is about the macro, you have completely
  failed to _read_ the discussion or you have bought the rogue programmer's
  version, which was that the standard does not matter, only his personal
  likes and dislikes do, and you do not see that this is destructive in a
  setting where people hammer out a fragile agreement over many years.

My apologies again, and thanks for having been more clever than me, and
not having escalated the whole thing into a whole email vendetta.

J.B.

  Yes, it is surprising how much you can only learn about people after you
  poke their eyes in, stab them the back, rape their children, kill their
  cat, burn down their homes, etc.  You could almost mistake people for
  normal until you take a _deep_ look into their character this way.

  It is much easier with the very shallow: They are exactly the same all
  the way down, and they _really_ believe everyone else is, too, and that
  you actully learn something useful about other people by teasing them.
  There are few so shallow people.  Most of them cannot even _understand_
  what it means to feel passionately about anything, least of all flakey
  stuff like freedom, rule of law, standards, trust, or, indeed, agreement,
  which they think is the same as truce.

Look, I gotta get our Lisp app's friggin' scroll grid working...

  No, _you_ threw in the Nazis here, Siegfried Gonzi.  Please realize this,
  and it will indeed aid you in that very hard and painful process of
  growing up and getting the hell _over_ your stupid psychological hangups.

  Did anyone understand what I said about 1 in 20 people blowing their
  fuses when they encounter a challenge to their tacit assumptions?  Please
  let me know how this Siegfried Gonzi shit could fail to understand the
  context of what I said to be strictly restricted to _propaganda_?  Shall
  we be forced to speak about only those things which will not inflame some
  retarded little fuck from a culture that has yet _understand_ how it
  collectively turned to the dark side of the Force?  I _expect_ that
  people get over the harsh experiences of life.

  Understanding how so many people could believe something so bad and feel
  happy about it so long is _vitally_ important, but the people who need it
  most are the most reluctant.  However, it can happen in any country and
  in any culture at any time.  It is the nature of the propaganda and of
  the psychology of men that determines how this works.  The psychology of
  propaganda discovered and exercised first by Josepth Goebbels is not even
  _remotely_ related to the specific politics that employed it, but I guess
  it takes people who _have_ grown up to realize these things.  So go play
  in traffic, you distasteful, hypersensitive, little piece of shit who
  dares bring in the Nazis to a serious discussion among mature adults!

  The fact that you run screaming to your Mom whenever someone pushes your
  Nazi button is something you should talk about with a mature adult with
  experience in untangling such mental knots, Siegfried Gonzi.  Get help!

(In my last posting you are responding to you were not meant at all. I meant
your alleged cronies. Of course in my opinion your postings are often not in
order but there are mitigating circumstances (this is how I see things). But
there are no mitigating circumstances for that "the end justifies the means"
attitude I was talking about. You could make feel me pain once (with that
grandparents-posting of yours) but that has passed.)

J.B.

Please: Could anybody tell me (per private mail)  how I can use my killfile and
Netscape. I often tried (seriously) to put in Naggum there but it does not work
(Netscape 4.7); the plan not reading Naggum-Clown is often hard to resist; a
killfile (he is irrelevant for my person, I will not miss anything) could help,
because then he is out of my mind (okay posts which handles about Naggum are
another problem). I prefer Netscape, because Outlook express cannot show
messages as Netscape does.

        With delicacies like these, Norwegians have *no* reason to be
jealous of their southern-European neighbours.

--
Raymond Wiker                        Mail:  Raymond.Wi...@fast.no
Senior Software Engineer             Web:   http://www.fast.no/
Fast Search & Transfer ASA           Phone: +47 23 01 11 60
P.O. Box 1677 Vika                   Fax:   +47 35 54 87 99
NO-0120 Oslo, NORWAY                 Mob:   +47 48 01 11 60