I started pondering the disclaimer I found myself having to put in in
order to be accurate: at least in the US.  I think some of the differences
in style that we see on the Internet may be tracable to cultural differences.
I wrote

Part of the reason I did (do) this is my upbringing.  I was raised
in the U.S., but my parents are Israeli.  In Israel the "rudeness
calibration setting" is much higher than in the U.S.  You have to
be a lot more obnoxious in Israel to be considered rude than here.
Israelis will scream and rant and call each other morons and think
nothing of it.  If you call someone ignorant in the States it's a
serious insult.  Likewise, a lot of things that we in the U.S.
wouldn't think twice about are considered unconscionably rude in
Japan.  It took me a lot of years to figure that out.  (I'm still
working on internalising the lesson.)

Perhaps the rudeness calibration setting in Norway is more like it
is in Israel than it is in the U.S.  Maybe you can call a Norwegian
an idiot or a twit and expect them not to be offended, or to localize
their offense to that one exchange and start fresh on the next one.
I am, frankly, sadly ignorant about Norwegian culture.

This is getting very far from Lisp so I'll shut up now.

  your introduction of no effort to think is quite typical of people who
  believe emotions to be irrational, which certainly explains why they (1)
  remain polite as long as they can, and (2) go ape when they can't.  I'm
  not sure it's worth the trouble to point out to you that you don't have
  to insert this premise into the argument, and that by so doing, you have
  changed the argument into something it was not.

  it also seems entirely pointless to attempt to dispell your desire to
  make this a dividing line between uncouth barbarians and sophistication.

| It's not suprising to me that a few people who would ordinarily prefer
| polite behavior would continue non-polite discussions if that was the
| only way to proceed.  I don't see how that makes them hypocrites unless
| they explicitly said earlier that they would not do this for moral
| reasons.  People have preferences, and they needn't be absolute.

  sigh.  I said "go ape", not "be non-polite".  at issue is why people who
  pretend to value politeness lose _all_ moral pretexts once the have to
  let "polite" go.  please read what I write, and please try to refrain
  from answering something I don't.  it wastes a lot of time if I at all
  want to waste the time it takes to answer you.

| Maybe, rightly or wrongly, they will explode due to this kind of prodding.
| Or, maybe they *are* behaving irresponsibly.

  I was trying to suggest that the _way_ they explode is indicative, not
  that they become angry, although that, too, is certainly a part of how
  people react.  you, for instance, assume that I'm angry over time, which
  I find utterly amazing given the fact that I give you a truckload of
  evidence not only to dispell that notion, but to give you a solid
  foundation for understanding what else is going on.  I'm annoyed with
  people who make such a fuss about their insight into other people's
  intentions and mode of thinking who can't even manage to update their
  silly notions in the face of evidence to the contrary just because they
  can't hold onto their beliefs, anymore.  such _is_ the root cause of the
  problems that some people get into, and not because they are polite or
  not, but because they are fundamentally unaware of what they are doing.

  I'm not sure what you're trying to accomplish by shifting the blame onto
  me for everything, but one thing I do know: those who consider their own
  behavior to be somebody else's responsibility, be that derived through
  biochemistry or whatever other mushy circumventions, will never learn
  from anything they experience.  I'm interested in the rest of mankind.

  a tacit premise for a reasonable discussion is that the particants do not
  contradict themselves simply because it suits their argumentation.  I
  find it rather bizarre that you believe you can get away with it.

| I believe you practice what you preach, in terms of directly stating what
| you think and feel.  (You might do this out of necessity, but I can't
| prove that.)

  why do _you_ need to engage in such foul play, Marcus?  is it because you
  would have nothing to say otherwise?

| However, directly stating what one thinks and feels can be an obstacle to
| communication, if there are alternative ways to express oneself that are
| less likely to create a fight, but still get the message across.

  I wonder, why is this a choice between "directly" stating what one thinks
  and hiding it behind polite language?  why did you need to narrow the
  argument down to _directly_?  is it because it's a good argument that you
  can't defeat unless you narrow it down to something much more specific
  but also wholly irrelevant to the discussion?  why do you go out of your
  way to make this as unpleasant as possible?  is it to see how I react to
  your twisting my words, shifting the context, and narrowing the argument
  so it is no longer what I have said at all?  yes, Marcus, you succeed in
  making me quite annoyed at your inability to stick to what I say, but I
  have seen your kind quite a lot: people whose distaste for something
  cause them to _invent_ something that is clearly bad in order to get an
  easy time fighting it.  such propagandistic communication is perhaps the
  _one_ thing I find most to be disrespected in somebody.

| I'd replace the idea of politeness with the notion of civilization and
| social order.  I often wonder how different suburban neighborhoods I know
| would degenerate if the water and power went away or if the police and
| emergency support was not available.  It's not hard for me to imagine
| seemingly nice people turning into cruel people in a short period of
| time.  If that happened, it wouldn't necessarily be because the
| hypothetically cruel people in the degenerate neighborhood didn't have
| their own morality.  It might be that civilization gives them enough
| latitude that consequences of the deep structure of their beliefs are not
| superficially evident.

  well, let's take a similar stretch of imagination and deprive somebody of
  air.  I "often wonder" how people would react if you took away their air
  supply.  it's not hard for me to imagine nice people turning into cruel
  people in a very short period of time, making a hell of a lot of noise
  and commotion.  but what does that have to do with polite discussion?

  why do you think this is a valuable comparison to anything we're talking
  about?  do you think a newsgroup is the victim of deprivation of power
  and water or police and emergency support when somebody is direct and
  clear and does not cushion every possible criticism so hypersensitive
  twits won't have anything to react to?  you seem to be arguing about the
  final stages of an all-out war, but who cares what you have to say about
  that if you are so opposed to it becoming that way?  what should have
  been interesting is to discuss how it all starts and develops.  I suspect
  you don't have a clue.  nobody starts off with the insanity you seem to
  take for granted, just as no conflict starts with depriving people of
  power and water.  I'm beginning to suspect that you are emotionally
  disturbed by the absence of such necessities of your life as polite
  conversation in a newsgroup that you don't even _see_ that those who
  start these things are incredibly rude people who have already dispensed
  with decency when they start firing at me.  imagine starting a war over
  not being polite enough?  who are they _kidding_?

  you certainly give of an air of wanting me to be blamed for all ills, but
  being a tad more intelligent than Raffael Cavellero, understand that you
  have to be more circumventious to achieve your goal of removing all
  responsibility from those who do what I react to: (1) post a bunch of
  false accusations, (2) assume the worst without even the possibility of
  making a mistake, and (3) react as if they have been personally hurt and
  in need of defending themselves from bodily harm.

  in short, you are so off the mark that your smug, nasty drivel is
  obviously completely irrelevant to anything I do or say, and can have no
  bearing on it except what slander you might make people believe, and I
  think even you would agree, if you were able to think about it, that such
  abuse of a medium in order to destroy somebody is cause for mounting a
  defense.  consequently, I'm not sure if you're doing this for the same
  kind of demonstration purposes as your comrade-in-arms Raffael Cavellero,
  but it sure looks like you're just as shifty and unable to stick to your
  arguments as he is.

| If a person mainly values a pleasant atmosphere, and someone goes out of
| their way to make it unpleasant to see how they'll react, then its easy
| to see how the interaction will be violent.

  I detect the foul smell of hatred in your words, Marcus.

  why do you have to make this complex issue into a simple black-and-white
  who's-to-blame?  first of all, there is no grounds for anything you're
  saying here.  if anything, people who accuse me Nazi sympathies or accuse
  me of favoring murder and torture of third-world workers are certainly
  going out of their way to make it unpleasant, and we already know that
  one of them did it to see how I'd react.  whatever is wrong with you
  manage to decide that everything is my fault?

  please take your nicely worded hatred elsewhere, Marcus.  I would prefer
  if you engaged in a little introspection, but I now have to assume that
  this would only lead to even stronger hatred and destructive desires,
  complete with the passive-aggressive "politeness" of your words.  which
  sort of proves my point: if you can lie and inflict harm with a smile,
  are you better or worse than if you do it while it is obvious that you
  are angry at something?  in my view, somebody who acts to destroy while
  appearing friendly at the same time is bordering on psychotic, and is
  certainly in no position to speak of pleasant athmospheres.

  if you have anything to say about the present situation or anything that
  could be applied to the present situation, I'd be interested in hearing
  it.  as long as you keep making statements that purport to be relevant to
  the present situation that couldn't even apply to it in a fantasy world,
  communication with you is indeed impossible, and will never be otherwise.

I still vaguely remember the message rn(1) gave before accepting a
posting - something along the lines of "your article will be posted to
millions machines worldwide, costing the net billions of dollars to
transmit - are you sure you want to do this?" (7 years ago?)

These days I would say that USENET is even less serious than
face-to-face communications - the only retributions you can expect are
flames and killfile, so people don't bother to think before posting.

An article by Marcus Daniels contained the following quote from Erik
Naggum:

Here is the exchange that started it all:

Erik:

I am baffled that Erik, who continually calls people to the carpet
for reading more into his words than is actually there, cannot see
that he is doing to me precisely what he berates others for doing
to him.

1. Erik does not make the comparison you accuse him of ("Your
   continued comparison ...").
2. *You* have chosen to interpret his words that way.
3. The comparison, if any, is that both men are exceptionally
   talented at fooling people ("not since ..").

Perhaps you could compile the appropriate threads into a document,
publish it on some server and announce the URL to this newsgroup? Anyone
sufficiently interested can then read the whole quibble at his leisure.

Regards,

But as an aside, that may have been what Erik meant (I believe it is)
but it's not what he wrote.  <sarcastic> As I am not as gifted with
clairvoyance as some people on the Net, I have to restrict myself
to responding to what people actually write. </sarcastic>

  for some reason, my news server doesn't have this article, anymore, so
  I'm following up to Lars Lundback's quotes from it.  (thanks, Lars.)

  Erann and I have been exchanging some e-mail privately, and it has
  suddenly dawned on me why he keeps saying that I introduced the Holocaust
  into this debate: he believes that Joseph Goebbels' propaganda had the
  Jews as their _audience_.  that is to say, it should be fairly obvious
  from reading what I wrote that I was talking about the German people, for
  which Joseph Goebbels produced propaganda films and other materials that
  subtly and very effectively made them accept the political stance of the
  Nazis to exterminate Jews and gays and the handicapped.  the disastrous
  future that Joseph Goebbels led the _Germans_ into was prolonging the war
  at least a year beyond the natural point of defeat, at enormous loss to
  those who believed the propaganda for many hard years to come, and
  _that's_ my comparison: the believers in propaganda are made to pay.

  however, I'm constantly amazed by how some Jews fail to grasp the losses
  and suffering that were inflicted upon other people during that war.  an
  enormous number of Russian soldiers died under horrible conditions.  an
  incredible wound was inflicted on Germany.  the whole German psyche has
  suffered 50 years of gnawing guilt for the fact that their people could
  _do_ something like that.  people who have been abused and who have been
  made to believe that they accepted it and is therefore to blame have the
  kind of individual problems that the whole German culture is oozing with.
  this happened, not because Germans are despicable, loathsome people, but
  because Joseph Goebbels was the greatest mass marketing genius the world
  has probably ever seen.  he sold ideas through entertainment!  it's so
  simple, yet so _deviously_ deceptive.  he formed people's opinions by
  giving them _his_ words to express them and _his_ imagery, and he made
  all the care in the world that he did not _push_ opinions on anyone.  you
  should be _enjoying_ his productions and think as little as possible, it
  should be _relief_ above all to watch the movies, and they you absorbed
  the ideas effortlessly because they were only a tad more specific than
  what you had in mind yourself.  you can all imagine how truly effective
  this is, and how guilty someone who has been tricked by it will feel.  a
  lot of people will do _anything_ to keep from realizing they have been
  duped, and that's the beauty of good propaganda: if you're smart enough
  to figure out that you've been had, something goes on within people that
  makes them work _for_ the propaganda machine, as if to make what it says
  true.  for whatever we ought to hate Goebbels, he really understood what
  makes the human mind tick when in large masses.

  meanwhile, in comp.lang.lisp, Erann Gat has consistently written about
  what I have been saying in the same kind of just-a-little-worse words
  than I have used, and you'd have to be _unconscious_ not to notice the
  effect over time, but that's just what people are.  that's what search
  engines are, too.  by setting up his own propaganda machine, he proved
  not only to object only to Goebbels in _name_, because he adopted his
  theories with a passion.  that's what I have been trying to stop: we
  should learn from Goebbels precisely because we should remember what it
  led to.  instead, we ignore the lessons because they came with a lot of
  pain, and then we set ourselves up to be hurt again.  I've said this
  before, too.  it annoys me to repeat it.

  obviously, and I mean this is _really_ obvious, Bill Gates doesn't hurt
  the people who don't believe him much -- it's the fools who do that are
  going to pay, and pay so much I predict a _very_ significant crash in
  technology stocks.  (now, I'm not Ballmer, so you won't see Dow Jones or
  NASDAQ take a dip today or tomorrow...)  it is also bloody obvious that
  Bill Gates is not favoring _killing_ any particular group of people,
  unless you take his pathological competitiveness and predatory behavior
  to be a dire threat to decent businessmen and smart people everywhere,
  but I don't see him as favoring such things _literally_.

  that Erann Gat responded as if the Jews were under attack again may very
  well be due to his personal cultural background (he mentioned that he's
  from Israel and few non-Jews are, so I'm guessing here), but I've worked
  with Jews who have not been on this 50-year-long victim trip, and I have
  worked with Jews who have been, but the latter appear few, although very
  vocal, like Erann Gat has been here.  only the latter see the Holocaust
  wherever it might be possible to introduce it.  I must say that I have
  about as much respect for people who conjure up ghosts like that as I
  have for people who can't get over being defeated at a battlefield 700
  years ago, which is apparently what ignited the masses on the Balkans,
  and I don't even consider people who at least appear to be smart to
  suffer from such debilitating delusions.  therefore, I didn't even cross
  my mind that anyone could read what I wrote to be about the "disastrous
  future" of the _Jews_.  (but _what_ future?  the Jews were robbed of both
  past and future, damnit!  Germany was left with their new legacy.)

  now that I have been the subject of so much fucking insane abuse from a
  whole bunch of deranged lunatics, I'm going to ask Erann Gat to speak up
  and state his assumptions (ever noticed how I keep carping on this? can
  you _finally_ guess why it's so important?): Joseph Goebbels' audience,
  which is what I was talking about, just like I wast talking about Bill
  Gates's audience, were the Jews, and that the disastrous future was that
  of the Jews.  then I can say: NO, Erann, the Jews were never the intended
  audience of Joseph Goebbels' propaganda.  Joseph Goebbels manipulated the
  _German_ people, so that the other Nazi leaders and Hitler in particular,
  could kill their enemies.  I don't expect anyone to believe me after
  Erann Gat's despicable smear campaign to have his assumptions turned into
  my intention (propaganda indeed!), but if he expects to set the record
  straight, let it be straight:

  Joseph Goebbels were _not_ concerned with propaganda towards the Jews.
  this is an historical fact.  Joseph Goebbels himself kept all explicit
  references to the Jews out of his material and his films, much unlike
  Hitler's shots at propaganda, where he explicitly likened Jews to rats,
  which Joseph Goebbels found utterly disgusting and counter-productive,
  which it turned out to be, so he was left alone.  I have studied the man
  (the first modern mass marketing and propaganda genius deserves a serious
  study, if for no other purpose than to avoid the third, now that Bill
  Gates is the second), and I have been much influenced by Noam Chomsky's
  works on necessary illusions and manufactured consent during my study.
  what I found was that (1) a whole bunch of nutcases thought that only
  neo-Nazis could be interested in Joseph Goebbels' works and movies, and
  (2) the vast majority of the people who are opposed to what he did, buy
  the same dirty propaganda from today's politicians and mass marketing
  people for the simple reason that they don't know what Goebbels _did_:
  only that he was an evil man that nobody should touch.  we're letting
  history repeat itsel because we shut our eyes to the past, instead of the
  only possible thing we can do with it: learn from the past through study
  and eternal vigilance against the warning signs of cultures that are
  likely to be influenced by the same kind of propaganda machinery that
  once killed many millions of people (and far from Jews, only).

I took Erik's words to mean that the *German* people were led
to a future that was disastrous *because it included the Holocaust
and the other atrocities of the Nazis*, which is neither what
it transpires Erik actually meant nor what he's saying Erann Gat
thought he meant.

If Erann thought the same, then this (1) explains why he
brought up the Holocaust, and (2) doesn't require him to
have been so stupid as to think that the Jews were Goebbels's
intended audience.

I don't think this is an irrational interpretation. Possibly
in Erik's idiolect "disastrous" always means "disastrous for
the people just mentioned", so that the German people's future
wouldn't have been "disastrous" if Hitler had won WW2. Not
in mine: in my opinion it would be a disaster for me if I
were to become (say) a hugely successful burglar.

This is clearly evidenced by the *end* of the sampled sentence "..into
such a disatrous future", which places us at the doorway to a disastrous
future (Bill Gates rules the world) as bad as the one Göbbels originally
placed us in (the Holocaust).  These rates the two as equal and can be
taken either as an exaggeration of the Bill Gates situation
(optimistically the intent) or as a slight on the Holocaust (which is
offensive).

Although I am a relative newbie to the list the obvious strategy here
(and in all text-only conversations) is simply to make the most
optimistic assumption (which you didn't), and if you take the wrong
course, then the other part[y|ies] will correct it.

So I wondering, do you have any top tips?

Cheers,

  I don't think leading 90% of the Western Civilization, those who have
  entrusted their information to a system running an "operating system"
  from Bill Gates and believe he won't intentionally harm them when it
  suits his own designs, into a massive shutdown because he doesn't want
  his enemies (that's just "competitors" to normal people) to win.  we
  already know that Microsoft _intentionally_ creates venues for viruses
  and make new products that are virtual breeding grounds for viruses that
  harm their users, and I suspect it's because they have interests in the
  anti-virus companies.  (and I say _intentionally_ because stopping this
  insanity is easy, and they refuse to do it and refuse to think about
  security issues until somebody outside the company exposes it, and then
  they downplay it and gloss it over.)  we already know how much press a
  virus gets, and how Bill Gates dons his glory and complain about the evil
  people in the world.  every damn time there's a serious threat, Bill
  Gates manages to win from it.  there's no reason to think this is not
  planned.

  we've seen what Bill Gates can do and what he routinely does to companies
  that provide a threat to Microsoft -- his actions are not that of a sane
  businessman, it's that of a pathologically competitive and now very
  powerful maniac.  what will he do when he realizes that the customers who
  want to leave his control pose a seriousthreat to Microsoft and himself?
  what will aircraft, traffic control systems, nuclear battleships, etc, do
  when their Microsoft-based software goes belly up?  the U.S. Navy already
  knows what happens: modern Navy vessels sit dead in the water for three
  hours while technicians get the NT-based computer system back on line.
  it has happened once.  it will happen again.

  the problem with any comparison of past and future is that some people
  will regard the past as much worse than it was.  there's no doubt at all
  that I offended Erann Gat's view of the Holocaust (which he may tell you,
  as he has told me, includes the German soldiers and civilians who died in
  WWII, which it doesn't in any reference works or even in any literature I
  have read) by diminishing its importance to him, but is he the standard?
  there are people out there who will feel that the entire female sex and
  every women in the entire world history are _suffering_ once somebody,
  somewhere in the world, looks at a pornographic picture.  no doubt they
  would say that I diminish the tragedy suffered by women if I made a
  comparison between somebody and Hugh Hefner, but is it _rational_ to
  respect their views and feelings?  does it serve any useful ends to tread
  so softly that one does not offend deranged people who have a _wildly_
  exaggerated view of something?  I don't think it does.  therefore, we
  cannot suffer the restrictions to which the Erann Gats and Raffael
  Cavallaros of the world want to subject all human communication.

  the United States have for a number of years had restrictions on what
  could be talked about, and it has been a self-policing that some have
  labeled political correctness, quite contrary to the explicit belief in
  the freedom of speech, which seems reduced to dealing with non-offending
  ideas and otherwise offensive material.  on USENET, we cannot avoid
  suffering the consequences of raving lunatics whose madness is triggered
  by words or ideas or even certain opinions.  it's even hard to tell where
  the line is to be drawn sometimes, but when somebody responds "I didn't
  mean what you interpret it to mean" and they keep raving, the line has
  certainly been crossed.

  how many people in the interbellum Germany were unwilling to consider the
  imminent evil even when Hitler published Mein Kampf and spelled it out?
  how many fled because they did understand?  and, more importantly, how
  many of those who fled were labeled paranoid and delusional by those who
  stayed and who later died or otherwise lost their future?

  we should learn from the past -- the makeup of the human being hasn't
  changed all that much over time and is unlikely to change a lot in the
  future, so the past is a very good guide to what might happen again if
  people don't learn from it.  by refusing to listen to the very many very
  serious lessons taught us by World War II, we don't see how the means
  employed to gradually poison a whole population with demented ideas and a
  desire for violent revenge that could not be mustered without a careful
  propaganda plan deployed over decades.  by refusing to consider parts of
  the history of a period during which atrocities were committed, we don't
  really know how they came to be committed, and that's the only thing we
  can use them for after the fact.  we can mourne and all that, but those
  who were not part of it, have a duty to prevent it from happening again,
  and if that means ignoring the insane wailing from people who are unable
  to deal with the facts that this atrocity had a history and a development
  that could be reinvoked only with people who are unaware of the history,
  so be it.  there are just too many people who exaggerate the importance
  of just about anything that we can believe them to be right without being
  careful when assessing the complainer's sense of proportions.

  a conservative estimate of the number of people who would die during a
  period of five years after only _half_ of the electronic infrastructure
  in the United States had collapsed is 30 million people.  this is part of
  unclassified disaster planning that surfaced because of the Y2K scare,
  and it has been published widely by scaremongers that a decimation, in
  the technical meaning of 10% loss, of the population is considered a
  tolerable loss.  if such an event should be caused by the pathological
  competetiveness of one man who has cut so many corners as to have very
  little left to stand on, with a whole company and culture who adore him,
  who are the people who would work _against_ securing a future where this
  does _not_ happen?  why does Erann Gat have to label this paranoid
  delusions simply because he doesn't understand the need for contingency
  planning and securing the removal of the option of atrocity?  are lawyers
  suffering from paranoid delusions when they write up contracts that
  specify how to deal with several really bad situations?  of course not.
  it is clear that the American people are just as unable to think about
  the future and The Road Ahead (a really retarded book by Bill Gates), as
  interbellum Germans faced with explicit rhetoric, and just as willing to
  be subjected to propaganda of the same kind.

  am I thereby reducing any tragedies or atrocities?  no, damnit, I'm
  trying to show how the attitudes that made it possible for them to become
  reality are still among us, and the worst of them is complacency and the
  rampant stupidity that goes with "they're German, don't mention the war".
  we can't hide from history, but we can forget, and if we only remember
  the horrors and not how they came to be, we stand unprepared in the face
  of the next horror.  we must get over the horrors and prevent the next.
  this is not reducing their importance, it's _using_ their importance to
  productive ends: to ensure that equally destructive-minded people don't
  get a chance to put their ideas into reality.

  those who stepped up to warn people in the early 1930's were ridiculed by
  the dolts who saw only the positive effects and the positive rhetoric.
  Microsoft's collapse is no more than 5 to 10 years away, and Bill Gates
  is already reaching out to take control over companies and technologies
  that will survive Microsoft.  I think the collapse could go largely
  unnoticed by the users, because all the products will have competing
  products on other platforms that can run on the same hardware, but there
  are a few signs to indicate that Bill Gates wants it to be otherwise: the
  drive to move most of the software in that used to be located in
  peripheral equipment is intensified such that manufacturers are pressured
  to make drivers availbale only for Microsoft operating systems and not
  disclose their specifications so others can make drivers for other
  operating systems, which means that people will lose their hardware
  investments when leaving Windows.  Microsoft is all about this kind of
  control and the consequences of too much control in too few hands should
  be well known by anyone who has even the slightest interest in history,
  even if they feel terribly threatened by comparisons with their favorite
  horrors.  I'm not saying we should ignore the scars left on our psyche by
  tragedies, but neither should we obsess about them so much that we get
  paralyzed whenever something similar appears, or deny similarity because
  that awakens the suppressed pain and angst and whatever.

  I just wish some people could quit being so hysterical and instead of
  defending their personal issues could understand the argument.  that
  would help us avoid derailing discussions.  if the argument is obscured
  by their own emotional responses, I suggest those who just _have_ to go
  bananas do it nicely by asking for a restatement of the argument, without
  including innuendo, accusations, assumptions, etc, etc, which would so
  rude as to render any argument about the value of politeness ridiculous.
  thanks in advance.

  it's actually a fairly good statement of what I meant, but I was myself
  trying to figure out this Holocaust accusation and had probably shifted
  the time focus from when I wrote it because of the ridiculous attacks for
  weeks.  my concern at the time I wrote it was the German people and how
  the propaganda affected them, namely that they went to war in the first
  place, which certainly is disastrous for all parties involved, and that
  the war was _prolonged_ way beyond the point of actual defeat mostly
  because of the successful propaganda, which caused most of the atrocities
  and loss of life on all sides.

| Possibly in Erik's idiolect "disastrous" always means "disastrous for the
| people just mentioned", so that the German people's future wouldn't have
| been "disastrous" if Hitler had won WW2.

  wars aren't won.  war is always a _huge_ loss to all parties involved.
  (other things are won _in_ wars, however, such as control over land or
  natural resources.)  I think the exact same thing about other fights,
  including USENET fights and boxing: neither party can "win" by engaging
  in it in the first place -- all you can hope for is to minimize the
  losses.  I have tried to defend myself against the accusation that I am
  diminishing the tragedy of the Holocaust (the accusation is obviously
  that it is on purpose -- I can't possibly be responsible if someone feels
  unease at facts) and the ridiculous accusation that I brought it up.

    Quirk's exception: Intentional invocation of Godwin's law does not
    work.

And these two were proposed recently:

    Seebach's meta-exception:  If someone mentions Quirk's Exception, in
    relation to any attempt to refer to Godwin's law, the thread is
    killed.

    Pinky's Law - a thread is *really* down the toilet when Peter Seebach
    carves another commandment onto the bottom of the tablet...

  Godwin's Law

    Godwin's Law /prov./ [Usenet] "As a Usenet discussion grows
    longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler
    approaches one." There is a tradition in many groups that, once
    this occurs, that thread is over, and whoever mentioned the Nazis
    has automatically lost whatever argument was in progress. Godwin's
    Law thus practically guarantees the existence of an upper bound on
    thread length in those groups.

I think they hire a lot of people that are not stupid and that can
plainly see that they are making complete and utter crap. If they
tried as hard as they could they certainly have the resources to get
enough talent together to produce a robust, stable, and extensible
operating system with a sane and logical system programming interface.
But then what would be your incentive to upgrade every 18 months to 3
years?

MS-DOS installations (with or without Windows 3.x) are still supposed
to far exceed installations of any other Microsoft operating system,
and Microsoft hates this. MS-DOS was in a way the most robust product
Microsoft ever produced, since with few exceptions[1], the complete
control it gave application programmers allowed talented teams of
third party developers to deliver very robust and high-performance
applications. Nowadays the stability of applications for Windows 95+
systems are at the mercy of the OS no matter what you do.

And as far as revenue-generation, growth, and profitability is
concerned, Microsoft has been a _very_ successful company. As far as
reputation, quality, and business ethics and morality goes, well....

Christopher

1. There are many stories about Microsoft inserting "XOR-encrypted"
[AFAIK] machine-coded routines into early versions of DOS to cause
competitor products to fail. There's a story that in the early days
there was a slogun among developers like "MS-DOS 2.0 won't show until
Lotus doesn't go" or something. Also, they supposedly put something in
an early version of Windows 3.x to intentionally cause DR-DOS to fail
to run it.

When reading the text you quoted (from Erik's first post(s)), I realized
that an explanation of what I saw behind Eric's words, in my posting,
would merely anticipate his own.

Erik has responded now, giving a full and detailed account of his
motives, and his reasoning.
When I responded to you, I had interpreted his text roughly as he
describes. I thought about some of the words he used, eg: "disastrous
future", but decided against explaining them, since the author should do
that himself.

I choose to ignore your remarks about my (lack of) knowledge about Nazi
Germany and the atrocities before, and during the Second World War.
Observing that you wanted to set the record straight, I can only hope
that you are able to see the whole discussion in a new light.

Just as it is dangerous to minimize the "disastrousness" of the Nazi
regime by comparing more mundane things to it, it is also dangerous to
remain ignorant of those dramatic evils of the past, as, if they are
forgotten, they might recur.

a) People have a tendancy to try to outdo one another in the things
they compare to.

This has a tendancy towards analogies having spurious connection to
the Big Thing Everyone Is Supposed To Understand.

If every political leader that anyone ever disagrees with gets
compared to Adolf Hitler, this leads in the direction of making
*important* such analogies (as might be the case with recent genocidal
activities in Eastern Europe and East Timor) "merely another minor
case of someone that's a bit of a tyrant."

(My usual rule is that unless someone is responsible for at least a
few thousand deaths, it is not reasonable to compare them to Hitler.)

b) The effects of World War II were so widespread and resulted in so
many millions of deaths that this puts big-time life-and-death
emotional triggers into peoples' minds.

There may be some of us capable of being dispassionate due (say) not
having much personal connection to WWII.

I had a couple of great-uncles that flew in bombers, and were shot
down, captured, and (happily) liberated at the end of the war.  This
*certainly* had long-term effects on they themselves; their
relationships were fairly clearly influenced by the traumas of the war
experiences.  (Then there's the other entertaining bit; the
widely-extended family includes an ex-Panzer commander who contains
shrapnel and sets off metal detectors at airports...  There were
military personnel at my brother's wedding that were on different
sides in that war...)

There are thus *some* personal connections, but I've no direct trauma
to cause me to have vigorous emotional triggers over WWII, Hitler, or
other "Nazi matters."  ... But that's just me.

        In any discussion of the relative merits of two programming
        languages on a newsgroup, sooner or later someone will claim
        that the opposing language has features which make it grossly
        unsuitable for writing nuclear powerstation control systems or
        other extremely safety-critical programs, with the implication
        that somehow this makes it inferior for all use.  After this
        point the discussion is dead.

Safety-critical systems with very high penalty for failure being `the
big thing everyone is supposed to understand' here.

You often see this happening when statically-typed functional-language
people embark on an anti-Lisp crusade (`you could get a runtime type
error in a control-rod program'), you also see it from the other end
when non-GCd language people claim that GC at inopportune moments will
cause your spacecraft to go catatonic or whatever.