Unsubscribing

[Bill Ballard]

At 7:54 PM -0500 5/3/04, Avery Todd wrote:
>I hope at least some of you can imagine how much this hurts to
>do this, but I can no longer deal with it! At least for the time being.

Avery, my best wishes to you and I'm sure you'll find he list a 
better place than when you left it.

Avery mentions two people as particularly grating, one of whom seems 
ready to accept the charges. I'm not interested in whom one or both 
of these may be. I'll just remind the list that in FEB of '02, I 
found myself increasingly reacting to beginners on the list with 
sarcasm and spite. So I took a 40-day vow of silence, a "walkabout" 
in the wilderness. This did not mean unsubscribing: I was still 
monitoring the list. This was far more difficult than unsubscribing, 
as there were numerous threads which were especially difficult for me 
to stay out of.

This list is not a form of reality TV (America's favorite reality). 
We can't vote someone off the island. However I will suggest that if 
someone finds themselves generally agreed by the list to be a 
contributor of friction especially in OT threads, that he (~and we've 
never have this problem with the ladies~) announce this 40-day vow of 
silence to the list and honor that vow.

The trampling of First Amendment rights of an individual by the 
majority? Not on a mailing list like this. If someone really makes a 
skunk of themselves, they can count on being filtered out of PTx 
mailboxes by an increasing portion of other individuals on the list. 
This isn't stifling his free speech, just insuring the whoever wants 
can choose not to have to hear it. And the person being thus censured 
has no way of knowing whether the extent of this filtering is 0%, 25% 
of 98%. He just notices his posts bring no replies.

 From one standpoint, there's no effective difference between someone 
being filtered out by 95% of the rest of the list, and someone 
deciding to mute themselves. But from another standpoint it makes all 
the difference in the world. When someone announces the vow of 
silence, the rest of the community recognizes this voluntary step. 
Peace and respect are restored.

At anyrate, that's what I think the rues should be on this island.

Words, words and more words. How they separate us.

Bill Ballard RPT
NH Chapter, P.T.G.

"The truth is inside you, Don Octavio. I cannot help you find that."
     ...........The hallucinated mother of a delusional patient to his 
psychiatrist in "Don Juan DeMarco"
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