Re: can someone please explain what this blog tagging this is all about?

> > How small? I don't hear the chorus of "we agree". I have maybe a
> > couple dozen emails saying "we privately agree", but that's about it.
> > Looks to me like the majority at least passively accept whatever
> > happens (which is the way of majorities, I suppose).
>
> It goes deeper than that. You talk of community, and the actions of
> those within. Well, sometimes groupthink works, and sometimes it
> doesn't. See Abilene paradox, Pluralistic Ignorance, Communal
> reinforcement, etc. on wikipedia or your favorite real references.
> Your apparent intent to help solve the meme virus and it's future
> variants may have been laudable, and you could have done things to
> engender sympathy, but the shutdown is seen by many as a tweener
> petulant frenzy, stamping your feet and crying and taking your ball
> home.

I have taken the trouble to explain my thought processes here so that people might work out for themselves how grotesque a caricature that is and how the emotions it implies aren't any of the things I'm feeling, or have felt, in the slightest.

I can't be held responsible if people don't want to read it, however. Or if, having read it, they choose not to believe it.

Ultimately, I don't particularly care. I'm not after their (your) approbation. And what thoughts about me parts of this community have or don't have are now irrelevant. That's what leaving a community *means*, after all.

[...]

> > You've had material you never paid for removed by its author from
> > general circulation. That's all. I get no pleasure from having done
> > so, but the principle of the matter requires me to have done so.
> > Instead of complaining about the effect, complain about the cause.
>
> I think you do have self-defined positive reinforcement.

I think you do too much speculating about what third parties you haven't a clue about might or might not be thinking!

> > It's not designed to *resolve* the situation. It's a **response** to a
> > situation. A situation that has happened. It is impossible to take
> > back the disruption to OraNA. It is impossible to take back the
> > personal abuse I received for daring to voice the thought that sending
> > a chain letter is irresponsible. It is impossible to take back the
> > fact that large swathes of the Oracle blogging community continue to
> > post "It was just a bit of fun".
>
> The difference is, orana has moved on.

Yes, that is what the past tense of the verb "to happen" usually means. The word I used was "happened".

> As expected by people when you
> complained.

Well, as I said before, perhaps it's stopped *because* I complained. Who knows? The originator of "the game" certainly wanted it to expand and to keep going, preferably out of the Oracle blog community and out into the wider world. He wouldn't have called it an 'infectious meme' otherwise. Am I supposed not have complained at what was being intended or proposed, and only to have kicked up a fuss if it had gone truly exponential? Sorry: it doesn't work that way. I merely pointed out the numbers involved. It wasn't even a complain, so much as an alert. The rest is history.

>I've seen water and electric utilities disrupted longer
> than orana.

So that's OK then. Actually, from where I sit, not.

You again assume that the end of the disruption would have happened this quickly anyway, whatever I had done. Neither of us can know whether that's the case or not. But in any case, to deliberately, and with cold calculation, engineer a disruption of *any* length is not the sort of behaviour a responsible community should condone -or dismiss.

Saying 'it was only a short disruption' is a bit like dismissing Hurricane Katrina as 'a bit of trouble' because it wasn't nearly as bad as the Boxing Day Tsunami!

> You ought to know by now any statement you make can engender abuse,
> one chiding people about their behavior is bound to. Chiding a whole
> group is bound to get a lot.

I chided no-one and nothing. **Please** make an effort to read the facts as presented in this thread! I wrote to 4 people (maybe 5, I can't remember now). I then penned a blog piece about what happens at 8^4, and asked people to please feel free to share their personal secrets but not encourage others to do so, at least not in an exponential fashion. That's not a "chide". It's not even a "complaint". But the abuse started anyway.

Regardless, you miss the point: this is a community that works in an IT field yet starts sending out chain letters at the drop of a hat and finds it fun to do so. This is a community that says, 'Well, it doesn't matter, because not a lot of harm was done'. That says, 'I don't use it, so I don't care'.

This community therefore has its priorities and sense of ethics screwed up, as far as I am concerned.

> > Strangely enough, the idea of "community" depends very heavily on the
> > first syllable of that word: "co". You do indeed have a co- and equal-
> > responsibility to condemn that which damages and inconveniences
> > others.
>
> For what value of damages and inconveniences? Your perception is
> obviously different than other's.

No, it's not, actually. You keep trotting that line out as if I'm the only one to have complained! Read this thread. Read the posts on Eddie's blog about the topic. Take cognisance of the fact that two of the biggest names in the Oracle Blogging community refused to take part at all and perhaps the biggest security expert out there decided not to participate. If my perception was so strange and peculiar as to be unique, none of that would be the case.

> It couldn't be otherwise. Balance
> between the perceptions is unattainable. Do more people condemn what
> you have done than condone it?

I don't know. Why don't you take a poll?

Given that you can't actually do that and the respective numbers must forever remain imponderable as a result, the question becomes, for me, a rather more intellectual or moralistic one. Do you have the right to deprive me of the effective use of a third party site, for however short a time? Do I have the right to remove material I wrote from my own site? The answer to the former, I would suggest is, 'no'. But to the latter, I would equally suggest, the answer is undoubtedly, 'yes'.

I don't think a numbers game, whichever way it would play out, captures the essence of the problem.

>Silence may be support, acquiescence,
> neutral or shunning.

Qui tacit consentit.

But regardless, those who exercised silence when OraNA and other blogs were being flooded with chain letters should exercise the same eloquent silence when it comes to me removing my material from the community.

>Most people in most communities believe some are
> more equal than others.

In terms of having a responsibility not to keep silent when they see abuse being perpetrated, they aren't. Of course, perhaps they didn't see it as abuse, in which case, they have no reason, still less a right, to complain about what those who *did* see it as abuse choose to do about it.

Anyway, we're off to the land of philosophical legerdemain, which might be frightfully interesting, but wasn't the reason I contributed to this thread. I've explained my reasons. Take 'em or leave 'em, basically. Whichever, I have nothing more to say on the matter. Received on Wed Jan 16 2008 - 17:55:21 CST