RMS's reply style & mailing list netiquette

At 12:16 2003.02.16, stefan probst wrote:
>the purpose ['of chopping and mixing your previous mail so much' was] to
>cut unnecessary parts in order to prevent mails getting bigger and bigger.
>That is list etiquette, and I actually fail very often to cut. See e.g.
>RMS: he includes only the one or two original sentences to which he is
>responding to. Everything else gets cut.

You make a good point about rms's style of replying.

Actually, i keenly noted that aspect rms' reply-style while debating him on
the PubSoft list over the question "Why fight for 'Free' when 'Freed'
[software] is so clear?".

You might have noted that i even adopted rms' reply-style about half-way
through that debate.

Why? After noting it, i consciously decided to fight fire with fire. Rms's
reply-style is a email debating trick: in reply, you select only the
elements of what the other person wrote that you want to see repeated or
you think you can most easily attack; then you delete the rest, implying
its irrelevance.

It's then left to your debating opponent to either follow the path you've
just chosen or re-insert the word you implicitly assigned to irrelevance.
Otherwise, the deleted words just disappear from the debate, unquestioned
and un-addressed.

If you go back over that debate with rms, you'll notice that i actually had
to do exactly that at one point: i had to re-insert my most important
points, and i even made note of the fact that rms had deleted them.

It was a key point in that debate, because it explicitly contrasted rms'
rebuttal against his own words, that contradicted what he'd just written.

That happened in one of the last few messages of that debate, just before
rms stopped responding to that thread and changed to other subjects --
which in debating terms is called "acquiescence" and "diversion". ;)

Those messages appeared right before i did my little "'Goal!' Dance",
switching between my [VICE]-8 and AD.VICE eddresses for a satirical
mini-debate with myself. ;))

Given rms' seniority and deserved authority, i didn't reveal his
acquiescence explicitly to that list.

Finally, i think if you go to some mailing list netiquette web-pages,
you'll find that rms and Mr Chassell were making-up the rules of the game
as they played it and betting on the authority of their names and positions
to leave their *new* rules unquestioned.

Here are a few references:

HWG Mailing List Netiquette Guidelines
... | Mailing List Policy | Netiquette Guidelines | Actionable Rules |. |
HWG Mailing
List Program | Archives | Mailing List Policy | List Guide Program |. ...
www.hwg.org/lists/netiquette.html - 10k - Cached - Similar pages

AOL NetHelp | Mailing Lists | Netiquette
... You are here: Home > AOL.COM Help > Mailing Lists > Mailing List
Netiquette.
Mailing List Netiquette, Mailing lists have been around ...
www.aol.com/nethelp/lists/mailinglistnetiquette.html - 10k - Cached -
Similar pages

Basic newsgroup and mailing list "Netiquette"
Basic newsgroup and mailing list "Netiquette". Summary. This is a regular
posting which outlines the basic newsgroup and mailing list ...
www.woodgate.org/FAQs/netiquette.html - 20k - Cached - Similar pages

All the best,
AD.VICE@ParadoxCafe.Net

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