[WikiEN-l] Re: Toning down the personal remarks (was: Nationalist POV-pushing on Wikpedia: what to do?)

Tue Aug 10 19:35:00 UTC 2004

Shucks, I guess I needed to follow my own proposal, and mark my posting as
being by a natural-born citizen of the USA, attempting to resist the 
tarring of USA contributors with a loony-brush.

On Tue, 10 Aug 2004 12:45:05 UTC, "Poor, Edmund W" 
<Edmund.W.Poor at abc.com> wrote:

>...
> 
> * This particular list is infested with Americans
> 
> Excuse me? I'm not a bug! (I put bugs in the software I write, though
> ;-)

Clearly I need to avoid this kind of jocular language about classes if 
people whom I want to hold up as good examples.

> 
> * hot-headed American
> 
> If I wear a hat outside, my scalp doesn't heat up so much; usually, I
> stay inside and enjoy the air-conditioning.

Waitaminnit!  I never called you hot-headed. 

If you publicly dismissed Jens's post as the usual anti-American 
stuff--that's the context in which I used the phrase--I missed it. And I'd
be surprised if it turned out that you did.  The point I thought I was 
making was that a hostile and dismissive response to the post is not 
necessarily the work of an intellectually dishonest American right-wing 
chauvinist, but might as easily be a hasty act of annoyance (which I quite
share) at a broad-brush accusation.  There are hot-heads everywhere, and 
about (to take an example at random) three times as many in the USA as in 
Germany, as one can easily determine from the census tables.

> 
> * some rabid nationalist loony
> * American loonies
> 
> Now, now. That's getting personal!

Nah, you're the conservative I mentioned who manages to hold weird 
political ideas <g> without being a loonie who falsifies evidence.  As for
loonies and hot-heads, I still think that acknowledging their existence, 
in both Red and Blue States, not to mention every other place in the 
world, is better than denying it. 

But it's plain that your main point is right: I've got to sober up my 
rhetoric, at least until I can get the sense across clearly (a skill that 
Mark Twain had difficulty mastering, so I'm not optimistic).