[conspire] Envoi

[Rick Moen]

And, with that, 'kw6 at xmission.com' (whatever his name is) decided to
take his marbles and go home.

A few general suggestions about How Not to Behave Like a Twit.


1.  Don't make postings attributing to your interlocutors positions 
they don't hold and never expressed, especially if those are immoral
ones like accusing the other person of sabotaging your computer 
(for no discernable reason).

2.  If you _are_ dumb enough to make such an accusation, when the
other party points out that you never had any reason to suspet that in
the first place and have gone off half-cocked based on a horribly wrong
assumption, don't respond by calling him a liar.

3.  When the entirely separate merits of _something you said_ are
challenged, don't rush to trot out your (irrelevant) personal credentials
in order to justify your statement and suggest that criticism was
somehow unfair.

4.  Don't claim to have been online for over twenty years and yet 
act clueless about how to configure your e-mail client to compently 
include your name in From: headers, something that your average AOL
user or college freshman could usually manage before morning coffee,
even back in the Year When September Never Ended[1].

5.  When the mailing list administrator drops a few clues that maybe
you ought to cool it with the overheated and moderately ludicrous
advocacy rhetoric, consider that his perspective might be worth weighing
even if you personally think he's wrong.


[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September