[conspire] (forw) Re: CABAL in the time of Cholera^W SARS-CoV-2: March event cancelled

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Dire Red (deirdre at deirdre.net):

> Anyhow, if you'd looked at Arnie's signature lines the last, oh, 20
> years, they'd have looked…familiar in pattern.
> https://web.archive.org/web/20150624180738/http://www.lermanet.com/faqs.html

As Deirdre's point was unclear from the above, she's referring to this
block down near the bottom, which apparently was one typical variant
among other bombastic and personal breast-beating examples:


  Sincerely,

  Arnaldo Lerma -- I'd prefer to die speaking my mind than live fearing to
  speak.

  The only thing that always works in scientology are its lawyers

  The internet is the liberty tree of the new millennium Secrets are the
  mortar binding lies as bricks together into prisons for the mind
  http://www.lermanet.com - mentioned 4 January 2000 in The Washington
  Post's - 'Reliable Source' column re "Scientologist with no HEAD"


As a refresher, there is a .signature block social convention among
polite people, originating on Usenet but widely observed in e-mail-based
forums as well.  It is:


o  Confine yourself to no more than four 80-character lines.  This is
   called the 'McQuary Limit', and I allude to it with the expression 
   'McQ!' in every one of my .signature blocks where there's enough 
   free character space to insert it.

   You will not be imprisoned by the Internet police for violating the 
   McQuary limit.  You'll just be quietly classified as a self-indulgent 
   jerk.  And, no, this has nothing particularly to do with 'needing to
   save bandwidth over dial-up lines' or such rot.  It's a matter of 
   avoiding being a self-indulgent jerk.  Yes, it's an arbitrary limit.
   Limits socially arrived at, that you should observe to avoid coming
   across as a self-indulgent jerk, tend to be inherently arbitrary.
   No, neither the US Constitution nor resolutions from Brooklyn  
   neighbourhood associations entitle you to scream and yell and throw
   tantrums over being classified as a self-indulgent jerk.

o  It's considered bad manners to hurl crude and inciting propaganda
   into your 4x80 personal-expression space.  Although that's McQ-compliant, 
   you'll nonetheless be considered a self-indulgent jerk.  Because, 
   really now.

o  As a really poor choice of standard delimiter (but it's the standard
   and we're stuck with it) you / your software should always delimit
   the signature beneath the rest of your message using the following  
   three-character line, flush-left by itself (without quotation marks):
   '-- ', followed immediately by a hard return.

   Yes, an obligatory invisible trailing space character.  Ugh.

   The use of this standard delimiter ensures that readers can, if 
   they wish, auto-suppress disply of .signatures, which in turn helps
   preserve the convention that you're free to say pretty much anything
   you wish in your own .signatures (as people annoyed by them can 
   filter them out with easy standard filter mechanisms).

   Saying 'my software won't allow me to do it correctly' will earn
   you pity and a reputation as a lamer.  Saying 'My employer requires
   a mandatory 20-line legal disclaimer that I'm not allowed to change',
   ditto.

   Saying .signature size limits are now obsolete and applicable only
   on Usenet and BBSes will get you roundly mocked as _a fortiori_ a
   self-indulgent jerk.


Our on-again, off-again contributor from Brooklyn elects to kick to the
curb the first two of those three courtesy guidelines in his ludicrously
long and loudly ideological .signature block underneath  Every.  Single.
Post.

Pro-tip:  Don't bother to tell him he's being a self-indulgent jerk by
so doing, unless you really wish to receive about ten separate long
e-mails of self-justification that are all about him.