X-Message-Number: 23988 Date: Sun, 25 Apr 2004 15:31:29 -0400 (EDT) From: Dan Hitt <> Subject: spam and the beholder's eye (your message 23980) Hi Randy, Thanks for posting message 23980 (which i'll have to rate as insightful at http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=23980 after sending this off). For reference, and to shave of all the nuance from your post, you raise the question as to whether Paul is being tagged as a spammer not because of spamming behavior but because of the contents of what he posts (anti-Bush pieces). Note that James S also raised a similar question in message 23857, where he questions whether other posters' strongly negative responses to Paul were because the material was off-topic, or because of their anti-Bush content, and then reminds everybody about Bush's anti-life-extensionist appointee Leon Kass and Bush's impedance of stem cell research, and wonders aloud how a cryonicist can support politicians inimical to our interests. I think you raise a good point. Is it really spam? Well, i posed this question to Kevin, and snipping just a little from his answer, he makes the point that Paul's posts have the characteristic of spam because they typically do not explain their relevance to cryonics, and they do not engage others in discussion or arise as a result of previous discussion. For example, in Sunday's cryonet, Paul makes a post about the PNAC (Project for a New American Century). Now, in fact, the PNAC is worthy of review (either on the basis of its chilling contents, or on the basis of the incompetence of any of its authors putting down their plans in writing and attaching their names to it). But we receive this information about the PNAC completely undigested, with no effort made to provide even a fig leaf of a connection to cryonics, even to the extent of a warning that we may not look so good in the future if we're seen as supporting anything from the PNAC. And it's not in response to anything on cryonet. In fact, it looks like it's part of a chain letter: somebody sent it to all of his friends with a note saying "pass this on", and it then gets passed on to here, unmodified. Some people here won't even take a look at it, but get even more annoyed at the poster, we get a rating system on cryonet, and maybe there will even be a few more votes for Bush/Kass/anti-stem-cell-research (and i guess the PNAC as well) in the process. This i think illustrates Professor Ettinger's dictum that we promote our cause by making ourselves more likeable (or maybe some converse of it: we hinder our cause by making ourselves less likeable). This may not put to rest the question that you raise "is it tagged as spam because of its contents?", but at the very least, i think that the presentation of the contents has clouded the issue enough that it can plausibly be called spam (however valuable the contents may be). dan PS: It won't show up in the header, but i'm copying this to the parties prominently mentioned, so they can set me straight that in this digest if they choose to. I make lots of mistakes, and i welcome correction from you or anybody else. Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=23988