cyberHitler

David Zeiger dzeiger at NETCOM.COM
Thu Apr 25 14:26:28 EDT 1996


[apologies for the long-winded off-topic post, but I've seen that
"vote no" message on 2 mailing lists and 6 newsgroups now...]

>
>         This is, I think old news.  The vote has, I think, already
> taken place (and failed :) but I'm not sure.

The vote ended on 3/18.  However, the results have not yet been
posted.  The reason we still do not have results is due to the
massive amounts of vote fraud.  Vote fraud with respect to usenet
group creation includes, but is not limited to, such things as
sending pre-filled ballots to individuals/mailing lists, overly
blatant campagining on unrelated newsgroups/mailing lists, and
possibly not voting with the official CFV form.

Basiclly, usenet "votes" are meant to be interest polls only.  The
*only* people who should vote are people who are actually interested
in reading the group--"no" votes are generally meant for people who
think the group has namespace problems, or other technical details.
Any voting on the basis of political motivations is a peversion of
the process, and should not be done.

Think of it this way--if it's OK for you to vote "no" to a
neo-nazi group, is it also OK for, say, Pat Robertson to go online
and try to get every fundamentalist Christian in the US to vote
for the removal of rec.arts.erotica?

Or, to use an actual example, look at the mess surrounding
soc.culture.india.jammu-kashmir.  Since Kashmir tends to be a
point of dispute between Indians and Pakastanis, the inclusion
of the name under "india" resulted in the vote being a contest
between Indians and Pakastanis as to who could get the most
people online to vote.

Is that *really* the way you want Usenet group creation to be
decided?  Namespace as a political issue?  Whoever creates the
most 10-free-hour AOL accounts wins?

If not, then don't let your general feelings be swayed by any
single moral issue.  Someone pointed out yesterday the potential
danger of a "protest" vote--and that's just what "political" usenet
voting is.

Of course, if you *do* want votes to be political in nature, well,
fine.  But note that votetakers are volunteers, and there's a good
bet that they'll stop taking votes if this problem continues
uncorrected--which means that either you need to step forward to
count votes yourself, or we won't have any new Big 8 groups at all...


--
            David Zeiger              dzeiger at netcom.com

Windows 95: The Dracula of Operating Systems--it sucks up all your
memory, bleeds your hard drive dry, and only works an average of
12 hours out of every 24.



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