From: Glenn Acres Is The Place To Be <[lf 7 z] at [midway.uchicago.edu]>
Date: Sun, 5 May 96 2:10:39 CDT
Subject: Re: Real Men Don't Use Smileys (Was: Re: Fuggin' Animals)

- -Poster: Glenn Acres Is The Place To Be <[lf 7 z] at [midway.uchicago.edu]>

> -Poster: [r w boyd] at [crocker.com] (Robert William Boyd)
> >-Poster: [arthur v k] at [xs4all.nl] (| a | c | w |)
> My point was simply that Fingerman wrote a joke that any reader of
> reasonable intelligence would recognize. Fingerman's joke was also an
> attack on Furrydom, and I suppose if he had included a happy face, that
> sense of attacking would have been mitigated. But I suspect he had no
> desire for his attack to be mitigated. It was a joke, and it was an attack.
> These are not incompatible.

Seems to me if you can write a paragraph like that and still not
understand why these conventions have evolved as they have, you're
still a little bit naive about what "netiquette" is all about.  It's
not about mitigating an obvious insult, it's about heading off
unnecessary misunderstanding, and therefore possibly getting rid of
"noise" follow-ups from people who just "didn't get it," at least it
was originally meant.  Bottom line for netiquette is high signal, low
noise, via civilized discussion and kiboshing miscommunication where
possible.  But this little war hasn't had anything to do with
miscommunication.  Hmmm.  OK, I'm gonna get verbose here, that's my
style when something I care about is threatened, and I hope you bear
with me because I care about the quality of the mailing list a lot.  A
whole lot, and not just because it's the only comix forum I have time
for anymore, neither.  No one take this personal or I will shoot you
down like the dog you are.  (Had it been deployed, a smiley here would
have meant that in reality, I own no guns, am a rabid pacifist, fight
passionately for the rights of dogs everywhere, and would by no means
ever shoot you down.  Even I though I do hate you, I'd probably only
poison you at most, you infidel pig.)

Anyroad, it wouldn't have helped Bob's original post out an iota,
hostility begets hostility, emoticon or no emoticon.  Watching this
thread, you and Bob are every bit as thin-skinned as Jim, IMO.  I've
been talking to Jim for like 8 years now, he is definitely not known
for flying off the handle, even with provocation.  (ergo, I'm not
calling anyone thin-skinned here, OK?  Belligerent buttheads, well
sure, but thin-skinned, no way!)  Telling Jim what furrydom is, that's like
suggesting Lazlo might check out Horny Biker Sluts or mail-order, or
Dr. Makr some euro stuff, or telling me what a hieroglyph is.  Homey
don't play that. On the other hand, I also know Jim well enough to know
that he gets very frustrated with the rampant stereotyping of both gay
comix and furry comix and fans, as he's been dealing with for a lot of
years.  So yeah, he's a mite touchy. >B^)  And I don't see any
difference between calling Groth comics' greatest asshole and saying
furry fans are mentally ill, tongue in cheek or not, except for one
glaring detail.  In the case of furry fans, there are plenty right
here on this very list (so there's no behind-the-back sniping aspect,
but you are most definitely dissing your fellow comix-listers, as opposed
to comix).  I don't remember who brought up the distinction between
laughing at and laughing with someone, but that's the distinction that
matters, and the addition of a smiley in this case would not have
created that distinction ex nihilo.  The follow-up wasn't nearly so ad
hominem, but surely we can do better about staying away from silly
personal insults than the post that started this mess.  I hope so.  I
read basically the same furries several others on the list do
(i.e. Cerebus, Omaha, Hepcats, Bone, Shanda -- the usual suspects), I
don't care what you call them, criticize them all you want.  That's
cool.  I don't understand or agree with all the dissing Hepcats gets,
for instance, but I won't be calling you mentally ill in the near
future.  At least not for that. ;-) (and again the prophet spoke, this
means I won't be calling you mentally ill at all, not that I don't
want you to take offense.  By all means *please* take offense, it's
your God-given *right* to take offense, and if even *one* of us loses
this right, we're all FUBAR!!!! (proph.: > "FUBAR; Fucked Up Beyond
All Recognition, alt. fubar, foobar", OldHackerese, Am.slang, modern
synonym "roadkill").  So go right ahead, I'll wait right here.
tap. tap. Done?  OK.)

One further concrete example is your dislike of smilies.  There's no
ad hominem in it, no one takes offense, everybody's cool.  Graceful
old-timers will smile knowingly, smirk, and think "he'll get it, we
like his posts, who cares."  And why say anything, because it's not
like it's a rule, it's just a contrivance of personal utility.  It'd
be like telling you which pocket to keep your keys in.  But go into
something like news.groups or comp.anything and tell 'em they're a
bunch of fuckin' losers for using smilies and couldn't find their ass
if they had hemorrhoids, and they'll tear you a new one.  (asshole
that is, pun intended.)  We'll have fun watching. >B^) Once upon a
time, long ago in a far away usenet, yea in the dark ages of digital
communications, these things were fairly well explained in a few posts
on the newusers newsgroup and everyone read them, everyone was on the
same wavelenghth.  They broke the "rules" all the time, but they knew
what they were and things got out of hand a lot less often.  On many
systems, mine included, you couldn't post until you had read these
things, or at least pretended to.  That's no longer possible if it's
even desirable, and the loss of that common knowledge has created no
end of pointless noise.  But I regress.

> In any case, you fail to convince me of the value of using those little
> happy faces. 

And I doubt we're going to, given your reasoning.  And no one cares,
it's just a matter of style anyway.  Your attitude is your attitude,
no matter how it gets punctuated.  It's like .sigs, unless they're
huge, they only ever get brought up by newbies, nobody else even
notices. (PSA... PSA... The following is a Vertigo "snob" smiley,
denoting sunglasses, punk hair, and a goatee. It being interpreted
means: "I am an elitist internet.old-timer asshole and I don't give a
fuck if you don't like it, I hope you don't."  To wit, >B^)> However,
and it's the however that says "bad motherfucker" so you can't miss
it, if you don't have a problem with an in-your-face ad hominem attack
like that, +/- emoticons, I'd assume they were disingenuous if you (or
anyone else) did use them in a case like this, anyway.  These things
you only get from participating in an online community long enough to
know the posting personalities of the other members, has nothing to do
with smileys.  It's all about context.  Context is God, it's a central
tenet of Cynical Hedonism, so it must be True.  The congregation will
please notice no one is *actually* called disingenuous here, right?
I'm disingenuous, but I'm a licensed and trained professional who
always wears the proper equipment.  No one else should dis ingenous
people, because hey, they were here first and besides it's just very
naughty.  So don't do it.

> as pointless and lazy. And worse, it seems cowardly because it says to the
> reader, "Oh, the thing I just wrote is a joke. You don't have to take it
> seriously."

This, to me, means that you're just not very used to interpreting them
yet.  Cowardly is just... well it's not relevant.  A smiley is not
really used to change the tone, so much as it's used to prevent
miscommunication.  What you said in quotes is generally true, it just
doesn't have anything to do with the current context.  Not to say that
folx don't try to get away with that sometimes, but when it does
happen it's usually transparent enough that it rarely does anything
but exasperate the problem.  Kind of like Bob saying his insult was
just a joke, it doesn't matter, it's not a legitimate defense and it
doesn't change a thing.  As an appeaser, it makes a good first strike.
Is it thin-skinned to expect people to leave the ad hominem jokes on
the playground?  Bob's new, I love his comics and he seems like a good
guy.  I imagine he didn't set out to piss people off.  Even if he did,
I'd still give him the benefit of the doubt, he's obviously got a lot
to offer in the way of entertaining discussion.  What's a lot more
disturbing is the way you guys jumped on Jim for defending himself.
If you tacked a smiley onto a pollack joke, it would still be a
pollack joke, pollacks would still be really pissed.  Let's say you've
made a somewhat subtle pun which relied on a mispelling or something,
or said the opposite of what you really meant.  (Yeah Cud really
sucks, I don't why *anybody* would buy that crap ;-) That's what a
smiley is for, not to head off criticism for an offensive joke.  When
Bob followed up, he spent a lot more time criticizing the phenomenon,
did a better job of steering away from ad hominem.  If he had started
there, I doubt anyone would've gotten pissed off, although it still
would've been obvious he had a bug up his butt for the genre, just by
the general tone and tenor of the thing.  However, people do that all
the time, it's no big deal, and it's not the same as saying "you
people are deviants (wink, wink)."  Chaput, for instance, could've
gone through a few of Groth's more well-known rantatorials or points
of editorial policy he didn't like or something, and still let a
little of the bile show through, and it would have been much more
palatable.  For myself, I find the personal attacks *really* annoying,
no matter whether it's Groth, Sim, Liefeld, furries, Perelman,
whatever.  ("I'm from Joisey", Mark ;-) Because it always means a lot
of pointless boring followups I don't wanna put up with.  So that's
it, since surely some of you are out there are wondering why the Hell
I'm droning on and on about this.  I know this equine corpsicle is
little more than a quivering lump by now.  But, I ain't ranting about
the one little flame war here. It's about the breakdown of netiquette,
and the wholesale attack of rampant growth on internet culture, and
the loss of "mores and ethics" which used to implicitly govern
behavior on Usenet, and by extension the mailing lists, via unenforced
communal consent.  I'm not mourning the loss of Eden, these things
exist solely because the consensus is that they're utilitarian.  As
traffic increases, it's more and more difficult to plow through noise,
people get touchy and miscommunication is a lot more likely.  Last
example.  Not too long ago I included a joke sans smilie in a usenet
post that went something like "....(me), who had a life, didn't like
it, and is currently seeking legal separation."  And knowing me, I
probably stole this wholesale from some late night comic or something,
but I immediately got a bunch of condolence notes on my
separation. :-/ (half-smiley, sad grin, or whatever... might be funny
in another context, or something).  These notes came from old-timers
I'd known for years.  Obviously, the mistake was mine, not theirs, and
I should have included a smiley.  And my wife has been putting up with
me 13 years next month, and no, she's not a furry fan, so don't even
go there.  Well I guess she likes Gon and Bone, but I still ain't
goin' there. >B^)

> Having said all this, let me add that the list would be much poorer without
> your posts, Arthur -- whether you use happy faces or not.

I'd say the same thing about everyone in this very unnecessary and
unproductive flame war.  I'd mean it, too, but no one would believe me
so I'm not going to.  And that's the truth.  pttthhhhhp.

(the .sig left me too, >>sniff<<.  must be a trend.  besides no one
read this far except the digest people who HAD NO CHOICE! HA! REVENGE
IS MINE!  MINE MINE MINE!  NOW WE TAKE BERLIN!)