Meta-Gian.

From: Alex Ferguson <abf_at_cs.ucc.ie>
Date: Sat, 26 Feb 2000 00:44:58 GMT

Before we get down to the nitty-gritty, let me first of all declare my top-level stance on the Great GianFranco Issue: I think he was, as others have said, both somewhat 'spikey' in his own remarks (nothing unusual there), and rather over-sensitive about others' (again, this is just Standard Digest Samsara...). No reason for him to feel forced to leave, I'd have thought, but clearly that's a matter entirely for himself. I do feel he was somewhat over-zealously 'List Admined'

• but I may be somewhat biased, having felt that that way about such practice for some time. But equally, I feel he somewhat over-reacted to that, too -- again, not that I can possibly second-guess his feelings about such a matter.

I too have had some discussion with Gian off-Digest, though I hasten to add, certainly not to abuse him. I felt he he something to contribute to the Digest, and hoped he'd 'see his way clear' to continuing to do so, but alas, it would seem not to be. I don't think we can expect the Digest to change to suit Gian, and equally Gian may not wish to accomodate the undoubted oddities of the Digest.

Andrew Larsen:
> If someone out there wants to attack Gian, they could at least have
> the honesty to say what it was that he did to offend them.

And who is it that you think might be attacking him? If you're referring to the passage snipped from private mail, it seemed to me to be a long way short of an attack, and that entirely aside, surely the quotee is the wronged party in this exchange. Firstly, by being 'end-arounded' by having private statements selectively made public, and furthermore, that this be done by means of quoting a private email, which is even at the best of times, if we're going to get down to 'written rules' both a clear breach of "netiquette", and arguably a form of intellectual property abuse.

> If the offense he committed was using a pseudonym, he's hardly alone
> in the Internet community in doing it. On this list alone we have
> TTrotsky, Terra Incognita, and someone named Sergi (which I assume is a
> pseudonym).

I can't say any of these cases bother me in the least, though I confess a bias in that I believed that I knew the name of all three. (Naïvely, I assumed Sergi Diaz's real name was Sergi Diaz -- at least, it looks like a name, and it seems to ethnologically match his top level domain name, which is more detail than I'd trouble to worry about, normally...) But it's one thing to have a consistent pseudonym, and quite another to multiply them, and indeed to post in circumstances tantamount to a claim that you're _not_ the same person.

> He has not
> attempted to manipulate or deceive the list by using it.

Well actually, it seemed to me that he's done both to some extent. It may not have broken the actual intent of Rule #4 (though as Constitutional Conservatives would say, if we don't mean what we say we mean in drafting the law, why pay all these lawyers and politicians so much to do it?), but it would be at best a Melodramatic Stunt, and at worst is an attempt to mess around with our collective heads. However, that's largely by-the-by, since Gian's concerns seem to largely ante-date this entire controversy, as I understand it.

Slán libh,
Alex.

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