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Re: Enough is enough



I adopted DB's solution long ago.

On Thu, 13 Feb 2003, David Bowman wrote:

Regarding John Mallinckrodt's comment breaking the gentlemanly
silence that has, until recently, attended the neverending
discussions involving David Rutherford concerning simple established
matters of mathematics and physics and his behavior in those
discussions:

I know that most have opted for silence in the face of these
continuing assaults out of one or both of 1) a well-meaning desire to
avoid inflammation and 2) a hope that by ignoring the posts, they
will go away.

In my case it was the latter. I kept hoping DR would run out
people to correspond with and that maybe he would give it up.

But I think it is now time for us to communicate our collective
abhorrence of this kind of behavior.

Hear. Hear.

... I
don't believe we should kid ourselves about our ability to reason
with Mr. Rutherford in further threads.

Another wise insight.

Enough is really enough.

Yes it is.

I had desperately hoped that when DR announced

Class dismissed!

in his post of 29 Jan 03 21:02:47 -08:00 with Subject: "There's work,
and then there's work" that we would no longer have to endure the
seeming endless abuse of the list's patience. But, alas, my hope was
in vain, and we had to put up with over 2 weeks more of this.

I, for one, am tired of it.

BTW, I do not advocate banning DR from the list. Rather, I encourage
everyone else on the list to delete his posts unread and, especially,
to never answer or engage them in any way so as to prolong our
collective misery. I prefer the Amish solution of shunning, to the
practice of excommunication endulged in by other communities.

David Bowman


--
"What did Barrow's lectures contain? Bourbaki writes with some
scorn that in his book in a hundred pages of the text there are about 180
drawings. (Concerning Bourbaki's books it can be said that in a thousand
pages there is not one drawing, and it is not at all clear which is
worse.)"
V. I. Arnol'd in
Huygens & Barrow, Newton & Hooke