At 12:54 PM 5/28/2003 -0700, Eugene Salamin wrote: ...
Your message goes beyond requesting members of math-fun to refrain from posting political content, and proceeds to provide considerable new political content, although perhaps not of the right wing sort.
Gene Salamin
To be clear about this, I am not personally opposed to the posting of political content on math-fun, but I have been resisting responding to it for several years, because many members prefer not to see it. If there's an agreed ban on politically oriented posts, and people make such posts anyway, that just makes those posts even less attractive because even though one may disagree intensely with them, responding in kind is discouraged. I admit to having violated that norm in response to what I perceived as considerable provocation over a long period of time. I also find it somewhat irritating when people request no political posts while at the same time posting their own, and I have previously pointed out that self-contradiction (while attempting not to fall into the same trap). What I was reacting to (one thing, anyway) is well characterized by one of several out-of-band replies I received to my first message that concurred with what I said:
What drives me nuts is the way things like this are so often phrased in an implicit "...as all of us right-thinking people believe" context, as though silence in reply will be taken as agreement. The lack of recognition that reasonable people can disagree is what makes these posts so unpleasant.
Shel Kaphan