My previous post

[Lawrence Esker]

In article <13740 at polyslo.CalPoly.EDU> dgross at polyslo.CalPoly.EDU (David Gross) writes:
>Hi.  This is David Gross and I'm somewhat new to the net.  New enough so I
>don't know whose directions to follow and whose to ignore.  The post about
>amino acids was the first and only post I have made to alt.drugs and to
>comp.sys.att.  I have since received confusing hatE-mail regarding my decision 
>to cross-post.
> 
>I was under the impression that AT&T was dropping alt.drugs.  Some folks had
>posted on alt.drugs requesting that they somehow be able to read the messages
>in alt.drugs through another medium...
>                                       ...I now realize that comp.sys.att is
>a newsgroup like any other and is not related (directly) to AT&T.
> 
>I apologize for whatever trouble this may have caused.

Looks like David got caught in the retaliation crossfire.  To give some
background for you and other new members to alt.drugs:

    1)  AT&T decides to drop alt.grugs for fear of media pressure.  (Ahh, the
        power of the media when on one of its crusades.  Don't even have to
        do anything, yet people cower in fear and paranoia.)

    2)  Some asshole in alt.drugs says "Hey my posting to alt.drugs is to
        important to be ignored by the employees of AT&T.  I am going
        to cross post to comp.sts.att"  Typical activist responce to media,
        net.police, establishment, relgious evangelist, etc.'s attempt to
        maintain control on what they belive will some America's problems.
        "Stamp out drugs, censor all conversation of drugs, make America
        a safer place for our children."

    3)  More activist agree to the proposal.  Wow, a consensus.  We will after
        all change AT&T's managements opinion and mediaphobia by attacking
        the readers of a newsgroup centered on AT&T's personal computers.

        I doubt if a majority of AT&T employees even read comp.sys.att, let
        alone the management management.

    4)  A new reader of alt.drugs comes along and follows the consensus and
        wonders why he was burned by flames.  You see, the creaters of the
        cross post anti-censorship retaliation didn't care about flames, they
        are too busy flaming AT&T.

As a lesson to all, please never cross-post to a group that is totally
unrelated to the subject matter in the message.  There are too many closet
militants with there fingers waiting on the 'F' key just waiting for such
an opportunity to flame the crossposter.  Even those who cross post with the
best of intentions will get flamed because some anti-social deviate is not
interested in the subject matter posted, even though it is related to to the
newsgroups posted to.

As you can guess, I think every side of this issue are wrong and getting
totally out of hand.  I am not a reader of the comp.sys.att and this is not
just another anti-crossposter flamer.

Lets be a little more constructive about our retaliation to any event that
we do not agree with.  The sooner we create a main-stream newsgroup to replace
the group alt.drugs, the better.  1) It does not effect the innocent in other
nesgroups.  2) It will throw AT&T management off garde (they will have be
continuously bothered by having to repeatedly censore every newsgroup we
create.)  3) It is of little hassle to the alt.drugs reader, all they have to
do is unsubscribe to alt.drugs and subscribe to the new group.  4) It will
be helpful to all is it is called something not intuatively obvious as
alt.drugs.  (The problems that occured when the system adminatrater saw a
file in by directory called News/Alt.drugs when I had saved a post.

Now the sad part in this long tyraid.  I do not have the time to follow the
formal procedure of creating a mainstream newsgroup.  Some of us have to make
a living and read news only on their precious free time.  If someone out there
is truely interested in keeping AT&T employees in our family, please pursue
this matter.  (Maybe we don't need the call of votes, etc. if all we want is
a name change.)


--
---------- Lawrence W. Esker ----------  Modern Amish: Thou shalt not need any
                                         computer that is not IBM compatible.
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