George Herbert wrote:
On 2/23/07, John Lee wrote:
The moderators have agreed to ban this user from
subscribing to the list.
Since he was not making any positive contributions through his membership,
it has been revoked.
This is sort of sad; gadflys and contrary opinions help strengthen
projects, and on his good days, he was on the "probably making me
think enough that it's positive overall" side of things.
But I see why, from the bad days.
We need a better class of gadfly.
This seems like a fair evaluation of the situation. An effective gadfly
gets under a person's or a group's skin, and gives one the urge to
swat. This cost the life of the world's most celebrated gadfly. A
quality gadfly still needs to be an irritant, but also needs the agility
to avoid the swatting hand.
Courage cannot become foolhardiness, and agility cannot become
evasiveness. That's a rare combination of qualities. Parker's agility
is lacking, but it is unduly harsh to say that he was making no positive
contributions. I am not so insecure in my views that I can tolerate no
criticism.
Ec