GardenBanter.co.uk - View Single Post

26-08-2003, 07:22 AM

(Bill Oliver) wrote in message ...
In article ,
Siberian Husky wrote:

For Bill Oliver, I think you have already made your points clear.
There is no reason to continue arguing. If you do, you will only
convince people to put you in their killfiles in rec.gardens. If you
keep responding to any one followup in this tread, maybe it will reach
a point that the sci.environment and alt.native readers will start
killfiling you.

Not my problem. I don't care if people killfile me. The
reason I follow-up as much as I do is that people like
paghat, animaux, Tom, et al. turn their lies into truths
through repetition. Every time paghat says I wrote something
I didn't write, it is necessary to follow-up, else the
unchallenged assertion becomes "truth." That's how
these people work.

I do not think it necessary, but again, these newsgroups are not
moderated and you decide what you wanna say

But some observations .....
-- I do not think you need to worry about people turning their lies
into truths through repetition. In this discussion, the people who
believe Roundup is bad, bad, bad will not believe anything else even
if Bill Oliver provides 100 peer-previewed journal articles to prove
that nobody has yet found Roundup to be dangerous. On the other hand,
the people who think they can go to Home Depot, buy a Roundup and kill
all their weeds and poison ivy will do that regardless how many people
in these groups tell them that is not good for the earth. Some
netters will switch side, but they are few.

-- Do not fight against anonymous people (who knows, maybe "Bill
Oliver" itself is not a real name, but I don't care

). After a
lengthy flamewar, most netters will believe Bill Oliver (1), Dick
Tracy (1), James Bond (1), Ethan Hunt (1), Clark Kent (1), ...... are
not contributing anything for environment and gardening discussions,
and they wan to ignore all of them. Anonymous names and email
addresses can be generated unlimited, but billo is only one. If you
decide to hunt them down, you will only spend your time in useless
directions.

I do not think gardeners like paghat or animaux are malicious. They
just don't have trust in Monsanto when you do not find any scientific
experiments showing Roundup to be dangerous (again, that is different
from showing Roundup to be safe). maybe thru misunderstanding, or
another netters jump in and digged up your employer and else, and
subconsciously you think "this is a war between me and them", so you
raise your tone and animaux or paghat also raise their tones, and you
know what happened...... Hehe.

From my experience, when more than 10 or 20 messages are posted in one
day on a thread, with most of them from netters taking turns following
each other with a "potential hostile" tone, it is an indication the
thread needs a cooldown. In this case, leave the thread for one or
two days to cool yourself down, and come back again. That helps :P
Maybe someone else wrote whatever you wanna say.

I think I said too much as if I can tell the other rec.gardens and
sci.environment folks what to do. I never meant that..... I will
still not use Roundup (who knows, maybe next month some scientists
will have an experiment finding Roundup to be dangerous), but I
appreciate your attitude in using scientific approaches on the safety
of Roundup.