From: vintageapplemac@gmail.com   
      
   In article <87a50zqdvb.fsf@asdf.ee>, Phil Carmody  wrote:   
      
   > vintageapplemac@gmail.com (scole) writes:   
   > > Something my History teacher said in class in the early 90s has  always   
   > > stuck with me; "If you want to know what the *really* crazy people are   
   > > thinking, buy your local newspaper and read the letters page...". That   
   > > used to be the only outlet that loudmouthed arseholes had to sound off on   
   > > their hobbyhorses, but involved some effort (writing on paper and posting   
   > > a letter) so only the genuinely committed and/or unhinged arseholes would   
   > > invest the energy, but when I got onto Usenet properly about 5 or 6 years   
   > > later I thought to myself "Hmmm, looks like this is the new Local Paper   
   > > Letters Page, then, but with a lower barrier of entry", and then thought   
   > > the same about messageboards about 5 or 6 years after that, and then the   
   > > same about Facebook about 5 or 6 years after that... And so on. It's all a   
   > > dead loss, that's the conclusion I've come to. A race to the bottom that   
   > > everybody's going to lose.   
   >   
   > Welcome back to usenet, where a decent proportion of the really crazy   
   > people have left for those other venues. (Far far far from all, though,   
   > alas.)   
      
   Yup, there's still crazies about on this here quiet, late-stage Usenet,   
   but they are much easier to ignore now than they were a quarter century   
   ago - killfiles are effective in a way they weren't so much when Usenet   
   was packed to the gills with nutters (and people replying to the nutters,   
   meaning you'd see much of the swill you had tried to killfile out...).   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)