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Path: utzoo!hoptoad!amdcad!decwrl!labrea!rutgers!noao!mcdsun!mcdchg!chinet!dag
From: dag@chinet.UUCP
Newsgroups: alt.flame
Subject: Re: MESmith, Larry Lippman and sanity.
Message-ID: <1903@chinet.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 25-Nov-87 11:27:12 EST
Article-I.D.: chinet.1903
Posted: Wed Nov 25 11:27:12 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 29-Nov-87 16:52:54 EST
References: <281@snark.UUCP> <21910@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU> <1278@bucsb.UUCP> <21918@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU>
Reply-To: dag@chinet.UUCP (Daniel A. Glasser)
Organization: Chinet - Public Access Unix
Lines: 76

In article <21918@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU> robinson@dewey.soe.berkeley.edu.UUCP (Michael Robinson) writes:
>In article <1278@bucsb.UUCP> ooblick@bucsb.UUCP (Mikki Barry) writes:
>>Seems we finally got ourselves the old style flamage that net.flame was
>>famous for.
>
>I, frankly, have been disgusted at the quality of the garbage that passes for
>"flames" these days.  My contribution is but a mere wisp of the flamage that
>was, and even compares poorly with what I was producing at my peak.  I sure
>have gotten out of shape.  I've lost touch with the power of the dark side.
>
>>this flamage gets my vote for the alt.flame
>>hall of flame.
>
>A far, far greater testimony to the mediocrity of alt.flame than to the quality
>of my doings.
> [ Loads of stuff deleted ]
>There was a day when men were men, women were women, and flames were flames.
>People stood up for their rights and beliefs and melted the modems of any 
>who opposed them.  Now all we get is whining and sniveling and sneaky little
>stab'em-in-the-back yellow-bellied two-faced false civility.
>

Yes, I remember the days of real flames.  Does anyone anywhere have an
archive of the net.flames from back in the early 80's?  I have some good
ones (directed against me) someplace, but I suspect that they are on an
RX-50 diskette (P/OS) and I don't have access to a DEC machine running
an OS that reads ODS1/ODS2 (files-11) floppies. (RSX-11M+, P/OS, MicroRSX,
VMS).

Maybe some reposts of some of the better general flames are in order?

Oh, the days of ...!rabit!bimmler flames,  the first appearances
of erehwon postings (including the spurious rmgrp messages), the
religious zelots of all flavors (christian, jewish, gun-control,
anti-gun-control, vegitarian, ultra-right, ultra-left, grammarians,
anti-abortion, spelling, hardware, programming language, c-indenting, etc.)

Anyone remember the firestorm about the usage of the word "usage"?
I once posted a poem in net.jokes from Readers Digest about physics
(which was, incidently, posted again recently by someone else)
and was immidiately flamed, both on the net and by mail because
it was "blasphemous" in the eyes of some people.  I loved it!

The best bit of flamage that I participated in at the time was
the result of an article I'd posted in net.religion in which
I had talked about misconceptions that some non-jewish posters had
about judaism (the title was "Christian, not Judao-Christian".)
I was flamed by several fundimentalist Christians (note the capital-C),
all of whom said that I was wrong, and several of whom said I was
damned to hell...  (One of my comments was that jewish doctrine
does not include hell)
Several prominant posters of the time jumped in on my side, some
jewish, some not, and a holy war began.  The final result was
net.religion.jewish, if I remember correctly.

No, the old flamers did not just attack individuals, but broad groups
of people too.  For the most part, the language used was not so sprinkled
with insults and words considered profane, netters of the day were worried
about FCC tarifs reguarding obscinity, but the flames were much more
powerful and lucid!

I have a theory as to what happened to the old-style flamers --
	They burned out!

The net has grown greatly since then.  When I first came on to the net
back in 1982, the entire USEnet site map (sort of like a rogue level
map in appearance) was routinely posted.  It took about 2 panels of
132 column paper, few gateways to anything else.  There are too many
things to read and respond to now to have enough time to compose good
flames.  Flamers of today suffer from information overload and tend
to lash out without thinking the flames through.  They resort to personal
attacks more often and attack against the ideas less often.  The use
of bathos, irony and logical criticism has fallen out and the sarcasm
being used is of inferior quality.

Anyone have any other observations on this quality issue?