Librarian's attitudes toward filtering: The turning tide

[Burt, David]

I'm sorry if I sound overly defensive, but I've gotten really sick of
all the personal attacks and what I see as "ganging up" tactics by
anti-filters.

When 10 people respond to a post and basically offer the same criticism,
and throw in personal attacks as well, this strikes me as ganging up, as
unfair, and it  gets me pretty upset.  When the 7th, 8th, 9th, and 10th
person "piles on" with basically the same criticism, as happened again
last week, this doesn't strike me as debate, it strikes me as an attempt
to silence debate, and I feel the need to speak up, least anyone get the
impression the debate has been successfully silenced.

What I'm really fighting for is a little respect more than anything.  I
truly feel that the positions and ideas of librarians sympathetic toward
filtering have not been given proper respect by a number of people on
this list.

If the people who feel so strongly against filtering would stop the
name-calling, the ridicule and the ganging up, it would go a long, long
way toward civilizing the debate.

BTW, I don't think anyone on this list is arrogant or stupid.  I was
describing a position as stupid and arrogant, not any people that way.

Maybe a new list , "WEB4FILTER", needs to be started, devoted
exclusively to the discussion of filtering.

Since I agree that pretty much everything than can be said on this topic
has been said, why don't we all agree to a 30 day moratorium on
discussing filtering, unless someone truly has something to say that
hasn't been said already.

Unless this debate starts to rage up again, and by that I mean 7 or 8
new posts on the topic within a 1 or 2 day period, this will be my last
post on filtering for quite sometime.  I think we would all benefit from
just letting it cool off for a while, especially the poor people who
just want to know how to make Netscape print properly and how to make
their CGI scripts run well.

  ***********************************************************
          David Burt, Information Technology Librarian 
          The Lake Oswego Public Library 
          706 Fourth Street, Lake Oswego, OR 97034
          URL:          http://www.ci.oswego.or.us/library/library.htm
          Phone:     (503) 635-0392 
          Fax:           (503) 635-4171 
          E-mail:      dburt at ci.oswego.or.us