Michael Price

>Even, to move to the more general, if these "off-topic" threads erupt, they
>also terminate of their own accord as people run out of things to say. Even
>if you don't like them, you'll have the pleasure of knowing you'll outlive
>the thread just by showing patience for a two or three days. ;-)

Most hilariously, posts complaining about or defending the eruption of a supposedly
"off-topic" thread tend to outnumber the actual posts on the original subject! Since
these commentary posts are clearly not about birding, aren't these commentary threads
actually worse than the thread that triggers them?

Remember the limerick prank? A small subset of tweeters (Dennis, Stuart and I forget
who else, though his name is on the tip of my tongue:) engaged in what amounted to
a one afternoon prank. Debate raged for days, with there being at least two or three times
as many posts as there had been limericks in the first place.

I think it's a funny phenomena.

As a couple of folks said, if you don't like a thread or feel the list is being
dominated by the anarchists just use your delete key, or unsubscribe and come
back a couple of days later when folks get back to work. Posting to the list
with complaints, which are guaranteed to lead to a flood of posts defending
the loose style we've evolved at tweeters, just leads to a "tweeters is tweeters
so quit whining" thread that will eat up more time than the original thread did.

As far as I'm concerned, folks like David Stiles need to be fought whenever they
flaunt their knee-jerk rhetoric. If you haven't noticed, that kind of stereotyping
of fields like conservation biology is rampant among the conservative wing of the party
that controls half (I think) of your legislature, both houses of mine (Oregon), and both
houses of Congress. They don't just spout such rhetoric - they act on it. There are
those in Congress who claim, like the fat man on radio, that spotted owls really DO
thrive in K-Mart signs.

And if you think fighting this has nothing to do with birds, I can only conclude you're
mimicking a large, flightless African species youself...