re hallam baker bashes tpgers was re welcome to police state usa in article c yypo ei dscomsa desy de hallam dscomsa desy de phill hallam baker writes in article apr a cs okstate edu kennejs a cs okstate edu kennedy james scot writes from article c t ia f dscomsa desy de by hallam dscomsa desy de phill hallam baker just what the hell do you base that ludicrous claim on there are plenty of fine decent people people who read post to t p g if any of these people are paranoid it is because of people like you hey dude you are making me paranoid what an argument while i wouldn t be too terribly impressed with anybody who got to be paranoid based on either usenet in general or phill hallam baker s comments in general you d be surprised for most people if you accuse them of something long enough and loud enough to enough people they start to ask why they re bothering to fight it if nothing you do will be considered right why bother to do right it s pretty basic human nature i d have a spot of tea with them you probably gave up on arguing the case for arms control directly long ago because posters who know what they are talking about e g frank crary disproved all your arguments for why more gun control is needed so you gave up because you know they are right and you couldn t refute their answers no frank crary s arguments are based on the assumption that most people are sane normal people tpg disproves this of gun owners what an amazing thing i didn t realize that over a hundred million gun owners all posted to tpg even if all the posts in talk politics guns illustrated what you say they illustrate it would still only reflect the written personas which is often different from face to face of a very very small and select group anybody who seriously generalizes any attitudes or positions on usenet to the general population of any country either doesn t care about accuracy or needs to have a few realities explained to them usenet as a whole disproves it of humanity as a whole speaking of which most of the readership posts i ve seen put the most read newsgroups at about readers a number i have a feeling is fairly inflated the posters rare and regular are themseleves a very tiny minority of that group and the whole of usenet readers are themselves a very distorted sample of humanity if anything the only real thing you can get out of the relative sample of usenet readers is that we ve got too much equipment and too much time available to us we now have proof positive that guns don t make you safer buy a lot of guns and you either get shot in the no knock raid or get the fbi to burn down your house proof that guns don t make you safer is that if you buy one the government will show up and kill you tell me if the government took away the voting rights of everybody who exercised their free speech would that then be proof that free speech squelches political activity you are equating two things with each other that don t see even in the paranoid mindset of tpg there are good reasons to support gun control phill if you really believe that the various posts on computer nets represents either most of the poster s in person personalities or the general public s general opinions then i have some serious reservations about your grasp on reality but don t expect you really do believe that it s simply a convenient way to make your point and hopefully make those people you don t like look bad cuddles n kisses phill have a nice day phill david veal university of tennessee division of continuing education pa utkvm utk edu i still remember the way you laughed when you pushed me down the elevator shaft sometimes i get to thinking you don t love me anymore weird al yankovic
