Daniel on discussion@ (Re: what makes a good president and chairperson?)

[Paul Boddie]

On Wednesday 5. September 2018 08.42.17 Bernhard E. Reiter wrote:
> 
> Am Dienstag 04 September 2018 23:22:33 schrieb Daniel Pocock:
> > are you trying to change/misrepresent the intention of
> > somebody else's email?
> 
> please read the exchange again and look at the quotes,
> I was asking what ostendali at gmail.com meant by quoting from an HTML mail by
> matthias.hager at zoho.eu.

I think that some people got confused by the message produced by the "Zoho 
Mail" service which evidently has poor-quality plain text output. It was only 
when I explicitly selected the HTML message part that I got something that 
coherently separated the different opinions.

Still, some of the ways of expressing dissatisfaction were not entirely 
constructive or polite, even though I might recognise the underlying 
frustration. And here I support your - Bernhard's - right to continue to 
respond. It is no-one's place to request that discussion be halted and that 
people remain silent in anticipation of an official response.

I think that there are things, perhaps not directly related to representation 
within the FSFE, that can be discussed constructively and which can inform our 
understanding of this very situation. There are hardly hundreds or even tens 
of messages per day in this mailing list, so if someone does not wish to read 
them, may I suggest using a better mail client or reading the online archives 
instead?

> BTW: as both email addresses have no direct hits on an internet search
> engine, they strongly support your points and they have similiarities in
> writing styles, I'm just asking you directly: What is your connection to
> these email addresses?

Well, the former address has been used by someone on this list for quite some 
time. It is therefore possible to review messages going back as far as 2016 to 
determine whether any such suspicions are valid or not.

Although we should always be cautious about whether people are who they claim 
to be on the Internet, we should also exercise restraint in accusing people of 
not being who they might say they are. Otherwise, we risk denying someone 
their voice and ultimately their identity, which is a very undesirable outcome 
indeed.

Paul