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From: pvp@ihuxl.UUCP (Philip Polli)
Newsgroups: net.politics
Subject: Collection of tax money, and some questions.
Message-ID: <927@ihuxl.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 23-Feb-84 14:00:10 EST
Article-I.D.: ihuxl.927
Posted: Thu Feb 23 14:00:10 1984
Date-Received: Fri, 24-Feb-84 02:19:12 EST
Organization: AT&T Bell Labs, Naperville, IL
Lines: 72

>If you don't think that we are being forced to pay taxes, then
>you must believe that a person's wages (fruits of labor) are not
>the property of that person, but are completely controlled by
>the state. The USA has a free market economy in which
>taxes are collected forcibly. If you don't think that people
>should be free to own property without being taxed for it, then
>you deny a basic component of freedom. I thank God that you weren't
>around to help write the Declaration of Independence, Constitution,
>and Bill of Rights.

This response causes me to think about a problem we've been
having in net.politics discussions on various topics lately.
Namely, how do you respond to an article which makes absolutely
no sense whatsoever? If you read the above statements, you are
forced to realize that the author does not understand how the
society he lives in operates, the reasons why it operates that way,
and is completely ignorant of its history. 

One type of response is to write a fairly lengthy article
pointing out all the errors in the article, and giving references
and quotations to refute it. This requires a fairly heavy
investment of time and energy on the part of the responder.
Most people who work for a living have better things to do than
to explain what the Constitution says to somebody who
has obviously never read it. (Don't they require an American
Constitution test in high school anymore?)
Even when someone takes the time and effort to prepare a good
response, it appears to have no effect at all. The nonsense
spewer simply goes on to another topic, spreading misinformation
and ignorance liberally around. Since it's much easier to make up
information at a terminal than to go out and learn the facts,
the nonsense spewer is usually two topics and five articles
ahead of the responses.

A second type of response is to point out that the author
is an ignorant idiot. This saves the responder the time and effort
required to educate the idiot, which is supposed to be the
function of the school system, anyway.
Unfortunately, the idiot then assumes that he's right,
and the responders are simply calling him names
because they can't come up with any counter arguments.
Also, your mailbox gets filled up with letters
from people who consider it terribly impolite to call
somebody an idiot.

A third alternative is to simply ignore the article. 
This seems to be tantamount to simply abandoning netnews
to the idiots, though. Now that all these articles get sent
to other countries, do we want to let these wild assertions
pass unchallenged? What image are we presenting to the rest of the
world? That our citizens are all as stupid as our president?

So I guess I have a couple of questions for the net:

1) I've noticed that a significant fraction of the idiot articles seem
   to come through uiucdcs. Is this just a reflection on that school
   (?the University of Illinois?) or is the problem more widespread?
   Does it have anything to do with the funding level of Illinois
   universities? Are these real people or is there just a computer
   program down there generating these articles? (A failed AI experiment
   perhaps?)

2) How should the rest of us respond to these articles? Is there an
   alternative to the ones I outlined above? Should we just write
   filters to discard articles from authors who are clearly off their
   rockers?

Responses any way you like to:

	Phil Polli
	{ihnp4!}ihuxl!pvp