NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #27/NN_1992_27.iso/spool/talk/abortion/49232

Internet Message Format | 1992-11-23 | 15.6 KB

Path: sparky!uunet!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!rphroy!ilium!nigel.msen.com!heifetz!rotag!kevin
From: [e-mail] (Kevin Darcy)
Newsgroups: talk.abortion
Subject: You're *Both* Guilty
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Date: 23 Nov 92 07:26:28 GMT
Organization: Who, me???
Lines: 307

Re: the Peter and Adrienne "Forgery? Did not. Did too." show. Time for some
facts...

First, here is a reconstruction of the relevant portions of Adrienne's
article <[e-mail]> -- the attribution part, followed by
an ellipsis, and then the relevant quoted text.

---

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Don Beaver) writes:
>In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Adrienne Regard) writes:
>
> [...]
>
>After sex, even if the man has never wanted to become a parent
>and used a condom and spermicide, he has no right to make decisions
>about his "personal or family privacy."  He cannot abort the child;
>he cannot escape child support obligations.

---

Why only a reconstruction? Because, despite a rather generous expire interval,
the article was posted rather a long time ago, and no longer exists on my
system. However, since I responded to that article, and I KNOW what I did and
did not change in my response, in terms of attributions, leaders, etc., I am
able to faithfully reconstruct Adrienne's article from mine, at least the
relevant parts. If anyone has the original <[e-mail]>
article archived, please email it to me.

Okay, now for Peter's followup to that article:

---

Newsgroups: talk.abortion,alt.abortion.inequity
Path: rotag!nigel.msen.com!sdd.hp.com!swrinde!gatech!hubcap!opusc!usceast!nyikos
From: [e-mail] (Peter Nyikos)
Subject: Re: Let's Play StipUlations..
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Sender: [e-mail] (USENET News System)
Organization: USC  Department of Computer Science
References: <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]>
Date: 17 Oct 92 01:01:09 GMT
Lines: 50

In <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Adrienne Regard) writes:

>In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Don Beaver) writes:
>>In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Adrienne Regard) writes:

>>After sex, even if the man has never wanted to become a parent
>>and used a condom and spermicide, he has no right to make decisions
>>about his "personal or family privacy."  He cannot abort the child;

Actually, he can, if he is strong enough.

From _Beyond Abortion_, by Suzanne Rini, p. 117:

"In 1981 a man who wanted his wife to abort became incensed when
she wouldn't.  He thrust his hand into her vagina and pushed
upward, severing the uterine wall, causing the baby [sic] to
pass into her abdominal cavity.  The baby [sic] died, and Robert
Hollis was indcted for first-degree assault against his wife and
first-degree murder of the fetus.  The state attorney sought the
death penalty.

"The state attorney general actually used _Roe v. Wade_ in his attempt
to convict Hollis, begging to the decision's idea of state interest
in the life of a fetus approaching viability.  Although the judge
sympathized, he ruled for Hollis on the grounds that the existence
of laws permitting abortions meant that fetuses not born were not
`persons' and therefore Hollis had killed `no one'.  However, an
appeals court reinstated the case and this judge reasoned that because
science can now diagnose and treat the fetus in the womb, even before
being close to viability, the traditional requirement that a fetal
homicide victim be proven viable was now outmoded....

"Eventually the Kentucky Supreme Court reversed the appellate court's
conviction of Hollis for murder of the fetus and upheld only the
conviction for first-degree assault on his wife."


>Since a woman's right to terminate pregnancy is based upon the fact that
>a pregnancy resides within her body,

Newspeak.  A pregnancy is a property of the woman's body ("a pregnant
woman") and not something contained in the body.

What was it Holtsinger said about pro-choicers reducing women to
containers?

>Adrienne regard

Peter Nyikos

---

Here's where the trouble began. Peter made massive quote and attribution
deletions here, since he wanted to start his article by addressing the single
phrase "He cannot abort the child", which in Adrienne's article was buried
about a page and about half a dozen different quotes into the body of the
article, some of the quotes nested 3 levels deep. In his haste, he neglected
to delete the <[e-mail]> attribution. This is not fatal
in and of itself, of course, since anyone could see that the quoted text
beginning "After sex", which has a >> leader, does not match the attribution,
which has the same leader. Attribution lines have one less > than the quoted
text to which they refer. And if anyone really wanted to see who the text
belonged to, they could look up one line and see the correct attribution, the
one citing the <[e-mail]> message-id (author: Don Beaver).

Next followed Adrienne's response:

---

Path: rotag!nigel.msen.com!sdd.hp.com!nobody
From: [e-mail] (Adrienne Regard)
Newsgroups: talk.abortion,alt.abortion.inequity
Subject: Re: Let's Play StipUlations..
Date: 20 Oct 1992 08:39:36 -0700
Organization: Hewlett Packard, San Diego Division
Lines: 17
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
References: <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]>
NNTP-Posting-Host: hpsdde.sdd.hp.com

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Peter Nyikos) writes:
>>>In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Adrienne Regard) writes:
>>>After sex, even if the man has never wanted to become a parent
>>>and used a condom and spermicide, he has no right to make decisions
>>>about his "personal or family privacy."  He cannot abort the child;

Peter, get your attributions right.  I did not say the above.  Don did.

I know you have a crush on me, and can hardly post, even in your conver-
sations with others, without some reference to me, but please, make an
effort to get it *right* when you pretend to be actually quoting.

(not that it would surprise any of us that you show no interest, period,
in ever getting things right on the net......)


Adrienne Regard

---

Here's where the sparks began to fly. Adrienne made a *HUGE* assumption
right off the bat -- she assumed that Peter's comments in response to
"He cannot abort the child" were addressed to her PERSONALLY. I think
that was an unwarranted assumption. True, Peter was responding to Adrienne's
article, but that can be explained by the fact that, in addition to
responding to Don's "He cannot abort the child" phrase, Peter also wished
to address Adrienne's "a pregnancy resides within her body" phrase, and
had no inclination to post two separate articles, where one would suffice.
There's no independent reason, as far as I can see, to believe that Peter
had intended a PERSONAL response to Adrienne wrt "He cannot abort the
chid" -- the response to that phrase was totally generic, and contained no
references to Adrienne whatsoever. If he had said "You're wrong, Adrienne,
he can if he's strong enough ..." then all bets would have been off. But he
didn't. On that particular point, he responded generally. Most of the text
wasn't even his, it was from Suzanne Rini, and what text he did add was
mostly just to identify the source.

Adrienne also made some questionable attribution-editing decisions in her
article. She DELETED the <[e-mail]> attribution which was the
handiest documentation of her own (true) claim that the words in question
were spoken by Don Beaver, yet she RETAINED the troublesome
<[e-mail]> attribution which had already tripped Peter
up once already. Did she really think these edits were going to clarify the
situation? Way back when I was in the financial printing business, I used to
juggle a lot as a freelancer between the typesetting and a proofreading
departments, and we used to have a rule that no proofreader works on the same
text that they inputted as a typesetter. The rationale was that if the
typesetter had screwed up something ONCE, that the chances were high that they
would screw it up a SECOND time, even if they're wearing their proofreader
"hat". It was a good rule, borne no doubt from years of bitter experiences in
a industry where accuracy can make or break a firm. Adrienne, on the other
hand, having already seen Peter screw this attribution up ONCE, decided to
send it back to him alongside the other aforementioned confusing attribution-
edit, to see if he'd screw it up AGAIN. And sure enough, he did. Did she get
what she wanted?

Finally, as a general observation, why did Adrienne even bother posting the
article at all, except to enflame Peter? Was she so impressed with Peter's
"refutation" of the "He cannot abort the child" phrase, that she felt
embarrassed to be associated with the original claim? Somehow I doubt it.
I think that Adrienne, as I, considered the Rini anecdote to be virtually
irrelevant to any GENERAL claim, since forced-abortion-by-unwilling-father is
so exceedingly rare. And even if she _was_ so goshdarned concerned about the
-content- of Peter's article, why did she not respond to the charge that Peter
had made that she was employing "Newspeak"? She let that one slip right by
her, whilst bitching and whining about secondary issues like attributions.
Given this, I think it's fair to characterize Adrienne's article as pure
"flamebait". The remainder of this analysis should be read with that in mind.

Since Peter's response to the previous article is rather long and involved,
I'm now going to lapse into traditional paragraph-by-paragraph-type responses,
addressing Peter personally. For those who wish to just press 'n' at this
juncture, my gist is that, even though faced with some highly questionable
behavior from Adrienne, Peter a) failed to recognize and admit his original
error in failing to delete the spurious attribution, b) overreacted generally,
and c) made some irresponsible statements which amounted, IMO, to an escalation.

In article <[e-mail]>, [e-mail] (Peter Nyikos) writes:
>In <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Adrienne Regard) writes:
>
>>In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Peter Nyikos) writes:
>>>>>In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Adrienne Regard) writes:
>>>>>After sex, even if the man has never wanted to become a parent
>>>>>and used a condom and spermicide, he has no right to make decisions
>>>>>about his "personal or family privacy."  He cannot abort the child;
>
>>Peter, get your attributions right.  I did not say the above.  Don did.
>
>>I know you have a crush on me, and can hardly post, even in your conver-
>>sations with others, without some reference to me, but please, make an
>>effort to get it *right* when you pretend to be actually quoting.
>
>>(not that it would surprise any of us that you show no interest, period,
>>in ever getting things right on the net......)
>
>I'm sorry, Adrienne.  I thought Susan Garvin was
>an AnotherAdrienneRegardWannabe.  It appears that, instead, you are an
>AnotherSusanGarvinWannabe.
>
>Chaney has charged Susan Garvin with forgery but when last I heard, he
>was still trying to complete his documentation.  I on the other hand
>have it in my files: The post to which you are following up, exactly
>as it appeared.
>
>I'm not posting it here, for fear that I may be falling into a very clever
>trap you have set for me.  I mean, your forgery, if it could be called
>that, is so transparently obvious to anyone who has been on this net
>seven weeks, let alone seven years, that you must be joking, and must
>be counting on everyone else who is not a clueless newbie know you are
>joking.

Peter, this is very loose talk. First of all, does this "fear" of yours
have any rational basis? Then why mention it? And what about this talk
of "forgery"? Sure, you've hedged it with "if it could be called that",
but you've already attached a stigma, and that can't be easily erased.
What if I were to say "Your rape, if it could be called that", would you
be satisfied that no stigma derives from such talk?

>I do, however, think you owe all the clueless newbies an apology.

You haven't shown that Adrienne's "joke" even exists, Peter, don't you
think it's a little premature to be asking her to apologize for it?
You sound a little like Jimmy "when are you going to apologize" Keegan
here. First, you should document this "joke" beyond a reasonable doubt,
and only THEN should you ask for an apology. Jumping the gun like that is
rather inflammatory.

>Especially since you haven't put in any smileys.  But, as I have told
>others, that is your prerogative as Lady High Everything Else of
>talk.abortion.  But, again, how is a clueless newbie supposed to
>know that?
>
>Note that there are exactly as many >>>> up there in the reference as
>there are in the part quoted.  That is as it should be, because the
>part quoted is from a FOLLOW-UP by Don Beaver to a post of yours.

This paragraph seems very confus[ed/ing] to me. The whole point of it seems
to be that something fishy is going on -- you say in one sentence that quoted
text should have "MORE" > leaders than their "reference", but, in another
sentence, you point out that, in Adrienne's article, there are "exactly as
many" > leaders to some quoted text, as to its alleged reference. Then,
having successfully identified that there's a problem here somewhere, you
simply dismiss it with "That is as it should be". Huh?

>It's always the case (don't ask me why; after seven years on the net,
>you are in a much better position to know why) that there is one MORE
>>  pointing to things in the text than there is pointing to the
>reference from which that text came from.

The reason for this phenomenon is obvious when one realizes that the "In
article ..." language generated by lots of posting software is considered
part of the quotER's article, not the quotEE's article. It therefore always
is given one less > leader than the quoted text to which it refers, no matter
how nested and "herring-boned" things get.

>Of course, your post had >>> where now there is >>>>, and my post where
>my alleged mis-attribution took place has >> in the same places, but
>again, all is as it should be.

Alleged mis-attribution? Peter, if you had gone back and checked, you
wouldn't have used the word "alleged". You _did_ leave in a spurious
attribution line. Maybe Adrienne reacted to it inappropriately, but if you're
going to make such an issue out of this, throwing around loaded terms like
"forgery", I would have expected you to at least double-check what she was
claiming. She may have made a mountain out of a molehill, but the molehill
did exist, and you were responsible for it.

>And of course, you edited out the attributions to Beaver, and to your
>own follow-up to Beaver, otherwise no one would have been fooled.

Yes, I have already noted how questionable this is. But imputing DELIBERATE
DECEPTION here, Peter -- "otherwise no one would have been fooled" -- is
I believe unwarranted and escalatory.

>Other readers please note: way up there, you will see a reference to
>a post by Adrienne preceded by >>>>, a reference to a post by me
>preceded by >, and nothing in between.  This is due to deletions by
>adrienne, which I can document.

This is just a restatement of the previous paragraph. Why do you address
it to "other readers"??

                                - Kevin