NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #31/NN_1992_31.iso/spool/talk/abortion/53250

Internet Message Format | 1992-12-29 | 10.3 KB

Xref: sparky talk.abortion:53250 alt.abortion.inequity:6206
Newsgroups: talk.abortion,alt.abortion.inequity
Path: sparky!uunet!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!darwin.sura.net!opusc!usceast!nyikos
From: [e-mail] (Peter Nyikos)
Subject: Apologies to Garvin, Keegan, clueless newbies, and Regard
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Summary: My THIRD attempt to post this sucker.
Sender: [e-mail] (USENET News System)
Organization: USC  Department of Computer Science
Date: 28 Dec 92 21:31:30 GMT
Lines: 213

Here I go again, trying to post this for the third time.  This time, I
am taking the precaution of e-mailing copies to Adrienne and to Will
Steeves, who has kindly offered to post things for me if my netserver
misbehaves again.

I have a number of apologies to make in this post.  Let me begin with
the easiest one to make now (because I have already apologized for it,
but many networkers interested in seeing my apology may have missed it).

This is to Susan Garvin for misattributing some things to her in a post.
It was a follow-up of several hundred lines to a 500+ line post of hers,
over 400 of which were actually a reproduction of an August post by
J. S. Greenfield.  I'd made up my mind to respond to it because I had with
me a copy of then-Chief-Justice Burger's powerful *Thornburgh* dissent,
which was higly relevant to certain hotly debated points in the middle
of this 500+ line post.

I have already explained briefly how this happened in another follow-up
post to Susan, and since I don't want to make this post too long, I
won't add any more details to the account now (but I can if people are
interested), and just say once more that I am sorry for all the confusion
caused by my initial mistake and a number of subsequent posts before I
realized what my error had been:

_________________________Excerpt from post___________________________

Now that I have seen the original post again, I admit Susan WAS right,
although I did not do it intentionally.  The last line of Greenfield's
text is practically a Susan Garvin trademark these days ("I have no
interest in continuing this"--how often have you seen Garvin post
similar words?) so when I got to Greenfield's .sig I just assumed it
was part of Susan's .sig, just as quotes by Susan long formed part of
Chaney and Doug's .sigs.  So I deleted it along with Susan's own
name at the very end.  Then I scrolled back, looking for things I could
delete from this long post, and when I got to the Greenfield reference
near the beginning, I assumed it referred to a short article I had already
deleted (the original post was 500+ lines long, with lots of excerpts from
articles by others) and so I deleted it too!

_________________________end of excerpt______________________________

But in the post from which this admission is reproduced, I made almost the
same error!  When I saw some lines beginning with >##  I whipped back to
the beginning of the post and saw only the following attributions:

In <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Susan Garvin) writes:

>In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Adrienne Regard) writes:
>#You know how it happens that things are always in the last place that

[I have also reproduced the first line of text to illustrate how these
were the only attributions at the beginning]

I then whipped back to the lines in question:

>##adrienne is not a "trickier" case. you accused her of
>##forgery. your accusation was false. in fact, anyone
>##familiar with the net knew your accusation was false

The lack of capitals and general tenor of the message indicated Keegan's
handiwork, but I thought I'd have a little fun and say that my guess
was that it was due to a Keegan computer by Holtsinger.  A pretty lame
joke, as I later realized, because the attribution line did exist, only
I'd been looking in the wrong place.  My eyes had glossed over both
the attribution lines below, in the middle of the post, because they
were jammed up against the following text with no blank line in between:

>#In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (James G. Keegan Jr.) writes:
>##[e-mail] (Peter Nyikos) writes to
>##-#Well, I don't know what qualifies as an apology in your eyes, but I just

I even speculated that the "missing" attribution line had been deleted
by Adrienne, and for this I apologize to her, and also to Keegan and anyone
else who was confused by my claim that the line was missing.


But now, on to something which has been confusing people for more than
two months now.

To Adrienne:

You and I have in the past had a reasonably civilized e-mail
conversation, but when we get to talking on the net, we both get carried
away by the presence of an audience into doing a lot of flamboyant things
we wouldn't do without them.  For two months now, we've let a
tangled web develop from a rather simple mistake that could have been
corrected very simply in a one-on-one conversation.

I propose we start to unravel this tangled net from the beginning.  Since
I made the initial mistake, the dubious privilege of first apology falls
to me.

To all readers:

Here I reproduce the post which set off the whole "attributions/forgery"
flap that has been festering on talk.abortion and assorted other groups
for almost two months.  I've set the Newsgroups line to the same two you
see in the reproduced post below.
It contains two errors.  See if you can spot them.  Solutions and apologies
given after the reproduction:

________________________Reproduced post_________________________________

Date: 17 Oct 92 01:01:09 GMT
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Newsgroups: talk.abortion,alt.abortion.inequity
Subject: Re: Let's Play StipUlations..
Distribution: world
References: <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]>

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
____________________________end of reproduced post_________________

Give up?  In chronological order, the first error was to somehow neglect to
delete the > in front of the Suzanne Rini reference, making it look like it
had been made by Adrienne, even though the subsequent lines, clearly from
the Rini book, have no > in front of them.  Apparently I had deleted a
whole line of text by Adrienne except for the  >  and typed on without
hitting <return>.

This, however, was not the mistake about which Adrienne complained in her
follow-up to the above post.  The mistake was to leave in the following
attribution line at the beginning even though there were no lines
preceded by >>> anywhere in the post:

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

Apparently I had deleted all >>> lines and hadn't bothered to delete this
reference, which belonged with them.

I discovered the absence of >>> lines only after several exchanges of
escalating intensity between me and Adrienne, and mentioned this discovery
to Larry Margolis, who, after several e-mail exchanges between the two of
us, pointed out to me that because the above reference was
immediately followed by lines beginning with >>, some clueless newbies
might think the lines were due to Adrienne:


>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;


A reader who knows how attributions work (a classification I've belonged to
since mid-July, a week after stumbling onto USENET) will quickly realize
that these >> lines belong with the > Beaver reference rather than the
>> Regard reference.

Anyway, I hereby apologize to any clueless
newbies who were confused by them, and to Adrienne for having to devote
some time to setting the record straight for the benefit of these newbies.

Now let's see whether Adrienne is ... er ... woman enough to apologize
for something in her follow-up that was, if anything, even more likely
to confuse the same clueless newbies.

If she does, she will find me most willing to continue to the next round
of apologies, and the unraveling of the tangled web can then continue
apace.

Peter Nyikos