On Wed, Mar 19, 2008 at 9:00 AM, Steven Hildreth [email protected] wrote:
I think somewhat the opposite is true. Those people who do register and "go through the trouble" of voting, by doing so, indicate they have enough commitment that they care to the outcome. It's somewhat comparable to a electoral process; Those who don't bother to vote, have no right to complain about the outcome of the voting.
This makes no sense to me. First, I've never bought into the argument that those who don't vote (whatever they election in question) have no right to complain. This claim is always completely without merit or foundation. We all have a constitutional right to complain but no constitutional duty to vote. Wishing people would vote and dreaming up a punishment of a restricted right to speak for those who don't yield to our wishes is just plain silly.
And second, we have an existing list and a subset of people on that list who want to impose a duty to cooperate with this vote on everyone on the list. Where does the authority to impose this duty come from? Do we have rules in place about this? The fact that some of the people on this list wish we would become more formal doesn't automatically create a duty for all of us to become more formal while we discuss whether or not to be more formal.
What if we only had two people voting for moderation and one voting against it? Wouldn't we reasonably have to conclude that we really didn't have much interest in the idea? We apparently have had more than three people voting, but how do we decide how much is enough to show some real interest? What principle are we using to decide if the vote is meaningful?
We had a proposal for a moderated list in addition to an unmoderated list. Surely such a proposal gives those who want moderation something without imposing additional restrictions on everyone else.
Adrian