According to the poem by Yeats, it is when the best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity that things fall apart, the center cannot hold, and anarchy is loosed upon the world.

We live at a time when the worst are indeed full of passionate intensity. The question is whether the rest of us have the courage of our convictions and the wisdom to make the right choices.

Wisdom comes from learning, which comes from education. The heart of education is the search for truth. But there are many kinds of truth.

In mathematics and science, knowledge accumulates. Theorems are built on top of theorems and laws on top of laws. We discover that the Earth is round and will never again think of it as flat.

We learn that the square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides. Through experiments and research, scientists steadily add to our store of knowledge.

We are, in this sense, far wiser than earlier generations about how the world works. In the areas of global politics and interfaith understanding, however, I'm not sure we are any smarter now than we have been in the past. When the new millennium came, we vowed to make a fresh start, but we haven't begun well.

We may hope, however, for leadership at home and abroad that will inspire us to look for the best in ourselves and in others.

TO BOAZ DAVID,

You go right on summoning "the better angels of your nature"
summoning your capacity to care for others in ways that can't fully be explained by self-interest, logic, or science...

Once again, everyone, apologies for my spray, and for the fact that it has actually prolonged the nuisance.

CJ, this is simply the price we pay for freedom of speech, just as world-beating skin cancer rates are the price we pay for living in a sunny country.

Bring on that user filter http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=1189#21843 (I buggered up the link last time)

I'd have to endorse the value of jpw2040's top ten countdown for the qualities of a good poster, given in the eighth post in this thread. I intend using it as a post quality assurance test for my draft posts. It has been copied and pasted into a Gedit document that is now permanently displayed on another desktop on my computer (No. 14 - the number of his name) that I had some time ago labelled "character map" but had not used, which seems appropriate enough. Ah, the power and elegance of Linux!

I'd have to endorse the effectiveness (oh, how I long to write EFFECTIVENESS, but I can't, and don't) of this countdown in eliciting posts that display these qualities. Look at the very next post made! Only 41 words, and in the first sentence demonstrates compliance with No.1, in the closing salutation compliance with No.2, in the second sentence compliance with No.3, and overall, with No.6 and (exempting the probably instinctively honorific capitalization of 'jpw') even No.8!

Now it has to be acknowledged that the ninth post miserably failed Quality No.9. Two of the three sentences uncapitalized at their commencements! Unbelievable!

The real biggie in the elicitation effectiveness stakes has got to have been compliance with Quality No.8, and compliance at that by the acknowledged winner of the award effectively proposed by the opening poster, Angela84. It cannot be said that there was not a large enough sample against which to judge the significance of this octal-quality elicitation from this poster.

Rejoice, jpw2040: your setting of the literary decathlon bar has achieved a demonstration of new life in an old poster! Old Chinese proverb say: "you give new life to lost cause, you responsible for rest of that life!" Yep.

Now, as I go to close and look at this document's automatically given Linux opening title - Unsaved Document 1 - I've just realized Bill Gates and Microsoft have a serious, serious, copyright and trademark problem. In the beginning was the Word, ....

I admit that seeing who gets the Prolific Poster award means nothing to me either. Quantity, to me, having nothing to do with quality.

But...last semester, teaching a Journalism class here (in China,for anyone who doesn't know)I posted a number of sites during the Course that I wanted my students to check out and even perhaps to participate in.

To my shame posting the OLO url turned out to be a huge mistake. Some students who, at the beginning of the semester, had professed a desire to visit Australia, changed their minds totally. One girl (Chinese Uni students are much more naive than their Western counterparts)actually began to cry in class reporting her findings, and the entire class said that they were shocked and horrified at the way people treated each other on many of these threads. A couple even reported feeling nauseus after being exposed to the level of hatred and bigotry they encountered.

We also discussed the fact that those who were the biggest offenders seemed to dominate the posts and how this therefore had given them the impression that these thoughts and behaviours were the dominant ones in Australia.

So: couldn't give a fig for who posts the most. Proves nothing more than verbal flatulence. But who adheres to the principles set out above regarding clarity, fair-play etc? To me thats the biggie.

p.s. I hasten to add, BD, that these remarks were not directed at any one person.

Hi Romany...no drama about who those sentiments might have been directed towards.. (from the Students) ..

Here is a thought :) if you want to live dangerously, and adventurously, ask the students "Do you know how Tibetans feel about Chinese, and why " ?

Ooooooh Brother! I'd love to be a fly on the wall on THAT day :)

Your post demonstrated something very important. And I mean VERY!

Without access to a cross section of viewpoints, a group of students can actually believe the country they live in, is some kind of holy citidel of virtue, when the reality is, it is full of horror and oppresion, specially of non them, such as the Tibetans.

Those same Chinese who are "Shocked and offended, even nauseated" by OUR rather colorful linguistic efforts, would be stunned into absolute suicidal depression if brought face to face with the exploits of their own government. How do they feel about 'Taiwan'? :)
As Jesus said "He who is without sin, may cast the first stone"

This is one of the primary reasons why one of my oft mentioned subjects is 'immigration/refugees/immig policy' and I specifically mention that it should be 'responsibly selective'...now.. if they read that little chunk...they probably would think "AAAAH... WHITE Australia" so you can tell them I'm married to an Asian and have mixed children. I have more relatives in Asia than Australa, some even CHINESE :)

JPW.. you need a 'filter' ? are u not capable of simply ignoring posts ? Even with a filter, others will be still exposed to what your 'enemies' say, so unless you can filter a person right out of OLO, you would simply be putting your own head in a rather sandy place.
I have a feeling, that if you could, you would remove ALL posters who you don't like, and become guilty of 'totalitarian information control'... you don't have a secret membership of the Kmer Rouge pre Vietnam invasion do you?

Ahhh... some more "verbal flatulence" from Boazy to start the day.

Ho hum.