[EM] Lomax and Manson comparisan + apology

[RLSuter at aol.com]

I was mistaken that Abd ul-Rahman Lomax was seeking to
win a debate. Serious debaters, as I understand it (I've
never been involved in formal debate activities), stick to the
questions being debated and avoid personal references,
whether to the people they are debating or to themselves.
Comparing me to Charles Manson, in addition to being
extremely insulting and inconsiderate (will his next
comparison be to Hitler or Stalin?), proves better
than anything else he has written that Lomax is more
interested in attacking people he has decided he dislikes
or disagrees with than in entering into honest, respectful
dialogues or debates about election methods. I expect
him to post another thousand or so words denying this
while attacking me once again, but he would be more
persuasive if he proved I was wrong by ceasing his
comments about personalities (including himself) and
restricting himself in the future to directly discussing
issues of the kinds this list was indended to be
limited to.

To the extent that I have engaged in unwarranted speculations
about people's motives, including the possibility that Lomax
and Dave Ketchum are too committed to Robert's Rules to be
able to consider them open-mindedly, I apologize to them as
well as to this list. I'll try to be more careful in the future to
avoid such speculations unless the evidence supporting
them is much more substantial, as, for example, is the
evidence for the conclusions in the preceding paragraph. 

-Ralph Suter