From: joe@sfbooks.com 
  
 This is basically two posts in one, since I'm piggybacking off the post 
 I'm following up to in order to answer the previous post as well.  If 
 you get bored with what follows the first quote, skip down to the 
 second for a complete change of pace. 
  
 In article <3f6e2721$0$23150$afc38c87@news.optusnet.com.au>, 
 Yowie  wrote: 
  
 > "Noreen Cooper"  wrote in message 
 > news:bkl03b$46q4k$1@hades.csu.net... 
  
 > > Okay, I'll like to address a theoretical question to the 
 > > news.groupies here.  Say, you have 150 people who are tired of 
 > > being berated on the regular rec.pets.cats* newsgroups for owing 
 > > a purebred and they want their own space.  What happens if 50 
 > > militant rescue people decide to vote NO for the reason stated 
 > > above, that the new group may make adoption from breeders more 
 > > attractive.  Their NO votes have nothing to do with whether 
 > > enough people want their own group or not.  It's a Catch-22 I saw 
 > > from the outset and I'm not sure how anyone can get around it. 
  
 At one time, this was considered the single most obvious problem 
 with the newsgroup creation system.  Well, some people also 
 considered it the single *biggest* problem, but, um, well, um. 
  
 It did a very good job of showing up what *I* considered the biggest 
 problem, namely the increasingly sclerotic paralysis of the system. 
 (The moderator of news.announce.newgroups had announced that big 
 changes were coming soon, roughly once a year from his start in 
 1991 to 1996.  The last such announcement came in the post affirming 
 the creation of soc.culture.indian.jammu-kashmir, which was the type 
 case of political YES voting, as the failure of rec.music.white-power 
 became the poster child for political NO voting.  The big changes 
 did not, as you may have guessed, ever come.) 
  
 In recent years, it's been considerably less an issue.  I find in 
 a date-sorted Google search (with the concomitant unreliability of 
 dates) the following most-recent cases of possible political failures, 
 with my criteria being a) the group must have failed; b) the group 
 must have received at least 100 votes; c) the group must have 
 received more than a typical number of NO votes (I've removed groups 
 I started by listing, where they got less than 40); d) there must be 
 some identifiably possible political reason for those NO votes.  In 
 some cases I'm reasonably sure I'm missing relevant data (I certainly 
 don't have all the talk.religion.bahai failures, for example, nor do 
 I have the failure of the stupid us.* proposal), but for what it's 
 worth: 
  
 soc.religion.christian.home-church 137:68, February, 2000 
  
 (note that the group didn't meet the 150-vote recommendation, though 
 it did meet the 120-vote one; note that it would have been moderated; 
 note that a previous vote on this group had been invalidated for 
 campaigning violations, although it's actually pretty damn hard to get 
 a vote invalidated on those grounds...) 
  
 news.admin.moderation 118:70, December, 1999 
  
 (again, note that it meets neither usual recommendation; although it 
 would have been unmoderated, many people were convinced that it should 
 instead be moderated, or at least a proposal for a pair of groups; the 
 proponent was a jerk; this is not, I think, the only time he proposed 
 this group, though it may be the only vote result) 
  
 soc.culture.padania 219:207, December, 1999 
  
 (here we finally see a grade-A political voting situation.  The YES 
 votes were votes for the Northern League party in Italy, while the 
 NO votes were in some cases votes against it, in some cases votes 
 against the embarrassment some people expected to get from the group. 
 "Padania" is more or less a name for the part of northern Italy where 
 the Northern League is strongest.  This was not the first time this 
 group was proposed.  The proponent was a jerk.) 
  
 soc.culture.padania 191:136, March, 1999 
  
 (see above) 
  
 soc.culture.padania 178:94, May, 1998 
  
 (see above) 
  
 talk.religion.bahai 109:65, February, 1998 
  
 (basically, various Baha'is, including sometimes moderators of 
 soc.religion.bahai, thought that the existence of an unmoderated 
 forum for discussion of their faith was contrary to the principles 
 of their faith.  Over time, they gradually concluded that instead, 
 stifling free discussion was what was contrary to those principles. 
 Or some such; I didn't follow each discussion in detail.  This was 
 the next-to-last vote of several.  Um, also, the proponent was a jerk.) 
  
 comp.binaries.ms-windows.ce 118:52, June, 1997 
  
 (again, an uncertain case.  My guess is that the NO voters were mostly 
 inspired by the fact that most of the existing comp.binaries.* groups 
 had by that time gone dead for lack of moderators, and/or by a belief 
 that the Web made it silly to distribute binaries via Usenet.  But I 
 can *imagine* that there was some kind of anti-Windows or anti-this- 
 version-of-Windows involved, and in general I suspect groups not 
 relatively close to traditional "politics" are under-represented on 
 this list, so just in case...) 
  
 misc.activism.radical-left 115:90, May, 1997 
  
 (like the previous group, this failed to meet any reasonable recommendation 
 for minimum YES votes, but anyway it was a purely political situation; this 
 proposal was in competition with the anti-fascism groups' proposal, which 
 had been languishing for a year or so in RFD after RFD, and which the 
 supporters of this group took as nothing but a vanity proposal.  They were 
 right about that - the anti-fascism groups' moderators have almost never 
 approved any actual articles to any of those groups - but they turned out 
 not to be able to meet their opponents' numbers.) 
  
 talk.religion.bahai 157:691, March, 1997 
  
 (see above) 
  
 soc.org.cisv 124:43, March, 1997 
  
 (again, a low YES total; again, I'm not at all sure any NO votes were 
 political - one of them came from the then-moderator of 
 news.announce.newgroups - but am including the group in case.  This 
 was the group's second vote; the first one failed for lack of 100 
 YES votes.) 
  
 soc.culture.kashmir 169:312, March, 1997 
  
 (the proposal for an unmoderated group.  Arguably, somebody somewhere 
 voted NO because they saw it as duplicating soc.culture.indian.jammu- 
 kashmir, 
 but in the real world, this was a political NO.  I think this was the 
 vote that led Jonathan Grobe to newgroup alt.culture.kashmir; I think 
 it was also the vote that put me fully into the opposition vis-a-vis 
 the then-moderator of news.announce.newgroups.) 
  
 soc.culture.punjab.moderated 113:70, March, 1997 
  
 (again, a low YES total, but maybe you're beginning to see why this 
 was once seen as a really important problem) 
  
 rec.arts.tv.barney.criticism 148:69, February, 1997 
 rec.arts.tv.barney.creative 142:74, February, 1997 
  
 (again, I suspect there were good reasons for many of the NO votes, 
 but list the groups in case; see below for why I don't list more of 
 this kind of group) 
  
 soc.culture.azerbaijan 1732:920, January, 1997 
  
  
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