[ RadSafe ] Keeping things civil

[Peter Crane]

The recent lull in postings to RADSAFE may have helped cool down the sometimes overheated rhetoric on this list.  I hope it’s a trend.  Though the RADSAFE rules say that persons on the list should not speak harshly of one another, it might be just as well if we also refrained from slurs on people who are not on the list, regardless of what we may think of them privately.  Not only does that contribute to a climate of civility, it might save posters and the list itself from a potentially successful libel suit – if non-members learn, for example, that their mental health has been publicly impugned.  It would be ironic indeed if pro-nukes on this list wound up funding the anti-nukes’ campaigns because the former couldn’t exercise greater self-control at the keyboard.  And whose mind was ever changed, or opened, by abusive words?

Peter Crane
Counsel for Special Projects, USNRC (retired)