On 2012-08-24, Michael R N Dolbear wrote:
Eric wrote
..
On 2012-08-22, David Cantrell wrote:
...
There are a handful of members who don't have email, but that
handful was deemed to not be important enough to justify the costs
of catering to their choice of not having email.

Discrimination, pure and simple. They are saying "we don't care who you
are or how long you've been here or what contribution you have made or
could make, if you don't have email we don't care about you". Nice. Not
having email is not necessarily a matter of choice.

And sometimes a matter of selective ignorance.

A gentleman who lives in my town wrote to The Times complaining that
our MP expected him to email.

The town's public library, open 7 days a week and with 20 PCs was
apparently beneath his notice.

If you don't use computers, or the library, why would you even think
of it? So your use of the word "selective" is at best an insult to
the gentleman concerned. There are many people who can not get what
computers are about, despite attempts to find out (with help), so maybe
he did know about the library but didn't see it as an answer for him.
He's allowed to do that, human rights are not diminished by an inability
to learn some particular thing (or indeed anything).

This attitude that people can be ignored if they fit into some category
is a kind of arrogance. People are not the categories we might put them
in, they are people, and need to be treated as people. It is pretty much
a certainty that some day you will be put into a category and ignored,
and that you will not like it.

Eric
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