"Adult supervision"

[Ted Lemon]

> I suggest IETF persons just ignore people like this or publicly force
> them to defend themselves and if they do not then the community will
> ignore them and problem resolved :--)

That sounds great in theory.   But in practice that isn't what happened 
in this particular case.   What happened was that every interested 
party engaged in debate with him until they realized that he wasn't 
listening, and this process, iterated across a number of wg 
participants, effectively swamped the debate, causing a number of 
interested parties to resign from the mailing list, and ultimately he 
got his way.   You don't know in advance that someone is going to be 
unreasonable, unfortunately.   This particular individual is obviously 
not a completely unreasonable person, either - he was an AD, and I 
agree with many of his positions.   Furthermore, I totally sympathize 
with his desire not to keep justifying his position - it does get 
tiring to keep re-engaging in debate on the same point over and over 
again.

My real point here is not that this person should not have 
participated, but rather that the way to avoid this kind of repetition 
is not to exclaim in disgust - it is to document the details and get 
consensus on them, and get them published as RFCs.   And if you can't 
get consensus, you don't get to claim that the issue is closed.