Subject: Re: Dead software (was: A draft business plan for free software LISP vendors)
From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no>
Date: 1999/03/10
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Message-ID: <3130020854936769@naggum.no>

* Craig Brozefsky <craig@red-bean.com>
| But anyways who am I to correct you Erik, I disagree you with so I'm
| obviously already a moron in your book.

  disagreement has nothing to do with it.  concluding that disagreement is
  the key is _probably_ cause for deciding you _are_ a moron, however.

  it's fascinating to watch people believe in agreement.  some people truly
  respect only those who agree with them on issues, and worse yet, their
  agreement is usually measured in words, not in meaning or in principles.
  for such limited people, respect for methodology and due process is much
  too complex to handle.  like lawyers who defend the guilty according to a
  complex set of rules to ensure they get a fair trial, I also get a lot of
  _stupid_ accusations based on some trivial and superficial issue compared
  to the core principles of due process and sound methodology.  probable
  morons like Craig Brozefsky, who have to trivialize this into a simple,
  one-dimensional agree-disagree axis are probably also completely unable
  to appreciate that an argument whose underlying methodology is broken is
  neither right nor wrong -- it's just noise, not even worthy of arguing,
  but it _is_ important to point out that it's so much noise so others
  don't go the route of actually trying to argue the points that appear to
  be there if you completely ignore the genesis of the argument.
		       
  what you see from me is disrespect for people who are unable to deal with
  information contrary to their existing beliefs, no matter whether I agree
  or disagree with it, particularly if they reject information that has
  been obtained with the _same_ methodology used to obtain the information
  they "agree" with.  I also have a very low tolerance for people who think
  that there is a difference in _who_ does something, particularly if it
  manifests itself in the belief that there should be one law for them and
  one law for everybody else.  or worse, one law for those they agree with,
  and one law for those they disagree with, which is, amazingly, quite
  common among the _really_ retarded people who post their stupid opinions
  on USENET, and, incidentally, who are often "activists" for some stupid
  cause or another and who usually know nothing of importance about their
  "enemy" save what their propaganda ministers have told them.  I have zero
  respect for such people and I think it is very valuable to smoke them out.

  so, yeah, Craig, you are probably a moron, but you would be whether you
  agreed with me or not, and I would probably feel impelled to tell you
  exactly the same thing if you did voice agreement, because it would hurt
  my case to have such people on my "side".  more precisely, the less smart
  the people who favor your cause is, the more you have to work behind the
  scenes, and I don't like to do that.  by exposing the morons who favor
  some other cause, that people who share that cause have to regroup and
  find ways to express themselves better, and differently.  this happens
  surprisingly often: whenever you see a bunch of lunatics take to the
  streets to fight some evil or another symbolically, the people who
  actually do something about it keep a clear distance to the "activists"
  and sometimes have to antagonize them with "compromises" to make sure
  that they are not seen as representatives of the activists, because that
  would cause them to lose credibility in general and be seen as equally
  shallow and one-dimensional as the activists are, qua activists for a
  single cause.  note, however, that only the representatives of activists
  are assumed to have one-dimensional views.

  it actually amazes me how little some people understand of these things,
  while I'm sometimes amazed by how much others do grasp of what's going on
  and what I'm actually doing.  this has led me to believe that if I can
  find one person every now and then who gets the point, it's worth all the
  stupid abuse from morons who don't get it, but the Craig Brozefskies of
  the world are _very_ tiring to deal with, which is why I'm trying to make
  this a little more explicit than I used to.

#:Erik