Re: [tlug] RMS is at it again

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Marty Pauley writes:
 > 2008/6/15 Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen@example.com>:
 > >
 > > The problem is not just that RMS is odd.  It's that he says is so
 > > thoroughly political that nothing he says is more reliable than what
 > > comes out of the White House.
 > 
 > I disagree.  I think RMS says lots of things that are more reliable
 > than stuff from the White House.

C'mon, Marty, you know that you don't get to pick which utterances are
reliable.

 > I also thing that a lot (but nowhere near all) of the things said
 > from the White House are true.

I'm sure they are.  But I no longer believe I'll know which ones.  And
I long ago stopped trusting RMS's claims.

 > I don't thing RMS is in the same league.

No, as a liar, he's not in the same league as most of our recent
Presidents.  But they're Presidents: it seems likely that by far the
most honest of them were Ford and Carter, and you know what happened
to them.

Nevertheless, RMS has encouraged me personally to lie about economics,
and failing that, to suppress results if they would indicate that, for
exmaple, permissive licenses are more conducive to production of free
software than copyleft.  I have seen him trash people's evidence as
FUD when they reach the "wrong" conclusion, then turn around and
praise the astuteness of a very similar post that reaches the desired
conclusion (just turning left instead of right at the final
intersection).  As far as I can tell, RMS takes the "the truth must be
made to serve the movement" point of view that propelled Lenin to
power.

 > I can see nothing in this recent article that is obviously false.
 > I think that the thing RMS gets wrong here is the politics, not the
 > facts.

I agree.  The ironic thing is that as one of those rare Americans who
can remember our history of internment camps, McCarthy, Nixon stomping
McGovern in a landslide, and the enthusiasm for a President who had
just put the country into a quagmire in Iraq, I'm aligned with RMS's
politics on this issue.  That's precisely why I wish he'd shut up!