His followers know he’ll deliberately cause instability, that’s what they want.

Charging the last terrified rapscallion

That already works, even India and China have (unnoticed by Western public opinion) transitioned from growth to stable situation, and it’s predicted their populations will be shrinking.

We are going to have the problem of too few people, not too many.

Murder threats are always serious. EDIT: When the victim thinks they are not - the most. It’s a protection mechanism or something, if a person receives murder threats and waves those off, it means the situation is really serious. When a threat alarms them, it may or may not be serious. But if it doesn’t, then run. Cause it means that the threat has been preceded by something less direct to desensitize them to threats from that person or group.

I’ve recently seen a nice description of that - “peasant mindset”.

People who are not ready and willing to peacefully discuss reality with literally anyone, and most of all marginal and weird viewpoints, like sovcits and antivaxxers, because those are more interesting, - have that “peasant mindset”.

(I’ve found something like that in my head too this morning, so sharing the thought.)

Aggression is a sign of fear, and fear is something we feel when we are not ready to change our mind if we get some good arguments, or when we get bad, insufficient arguments, but are pressed to change our mind anyway.

Why can we not be ready for that, feel powerless before that possibility of deciding to think differently 5 minutes from now?

Because there’s something that we follow like a peasant follows their master. It’s the assumed identity, the family, the group, the party, the state, the nation. Such a decision, and a decision to discuss reality preceding that, is an act of defiance toward those. It’s a conflict, and we as humans sometimes try to avoid conflicts. It’s like discussing orders. Only there’s not a single soul above us who is entitled to order us how we vote or how we think.

Every decision worth making is destructive, everything new comes in the place of something old and something that could be, there’s nothing to fear.

Changing one’s mind by a conscious decision after careful consideration is a sign of having personal dignity. Not changing one’s mind in the same situation is too a sign of having personal dignity.

Keeping your head down and trying to eat anyone not in line is not.

(too long again)

I thought I’m alone. A rather obnoxious person just plainly refusing to reason.

Surprisingly few. I usually block people who think it’s a good idea to incorporate my comments into their witch hunt and go my way with a pitchfork. That is, those who use offensive or derogatory tone instead of arguments.

Israelis are more known for putting backdoors wherever they can than Russians, for example.

Anyway, nation-states are not the only kind of group with malicious interest. Maybe a maintainer is a member of some mafia, I dunno. How are you going to know this?

Many things can be done with FreeBSD. Again, in our time it may get some popularity again not because of such events even, but because of their possibility and to avoid monoculture (in the context of backdoors too).

No, it’s not. But the US is closer to it than some Americans think.

That’s the point of FOSS as copyleft, to use the law to protect “free and open” information. This allows bigger projects, because contributors don’t have to keep their heads down.

At the same time maybe this is a downside, not an upside. As the reason why it has all gotten so big and complex and corporate-influenced.

This does very little to protect against supply chain attacks.

Your example shows that too.

Increasing modularity and reducing complexity of software seem to be the right way to that end. Plan9, GNU Hurd, Minix3 are interesting in that context.

It’s not decentralized on the level of project development, the visible proof of which is what we’ve seen happen.

How many times have you seen two branches of a significant project to coexist with comparable popularity?

I wonder if there’s some way to manage an open source project so that it’s not subject to particular national laws in this way.

Yes. Pseudonymous software development. I’ve seen Ross Ulbricht’s name today, so we also know the risks.

Naturally this is closer to some underground warez than to copyleft, because the legal ways of protecting copylefted information against appropriation will not be available. A different paradigm.

I’m thinking about that conspiracy theory of Linus having been made an offer one can’t refuse, when some time ago he took a vacation and returned with news about seeing the error of his ways.

It almost coincided with Stallman being canceled for one of his usual highly socially unacceptable, but in principle consistent opinions. With most of the attackers being frankly some new random corporate-associated people, not very active in real communities.

Maybe I’ll re-read J4F and compare Linus from there to these events. Canary and all.

EDIT: Before you downvote this for the mush in my head (thx Linus) propagating conspiracy theories, offers one can’t refuse are not exactly an impossible thing. And WWII radio games, where, having captured an enemy station’s operator, one of the sides could either imitate their style in transmissions or just force them to transmit what it wanted.

Save your energy, reduce sugar and glutene, sleep well, reduce distractions, exercise.

Also what you said to not tell you.

I only know one that went into a field where their genius mattered.

That’d be one more than I know, if we don’t count relatives.

One high school dropout,

My tribe.

one just surviving and making decent money doing whatever they try.

That actually sounds nice.

Eh, I have a Yoda-looking USB stick with Slackware 14.1 written to it in times immemorial, as in high school.

I thought I lost it or someone stole it (looks nice), until I found it mutilated by mice (the rodent kind, not the input device kind) in one place I rarely visit.

I don’t generally carry it with me, though. But when I did, it was the same.

rock-bottom of stupid as soon as they step foot outside of their field of study

That’d be too many people around me, from the qualified kind. I’m not a doctor though.

Sorry, it’s impossible. It’s normal for people to be what you described. Just human.

I mean, if you actually manage to create a working procedure for such selection, half the people in the profession will have Aspergers, always red eyes and sleep at work, and the other half will be NT, but some bloody geniuses whose abilities would rather be used in something like fundamental science.

Doesn’t have anything to do with what I said.

I said that all propaganda is problematic, not only that of visible political parties, and not only right-wing one.

Furthermore I said that the problem is that humans are, I repeat, fucking apes.

And you writing something irrelevant and some anonymous idiots downvoting me illustrate this very well, because only fucking apes would take this as an attack on their particular crowd of apes, and ignore the actual meaning.

Oh, only right-wing. When you want to say something cool-looking, but don’t have the courage to be honest.

It’s all of propaganda, but even that’s not completely true.

What’s true is that humans are fucking apes. There’s no victory over that.

There’s no political good.

I dunno, I have some workout trousers with a Chinese logogram on them. Dunno what it means. Hope I won’t ever