This one covers a portmanteau of particularly brain-dead Loon claims. It starts with the obvious:
“You’ve never tried Linux. You’re bigoted. Try it, you’ll love it!”
We’ve tried it. It fails. Next, please.
“It’s a Community! We care! We share! You’ll never understand FOSS unless you contribute!”
Luckily I haven’t (mostly through laziness), but many have. And the Loons seem to be correct. You’ll never understand what a vicious, rude, back-stabbing, incompetent Community it is until you submit a bug report or make a request or even join a forum.
The final (?) assertion in this unholy trinity is often brought up by anybody from the Looniest of the Loon (Oiaohm) to the reasonably sane but slightly Loon-soiled (IMGX64):
“You haven’t read Stallman on this, have you?”
or
*Eric Raymond says something interesting about that”
or even
“If you only read the GPLv3, you’d …”
It’s all crap. We’ve read all of it. We wouldn’t be quite so incensed if we hadn’t read all of it (see “About” tab, above). Pointing somebody at a supposed authority and then failing to justify why you think it is an authority is a technique beloved of junior debating societies, but worth jack-shit in the real world.
It’s the condescension that gets me. What bloody right do these idiots have to assume that I, and millions like me, didn’t bother to think (or to look things up) before we made our decisions?
And why on earth do so many of them think that this technique is a fruitful way of making converts?
Comments
It would be like cultists believing that people won’t join their suicide cult because they don’t like Kool-Aid.
Autism.
They can’t stand anything else but UNIX (or whatever they perceive as UNIX), and so they assume others can’t stand anything but Windows (or Mac, or whatever).
But, they reason, if we only overcame our inhibitions (that we don’t actually have) and judged their beloved Durden fairly (something they believe us incapable of) then we would have surely fallen in love with it.
Alas, they know it cannot be, since no true autist can stand change…
———————————————-
Unfortunately for the Durden idiotas the hate comes mostly (if not only) from people who have actually tried and saw the abortion/OS with their own eyes.
And the more they evangelise the more hate they reap.
Well what can you do? (Fix the farkin piece of crap… just a thought, never mind.)
“The final (?) assertion in this unholy trinity is often brought up by anybody from the Looniest of the Loon (Oiaohm) to the reasonably sane but slightly Loon-soiled (IMGX64):”
To defend myself, when I post about something a so-called authority wrote, I don’t always agree with them. I just try to fill the gap in the conversation with the opinions of the other side, regardless of what I think.
I believe Administrator once said he wouldn’t like it if this website turned into a bunch of yes-men agreeing with each other.
(Oh sorry, I just did it again. If you consider Administrator an authority, that is.)
Anyway, if it really bothers you that much, tell me and I’ll stop.
> Anyway, if it really bothers you that much, tell me and I’ll stop.
And you did it again. Our doctor is not authority either – he’s just smart guy with his opinions. If you need authority, I grant you permission to have your own opinion as long as you stay sane (even doctor admitted that you are).
[SmileyToShowThatImJustKidding here]
@IMGX64:
I sort of have to apologise for that. (Note that this is a real apology; it’s only the compulsion that’s sorta.) I wanted to book-end a spectrum with Oiaohm at one end and a rational human being at the other, and I’m afraid you just happened to spring to mind (mostly because you adverted us to Stallman’s hate-words article, as though we’d never heard of it).
So, I apologise. I could just have easily used myself, six or seven years ago, but that would have been weird-looking and too complicated to explain.
You must be signed in to leave comments.