On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 9, 2014 12:53 UTC (Thu) by niner (guest, #26151)
In reply to: On the sickness of our community by timtas
Parent article: On the sickness of our community

Please reread your posts, too. I have and still come to the same conclusion. I don't even care about Lennart's innocence or guilt. Because thats _not_ the point!

No digression whatsoever on his part can justify death threats, calls for cutting his arms off, petitions to get him fired or even the loads of verbal abuse he or Kathy or Jonathan Corbet have to withstand. That would be an eye-for-an-eye reaction and surely we are above that by now?

If Lennart crosses lines, than he may be criticised and I will be the first to join in. But there's a big difference between criticism and abuse and the latter can never ever be regarded as the first. Because using one person's perceived misconduct to justify abuse will always be just that: blaming the victim.

So unless you stop bringing Lennart's behavior into a discussion about the abusive behavior of his haters, I will always call what you do by its name: blaming the victim.

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On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 9, 2014 13:07 UTC (Thu) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link] (17 responses)

You're falsely simplifying the concept of blaming the victim.

Blaming the victim means that you claim that the bad things that happened to the victim are specifically the fault of the victim.

If someone gets beat up at a bar after work, and I said "Why was he such an idiot to go drinking at that bar, it's his fault!" then I'm blaming the victim.

If someone gets beat up at a bar after work and I say "He always was an asshole." Then I'm not blaming the victim, I'm just insulting him at a gauche time.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 9, 2014 13:11 UTC (Thu) by niner (guest, #26151) [Link] (16 responses)

So timtas is either blaming the victim of abuse or joining the abuse by adding his own personal attacks. The result is pretty much the same from where I stand.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 9, 2014 13:40 UTC (Thu) by timtas (guest, #2815) [Link] (14 responses)

I'm joining the abuse by adding my own personal attacks, that was at least my idea. Sorry if it came out as if I wanted to blame an innocent victim. Again, I'm stating for the third time, that death-threats are totally unacceptable, but you somehow still seem to be totally missing that. Maybe I have to put it on a separate line in capital letters:

I THINK THAT DEATH-THREATS AND SUCH ARE TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE!!!!!

Got it?

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 9, 2014 13:45 UTC (Thu) by niner (guest, #26151) [Link] (13 responses)

What about the rest? Do you think calls for hacking his hands off are acceptable? Do you think petitions for him to loose his job are acceptable? Do you think verbal abuse is acceptable?

Just because you mentioned the one tiny bit, doesn't make the rest go away.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 9, 2014 13:55 UTC (Thu) by timtas (guest, #2815) [Link] (9 responses)

No, I was referring to that by stating

DEATH-THREATS AND _SUCH_

Any forms of threateanig physical violence are totally unacceptable because Lennart is only a major, insulting arsehole, but never threatened physical violence on anyone, as far as I know. So I agree with you, totally unacceptable.

Petitions for him to lose his job are also stupid, I'd never sign anything like that. Let him keep his job.

Regarding verbal abuse, that's a difficult subject, it depends how far these verbal abuses go. In my opinion, a lot of what he writes qualifies as personal, verbal abuse as well, so I think he deserves some of that. Just because he packs his insults in decent language doesn't mean it's not deeply insulting.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 9, 2014 14:02 UTC (Thu) by niner (guest, #26151) [Link] (8 responses)

You added the "and such" only in your third try.

Am I reading you correctly? Threats of violence against Lennart are unacceptable _because_ he did not threaten anyone himself? But verbal abuse may be ok, because of insults?

So what if Lennart did threaten someone? Would it then be ok to threaten him? Eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth? Is this the kind of community you are propagating?

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 9, 2014 14:07 UTC (Thu) by timtas (guest, #2815) [Link] (3 responses)

Some call it "Eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth", others call it "what goes around, comes around" or "the grapes of wrath". Let's leave it that. Back to work!

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 10, 2014 2:13 UTC (Fri) by misc (subscriber, #73730) [Link] (2 responses)

I do not see why it matter, since so far, no one showed where there is repeated abuse from Lennart, just people saying this occured without evidence, repeating it ad nausuem without pointing to anything.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 10, 2014 8:00 UTC (Fri) by edeloget (subscriber, #88392) [Link] (1 responses)

To be fair, it's quite easy to find some Lennart bashing threads on the net. They are literally everywhere. You might even find some on LWN - and if you really want to read stupid user comments, you can give a look to Phoronix (apologies ; I don't mean that Phoronix is bad, just that some users are repeatedly crossing the line ; but hey, any mention of Lennart in a news is generating 100+ stupid comments).

To be even fairer, a large part of Lennart defense - either by him or by some (why do they even exist) fanboy is a simple argument: "you do not criticize <INSERT PRODUCT NAME> because it's technically bad, you criticize it because you dislike Lennart". Which is as abusive as criticizing Lennart in the first place (this is and the too classical "you don't understand <INSERT PRODUCT NAME>, so shut up" or the "You're just a user, you don't have any word to say. Only coders do" which is also kind of wicked (software tend to be used by... well, users I think)).

Some people in the community need to learn how to communicate with other people in a constructive way. Some people need to learn how to listen other people. That's how we're supposed to build both a community and the software this community uses.

Regarding Lennart, and while I don't want to play the victim blaming game, I believe he needs to both learn how to communicate and how to listen others. Part of the bashing he receives (and I agree that it goes far beyond what is acceptable) has roots in his own attitude ; he made himself a very polarizing person - so a good way to help correcting this is also to work on his own behavior if it's not too late.

(I really hope I wrote this correctly ; it's a fine line I'm walking, and I have to say that I don't want to be neither inflamatory nor disrecpectful.)

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 10, 2014 14:42 UTC (Fri) by misc (subscriber, #73730) [Link]

Did he made himself polarizing, or do people made him polarizing ?

Because I see him listen to people as much as he can ( unless we suppose that the TODO list of systemd filled itself ), he went to speak and listen to several free software events, and he say in g+ that he did read lots of thread everywhere.

So the whole idea of "he doesn't listen to people" is more a variation of "he didn't do what I suggested at some random place or he disagreed with my vision".

We have bugs rotting in all bug trackers, and no one get called for that, no one say "I am being ignored" despites the fact this happen to everybody on every projects. Or PR, for that matter. yet, when a bug take 8 months to be fixed, people use it as a evidence to confirm their existing bias, applying double standards.

Anyone who think about free software realize that the ratio of people who code on a project vs people who use the project is most of the time very low. So of course, you cannot answer to everybody in a satisfying way for everybody. Yet, people seems to expect that for some reason for systemd.

Since that cannot happen until we start to recruit lots of people doing bug triaging and "customer" services handling, they then just use this fallacy to justify complains about Lennart as if this was different from any others projects. And people who do not want to take side start to think "yeah, maybe there is a middle ground", and just give more force to accusations.

Maybe that's a more general symptom of users/developers communication deficiency in free software, maybe that's just people jumping on the band wagon and not spending time to think about how free software is produced.

But in all case, just saying "he should listen more to users" while there is evidence he does is just propagating vicious memes leading to victim blaming. Sure, you do not want to do that, but that's the beauty of it, it is not sufficient to say "I do not want to do that" for it to not happen, ideas evolves outside of your control once your propagate it.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 9, 2014 16:59 UTC (Thu) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link] (3 responses)

You're clearly *not* reading him correctly; you're going to great lengths to misread, nitpick and twist someone else's words in order to extract some sort of confession. That's simply another form of abuse.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 10, 2014 9:05 UTC (Fri) by niner (guest, #26151) [Link] (2 responses)

Err...if I'm not reading him correctly, why did he not say so himself? He answered to my comment, so he obviously read it. Instead of contradicting me, he even confirmed what I said by repeating his preference of a revenge based society.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 10, 2014 11:38 UTC (Fri) by timtas (guest, #2815) [Link] (1 responses)

Can we now stop this?
"Revenge-based society", come on.
I just detest people hitting out at other people and when they're hit back, start crying like little babies: he hit me, he hit me!
I know that you're now going to bring back that I'm in favour of death threats and will ask again for a list of references where Lennart has been personally insulting, but it's useless: You Lennart fanboys are like Apple fanboys or fundamentalistic teligious believers: you've found the right way and no mountain of evidence to the contrary will bring you off your path to the golden future. Walk on!

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 10, 2014 12:30 UTC (Fri) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

… and no mountain of evidence to the contrary will bring you off your path to the golden future.

“Mountain of evidence”? Come on. “Mountain of unsubstantiated claims” would be more to the point.

As far as the “golden future” is concerned: Systemd is doing fine so far and very likely to be part of all major Linux distributions in due course. There will probably be some problems (there always are) and they will probably be resolved one way or another. There is no need for insults and threats on either side of the debate. Three years from now nobody will remember what all the flap was about.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 9, 2014 18:18 UTC (Thu) by Funcan (guest, #44209) [Link] (2 responses)

I think verbal abuse of somebody who is verbally abusive is understandable if not a good thing.

Looking at a guy with a broken jaw and saying 'he only got punched because he punched the bouncer' is *not* victim blaming to my mind.

Death threats are rarely acceptable.

Petitions for somebody to loose their job are very context sensitive morally (e.g. I've personally called for and actively campaigned for certain politicians to loose their job, and feel I was absolutely morally right to do so), and I'm not aware enough of the context of the calls for Lennart's sacking, so I'll assume they were probably unreasonable until I learn otherwise.

Calls to hack off somebody's hands? That, depending on context is an obvious joke or entirely unreasonable.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 13, 2014 10:57 UTC (Mon) by OdyX (guest, #58768) [Link] (1 responses)

A politician's mandate is not a job. The electing body should be allowed to ask for withdrawal from the elected mandate when things go wrong.

Petitioning to a corporation (which most petitioners are not even clients of) to get someone fired is a totally different thing, to which the only answer I'd expect from said corporation is /dev/null.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Nov 1, 2014 18:32 UTC (Sat) by blujay (guest, #39961) [Link]

> Petitioning to a corporation (which most petitioners are not even clients of) to get someone fired is a totally different thing, to which the only answer I'd expect from said corporation is /dev/null.

$ find . -mtime -365 -iname "*eich*"
./Brendan Eich "steps down" from Mozilla.html

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 9, 2014 13:55 UTC (Thu) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link]

Sigh.