Posted on 05/24/2004 3:40:20 AM PDT by thedugal
For those who don't know of it, slashdot.org is a "news for nerds" discussion site geared towards the Linux/open source community. The articles posted are mainly technically oriented although some regular news items get posted. The general tone is anti-capitalist, anti-Microsoft and anti-Bush, but there are a few posters who balance it out a bit. Most posters are left leaning, but the latest article shocked me with hundreds of extreme leftist comments. The topic, Michael Moore at Cannes.
Cannes' Palme d'Or goes to Michael Moore
As an example, one poster wrote: Even though I feel CNN is slanted to the left...
To which he was berated with the following:
You feel what?Jesus H. Christ! How far to the extreme deep right are you exactly?
Example: When the U.S. troops invaded Bagdad, a CNN reporter stood outside a palace and commented that the soldiers were taking "souvenirs" from the palace. He even mentioned that most of those were solid gold.
Souvenirs? They were looting the palaces of the conquered! But since CNN is the Pentagon News Network, they spewed that outrageous piece of doubletalk with a straight face. He even seemed proud that these soldiers were looting!
However, even though I am not "far right" I consider the person who made the above comments to be my enemy as much as any Talibani or al-Sadr militia. I don't advocate violence but I become violently angry when I am confronted with American hating Americans.
I simply do not believe we can share a country with people who are diametrically opposed to everything we believe. I don't know if this vanity will get pulled or moved, but please discuss the rift between America and the loony left.
/. got really nasty during the last election... It is a lot more conservative than it used to be... I think it had to do with everyone losing their jobs.
Slashdot? Conservative?
I'll admit we've gotten a little bolder in posting there, but 90% of the time you have to do it as anonymous coward because the liberals outnumber 5:1 and you end up getting moderated down to -1, troll/flamebait or the "overrated" which can't be M2'ed.
As much as I hate to think this and it does sound rather looney, I am afraid it IS becoming more of a case of good vs. evil. Many people are working hard to blur that distinction (boiling frog thing) and thus that is the only conclusion one can come to.
I think that there are a handful of active posters who use several usernames. They try to dominate the discussion because they have an agenda. I wouldn't let it bother you.
I wish /. would stick to tech stuff: the Michael Moore thread has nothing to do with anything of interest to "nerds." In a way, it demonstrates the leftist bias of the mainstream media perfectly: it is considered newsworthy by the left and therefore gets coverage that it honestly does not deserve.
That being said: being anti-MS does not make you anti-capitalist. There are plenty of tech threads to hash this one out, but I just wanted to point out that many of us die-hard, right-wing gun nuts have no love of MS and its bully-tactics or MS's support of the far left-wing agenda.
Which is why I placed a comma between the entries.
I worked with a charter member of the looney left yesterday, and we had a rather "spirited" discussion of various issues. I swear, every topic we discussed ended up being Bush's fault. Michael Moore not being able to find a distributor for his fictional documentary? Bush's fault, because "he's the most powerful man in the world, and he is suppressing distribution in the US". How can you debate someone like this who is so narrow minded and has such twisted logic?
Which is why I placed a comma between the entries.
Glad to see I'm not the only one becoming aware that radical liberals are congregateing under the growing "open source software" movement at Slashdot.
Their leader is Richard Stallman, the inventor of the "general public license" or GPL, a controversial and as of yet legally unproven software license whereby software is developed that mimics products from normal software vendors and distributed around the world for free, the most commonly known being the "Linux" software. You can read about Mr. Stallman on his own personal website, be sure and check out the "political notes" section which is updated daily.
http://www.stallman.org
One of Stallman's main organizations is the "free software foundation" or FSF, who push their belief that ALL software should be free, and no proprietary code should be allowed to exist. They are now even trying to get laws passed that government organizations worldwide would have to choose open source software over existing proprietary solutions, helping fulfill their "ultimate goal of making proprietary software obsolete".
http://www.fsf.org/gnu/gnu-history.html
Many of these radicals dedicate their life to this cause, and often "hang out" at slashdot, having a very large international readership. There are very often incredible anti-American statements posted, somewhere on FR is a link I showed someone a posting I had seen that day from a "slashdotter" who said he wished he could "nuke the entire United States". Of course, a couple of open sourcers right here on FR defended the post, claiming "it was just a joke".
What you'll notice is, in typical democratic lockstep the open sources will accept no criticism of their cause, despite the fact that "open sourcing" of any code under the GPL makes that code freely available to anyone in the world including our advesaries, as at this time there are no export resrtrictions on it. However, whenever I try to have serious discussions on the issue I am personally attacked as some sort of paid shill for the Microsoft corporation, their defacto smear of anyone who opposes them. Take a look at some of the ridiculous comments on this thread from yesterday, devolving into jokes about US National Security:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1140064/posts
There are serious questions not only about open source software, but more importantly is the growing mob of supporters who will distort the facts to push their agenda, an agenda supported by the United Nations, the democratic and labor parties of America England and Australia, socialists in the EU, and communists in China. If anyone has any questions and would like a well reasoned and respectful post, feel free to ask. However if you want to use this as just another pathetic attempt to smear me or spread your disinformation, prepare to get both barrels.
There may be some of that. However, your post raises the point of political segregation. There are people on the left who talk about politics with everyone they know and never hear a conservative commentary. And there are those on the right, particularly those who spend a lot of time on conservative sites who simply don't meet many leftists. It becomes natural to think the other side is an extreme minority when you never meet them. Which also helps explain why both sides are convinced the other side is cheating the elections. Of course, the dems do have a history of voter fraud.. so.. ;p
They're easy to meet. Tune to the alphabet networks.
Yeah, you have a good point there.
As we geeks age, we tend to get far more conservative. (I'm an exception -- I've always been conservative.) Most of the far-left rhetoric on Slashdot comes from those outside the U.S. and from college students.
I've never been modded down for an on-topic (conservative) political comment. As an occasional moderator, I have modded down other people for gratuitous, off-topic political comments. (E.g., some people will take any article and make an anti-Bush, anti-US comment not even tangentially related -- these get a "flamebait" or "off-topic" from me in a heartbeat.)
You left out blaming them for the end of the world and for cause proton decay to increase.
THere is a fairly good chance the writer was french or german. /. has a fairly international audience. There are also a lot of screaming leftists there.
That's life, though. Someday everyone will be clear-eyed and rational enough to rank posts on their own merits, and simply ignore the politics altogether in favor of reasoned discourse. And later that day, we'll all have snow-cones in Hell ;)
Thanks for your message. The primary concern I have is this software and it's controversial license are attempting to undermine the for-profit US software industry, to replace that $150 billion portion of our tech economy with $0. And they do this in a variety of ways, including some that I already mentioned such as attempting to have laws changed so that governments must use open source software if it is available. The license also allows for complete distribution to anywhere in the world, downloaded from countless servers across the globe. International Business Machines, who is currently under lawsuit for transferring advanced technology from US proprietary Unix into the foreign freeware Linux, seems to favor this sort of thinking in the hope they can finally sell hardware without having being obligated to anyone else for software costs. That may help IBM's bottom line, but ultimately destroying all the software companies in the US is not good for the rest of us.
Why does it matter that our adversaries don't get any software? Is the horse not out of the barn? Is there anything that we could deny them that would actually make a difference?
China and North Korea are perfect examples of potential US adversaries that should be required to adhere to the trade and license laws of this country before this country, should trade be allowed with them, at all. If they want to continue to pirate US intellectual property, instead, then an international complaint should be filed with the World Trade Organization, if not other groups to force them to join the 21st century or expose them as the barbarians they likely are. But open source software removes any requirement for them to register or pay for any of this software. In fact, the official operating system of the PRC is "Red Flag Linux", a currently legal copy of the US operating system "Red Hat". That's right, the Chinese can under these current laws take our "Red Hat Linux" product, rename it "Red Hat", then load use and even resell the product for their benefit, all with zero return dollars to the US.
Just so you know where I'm coming from, I've been attacked over there too. I don't begrudge a man making a buck, like Gates, but I also think that if I want to publish stuff and make it freely available then there should be no legal impediments. Furthermore, I think you're painting that crowd with a pretty broad brush, especially with phrases like "democratic lockstep".
If you want to release your work into "public domain" or other non-GPL license I really don't have a problem with it, because those are not anti-capitalistic licenses as corporations can then take that code and use it without having to pay the FSF 'boogeyman'. Yes I agree that not all open sourcers are in democratic lockstep, but the significant majority of those who think open source is the end all be all are.
What is there to seriously discuss with any advocate of anything that is not willing to change their mind unless you're willing to change your mind? For me, that would involve compromising my principles.
I could possibly be convinced that GPL software is good for the US tech economy and US national security, I just haven't seen any real evidence of it. The main argument seems to be "we can give our tech away because we are receiving contributions from them". Which doesn't make much sense when you realize all that is being contributed back to us is cloneware of our already existing and superior products.
I don't try anymore to convince them that M$ isn't evil. It's like each of us trying to convince the other that red is blue and blue is red.
Probably a smart move on your part, I have better things to do with my time than defend Microsoft as well, they are the dominant software company and will be for some time for a variety of reasons. However, I will defend them whenever I see the blatant lies claimed against them, such as "they stole millions of lines of Multics" over and over by one poster here on FR. Has he ever backed any of this claim up? No, nor we he probably ever be able to. Which makes the rest of his comments worthless, yet these people continually try to tell us something is inherrently evil, then they go on these rants full of lies. It gets quite old, quickly.
Thanks again for your message, hope to hear from you again.
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