muckrights-sans-merde
bonum fabula frat
### bullshit-of-the-week
other pages:
=> how-to-deal-with-your-raspberry-spy.html how-to-deal-with-your-raspberry-spy
*originally posted:* apr 2021
*updated:* aug 2021
### * 2021-08-29
the bullshit of the week is that there was no bullshit of the week a week ago. actually, there was enough bullshit last week, but there was also bullshit that took precedence over the bullshit of the week, so the bullshit wasnt even posted.
but the bigger bullshit of the week is that although there is still plenty of bullshit to cover, this format isnt really working out now. oh its doable, it just isnt ideal or convenient at this point. so this page is retired for now, and if you want to find out more about the bullshit with free software and muckrights, the first place i would recommend is this page:
=> https://muckrights-sans-merde.neocities.org/
and possibly even this page:
=> https://wrongwithfreesw.neocities.org/
### * 2021-08-15
after last weeks triple, im not surprised it was a slow week for bullshit. well, it was and it wasnt. muckrights focused on epo stuff mostly, took some personal potshots at me (those are to be expected at this point) and those are documented. maybe this week muckrights will be more full of shit.
there was some mediocre bullshit as always, and the bullshit about me was irritating at first (because it is really irritating at to have someone spend months trying to mislead other people about you) but after a while, at least for a while, you get blase about it sometimes. roy is going to have to step up his bullshit if he wants it to do much, and when he does it just leads to more documentation and synthesis, summary and overview. though perhaps "summary" isnt the best word.
if roys potshots are going to be the bullshit of the week, they have to be significant enough for me to feel its worthwhile to call it that. otherwise, i prefer to address things that are more general. and if theres nothing much of note in that regard, then it had to be a slow week for bullshit. or slow enough. its not that i didnt take the time-- i looked at the past weeks articles, i read the logs. its never bullshit free, but lets at least pretend there are some standards here. until this has to be done two weeks in a row, and at that point i guess any old bullshit will do.
### * 2021-08-08
the bsotw is a triple from roy, which has resulted in some changes with regards to ewwfs and muckrights-sans-merde:
1. the first is roys claim that muckrights is "systemd sceptics", which requires ignoring so many outragous things to be true that even a politician would say "FUCK, you can DO that?" im so tired of this lie, ive even dropped one of the (subtle and yet conspicuous) pretenses of these two websites.
2. the second is roy doubling down on the ridiculous notion that a. musescore is worth nudging into removing telemetry when a viable fork exists, and b. that the fork doesnt have enough reason to exist. for some reason, audacity gets a pass on betraying users (and developers) while mozilla gets held accountable. theres a difference in timeframe, but i think "the people" have spoken and roy just doesnt give a shit. he has yet to successfully mediate any betrayal of the public by developers, but he has run interference many times between people trying to fork a newly-bad thing into a once-again-good thing, using bullshit and outright lies to do so.
3. the third is roy continuing his months-long trolling of openbsd-- the part about the funding ought to count, but its not actually the rationale here. rather the quip that he thinks openbsd "doesnt even come with x or anything" finally resulted in merging ewwfs with muckrights-sans-merde (as ewwfs has been around longer and while i consider muckrights-sans-merde successful by my very modest standards, ewwfs can lend it something extra) and getting around to compiling a timeline of roys anti-bsd bias.
honest opinions are one thing. i go into detail on just why roy is trolling (and lying). i dont dispute that roy has a problem with bsd-- i dispute only that he has a good reason, as well as the idea that the reasons he states are even honest.
roy gets a perverse thrill from telling big lies, so this triple ought to make his day. congratulations, roy! youre REALLY, incredibly bullshit this week. this might even top your score, go buy a fucking cake (and shove it up your arse).
julia reda and zdnet have both managed to best roy at one point or another. dont let roys olympic-level lying intimidate you, theres nothing completely brilliant about it-- he just makes up shit to be obnoxious, and then doesnt back down. if a spoiled politician can do it, roy can outdo everybody else now and then but even he cant corner the market on bullshit or be at the top of his game every single week. other people can still "win" this, keep on insulting and underestimating your readers-- josh couldve been a contender!
### * 2021-08-01
the bullshit of the week is muckrights itself-- but not just muckrights, particularly the latest "trend" of muckrights, which roy has fuck-all to do with:
> But our plan is to add more focus to simplicity and UNIX philosophy (the roots of GNU). Something ought to be done about complicated, monopolised, privatised, and centralised so-called ‘tech’. We need to change that current trajectory because people are being farmed, not served.
lets translate this into honesty-- roy used to ask me for stuff to publish during slow "news" cycles. now that ive left, during slow news cycles he outright plagiarises my articles:
(feb 2021)
=> https://wrongwithfreesw.neocities.org/nonfree-software-is-a-lot-like-malware.html
> the default state of a computer operator isnt "user"-- the concept of "user" is similar to the concept of "subject", as in someone who is subjected to rule. at least thats what the concept of user has turned into.
> a liberated user would be better known as an "operator", a person who operates a computer.
> if we fast forward to the 70s and 80s and the *personal* computer revolution, it becomes even clearer that computers were designed for operators. this was quickly transformed by industry to create the relatively helpless "user" of today, throughout the 80s and 90s you can find articles and advertising that brags you can use the computer without understanding a computer. the notion of a "computer person" vs. a "non-computer person"...
a month later, roy takes it and runs with it: http://techrights.org/2021/03/14/free-software-operations/
> What It Means to be a Free Software Operator, Not a User or Consumer
> A lot of what was written back in the 1980s is still highly relevant today.
when we used to collaborate, we played fast and loose with ideas-- and everything got published on muckrights anyway. we would cover each others ideas and there was an understanding about it (which down the line was more than implied, we talked about this explicitly).
the thing is, i dont write there anymore. i left muckrights because roy was taking things i said (in articles) and twisting them around (in articles) in a condescending way, and when i called him out on it, he told me it was a "misunderstanding" and he told people in his irc channel i was being "flippant".
months later he started using things i wrote without attribution, and telling people i had come back:
> fig is sort of back, albeit too shy to admit that he wants to beback after insulting a whole bunch of us (RMS and Oliva too) in a totally unwarranted fashion
yeah, im pretty sure twisting around things your contributors said and then throwing them under the bus calls for YOU to get an apology, you compulsive lying narcissistic twat. apparently i was "back" in the sense that my writing was there again, albeit without attribution.
theres some context here-- i am generally extremely flexible about these things and very free culturey. theres almost no use of anything ive written that i wouldnt call "fair use", because i write primarily to spread ideas. most of the stuff i wrote for muckrights was cc0 licensed, so ive waived a legal right to attribution insomuch as its tied to a copyright license. and im ok with that. but it doesnt change any rules regarding plagiarism (in other contexts, whether its about honour or honesty or where applicable-- academic rigour) or outright misrepresentation. as i have pointed out in the past, stallman uses "no-derivs" and it didnt prevent anybody from smearing and misquoting him.
as you can see, using cc-by-sa doesnt stop roy from biting off my work either. even when i use by-sa, there are certain situations where ive waived any need for attribution (ive done this for tom, so he can use certain work freely and choose when and when not to link back to the original) for reasons that are mostly my own.
but its not really the lack of attribution that pisses me off. roy has an integrity problem and he deliberately twists things that people say (as well as puts words in their mouths-- including stallmans).
roy specifically needs to refer to the original when he "steals" my work. for most people (this is not a blanket permission, if youre considering interpretating it that way) im not too worried about it-- its mostly a courtesy and i only insist under certain circumstances. but thats why i use by-sa for most of the articles here-- so i can mock roy when he steals.
generally i want my ideas to be shared. its the way that roy waters down and twists around everything i say that makes me want to force him to link back-- so that people can compare his bullshit to what was ACTUALLY said. roy abuses his readership and has lied to them over and over and over again. he does the same to his contributors, he is a condescending, dishonest prick.
but all of that is said in preface. this is the context that makes it so egregious when he says:
> But our plan is to add more focus to simplicity and UNIX philosophy (the roots of GNU). Something ought to be done about complicated, monopolised, privatised, and centralised so-called ‘tech’. We need to change that current trajectory because people are being farmed, not served.
NO, DOUCHEBAG. that is not "OUR" plan. YOU have no such plan.
that plan is something youre going to plagiarise and exploit, water down and misrepresent until your usual sources pick back up again. you treat my work exactly like you did when i wrote for you, and someone really ought to contact toastmasters because roy claims to be a member, and they have a code of ETHICS, not a code of "conduct", which he is surely violating.
unlike the code of conduct, the toastmasters code of ethics isnt some corporate scheme to put a yoke on free software projects. im sure that toastmasters wouldnt love to find out one of their members is deliberately misquoting and plagiarising other peoples writing, and then smearing the very people hes misattributing the ideas, writing and research of.
unlike toastmasters, roy has no ethics to speak of. and i wouldnt care that he was going to turn good ideas into watered down BULLSHIT for filler blog posts, except that it was his entire m.o. the whole time i wrote for that arsehole and my leaving didnt even stop his shameless exploitation of the people who try to contribute to "his" efforts and help the ungrateful fuck out. not unlike microsoft, he didnt even start his fucking websites-- neither muckrights nor his other website, he simply took over for the people who did start them. he does have a personal website, which barely gets any attention from him. as for toastmasters, hes simply borrowing their image and using his membership as something to brag about. i dont know if hes even a real member, or if he lied about that as well. but hes doing them no favours.
i already caught him lying about stallman (making up things stallman never said-- which i verified personally) and ive noted countless instances of him doing the same to me, and hes doing it again when he says "simplicity and UNIX philosophy (the roots of GNU)".
if he bothered to research stallmans own positions, he would know that stallman doesnt give a shit about unix philosophy: http://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html
> I never used Unix (not even for a minute) until after I decided to develop a free replacement for it ( the GNU system ). I chose that design to follow because it was portable and seemed fairly clean.
none of this would be a problem if it were possible to get roy to stop using people to back up the claims he pulls out of his arse. he is unrepentant, dishonest and seems to feel entitled to use and say whatever he wants, even pretending that people agree with him when they dont or that he disagrees with them on something (when in fact he said the opposite just days prior).
roy is a co-opter, not an activist. he is a self-worshipping egotist that conflates bullshitting people and lying with activism. he is as much an activist as gilderoy lockhart is a wizard, and he operates in the same fashion-- hijacking everything in his purview that tickles his fancy, and then watering it down because if he didnt, it would get away from him again and actually go DO something instead of just talking a lot of shit.
> our plan is to add more focus to simplicity and UNIX philosophy
no it fucking isnt. your plan is to read a bunch of shit people say, and then bullshit your readers, as usual. fuck you roy, you fake fucking shit.
just to back up what im saying a bit further though, wait and see if leah ever gets her savegnu page up and running (i hope she will, i like some of the ideas even if im very critical so far and id like to see her actually try to make her plan work, despite the parts i disagree with) and roy will switch right from whatever hes reading here to whatever hes reading there, even if theyre polar opposites. roy doesnt actually STAND for ANYTHING. hes made no effort in half a decade to rid himself of systemd (no, getting your "self-host" to move from centos for you doesnt count) and he tries to say he supports that issue as well, when he sat on it year after year while his own associates warned him (since before even 2014).
its a fucking joke.
### * 2021-07-25
last weeks bsotw was actually slated for inclusion weeks earlier, but zdnet didnt let us down-- they always at least try to do something riduculous, stupid and arrogant. this week was a (relatively) quiet one on the bullshit front-- not to say that it was bullshit-free, but nothing really stood out. osi at least, tried to bullshit with a blurb about copilot. theyre never not bullshit, but its all relative and they seemed a bit tame (almost reasonable!) compared to their usual bullshit selves. this is no endorsement, open source is still (and always) a scam. this weeks bullshit: possibly just more of the same old shit.
### * 2021-07-18
this weeks bullshit of the week is: zdnet. because zdnet is bullshit this week, and every week.
### * 2021-07-11
there were so many candidates this week, but the hands-down winner is traitor julia redas idiotic diatribe against people who understand the implications of github copilot, while she defends her own imaginary version of what it does. theres no "straw man of the week" award, but if there was she would get that too.
### * 2021-07-04
this weeks bsotw is soon, github will have a monopoly on html rendering development, at least in terms of free software. (it may already have one in terms of free software spell checking-- even gnu aspell is on github). mozilla is already controlled by github, webkit now plans to migrate as well.
not bs in terms of being non-factual (it is at least, official) but certainly in terms of webkit doing this is a bullshit move.
the fsf is doing a GREAT job telling people not to use github! what? its doing FUCK-ALL? oh, right!
=> https://wrongwithfreesw.neocities.org/github-timeline.html
### * 2021-06-27
this weeks bullshit of the week is the idea that alpine is less corporate than gnu:
> Sun 16:19:04 │ tbh i see alpine as the future of free software, GNU is compromised extensively by corporate interests
while i agree with the assessment of gnu, the comparison is silly. just go to to the linux foundation blog to see how silly... (this is from a search engine result for: alpine linux foundation)
> Linux Foundation Archives - Linux Foundation [...] https://www.linuxfoundation.org/category/blog/lf/ The Linux Foundation and Google funded various improvements to Alpine Linux, including a security response team.
who is on the security response team? the same person saying gnu is more compromised than alpine! she says:
> My activities relating to Alpine security work are presently sponsored by Google and the Linux Foundation.
if anybody actually cares about this ridiculous double standard, i know shes more likely to write a refutation of this on her blog than most people. unlike roy, i expect her bullshit to be more consistent and more difficult to debunk (although she is known to waffle too). facts are wonderful, so im expecting undeniable facts-- albeit out of context, which is what i think enables her to make such a ridiculous claim in the first place. is it actually "compromise" if you really believe in the fake monopolistic corporation? probably! who knows?
### * 2021-06-20
the bsotw is "the self-hosting song", because most of the hosting that muckrights relies on is not on a server roy owns or ultimately has control over. even his personal website uses catalyst2, a professional hosting company. its not just the absurdity of the song that makes this the bsotw but the context, because self-hosting is certainly a good idea for the reasons roy says. rather its that he routinely exaggerates the level of autonomy muckrights has with regards to hosting, and the self-hosting song should be labelled a self-parody, to avoid being called "bullshit".
roy also claims muckrights recently moved to "self-hosted" irc. no, not quite. you moved to an irc hosted by someone who threatened to pull the plug on your hosting, based on the lack of control you imposed on an irc channel on a 3rd party server-- whom you then appeased by exerting further control. now THATS some bullshit. none of this should be construed (or twisted into) an endorsement of freenode. self-hosting irc makes a lot of sense, except that muckrights will never do it and they pretend to anyway. here then, is a parody: (original at http://techrights.org/2021/06/18/self-hosting-song/)
WHERE is your server?
Somebody far away
Says you can rely on it
Unless she gets dismayed
The core count is astounding
It mostly can withstand
Your old CentOS bullshit
When things get out of hand
Autonomous you aren't
Self-hosted you are not
You'd best appease the donor
What choices have you got?
Censorship's no problem
When censorship's not seen
But after you've caved to demands
"Oh, that's not what I mean!"
I wouldn't write this poke
But hosting is your yoke
What's in that thing you smoke?
Your poem's such a joke
(august-written bonus chorus a la betty boo because the silly metre in the previous verse matches one of hers)
where is your servah-ah-er?
its not your raspberry spy
oh you deserve-ah-ah-er
but just dont ever ask me why
dont you desert-ah-ah-er
she hosts your bullshit and your lies
cause zemlin pays-ah-ah-er
and you are too much like that guy
### * 2021-06-13
this weeks bsotw is the fsf moving to libela.chat. im not sold on freenode, but nobody on freenode was making it necessary for the fsf to make any immediate change, and libela is run by stallman cancellers who have used the same coc-related arguments to attack stallman and the fsf since late 2018.
then again, this is the same organisation that (for years now) says and does fuck-all when people drag parts of the gnu project off to microsoft headquarters, so what do you expect? if the fsf wanted to stay true to form, all they would have to do is pretend to leave irc for a year and a half, then announce "WE NEVER LEFT" to the coc-thugs at non-freeplanet, which is nothing more than a club to have already-paying members (and whatever other suckers they can find) pay to hear lying corporate shills argue for destroying whatever the fsf spent the past 30-something years building.
maybe i to say that the bsotw is the fsf itself, but the last time i did that nobody got the joke.
### * 2021-06-06 (calling it early)
its probably a bad idea to call the bsotw early, its meant for sundays and its friday now. and too noteworthy not to consider is the gcc move away from copyright assignment to the fsf-- but thats a hard call to make, and the bsotw generally ought to be straightforward enough.
so this weeks bsotw is the ongoing but new "charm offensive" (a popular microsoft tactic) from muckrights regarding irc. its VERY, VERY good. because this is not roys typical level of gaslighting, he is really stepping up his game: "Instead of fighting one another we encourage people to foster a healthier dialogue and, if possible, also take control of their IRC channels (those can in turn be connected to larger networks using bridges)"
its still bullshit-- moreso, if anything. but what makes charm offensives work is they fool people. the reality is that this will increase the trolling, probably increase the number of people being muted-- im not "against" the new federation of irc networks but i know from first-hand experience what happens with federation; and these arent even concerns of mine alone, theyre concerns from the people promoting this stuff-- that people will find the link unreliable but rely on it anyway (thats practically unavoidable with federation, because different sides end up censoring differently) and that MORE trolls will come in.
roy pretends that hes bothered by trolling. if anything, it helps his sense of self-importance. ddos, trolling, criticism-- roy paints it all as "theyre doing it because what we do is so important." for the patent stuff, maybe. though hes ignoring the fact that anybody can be trolled, for any sort of reason. its not like every troll is a paid lackey or giafam fanboy. many trolls troll just for fun. roy does the website for fun, too.
the real bullshit is that he wants to "foster a healthier dialogue". it sounds REALLY GOOD, it even sounds sincere. this is someone who will troll and smear you for ages, just because he feels slighted. its not like roy invented covert narcissism; pretending to care about "healthy" dialogue when really its about serving a particular narrative (not even the one that is being presented openly) is jono bacon territory. bacon was all about "fostering a healthier dialogue" and (as [h]omer from muckrights irc noted more than a decade ago) that was all bullshit, too.
you know whats healthy? being honest with your community. you know whats unhealthy? bullshitting people as a means of control.
what this is REALLY about is that roy doesnt want to lose control and influence. he sees a potential threat that could lead people out of his theatre of influence, and he is working to preserve and expand the footprint of muckrights. his methods are nothing to sneeze at, i suppose-- its the intentions that make it utter and fantastic bullshit-- on a 10,000x scale of this, acta really just wanted to stop counterfeiting. google just wants to stop you being bothered by ads that are irrelevant to you. anybody can do a charm offensive; all you have to do is get better at lying, and be willing to bullshit with a smile.
as roy is fond of quoting microsofts james allchin: "we need to smile at novell while we pull the trigger". http://techrights.org/2021/02/18/new-microsoft-fallacy/ the new muckrights fallacy is the same as the new microsoft fallacy. dont worry about roy nadella, he takes his mask off several times a month on average. muckrights IS his mask, it usually hides a nasty grin. charm offensives (aka "hoovering") have nothing to do with resolution, unity or reconcillation. theyre about repeating the cycle of lies and victimisation-- and nothing more.
### * 2021-05-30
this weeks bsotw is that doing something for someone makes you a nice person-- whether you give money to the fsf when you could be bribing them or acting as a mule for someone who wants to bribe them, or whether you offer free hosting and administration but then use it to control and blackmail and silence people, or whether you share that free hosting with contributors and use it to put words in their mouths, or borrow credit for their work so you can pretend it says the opposite of what it does. dont take candy from strange people in a van. but also, even if its not from strange people, its not always something nice.
nice people do things for people. awful people also do things for people. intentions and context make a world of difference, but simply doing something provides proof of neither.
### * 2021-05-23
the bullshit of the week is: libela.chat
### * 2021-05-16
the bsotw is roy lying and insinuating repeatedly that stallman understands the problem with systemd:
=> https://muckrights-sans-merde.neocities.org/the-second-biggest-lie-at-muckrights.html
its not a new lie, but it is a recent one. now caught, roy is also trying to launch decoy flares to stop people from calling it out, insinuating that anybody who does is just being anti-stallman. i consider that to be roy exploiting stallman as a human shield for his own dishonesty:
=> https://wrongwithfreesw.neocities.org/standing-for-truth-vs-hiding-behind-stallman.html
its unfortunate that stallman is not against systemd. however saying (honestly) that its unfortunate does not make you a bad person. its unfair (and dishonest) to insinuate that people who disagree with stallman over things that are true (such as the stance he has on systemd which is NOT fabricated, NOT misquoted, and NOT misunderstood) are in the same camp as those who have smeared and lied about him. however, it was already the bsotw BEFORE roy started trying to protect himself with such insinuations. lying (implicitly, for now) about the people who caught him in his lie just makes this bsotw a double! bravo, muckrights-- in just one week youve invented a new bullshit sandwich!
=> https://muckrights-sans-merde.neocities.org/wrong-about-detractors-and-wrong-about-vegans.html
### * 2021-05-09
the bullshit of the week is the notion that ibm is losing because they merely control the entire gnu/linux ecosystem, and nobody wants "their" distro. roy conflates ibm killing things it doesnt want with ibms own alleged "instability". that would be lovely, of course-- if it wasnt bullshit. he cant tell the difference between a company doing whatever it pleases with something and a company failing. did microsoft not also purchase many competitors just to chuck them in the bin? who are we kidding? ibm has also done this before-- its hardly "failure" if they wanted to kill it from the beginning.
### * 2021-05-02
a couple of weeks ago, i said:
=> https://muckrights-sans-merde.neocities.org/msm-and-the-website-that-almost-wasnt.html
> hes going to try to get other people not to mention it, hes going to smear them for "propping it up" (some will actually "prop it up", and thats horrible) though hes going to try to conflate actually informing people with "giving publicity"... then when (almost) nobody talks about it, hes going to swoop in and have it to himself.
the bsotw is he did just that, saying "the coup against free software is not over" (of course it isnt, dipshit. but you knew that already).
### * 2021-04-25
maybe this is like arguing with a horoscope, in that the most important comment is vague enough that he can plausibly deny any meaningful interpretation, but here is the bsotw: http://techrights.org/irc-archives/irc-log-techrights-220421.html
```
schestowitz Notice how Andy's Wingo's dumb "gnu is not uniform"
(GNU) BS vanished Apr 22 07:32
schestowitz only LWN and Phoronix mentioned it once and that was it Apr 22 07:32
schestowitz another failed coup effort Apr 22 07:32
schestowitz very much failed Apr 22 07:32
```
who cares if wingos prototype/draft is still online or not? gnu.tools is still up, and wingo is there with it-- you dont even have to scroll down on the "people" page. not to mention that wingo has helped lead this coup (from guix) for more than a year: https://guix.gnu.org/blog/2019/joint-statement-on-the-gnu-project/
by no means do i think that these arseholes are an unstoppable force, but roys routine posturing and chestbeating pretends that nothing is wrong, that the smallest part of a coup is the coup itself. its only a useful technique if you plan to win the war with propaganda, instead of facts and context.
in my opinion, we could have possibly stopped (or heavily defeated) this years ago if we had fought this directly, instead of trying to beat them at their own game of bullshit. the truth is, this is still going-- very possibly because the fsf and muckrights want to hide problems and be heavy on rah rah rah, light on facts.
### * 2021-04-18
if the bsotw wasnt the gnu ass-end-ly itself, then the bsotw NOT being that would be the bsotw.
=> fraud-as-in-fraudulent---the-gnu-ass-end-ly.html fraud-as-in-fraudulent---the-gnu-ass-end-ly.html
### * 2021-04-11
the bsotw is that pocock is still confusing what amounts to legalised swatting with protecting (rather than threatening) "constitutional rights". this isnt new, but hes still recommending it in new posts this week.
a lot of the stuff he has exposed is useful, but this is just pure fucking bullshit.
get a clue, dan. you may think youre being consistent but your position is hypocritical is fuck, and youd have to be delusional to think its (even rhetorically, let alone actually) a good idea. several people who have appreciated and supported your work think this is a fuck-awful idea. i personally know of three, i guarantee there are more.
### * 2021-04-04
todays bsotw (also the first) is the idea that it was only / mainly "the gnome foundation", not "gnome" supporting the next phase of the anti-stallman coup.
people from the gnome foundation created and maintain the petition, but of the 60-something signatories that mention anything "gnome" as an affiliation, only 35% mention the "gnome foundation" while 65% do not.
several of those from the gnome foundation who signed are also associated with a gnome software project.
=> https://muckrights-sans-merde.neocities.org