muckrights-sans-merde
bonum fabula frat
### dismantling-a-network-of-literally-thousands-of-lies
other articles:
=> the-delusion-of-a-gnu-linux-community.html the-delusion-of-a-gnu-linux-community
*originally posted:* jun 2021
the gnu/linux of today is constructed of (literally) hundreds of thousands of lies. from 2018 to late 2020 i helped muckrights address those lies, while muckrights told lies of its own.
in august i had reached a point where things i wrote in one article were being misrepresented in another article. so i said i would leave, i was told it was a misunderstanding (one more lie) and i stayed and continued writing (maybe another 10, 15 articles) until december.
during that time, someone (i cannot really guess who, and id like to) told the fsf a bunch of lies. how many (if any) of them were about me, i dont know-- it might help answer a few questions, other than that it isnt the most important thing.
the person id spent years helping (he should have just let me leave when i wanted to, but on both occasions he tried to keep me on, where he could exploit and misrepresent my efforts even further) threw me under the bus, acting like it was me that the fsf should take issue with, not muckrights. the timeline will shed at least some light on that. but getting paid for two years of work with lies and backstabbing was not great. ron does not deserve help from anybody, but more than that-- nobody deserves to have their efforts exploited like mine were.
ron is a pathological liar, a manipulator, and he exploits those who help him.
not everybody is bothered by this. until 8 or 10 months ago, i probably would have defended him against anybody who tried to say he was exploiting my work. other people who work with him are probably getting whatever they want. there are people who take pleasure in manipulating manipulators, and (i have no intention of naming names here-- this is someone who has done nothing to me personally and im not trying to interfere with their activities, which doesnt mean i endorse this) at least one person i can think of may get everything they want out of this.
what i wanted to do is fight for free software. and of course, ron did everything to assure me that helping him would serve that very purpose. i think that was a stretch (really, another lie). some might argue i wasted my own time, though i dont entirely agree it was wasted-- i am in the process of salvaging it right now. rather some of it was wasted by rons lying. but that alone is what it is, and it is not what drives me to work on unravelling his sprawling network of bullshit upon bullshit.
rather, when i left muckrights to get away from this bullshit, ron pursued. he continued to be manipulative and exploitative, petty and vengeful, dishonest and dirty. i spent week after week cataloguing his lies and retribution-- for what? all i did was leave. and i told him to knock off the lying a couple times. all by email-- it was his choice to make it public. and ron may tell you he had to because its his policy, but thats bullshit. hes obviously selective in what emails he makes public, as this year is as busy as ever but apart from exchanges about patents, we are privy to none of what we used to be in the logs.
no, ron went to extra, unnecessary trouble (even by his own policy) to try to drag me through the mud for tiring of him and his bullshit.
and he didnt stop there. he attacks other things i care about, because he is petty. but that will be harder to prove than the mountain of lies, so i wont start there.
i enjoy taking things that most people find complicated (either too complicated to believe they will understand it, or too complicated to care about personally-- but not too complicated to understand per se) and simplifying them. i try to start with literally everything and work my way down to simplicity from there.
there are, as with any person, plenty of things i dont understand. i suck at math altogether, which limits the degree to which i understand physics. i cant prove things the same way a mathematician or physicist can-- and i only have so much patience for things that are arbitrarily complex. but complex by their true nature? when theyre relevant to something i care about enough? sometimes i am happy to wade far out into such topics, to explore them in great detail.
for muckrights, i did this with free software, with various subjects connected to free software. now, i do this to unravel muckrights itself.
it will take some doing. the reason i am posting this now, is i have spent over a month doing research-- starting with literally everything, as i said-- and working my way down to simplicity.
its not entirely different from what i did while i was there, the difference is that i treated (at the time, it was a reasonable assumption) that muckrights was on our side. i had no reason to think otherwise. i had plenty of reason to believe it. within a couple of years, the narrative wore thin. the lies stopped holding up. i became sceptical. i questioned more and more.
you might think i simply reacted, and swore off any notion that muckrights was not bullshit. that is not what i experienced however. i experienced all sorts of doubts, i second, third and fourth-guessed everything over and over again. i do not merely do a 180 from spending years trying to support something to spending months working against it. it is a long, tedious and difficult process of reassessing everything. compare it to a cross-country road trip, followed by a wrong turn. instead of just getting off at the next exit, we drive all the way back to the start and comb the path a second time, looking for how that turn even happened.
why do this? is it simply for revenge? no-- though im sure many will assume so. thats what drives people to do this sort of thing, right? i mean, its one possible reason.
i do this because until it is done, this bullshit will continue. it may continue anyway. but right now, the largest thing in my way of fighting for freedom is ron using his network of bullshit against truth itself.
and you may even think: oh, i get it, you think if he attacks you hes attacking truth itself. no, i was quite intent on LEAVING. not continuing. NOT staying involved. ron stayed involved in MY affairs, he may as well have said "i wont let you leave unless you fight me".
as i was saying, ron didnt only set out to smear me personally. he did that, its true, but all i had to do to slow that down was catalogue each instance. it slowed down-- i cant prove (im not trying to) that it would have stopped there but its certainly possible.
the reason i created ewwfs was to have a place to write again. OF COURSE one of the subjects was the ongoing smear campaign to punish me for leaving (and rewriting history to make it look like ron had part in everything i did-- he had part in SOME of it for sure, but the exploitation and lies did not stop when i left).
he decided to attack more things so i would have to defend them. given my experience with such people, i doubt he had conscious, willful plans to do even half of this. i mean, it probably does occur to him that he can "get" me by misquoting me and telling people things that are actually bullshit (based loosely on things i said) about things like openbsd.
its a tactic narcissists use to try to get people to come back to their domain, their control. ron enjoys manipulating people into doing things for him. he tells them to boycott things (such as bt) which he has no intention of boycotting himself. he lets people write things for him, then arbitrarily contradicts things they did or did not say. he says he cares about issues that he spends years ignoring, even when people are pleading with him to talk about them. then he congratulates you on how many pageviews you got.
but if you leave, maybe he attacks things you love-- things he hardly attacked before, but youll come back to defend them. youll stay within his domain of influence.
unfortunately, this domain of influence is widespread enough that enough people (like myself once) actually believe that muckrights is one of the best sources for REAL news in the tech world. because its anti-microsoft (it laughably nitpicks that it isnt, the timeline will point you to it) and because its pro-stallman. and i am also both of those things. but activists are not monopolists, and monopolists are not activists. and ron is-- in fact, a monopolist. he will work to "own" anything you do-- to make it his, to control it with revisionism, fabrications, special pleading and bullshit. and i can demonstrate that.
ultimately ron will begin to speak for you, while no longer allowing you to speak for yourself. and he will do this once he has what he wants, and you have to weigh freedom from manipulative, constant bullshit against years of sunk cost fallacy. muckrights is an activist trap-- you go there to help free software, but you stay to serve ron in whatever he wants, on a whim. if he wants to attack something unfairly, you can help him or stfu or get poked at for being honest. if he wants unity with some backstabber, you can help him or stfu again. you can say whatever you want, as long as youre cool with him telling people lies and bullshit about you, too.
in fact, one of the biggest changes that happened is someone else-- who took interest in what i was doing anyway-- interest in MY work, also began to see ron for what he REALLY is.
and the time i become most aggressive against muckrights was after MONTHS of abuse and smears and not only that-- but after he started pulling similar shit with someone else who helped him.
i am no longer the only person i know, who knows ron better now. so i fought ron even harder after that. i even wrote a parody of a charles dickens novel (thankfully, novels were a lot shorter back then) just to throw in as many jokes and illustrations of real behaviour we experienced as possible.
and that was just the beginning. there are literally tens, of thousands of articles hes written. i wrote more than 100 of them (thats less than 1/3 of a percent of the articles, and that percentage gets smaller as the rons total continues to increase). muckrights has been around since 2006-- though i was quoted in it as early as 2010. i didnt really contribute articles until 8 years later. at the time, i had no plans to contribute regularly-- but thats what happened.
muckrights is an incredible bullshit machine, operated by an incredible bullshit artist. but as surely as marcel duchamp painted the mona lisa with facial hair, i am going to dismantle thousands and thousands of posts to make rons lying accessible-- and plain as day.
but the point of THIS article is-- that is not simply a task that requires patience and research. i mean, i suppose thats one way of putting it, "patience and research" but it makes me think of those silly movies where the hero has to clip the right wires (in sequence) to keep something from blowing up in his face. yesterday, while fact-checking ron, my favourite source in the world got curious about my questions. i knew he would eventually, and now i wont be able to ask the same person those sorts of questions, because he will surely feel he is in the middle of something he doesnt want to be in the middle of.
nonetheless, the first time i did that, i exposed a complete lie and absolute fabrication. those other two were intended (on rons part) to hide the first lie. the part about systemd is a complete fabrication, but the part about rust was a half-truth and all that will matter to ron is not that he made up something about systemd, only that later stallman understood something about irc and YOU SEE, RON WAS BEING HONEST AND ACCURATE ALL ALONG!
thats how it will go. so i clipped the wrong wire, and i should have just left it alone.
but, to stick with the movie metaphor, the only one i clipped was the one that makes the timer go faster. it is still possible to dismantle this thing. and ive spent literally a month (more really) working on a SCHEMATIC of 15, 16 years of posts. a schematic of rons bullshit-- and also the truths.
you need the truths, so the bullshit has something to stick to. people who have caught on to rons bs tell me (as i certainly know, but they notice it too) "theres a lot of good stuff in here!"
of course there is. bullshit doesnt stick to nothing. if you want to tell a lie, you need a kernel of truth to make it work. if you want a mountain of bullshit, you need an entire framework of truth.
exposing the framework of truth will take a while, but that much of it is nothing i havent worked on before-- its just MORE of it. and once the framework is exposed, then the bullshit is OBVIOUS.
so thats whats going on here, and ron doesnt have to hate me for it-- he already hates me for leaving. he wants to treat me like a troll, like the person who turned on him, and im sure he will try to do that.
its true, that i want to save a few more people from what hes doing-- but ive already guessed that maybe the people still there are there because they still prefer to be. even if ron is bullshitting them, they either sort of know it and dont care-- or they are still getting something they want (or believe they are getting something they want).
i was lucky to have a chance to help anybody (on the inside) see what was going on. my main priority is helping people on the outside. after all, there are for more people who are not helping muckrights, than people who are.
id like to keep it that way.
but also-- and this is what i was getting at before, the biggest annoyance in trying to do what i do, is having ron try to twist it around and have people ON OUR OWN SIDE believe his bullshit.
he keeps giving me a reason to fight back. well, heres how i do it. keep exposing enough truth, even a little at a time, and the bullshit will eventually fall off-- as the truth becomes a non-stick surface.
i am still aware of the fact that each lie has several more lies used to hold it together. and while you might think that makes it easier, in reality, its there to make this too complicated for anybody to bother refuting. its the same deal as telling the same lie over, and over, and over again-- except that each lie has "backup" until you give up and just decide "he couldnt lie THAT MANY TIMES, so it must be true!"
that sort of bullshit can hold up for years-- even become part of our history. and yet, there are still people willing to keep questioning things, keep working thorugh the bullshit to get to the truth. open source has rewritten history since 1998, and ive fought THAT since at the latest, 2010.
if i would go to the trouble of making arguments, while up against billionaires propping themselves up with media monopolies to keep the public misinformed and volunteers working to maintain their monopoly for them, why wouldnt i do the same for a two-bit hack that wasted 2 years of my time lying to me and everybody else around us? really, some days, its ALMOST as simple as that!
ron thought i was a pushover. and just like microsoft, when he finds a formidable opponent, he tries to make friends with them-- so he can try to beat them in a rematch.
we arent friends, though. but he sure tried to make it seem like the band was getting back together in late march. after months of telling people bullshit about me, he started telling his closest associates that i was coming back to muckrights-- and then even pretended i was back!
http://techrights.org/irc-archives/irc-log-260321.html
```
fig is sort of back, albeit too shy to admit that he wants to be
back after insulting a whole bunch of us (RMS and Oliva too) in a totally
unwarranted fashion Mar 26 10:17
Techrights-sec well I'm glad he's back Mar 26 10:37
too proud though to apologise to us Mar 26 10:37
```
at least it made for a great april 1 post. but most of this is no joke. ron is having a laugh, and i will try to enjoy myself too when i get the opportunity, but most of this is about ron lying to people to get free labour, which props up his little shrine to himself and his fake journalism. he plays both sides of the fence to maximise the number of people interested-- then when they are just about to realise theyve both been duped, he says "stop fighting guys! this wont solve anything!" so hes a peacemaker now.
then when everything is cool, he goes and writes that story about what an arsehole the other side is. and just like that-- theyre duped again!
marvelous-- then again, thats what pathological bullshit looks like. but taking it apart and showing how it works; try it with someone who lied to and about you sometime. its a challenge. im not doing it for the challenge, id prefer it was less work, really. the bigger picture is the corporate takeover of free software, and ron is a thorn in my foot while i try to move forward fighting that. but hes a well-intentioned thorn, and lying his arse off for all the best reasons, dont you know...
=> https://muckrights-sans-merde.neocities.org