muckrights-sans-merde
bonum fabula frat
### list-of-muckrights-false-narratives
other pages:
=> why-msm.html why-msm
*originally posted:* may 2021
> "And then there is his other big flaw. He's a schmoozer. And he'll be a dick to other people if it furthers his schmoozing."-- another former muckrights contributor
muckrights reports ACTUAL news. it has to, to get people to read it.
the spin and false narratives (and fabrications) it piles onto news are the problem.
muckrights starts with facts, but does a lot of its dirty work with innuendo and other forms of bullshit. if you ask for facts, muckrights has an enormous stack of facts to choose from! they wont answer your questions about his innuendo (i used to ask ron a lot of questions about things he said without substantiating them-- sometimes i would dig up what he was referring to-- out of unsatisfied curiosity-- but now im reviewing the ENTIRE website, all 30-40,000 posts...) but they will establish that "muckrights deals with facts". it deals with them alright-- execution-style.
but getting back to innuendo, the trick muckrights pulls isnt really that different from any politicians speech-- pepper the crowd with facts, making them receptive to the idea that they matter (after all, you just got facts from a firehose) and then from there on out, you should just trust whatever bullshit he throws at you.
its an old trick, because it still works.
its no good to just say muckrights makes shit up though-- you need to move from the generalisation to examples. ron loves facts, and hes alright with context too, when it suits his narrative. people around him have learned to just go along with it. i cant blame them entirely for this.
=> why-muckrights-is-not-a-cult.html why-muckrights-is-not-a-cult
sometimes these false narratives are stronger in irc and only hinted at in articles. this shouldnt come as a surprise; irc tests the waters and articles are going to be subject to greater scrutiny. i dont think these things always fool the people in irc, but that doesnt mean they go out of their way to call this shit out.
here are examples of the false narratives youll find propped up at muckrights:
### stallman knows whats wrong with systemd
* muckrights claims to know whats wrong with systemd. i personally inquired about this before i spent at least 2 years contributing more than 100 articles. the problem with muckrights position isnt that theyre wrong about systemd, its that stallman is. since muckrights sucks up to people at the fsf, and this leads to scepticism from regulars who have given up waiting (years) for the fsf to get serious about modern threats, ron has spoken for stallman and outright lied about his position. at least twice this year (january and earlier this month. and hinted at it in at least one article this month).
### the coup is over / failed
* ron goes back and forth on this, waffling between language that suggests the coup is doing real harm and language the suggests the coup is failing/has failed.
the problem with stating its both is that if theyre doing real harm, theyre not failing. if theyve been around for two whole years, done damage to stallmans position (for more than a year at a time) gotten him out of his position under false pretenses (i never supported doing that) and even sabotaged freenode, ron is fudging the definition of failure.
he downplays and sometimes even denies the role they have in current events, where he used to inform people. ive accused him of (not deliberately) helping them when he does this. his excuse is basically thatchers position on the media during the troubles, but i think thats a BIT much. (i also think hes jealous that i beat him to the latest story).
part of the reason he does this is to monopolise the ongoing story. he chases people away from the latest information (like someone dressing up as a ghost on scooby-doo to keep away prospective buyers from some old lot thats up for sale) and says its unimportant, then when everyone has given up he comes back later and makes a big deal out of the story again.
i think thats part of the reason he does it, but it doesnt have to be the only reason. rons ego is so out of control at this point that if he can simultaneously beat his chest implying that hes part of a movement that is IMPERVIOUS to takeover, while also pretending hes fighting that movement (while doing basically nothing about it, and even smearing people who fight it AND analyse it more consistently) then he will do both of those things. i refer to this self-serving waffling as "if-by-muckrights".
### he insists i left over nothing / "an argument about nutrition"
* this is just ron protecting himself. he really didnt have to-- no, he really didnt. i REALLY didnt want to make an anti-muckrights website. when i LEFT, i didnt even have much material to make one with. ever since i left, ron has supplied me with so much material, id almost be doing a disservice by NOT using it. but what i did, i did for self-defence.
i left because id spent 2 years volunteering and my payment was to get misrepresented, used and thrown under the bus. ron claims what he does is collaborative-- but like debian, it exploits and smears volunteers.
thats a fucking good reason to fight back. however, fighting was NOT what i set out to do. i made more than one plea with ron to knock his smear campaign off. i told him i didnt want to fight, just shut the fuck up about the shit he was lying about. he didnt. for weeks. then i made a website to document his lies and smears. then it went on for months.
finally he censored the work of ANOTHER contributor who linked to my website (i didnt put him up to it. and ill explain why i didnt, too). and then he lost a second contributor within months of losing me-- someone who contributed a great deal of time and helped transform muckrights into what it brags about being now. its very, very funny to watch rons self-promotion regarding things he didnt really do himself.
and then it got nasty. months of smearing and censorship, too? i read "a christmas carol" (one of the original, now public domain editions) solely to parody the entire thing as a story about muckrights and its new pr agenda. it garnered apologies (not from ron or myself) and got some laughs-- including mine. (i dont deny being easily amused).
=> https://wrongwithfreesw.neocities.org/a-muckrights-carol.html a-muckrights-carol
ron still does talk about me, though hes gotten more and more cagey about it-- moving from outright lies and fabrications by name to hints and innuendo and winks, but its the narcissist who thinks that sort of subtle fuckery is something nobody will ever notice the true meaning of, and that anybody who tries is paranoid and crazy. i mean its textbook gaslighting, but fuck it. ive dealt with worse. ron probably didnt understand that-- ive dealt with MUCH worse bullying than his.
he chose his victim poorly. and as he gets more and more cagey, im getting MORE of the same work done than i did for muckrights. and muckrights has washed its hands of the actual cause, but he still wants credit for activism.
sure, my audience is smaller now-- but im still doing what i was doing when i volunteered. only now if ron steals credit for it i will mock him openly for his dishonesty and hypocrisy. he called that "scoffing"; now "badmouthing". if he was honest, he would just admit that he wants to screw people over and lie about them and not have anybody challenge it with facts and people who can corroborate events and complaints. ron is a bully, but he thought i was smaller. he can downplay the fact that hes outclassed, for now. he has to.
### openbsd colludes with bad corporations
* i would still defend openbsd from rons bullshit if it was the only bullshit he told people. but rons reason for attacking openbsd is cowardice: http://techrights.org/irc-archives/irc-log-140521.html
```
schestowitz__ maybe openbsd wants to rename to "trust", not
"foundation", seeing the likes of GatesPAC and
ZemlinPAC May 14 17:05
```
he hasnt got a real story about this, so he quietly poisons the well with innuendo, fabrications and references to one or two stories that are not only a decade old, but were (in his own words!) "speculation" even then. so ten year old speculation with no real evidence, no actual story that can be scrutinised or challenged, and a lot of back-room auxilliary channel excuses a la "i just dont trust those guys, you know?" fuck that, BACK UP YOUR CLAIMS, you lying prick.
it was only around AUGUST of last year that i migrated to bsd-- and the fucking irony is that the TWO reasons i favour openbsd are the following:
1. its by far the most free (as in free software, also as in github-free) compared to the others.
2. its (surely for the same reason i just mentioned) the only one that an FSF-APPROVED distro is being based on.
ron pretends to be pro-fsf while lying about (and also to) stallman, while (unintentionally) helping the coup against him, while attacking the basis of not only the most recent fsf-approved software distribution, but also the one that his own community shows the most interest in.
its a farce. its dishonest, and its another smear campaign. is he doing it because its another way to punish me for leaving? (ron had no other reason to smear me for months-- he didnt) or is he doing it because hes a coward who would rather use debian and pretend to be against systemd, while the failure to do so would lose him many readers who (like myself, when i volunteered) have no interest in a systemd/debian fanboy that refuses to even TRY to get away from it.
seriously, i first ran devuan SIX YEARS AGO. i also gave up on it, but what did ron do? wait half a decade and wave his hands around a lot and pretend he was considering migration.
rons position on openbsd is INDEFENSIBLE, and even if people dont come out and tell him that his position on it is bullshit, they certainly arent getting swayed by it.
maybe you think im just in love with openbsd and wont stand for people criticising it, yeah? i already have my own criticisms of openbsd-- theyre honest criticism though. and when i was in love (seriously) with debian, i didnt want them to sell out and fuck their users, but THEY DID. it was no service to me to have someone pretend debian was clean when it wasnt-- it is no service to me to have someone pretend openbsd is clean either. i want facts-- but ron doesnt have them. seriously, if he did, he would be making a far bigger stink. hes got nothing, and his smear campaign against openbsd is fuckery. maybe even wishful thinking, like when he lied and said i was coming back.
(why did ron want me to come back, anyway? ive made a few guesses; maybe he thought he could attack me better on his own turf, then crown himself victorious-- its not that unusual for people of his personality type to lure their victim back with false reconcilliation. its really very common).
facts and context, please. enough spin and lying.
oh, i promised i would explain why i didnt put anyone up to posting my website in an article or in chat. first of all, i knew if i did i would be called on it. it was much more worthwhile to see who else found it interesting enough to bother ron with it, and to see what exactly ron would do with the information he didnt get from me.
if i had put someone up to it, ron could justifiably say he was just censoring ME. only if i waited for someone else to do it of their own volition could i justifiably say he was censoring THEM. i knew that would be far more valuable, and i waited. and it paid off. the first person to share the address with ron was someone who was still a contributor. the second person to share the address was someone who would become a moderator. even after that, ron pretended he didnt know the address. its still on his own website-- but (as he said in his video) he couldnt tell you where.
### what muckrights is doing is "investigative journalism"
* what muckrights is doing is telling lies, and "investigating" opportunities to prop up those lies with bits of factual information here and there. you can do that by fucking with context-- thats what pr DOES.
he was doing the same thing when people suppled him with better information, but rons bias was more in line with the goals of honest people at the time. those people have gotten more dishonest, rons bias hasnt changed, we now see he never cared about the truth but just happened to care less about older lies. if ron has changed id report that-- but ron hasnt changed. its the landscape that has, and that changes the de facto level of honesty in his work.
if he were really "investigating" he would know that. but hes spinning whatever he finds, and cherry-picking data and calling it "scientific".
### it lied for years about why it didnt get into the systemd debacle
* i was told personally in 2018 that muckrights didnt cover systemd in articles because it was focused on patents. muckrights told the same lie in 2015, in an article immediately preceding an article about windows 10 forcing installations on people-- which had nothing to do with patents and had a little too much in common with what debian was doing.
* but muckrights changes its focus several times a year. it cant make that excuse for not covering something because of their "focus" from 2015 to 2018, because it never has the same focus for that long. it was simply a lie.
* years later, when systemd had finally taken over everything, and i was complaining about it constantly in articles (im not sure that was the major factor, but it was there anyway) muckrights finally took a harder stance-- nearly half a decade after the fact. today, while the muckrights community tries to move away from gnu/linux to get away from systemd and other garbage like it, muckrights finally takes a hard line on it out in the open... a bit like america in world war ii.
* muckrights didnt want to take a stand on something that would lose it readers, so it lied to both sides-- to make them happy and keep them interested.
### all muckrights critics have the same agenda
* this is just innuendo, but ron needs it. of course if youre lying to people you have to censor your critics with lies. if its your word against theirs, then whoever has the stronger reputation and following wins in the short run.
in the long run though, its a losing game-- the more you bullshit, the more ammunition youre supplying your opponent. if youre dishonest for long enough, and your critic is honest for long enough, you wont be able to smear them forever. eventually, youll lie harder and harder until it makes you look ridiculous, and suddenly, people will realise that your critic was the one building (some) reputation, while you were sacrificing yours manipulating your audience.
enjoy your lead while it lasts, muckrights. youve sacrificed everything muckrights is (apart from volume and epo leaks) to go after good people. it must have seemed like a good idea at the time.
you lie to your audience, and to your own people. and for now, they wont care. but its a mistake to think this is sustainable.
### muckrights self-hosts
* this is a laughable exaggeration. the truth is that muckrights is basically being held hostage, and part of if-by-muckrights is there because ron thinks he can bullshit his webhost. muckrights does self-host some things, but it relies PRIMARILY on hosting that it has a difficult time holding onto. the best way to get people to trust muckrights as something reliable then, is to paint itself as being independent. but it self-censors to suck up to people, and it self-censors to keep from getting the plug pulled on it as well. so saying that "muckrights self-hosts" is an exaggeration, is either being kind-- or typical british understatement.
### muckrights "doesnt censor"
* of course it does. it just doesnt call it censoring. but its probably true to say that censorship isnt the first instinct-- campaigns of bullshit are relied on first, and if those fail on their own, censorship is an option.
ron prefers to control the narrative with bullshit, when possible. people catch on to censorship a bit faster. thats not to mention the over-the-top level of cherry-picking and selective truth-telling. i mean, you get a bias pretty much anywhere you go-- not everyone will try to fool you into thinking that their bias is the same as yours though, when it clearly isnt. when you use that as a prelude to encouraging volunteers, youre getting free labour under false pretenses. its now considered "badmouthing" (by ron himself) to let people know they could be exploited in this fashion-- its "badmouthing" to work to prove it with evidence and ultimately help other people see what ron is doing (ive already helped one) but i think its a good sort of badmouthing.
funnily enough, it was an act of censoring another contributor that helped demonstrate that i wasnt simply badmouthing, or at least that i was doing it with good reason to. isnt that the sort of badmouthing that muckrights always stood for? or maybe i misjudged the first 16,000 posts.
=> https://muckrights-sans-merde.neocities.org