muckrights-sans-merde

 bonum fabula frat

### why-msm other pages: => how-to-deal-with-your-raspberry-spy.html how-to-deal-with-your-raspberry-spy *originally posted:* apr 2021 on january 5th, i created "everything wrong with free software" (ewwfs). this was a place for me to talk about, appropriately enough-- everything wrong with free software. at the time, one of the things i had been dealing with was a weeks-long campaign of vindictive and dishonest bullshit from a website i had spent literally years contributing to. the reason i was being subjected to this campaign? revenge for leaving. there was absolutely nothing else i was doing to invite this abuse. make no mistake, i was annoyed when i left. id already felt on several occasions that not every dealing was fair or even above board. its worth noting that at the time, i was definitely too flustered by the campaign of little lies (and the fact that i had spent two entire years helping out this person) to get a truly excellent handle on what was going on. but over time, patterns emerged and were brought into focus. when i started ewwfs, i couldnt have dreamed of having so much to say about this. but again, i was already coming from 2+ years of experience contributing and nearly a month of bullshit (i didnt set out to create a website right away). more than the other things ive said so far, this post will hopefully explain the path from saying nothing to dedicating a website to the purpose. but i havent explained it just yet. early-to-mid december 2020 was when i left, and i had already considered leaving in august. i had written some things in articles and/or emails, and those things were being misrepresented-- in articles written by the site owner. i tried to correct those misrepresentations in another article, and explained an intention to leave. the new article was published, and i was told it was a "misunderstanding". months later, the site owner described my correction of his deliberate misrepresentation as "flippant". so to my face, this was just a misunderstanding-- when described to others, it was "flippant" to take issue with someone twisting my words around and misrepresenting positions i held. at the time (that is, august) i had very little cause to think it wasnt a misunderstanding. it seemed like something else, but i couldnt be sure of anything about it. it took 6 weeks of lies from the site owner to establish a clear pattern about what was going on-- at least, there were 6 weeks to go on. i couldnt have begun to (and didnt) anticipate any of that when i started ewwfs. i figured this bullshit would cease soon enough (and ive documented it in great detail) but i didnt think i would still be writing about it in april. indeed, if you think that this is solely about whether i need to just let this go, i will further explain the timeline of events that has led to a second website about this. ewwfs was never intended to be solely about muckrights, even though it was naturally the first topic i had to discuss. one of the reasons i call it muckrights is to avoid feeding search engines the name of the actual website. there are other reasons as well. ewwfs was intended to be exactly what it says, and msm is also intended to be exactly what it says-- to whatever extent that is reasonably possible. ive also spent 2 years discussing and analysing the war on stallman and the war on free software. when i first started writing for muckrights, these were called "guest articles" of course; but it was also a "guest article" when lxo wrote something-- they were sometimes called "guest articles" even when they were actually a paper written by gavin rebeiro which i predicted the site owner would split into installments, which didnt please him greatly. i have predicted the cancellation of stallman and the purchase of red hat, albeit by microsoft instead of ibm (microsoft was considered as a buyer). i was just yesterday putting together a list of traitorous projects within gnu that ought to be purged from it, which i half-jokingly sent to lxo (because i believe he will be the chief gnuisance someday, but i know theyre not going to start purging parts of the gnu project-- even if they should) while a strikingly similar group of projects were at that very moment (within the hour or so, it seems like) preparing to officially secede from gnu. or actually if you secede but try to convince the public you are the very thing you have seceded from, that is more like a coup or being a pretender to the throne. the relevance of these events to my personal experience with muckrights is simpler than it may at first seem-- when i contributed to muckrights, i considered it the last, best hope for tech journalism. thats pretty laughable now, but they do at least cover some interesting leaks. i couldnt determine a significant degree of spin that was put on these stories until i saw them from before-and-after angles to compare. before i was contributing to muckrights, it was where i personally learned about many of these things-- i got the post-spin angle first, then worked to piece together more of the story for myself-- and the owner just played along like we were on the same page (again, i didnt know he was doing that until i saw it from the outside). the owner of muckrights first became aware of my website on or around the 13th of january, roughly one month after i left muckrights and 8 days after i created the website itself. meaning he has known about it for months now. someone i talked to decided to post a link (i honestly did not put them up to this) to ewwfs in the main muckrights irc channel: * the owner knows ewwfs exists * he published a paper on his website (in several parts) that links directly to it * then he did a 40-50 minute video (in april-- just a week or two ago) about a wiki page i had made where he mentions that i have a website * but he pretends he doesnt know the address i already wrote about that video, but i know why he pretends not to know the ewwfs address even though theres more than one link to it published on muckrights itself. the reason that he pretends not to know the address is because it calls him out on every detail of the shit he pulled against me. if people from muckrights read ewwfs, they get weeks, then months, of evidence that muckrights is run by a compulsive liar. why say hes compulsive, and not just a liar? because he does these little "victory laps" where he says something so outragously false, so demonstrably and provably dishonest, that its almost like those stories about serial killers who help investigators solve their own crimes. ive dealt with liars and ive dealt with narcissists, but this is either a game or a compulsion-- and if its a game, its still a compulsion. ive been on the receiving end of this for months now and ive documented it in detail when im pissed off, and ive documented it in detail when im cool and calm. the muckrights owner meanwhile has tried to paint as "rage" things said while perfectly calm, in an effort to make me seem completely irrational (this is textbook gaslighting incidentally). its a trademark of mine to express anger in my writing, and it doesnt prevent people from complimenting my work. i hardly think im a great like carlin or bill hicks, though they are my inspiration and i love and admire their work. i absolutely think you can tell the truth, make rational points and still express outrage-- all the the same time. sure, its a greater challenge to come across as rational when youre angry, but then its not every day that someone who has published angry writing of yours for years (because it brings pageviews) tries to spin everything you say as rage even when its not. the problem is im an extremely analytical person-- and i dont love superficiality at all. i think its one of the worlds greatest and most troubling sins (im agnostic, but lets call it a sin anyway) that people like to dance around the truth and never get their hands dirty when learning about the world and its bullshit. its a recipe for ignorance that makes people more easily led, and lends more power to the people who wish to lead them, which is why power and corruption will always rely heavily on superficiality. along with bill hicks and george carlin, i also like richard stallman and henry david thoreau. i even like theo de raadt (he and stallman were both a little unfair to each other) but i dont like todd miller, who i told to sudo go fuck himself. and i still talk to people that the owner of muckrights *routinely* says i had a "falling out" with. but dont bother asking him what his point is, because its just innuendo. a little superficiality is efficient, when its honest. a lot of superficiality is a quick path to trouble, and muckrights is becoming more superficial. but ultimately, the reason msm exists is this-- im now forcing a confrontation, not on why the owner has spent so much time lying about me and putting spin on my 2 years of contributions, because ewwfs was already doing a suitable job of that. msm is about the fact that muckrights isnt even a news site anymore. and considering that for a while i thought it was the last (and best) tech news site, the fact that its not even a news site is appalling. my vision for the free software movement is NOT a website, but a network. and muckrights WAS providing such a network, even if it was being dishonest and manipulative about it. i refuse to return there. i wrote tips to warn people who wish to contribute there. the owner actually lied to his associate (or if im even more cynical, possibly staged an irc exchange with his associate where he pretended to say things the associate knew were not true... but im going with he lied to his own associate) about me returning to muckrights, which ive documented. there was no mistake, it was a complete fabrication. it was just before april 1, so i wrote a derisive april fools post about it, where i explained that YES, im coming back and im going to help fork his mediawiki instance to parse geminitext (and install a ddos-proof hardware firewall made out of a speak & spell). but i still write about the free software movement. years before i (unofficially, whatever) joined muckrights, i was working on ways to promote freedom, writing software and talking about the importance of history (as it refutes the bullshit history-rewriting propaganda that open source dumps on people). it should be clear solely from what ive said here, that i have interests besides muckrights itself. but the lack of a proper tech news site anywhere on the web (or geminispace, im not saying theyre not up to it) is too great a drawback not to fight it. muckrights refuses to be that news site, and i demand to know why-- even if i sort of already know. if all i wanted to do is show you the kind of crap i had to deal with, theres already a website for that. i have never had the ambition to compete with muckrights in any sort of 1:1 fashion-- im not interested in that, its not what i do, maybe i could spend years trying but its still not a goal i have. if i cant get muckrights to be serious (and i definitely cant) and i cant compete with it in terms of viewers (and im pretty confident thats not possible either) the one thing i can do is try to rally people to collectively address this dearth of "proper" (at least, honest) tech news coverage. i wont pretend this is my top priority. but its the reason msm exists. and you will (if you dont find this website fucking boring) learn more about how muckrights really works, from someone who spent years there. that serves two purposes-- forcing the abovementioned confrontation, and also giving people ideas on how they can compete (collectively) with muckrights, if that is an ambition they have. msm doesnt compete with muckrights directly and it isnt intended to do so. rather, it can hopefully provide information and inspiration to people who might wish to do so. as ive taken to saying, the owner is a monopolist. he doesnt do it with copyright-- muckrights is mostly freely licensed, just like msm is. instead, he monopolises with bullshit, smears and other subtle forms of manipulation. thats one way to get free work out of people, another way is to be honest. but being honest is the hard way, and the owner of muckrights plays to his strengths. honesty just isnt one of those. thats alright-- if richard stallman can make a free-as-in-freedom version of an operating system from bell labs, i think the web and geminispace can do similar with muckrights. fun fact-- several decades ago, the united states government went to bell with a list of proposals for upgrades that would make their communications network more robust (and what we today might call "internet-like"), but bell turned them down. so they just built it themselves, instead. dont sell yourself short-- much more is possible when you routinely attempt the unlikely. => https://muckrights-sans-merde.neocities.org