Re: Brian Kernighan, maybe I'm not worthy, maybe I'm scum

On Dec 29, 3:58 pm, Randy Howard <randyhow...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
On Sat, 29 Dec 2007 01:12:21 -0600,spinoza1111wrote
(in article
<8712e837-59e1-4161-ac43-9735a14d8...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>):





On Dec 29, 6:37 am, CBFalconer <cbfalco...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
spinoza1111wrote:
Randy Howard <randyhow...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
spinoza1111wrote

When I had started working at Princeton University's Information
Centers in 1987, my boss at a reception for alumni student Info
Center workers said to me, Ed, this is *Brian Kernighan*.

Nilgewater is back again.

This time, Mr. Howard, your compulsive stalking will not be
tolerated.

PLONK

Good, you do that. And stay away if you plan on bullying people here.

A rational person might determine that when you try to tell people what
to do, it is you that is doing the bullying.

This is complete nonsense. Is your boss a bully? Or does money talk?
Or, if you're self-employed, is your client a bully? Or does money
talk?

The bully, whose prototype is indeed Hitler (might as well converge to
unity rapidly), is forever claiming, as did Hitler, that he's merely
defending das Recht, or der Vaterland, or American normalcy, or "good
technology", against an inchoate and shadowy threat who's the "real"
bully, who's trying to push people around...perhaps "making" them use
Hungarian notation or girlishly long identifiers.

This makes a fundamental libertarian error. Hobbes pointed out that no
human being can "make" anyone do a goddamn thing in the mechanical
sense of cause and effect: in Hobbes, the condemned criminal on the
dock retains the right of rebellion and the choice to refuse the
authority of the court.

Therefore, the rage for "liberty" which is a hardy perennial in
American life, a rage in a country which has always given its people a
great deal of liberty (include the de facto, if not de jure, right to
slay each other with easily available guns) is a great mystery.

When you tell a person not to tell other people "what to do", this is
usually an abstract attempt (one which conveniently evades the issues)
to put that person in a subaltern role where you tell him what to do,
and he shucks and jives, saying you is such a kind old Massah.

Kernighan presented a certain model of "elegance" and was of course,
"telling people what to do". In my response I demur, "telling people
what to do". And for months, you "told me what to do", mostly get
fucked, in such an uncontrollable way that I believe you may have
undiagnosed and untreated military post-traumatic stress.

Much of language is "telling people what to do", the attempt to
influence behavior which fortunately for human survival replaces the
club with air...what Anthony Burgess calls in his eponymous *tour
d'horizon* of language, a Mouthful of Air.

Let's get back to a boss or client. A boss or client is a bully in
excess of the cash nexus insofar as his putatively bullying language
accentuates the negative and in some sort of hegemonic fashion, says
that the mark is undeserving of membership in a human community.

Not once, to my recollection and to my knowledge, did you in 2003
contribute anything positive to the discussion. Instead, you stalked
me, and your observations on programming seemed to me deliberately
jejune so as to avoid the risk of being found wrong. You based your
campaign on some assertions and a Web page created by Programmer Dude
which in turn addressed mostly unprovable and undecidable issues of
programming style, which were neither verifiable nor falsifiable.

I'd taken the risk, as I take here, in being wrong, as people did in
the old "structured walkthrough" (which has been pretty much
eliminated by corporate bullying), to verify my opinions about the
superiority of OO, and here, I am concerned about Pike's code. You
entered strictly to "tell me what to do", which was mostly, get
fucked.

This type of "telling people what to do" is bullying and stalking, and
this time around I'm not going to put up with that *** from you or
anyone else.



--
Randy Howard (2reply remove FOOBAR)
"The power of accurate observation is called cynicism by those
 who have not got it."  - George Bernard Shaw- Hide quoted text -

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