Re: Message from spinoza1111

On Feb 5, 2:21 am, "Malcolm McLean" <regniz...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
"spinoza1111" <spinoza1...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message

On Feb 4, 9:19 pm, "Malcolm McLean" <regniz...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:>People will do that any way. The most common way of going off-topic is
to focus on personalities, to start calling a person a troll for (in
my case) being more literate than the norm, and for reading outside
the sports pages and want ads.

When this is done (and it is the norm) I am left no alternative but to
start doing what you call sociology and politics.

A meta-topical discussion is discussion about the workings of the newsgroup,
such as I am engaging in now. An off-topic message could be in a closely
related area - for instance there comes a point at which mathematical
discussions lose all programming content and become purely mathematical, or
discussions on operating systems likewise become discussions about markets
rather than about programs. Similarly subjects can be competely off-topic, a
discussion about knitting, for example.

Off-topic discussions can be tolerated if discussion about say, geometry,
led to a discussion of the topology of knots, led to knitting vs
crotcheting. However to post a thread starting on the merits of knitting
wouldn't be acceptable.

You say "this is usenet" as if the deviant behavior here was some sort
of eternal fact, like "boys will be boys" (which is also
questionable). However, the Internet in America dawned in my
experience at Princeton, and from day one I was shocked by the
obsessive bullying of personalities who in the perception of self-
appointed thought leaders weren't conforming to an American middle
class ideal. This bullying, I could see then and believe today, was
less a technical fact (although enabled by anonymity) and more
expressive of a growing middle (and technical) class anxiety that due
to the growing insecurity, "the worst thing in the world" would be
social isolation.

Usenet is a different social environment, with its own rules. Just as
industrial workers can form unions and go on strike whilst agricultural
workers can't, information workers connected by newsgroups can do some
things that industrial workers cannot, and are barred from some forms of
organisation open to them.

Heathfield's topic happens to be his right to dominate this newsgroup
with information that is often useless; he advises a student
struggling, as far as I can tell, with switch statements and bubble
sorting to use a tree without telling him how to architect a tree in
C; he often informs his correspondents that what they know is wrong
(undefined) which is convenient when your concern is never being
wrong.

Accuracy is sometime too highly prized. I managed to persuade people on
comp.lang.c that it was OK to simplify for pedagogic purposes, but it was a
long battle, still not completely won.
Heathfield, however, does have instincts tnhat would make him a good
teacher, even if the tree was a trifle too ambitious.







I'd be proud to be "Nilges, the Marxist crusader against the
universe". The problem is that this isn't "the universe". It's a very
small group of complete losers who you and Ben and Julienne enable by
assuming that they must be the norm somehow.

If you'd make sure that every Marxist or sociological-type statement was
directly and unambiguously related to programming, you'd find out who >>
agreed with you or not. As it is, I am not prepared to be drawn into a
discussion of race and the US election here. Heathfield et al are right
about that. Discussion of Obama's blackness is not what this newsgroup
is for.
I'm not discussing Obama's blackness, because in case you haven't
noticed, I am always on-topic; I merely use alternate ways of looking
at a core issue which are beyond the ken of programmers who don't read
the newspaper outside of the football results and the want ads. Like
Serge Diaghlev, I leap and pause, returning consistently to the basis,
which is either the technical (or technical-stylistic) point I am
making, or my human right to mutuality of recognition and respect, a
right which everyone needs here if this ng is to fulfill its charter.
Period.
The fact is that usenet has tracked the rise of negative campaigning
in the American (and, increasingly, the world) political sphere where
issues are no longer linked in a coherent narrative vision but
manipulated by paid political consultants using (surprise surprise)
data bases which foster the illusion that one issue can be as
important as the next.
For example, John McCain's (nonexistent) black crack ho love child
(actually a child he adopted) was made into an issue which lost McCain
the South Carolina primary in 2000 and the 2000 election. The issue
was carefully elsethreaded and offlined and made into a thought-
stopping sound byte in almost exactly the same way "Schildt's errors"
have become a sound byte here.

I'm British. I have never heard of the issue you mention until now. Clearly
if a candidate was accused of being the father of an illegitimate child he
had actually adopted, that would be most unfair. However the impact is
unlikely to go far beyond America.

This gets right back to the issue of programming, specifically the
very ability to even have an intelligent, adult discussion about
programming in this newsgroup. Just as Weinberg discovered (cf. The
Psychology of Computer Programming) that programming productivity
was more related to collegiality and decency in structured walkthoughs
than to hardware speed or elaborate OSes, NO discussion of
programming is possible here unless the bullying STOPS.

I am sure Weinberg is right. However comp.programming is not an organisation
tnhat produces programs; it is a discussion forum whose topic is computer
programming. As such, the result does not necessarily generalise to it. I
think there is a need for a certain level of personal animosity on technicla
groups. People are human, and easily get bored with pure discussions of
methods of sorting, for example. Which is why I consider your posts to be
often dangerous, because most people are far more interesting in politics
than in algorithms.

Obama on the left, and McCain on the right, avoid negative
campaigning. Hilary and Romney do not, and us Yanks are beginning to
wise up; if McCain runs against Hilary I might even vote Republican.
Like Hilary Clinton, people here seem to me to be deeply insecure
about their programming ability and anxious for this reason to find
scapegoats. Of course, this makes no sense; I might be incompetent,
you might be incompetent, and we all might be incompetent.

Hilary Clinton is a famous person playing for extremely high stakes. Most of
us are relative unknowns with ordinary jobs. I don't think you can draw
meaningful parallels. I don't have a campaign manager whom I consult on
every post to see whether it is projecting the right image. Mrs Clinton
does.

"I think we're ALL bozos on this bus" - The Firesign Theater
And given the sort of challenges that face people far lower down on
the social scale, from people who work for professional cleaning
services, to Mexican immigrant laborers who do landscaping, to London
cabbies who have to learn "The Knowledge", the playwright and essayist
David Mamet may have been RIGHT when he theorized that such jobs as
"computer programmer" were invented as a form of social control and as
a catchall for people no longer needed in industry or the
professions.

I don't think so. The idea in the 1970s was that every manager would know a
computer language, and knock up quick programs to access the company
database. That actaulyl worked in the city of London, where traders often
use software they have written themselves,  but it soon emerged that it
wasn't a good paradigm for most development. Hence the rise of dedicated
programmers.

Of course, such a hidden social mechanism would be "a conspiracy so
immense" as to give it only a locus in the subconscious of
programmers, although it may explain both their lack of self-
confidence, and their tendency, here, to viciously lash out at
personalities in preference to talking about issues. But it would
explain, as a matter of social psychology, the waste of time here on
personalities and the careful mechanisms that thought leaders like
Heathfield use to avoid exposure.

Agricultural workers can't strike, and I think information workers can't
either, though for different reasons. If you hope to organise programmers
like assembly workers, I think you are doomed to disappointment.

It's a waste of time which has made me repeatedly bail in order to use
my free time for more productive pursuits, such as programming in
object-oriented languages exclusively, painting, and self-abuse. But I
make no apology for returning. Times change.
The situation here parallels and is illuminated by the political
situation. I understand that British politics is very different,
although the mad woman (Thatcher) did make personal vindictiveness
part of her style, and Number 10 has gotten more and more Americanized
under your Tony and Gordon.

A lot of people who hated Margaret Thatcher at the time now appreciate that
she reversed Britain's relative decline. Actually there is now no real
difference between the two main British political parties on policy. The
interesting struggle that is shaping up is on social issues, like divorce,
abortion, working mothers, immigration, care for the elderly.

I can't reply to all your interesting points right now, Malcolm, will
do so, later.

Thatcher did NOT reverse Britain's relative decline. The British
people did that and even in terms of what Number Ten can do, Major and
Blair did far more to restore Britain's economy and international
standing, until Blari was forced to join the USA in Iraq.

By the end of the mad woman's 12 years, the British economy was in the
toilet with people getting a preview of negative equity after having
being suckered by her rhetoric into buying flats. She only rearranged
the misery of your "winter of discontent" in 1979 so that people who
didn't matter, primarily youths, women, and male blue collar workers
in the unfashionable North of your country, took the hit, and Thames
Valley types no longer had to worry, as they had to in 1979, about
their drains, their mains, or their trash pickup.

The friendly Cockneys who cheered us on in the London Marathon of 1983
were driven off the Isle of Dogs and now suspicious faces peer from
"luxury flats", each hiding what Adorno called the secret contour of
their weakness.

Entire communities were turned into ghost towns in the North and
Wales.

The miners suggested in 1983 during Thatcher's stupid, macho face-off
with Scargill (who managed to be as bone-headed and bloody minded, to
mix a metaphor, as the mad woman) that the coal faces continue to mine
coal in the face of energy prices that were declining in 1983, for
stockpiling against energy shocks. This was treated with crude
laughter and cries, perhaps, of "what my foot my tutor" because the
lads were not considered able to think or plan, despite the thinking
and planning Orwell saw at the coal face when he went down to Wigan.

[Coal miners would never sort coal using a bubble sort, I am certain.]

Well, hey presto, the coal faces are now re-opening, and being staffed
with Eastern Europeans who still know how to dig coal. An entire
generation of British kids was flushed down the toilet in the working
class communities that used to mine coal and this wasn't, in any human
or extended sense, economically rational except to the most narrow
minded and inhuman Utilitarian or Gradgrind. The same cruel logic was
applied to the North and to Wales as was applied to the Irish in the
1840s.

Elvis Costello, who hates the mad woman, said it best:

Nonsense prevails, modesty fails
Grace and virtue turn into stupidity
While the calendar fades almost all barricades to a pale compromise
And our leaders have feasts on the backsides of beasts
They still think theyre the gods of antiquity
If something you missed didnt even exist
It was just an ideal -- is it such a surprise?
What shall we do, what shall we do with all this useless beauty?
All this useless beauty...

This is relevant to comp.programming. I've pointed out that the yob
factor makes it impossible for technical conversations to avoid
vandalism, and the yob factor, the self-centered narcissism of the
Mark Thatcher bully, became fashionable in the UK as a result of
Thatcher, and in the USA as a result of Reagan.

For example, I've discovered that below a certain age, British men
don't even understand the word "bounder", because Thatcher gave them
permission, in fact, to act like cads and bounders here and elsewhere,
with Heathfield being exhibit A. Sure, it's an old fashioned term, but
slang terms like OK have a longer life.

And just as in the USA, where the real cowboys were driven off the
land years ago while Eastern swine like Bush adopt their accent, the
trendy Thames Valley accent is now Northern in origin. We Americans
took the blacks' music and drove them out of the center city and it
appears the same deal happened in the USA: people who don't matter are
expropriated, and the sheep eat the people.


--
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