Re: Dealing with ad hominem attacks in comp.programming

(Sigh)

On Feb 18, 3:00 am, "Malcolm McLean" <regniz...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
"Richard Heathfield" <r...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message

news:v-CdnVDLYpazZSraRVnyhwA@xxxxxxxxx> There has been an unfortunate spate of ad hominem attacks in this
newsgroup  recently. This is not good for the group as a whole, it's not
good > for the victims of the attacks, and it's not good for the attackers
either.

Nilgesis an interesting case. I've noticed for instance that the amount of
political content in his posts has dropped markedly since I objected to its
relevance. I don't think he's a troll in that his desire is not to disrupt
the workings of the newgroup. However there seems to be some lack of
perspective. He's not the only person to think that C sucks as a language,
for instance, but most people advancing that position would expect pretty
robust dismissal for C practitioners. He sees it as a campaign waged against
him.

Looks like I don't get a vacation from this ***. I will have to reply
to this in real time, because if I do not, Heathfield et al. will
continue to lie to you.

Malcolm, the problem is that this newsgroup is absurdly biased. Almost
all examples are in C, and NO examples use object-oriented modern
languages.

Your weak reply is "what do you expect?" I think people have a right
to expect certain things, including the truth and basic honesty and
decency, especially here, where there's financial no reason to lie.
You are significantly at fault for the nasty tone of this newsgroup
because you're too cowardly to criticise.


Some of those attacks have been directed against me. Whilst I think it's
bad for the group as a whole for me to respond to such attacks
point-by-point (I've done this before, and it did indeed result in
monster-threads that almost nobody wanted), I do think it necessary to
point out that my lack of a response does *not* indicate agreement with
those (very few) people who are conducting those attacks.

I think the problem is that most people are more interested in other
peoplethan they are in programming. There's nothing to be ashamed about in

That interest sounds benign in this phrasing, but please note: the
interest is almost exclusively in tearing other people down.

Apart from sucking up to the self-appointed thought leaders, no-one is
supportive of any one else at any time and no effort is made, in
Hamlet's words, to "as a stranger give them welcome".

And what it means here is that people who think they are programmers,
but lack general, scientific, and even computer culture outside of
narrow career specialties, aren't interested in a trade that they do
not practise well, and in which it is commonly known that they make
mistakes that are far more global than using strlen in a for, such as
failing to realize the difference between && and || and that their
version of memswap inherits all the bad features of memcpy.

But what you say, given the absence of collegiality, implies that they
don't come here to make friends. They come here to shore up a damaged
sense of self by finding someone who they think can be caricatured as
the nasty little *** they fear they are.


this. Only unusual people would think the reverse is even possible. And
generally, whilst technically-focussed people do find a niche, those who are
promoted to high position tend to be those with good social skills, not the
most competent.

With the result, for example, that astronauts die: for the
administrator of NASA, Mike Griffin has those social skills you
mention, and having those, refuses to fix a safety culture at NASA
characterised as broken by the late Richard Feynman and by UC
scientific anthropologist Dianne Vaughan.

As in the case of being a "people person", you make something sound
benign which is malign. What you mean is that "people persons" are
precisely thugs whose "interest" in people is how they can use them
for their own gratification, and destroy them if those people talk
back, as I do.


However the group is a group about programming. A thread demanding the
removal of a poster is so meta-topical as to be absurd. Other people don't
bnecessarily want to enter into internal battles for dominance.

There has been such a battle in this and many Internet groups since
the early days, since in all too many cases, because "on the Internet
no one knows you're a dog", people with the social skills of losers
and thugs come here to form small but dominant groups.

I ask you to note one thing, Malcolm. Heathfield doesn't seem to have
a life outside these newsgroups. He's always here. NORMAL people take
vacations, and sabbaticals, and, when sick of *** like this, longer
breaks. Heathfield's conduct is abnormal.

It has become a genuine programming problem because his efforts to
remain in control, to target people who don't agree with him, and now
to appear normal, occupy all our time to the exclusion of programming
outside of arguments about C, an outdated programming language.


Whilst he is not the only offender by any means, it is of course mostly Mr
Nilgesto whom I refer. It is possible that MrNilges'shabit of
misrepresenting reality might, by dint of constant repetition, mislead
some people into thinking that his attacks might have some substance to
them.

That's a danger, I agree. The saying "never argue with an idiot, because
people listening will not be able to tell the difference" has some merit.
You pullNilgestrick in the paragraph below of referring to some obscure
incident as though it were current and important.





Just one example will suffice here: he keeps banging on about a C++ test
in
which I "did poorly", by which he means that I *only* scored 86% on a test
set by an idiot who'd probably learned his C++ from a Schildt book, and
the "poor" score of 86% was achieved despite refusing to answer at least
five of the fifty questions, because it was quite clear to me that they
had no correct answer. (Do the math, and you'll find that my 43 "marked
correct by a question-setter who doesn't know the language" responses out
of a self-imposed maximum of 45 comes to over 95.5%.)

Others who took the test, and who I am happy to concede know C++ far
better than I do, also commented that the test was flawed. This was in
fact
the test in which I was so busy spotting one error that I didn't happen to
notice *another* error in the same question. (This is the &&/|| thing, by
the way.)

A couple of questions had flaws, and then it became a game to see how many
questions could be presented as flawed. Mutliple choice questions are very
frequently like that, partly because truth is in shades of grey, even for
something like programming. So plausible distractors usually have some truth
to them, often the answer will have some elements of falseness.

I promise that, if he continues to make these ludicrous accusations, I
will
*not* post (or at least *try* not to post!) rebuttal after rebuttal after
rebuttal. As you may have noticed, I have been practising for some weeks
before making this promise, and it does seem that I can more or less keep
to it.

You could maybe ration yourself to one rebuttal a thread. Ghis can be as
short as "A Nazi, me?".

But what I may do instead is put up a rebuttal Web page, a link to which I
will post when necessary, so that those who really want to know the facts
behind the lies can find out without a monster thread being generated.

I really don't think this is a good idea as it feeds Nilge's fantasy that
there is some sort of orchestrated campaign against him. At times this even
looks very like a clinical condition - it is very characteristic of people
with certain mental illnesses. You can be charitable - after all, you might
develop mania yourself some day.

I worked with a person with a genuine clinical condition, John Nash.
Crazy people cannot write and have not published: I have. Crazy people
are unemployable: I was employed constantly in the computer field for
thirty years, and am now working six days a week in a far better
field. When Nash recovered he started to publish again in his field.

Crazy people don't have a sense of humor, but my sense of humor falls
flat with Richard Heathfield who almost never gets a joke he didn't
make himself.

Crazy people's humor is at best a sort of twisted mockery of others,
of the sort that Howard specializes in.

Crazy people make the wildest sort of assumptions based on
insufficient evidence. For example, Howard says he was shocked to
discover no mention of the Nash connection in my bio at Developer Dot
Star and implied a conspiracy theory. What he didn't realize, of
course, that at Princeton I met other Remarkable Men and women who
were far more personable than Nash, and that I'm not someone who had
some brief moment of glory.

Crazy people demonize others. I have been demonized.

But most of all (cf Fromm) crazy people can't love and feel pleasure.
Heathfield and Howard got no pleasure in the Spark Notes test. Instead
of being amused by its flaws, they took those flaws personally and
wasted all our time in telling us, with madmen's lack of humor, about
its flaws.

Unfortunately, despite the work of Fromm and Adorno, the psychiatric
profession refuses to recognize an "authoritarian personality
disorder", despite its commonality, because the psychiatric profession
itself is manufactured by authoritarian personal relations of
dominance and control, as in the case where the competent MS therapist
can't get paid through medical insurance but has to work for an
ignorant MD.

Crazy people, in fine, sit on their ass and make judgements about
others based on insufficient evidence and their own ignorance.


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