Bound to fall on deaf ears, I'm afraid.
I'm tired. A movement that is not unaccountable would make me young again. The inane practice of arbitrarily calling things divisive Divisiveness is unquestionably a tactic of saboteurs-- it's the aimless, arbitrary lobbing of accusations that is foolish. The rough, clumsy opposite of divisiveness is unity. Unity around sound principles is no vice, but unity around foolishness leads to self-destruction. Those who care about success (and sanity, even in typically small amounts but that's still likely better than none) will always be critical of unity around foolishness and self-destruction. The foolish will always accuse such critics of being divisive. This is not unlike a murderer pretending that someone else could be the culprit; it conveniently shifts the blame from those who are actually guilty to anyone who simply looks funny. What a convenience! The test for honest critique is of course, honesty. What the idiots are doing is claiming that the test for honest critique is not the honesty, but the critique itself! Who is this person, they demand, who thinks they have to the right to come here and tell us what to think or what to do? But honest critique is a right, for good reason. To call honest critique "divisive" is to imply that honest critique is a privilege. This reveals the mindset of those who wish to make critique (and by this, speech itself) a privilege. Even Techrights, that bastion of opportunistic doublespeak, wrote an article years ago that gave honest free software supporters (not only those who contributed paid support, as the primary author of Techrights has never been an FSF member) carte blanche to honestly critique the FSF. But the cheque bounced, and his own rhetoric has proven it to be a forgery. He may have addressed the envelope to everyone, but he made it payable (as he frequently does) only to himself. When false unity and false compromise make treachery unassailable, true progress makes division inevitable. Calling for division with treachery and for the neglect of dishonesty is not divisive, it is restorative. But some people take great pleasure in double standards, and saying that the critiques of their destructive, arbitrary and foolish priorities are divisive. It's shifting the blame, and no less divisive than what they complain about, but that's the thing about being arbitrary-- arbitrary responses to honest critique and real problems can help a little, or hurt a lot. If the rule itself is arbitrary, then relying on the outcome to be positive is worse than naive, it is utterly stupid. _______________________________________________ Discussion mailing list Discussion@lists.fsfellowship.eu https://lists.fsfellowship.eu/mailman/listinfo/discussion
