Re: [Ghm-discuss] The posh talk does not complain with the policy

[Garreau\, Alexandre]

On 2014-08-12 at 23:24, John Gilmore wrote:
> Jose E. Marchesi writes:
>> The main reason why my talk violates the current policy is that it mocks
>> and somewhat ridiculizes the very rich aristocratic people, including
>> their appearance and the affectionated manners usually associated to
>> them [1].
>
> I was so offended that I dropped my monocle.
>
> Seriously, I don't know what it is like where you live, Jose, but it
> is not a pretty thing being a rich person in America today.

That sounds like “bourgeois tears”, like “men tears”, or “anti-white
racism” or “heterophobia”, but for rich people…

> There is a deliberate attempt to stir up an "us versus them" against
> the rich,

It’s more a “us versus that”, not against the rich, but against the
whole concept of richness, inequality, monopoly, etc. And, oh, it even
has a name: “class consciousness”.

> regardless of their innocence or guilt in any moral sense.  The "99%
> versus the 1%" is all about divide and conquer, us versus them.

The fact negating “class struggle” saying it’s made to divide people
(while it is to bring them together), when coupled with nationalism also
have a name: fascism. Fortunately you saved yourself from that not
putting some off-topic patriotism where it shouldn’t, you didn’t made
any assumptions about your country or the nationality or other, neither
even mentioned your… oh, wait…

> People who believe themselves part of "us", "the 99%" are led to think
> that they need not care about "them", the 1%.

Well, actually, a world where you take care of 99% of the people without
1% would look really strange, because oppression and inequality is a
mass system. If you got rid of monopolization of world resource by a
minority who can’t even use/consume them, actually everybody would be
able to enjoy it, and therefore a system where proprietarian oppression
doesn’t exist wouldn’t “not care” about 1%, it would just care of them
like others, providing them what they need, and then what they want and
can have without going against others needs (yes there’s enough
resources for that).

I think what you are meaning by “not caring” is just not a loss of
caring, but a loss of privilege. And since a privilege is defined by the
differential with others, taking away this privilege (what you could
interpret as “not caring” or “attacking”) just mean “not having others
not benefiting for as much”. So, like in men tears, it’s just the fear
of change, the fear of loosing power and “security” derivating from it.

> By definition, they are not looking for solutions that work for the
> 100%, i.e. everyone; they don't care if their policies step on the
> lives or the rights of 1% of the populace.  Poor activists are blind
> to the irony of denouncing the "greed" of the rich, while the same
> activists greedily seek to take other peoples' wealth for their own
> projects.

Loooooool xD^W^WActually what they are trying to do is not to attack the
1% but to make the economic differential between this 1% and the other
99% disappear, thus, making privileges disappear, thus, making rich
disappear as “rich”, but just appear as “human beings”, with rights and
ability equals to others, so that we can go beyond hierarchy, power,
oppression, and become more free everyday.

By denouncing the behaviors and usages of some portion of population, it
tries just to underline the absurdity (in the Camus (the French
philosopher) meaning) of a such system.

> And it's not just yakety yak, there are real consequences.  Once that
> attitude became established here, politicians started increasing taxes
> on only the rich.

How horrible! Politicians working for the people! Yuck! They should do
as usual: use the excuse of property, and take the resources of the poor
to give it to the riches who can’t even use/consume them!</troll>

> At its worst, this attitude caused the Reign of Terror during the
> French Revolution;

What did that is a completely different attitude: it’s envy of power,
counterrevolution, centralization, and fear. Only things that derived
From people ignorance, from disinformation, from lack of *consciousness
taking*, class consciousness, consciousness of fundamentals of hierarchy
concept, of the authority principle, etc. A true revolution can only
happens beginning in the head of people, then the
popular/material/physical “revolution” as we mean it can just ratify it.

> and caused the national police in Guatemala to systematically kill off
> most of the educated people in the country, over 30 years of ugly,
> murderous civil war that only ended in the 1990s.

Powerful people killing other powerful people to get more powerful… oh,
yeah, nothing strange… just a need to get rid of power itself.

> In the US, the big lie is that "the rich don't pay their fair share".
> If you look at US federal income tax, 40% of the adult population pays
> no income taxes at all!  (In 1984 it was less than 15% of the people
> who paid nothing, but things have changed.)  The lower income 50% of
> the people pay less than 4% of the income taxes.  The upper income 50%
> pays 96.5% of the income taxes.  And the top 5% pay 55% (with the top
> 1% paying 35% all by themselves).  Figures like these are easy to find
> online, for example:
>
>   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_tax_in_the_United_States#Distribution
>   
> https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e0/2010_US_Tax_Liability_by_Income_Group_-_CBO.png
>   http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2704794/posts
>
> So, in actuality, the rich (and the 1%) pay far more than their fair
> share, unless the word fairness has lost all meaning.

Then we could argue against *which type of riches*: to the most
powerful. What’s about governors, companies, etc.? What’s about the fact
they still get richer, and the poor poorer? And that just by the magics
of speculation/property/capital?

But still we can agree on the fact fixing the situation taxing the
riches is like trying to fill a holed container. What we need is close
the holes. And that’s the purpose of movements like 99%.

> So, perhaps you thought you were speaking to a crowd of poor people,
> who would all cheer when you demonize the rich.

Well, to people who aren’t the 1% (quite 99% of population) or to people
who would benefit from a better situation for them (more than 99%, near
100%).

> But a few of us in the free software community, like me, actually
> learned how to make money writing and giving away free software,
> making money from supporting it and extending it, and ended up rich.

Great, you found a way to make money without speculating, prohibiting,
privating, apropriating, oppressing, etc. That’s rare! You’re really
lucky :D …and thus you’re not part of the 1% whom the 99% movement is
about ;)

> I am not ashamed of making money or having wealth, nor do I think I am
> making the world more evil by doing so.

Actually you could be ashamed if like most of the richest you made up
money not by work force but by simple property. Though I think it’s not
a reason, and that shame doesn’t have sense and shouldn’t exist, since
everything that you do is determined by your environment, and if you end
in a situation where the society conditioned you to oppress the people,
it’s not your “fault”, but the result of an unegalitarian and
hierarchical “social” system we need to deconstruct. So we don’t need to
get rid of powerful people but of power itself.

Like said Jesus of Nazareth: “don’t hate the sinner but the sin”. And
then the Church did the exact opposite and invented the concepts of
“free will” and of “fault” just to justify the punishment of people (and
stopping people from questioning society and situation determination)
and gain more power :}

> So, you are correct in supposing that you should revise your offensive
> speech, or should stay away from the meeting.  Thank you for noticing,
> and for volunteering to leave.  (I would prefer that you stayed, and
> just eliminated the deliberate slurs against persons of wealth.)

The problem is not persons of wealth, but persons who prevent others to
have wealth… Especially in a society where technology and machines make
us produce enough food and commodities for more than three time the
whole human population… and then throw away the 90% of that for “profit
reasons” x)

> Ludovic =?utf-8?Q?Court=C3=A8s?=w said:
>> I can sympathize with the rejection of institutionalized political
>> correctness that (I think) JosÃ's message is about.  After all, the GHM
>> audience is small and should be able to address problems through
>> discussion, without resorting to a lawyer-jargon policy.
>
> I am no fan of censorship.  And I donate annually to TheFire.org, the
> Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, which has spent a
> decade working to eliminate "speech codes" at government-run
> universities, most of which are aimed at suppressing poorly-defined
> "hate speech" or "speech that offends somebody".  FIRE defends
> students and professors who get kicked out of school over such issues,
> for example.  So I know the issue pretty well.
>
> But, because we are not a government, it is our right as a voluntary
> community of interest to decide on our own standards of behavior.  And
> to decline to participate with people who violate those standards.

But remember the right to attack others’ rights isn’t a right but a
privilege of the powerful.

> Because hacker culture historically came largely out of universities
> full of relatively young,

> socially naive,

Hippies. I have to notice and warn you: full of hippies. Hippies
everywhere. They even began questionning agism and racism before
others. Sexism were just a question of time, and guess what: it’s still
coming.

> hacker culture has been a hotbed of unconscious sexism.

Not “hacker culture” specifically, all culture is full of unconscious
sexism. We’re built in a sexist society, we’re all sexists, even the
most feminist of us. So all that we can do is *becoming* *less* sexist,
and deconstructing every day our irrational and unegalitarian behaviors.

> We have unknowingly suffered from testosterone poisoning.
> […]
> The true spirit of free software is as much at home in estrogen as it
> is in testosterone.

Don’t imply it’s a natural/hormonal issue. Humans are powerful living
beings because most (maybe all) of their abilities and behaviors are
socially constructed, thus *cultural* instead of “natural”: we’re to
most of other animals what computers are to most of other machines,
powerful because mostly made of software. Now we have to fix our
software parts, to hack them, to dive into the deepest parts of our
proprietarian firmwares and BIOS to deconstruct the things that are just
the fundamentals of the oppressive and hierarchical society: patriarchy
(as Engels, Simone de Beauvoir, Kropoktine and others noticed,
patriarchal and proprietary behaviors are like the two sides of the same
coin: the coin of authority; and let’s recall the deep, almost
essential, fundamental anti-authoritarian values of hacker culture).

And let’s recall men produce estrogen too, and women produce
testosterone too. Maybe not in the same proportion, but if men produce a
bit more testosterone, women are a lot more sensible to it, and that
largely compensate the difference. Hormones are just of negligible
effect. What drive us is still mostly the brain, and what’s were built
in it by society, would it be rape, or solidarity. It’s up to us to hack
it.

> The GNU project's roots are deep in hacker culture

And hacker culture’s roots are deep in
hippie/anarchist/anti-authoritarian/anti-proprietarian/egalitarian
culture. Too much to stay affected by some marginal and accidental side
sexism.

> Richard Stallman embodies the stereotype remarkably well, despite the
> decades that he has spent learning to be more persuasive to broader
> audiences.

And the narration of the hippie spirit in hacker culture at MIT at the
hacker golden age remain to me the most exciting and convincing part of
it discourse, because it go trough philosophical, political, ethical,
economical and psychological values. And it’s a really strong discourse.

> It takes a constitution of steel, or a principled rejection of
> relentless input from outside, for a woman to survive and thrive in
> yesterday's hacker culture.  But because it is OUR culture, we can
> shape it to be less abrasive.  Both less deliberately abrasive, and
> less unconsciously abrasive.  And every strong or self-sufficient
> woman who comes in, can slowly help teach us to make it more welcoming
> to the next rank of women, who are not quite as strong or quite as
> isolated.

First, s/women/feminists/, because some women are so much conditioned by
our sexist society that they can’t exit out of it and keep supporting
it, and because even men can study patriarchy and deconstruct sexism to
make a better world. It regards everybody, not only some women.

There are plenty of feminist documentation across the web and libraries
too. You can try to document by yourself: there’s a lot of really
interesting things that could answer to a lot of your questions. Most of
feminist already spend a lot of time for a lot of work, studies,
reflexion and activism to do, so it’s better not wasting it and… well,
as you probably already heard, in a nutshell: RTFM.

> The mere fact that we are having this discussion means that the policy
> is having an effect, and probably a positive one.  As you review your
> slides and your draft speech, if you get a twinge about a racist,
> sexist, ageist, or cashist comment or image that you were planning to
> use, consider how you could rewrite it to make your point without
> putting anybody else down.  Some people climb to the top of their
> field on the shoulders of others.  It's a much slower climb if you
> spend your time stepping on their toes instead.
>
> PS: As this discussion has noted, perhaps the GNU project should revise
> some of the sexist jokes on the website, too.

+1

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