Vision for Kubuntu

[Xen]

Valorie Zimmerman schreef op 24-10-2016 6:43:

> All the best,
> 
> Valorie

I think you know my opinion.

One thing that should be an indication is that there are hardly any 
users participating in this mailing list.

I don't mean to sound rough and I think your goals are wonderful. Yet 
sometimes what people do and what people say are different things.

If you are going to oust dissidents in whatever way while at the same 
time claiming you want more users to come in, you are doing 
contradictory things.

If you become hostile to contributors or people that mean well, because 
they use the wrong words or are critical of what you do, don't use the 
correct path to entry or whatever there is wrong with them,

And I have seen this on the Gnome mailing list in the past as well. And 
you can put me on moderation again for writing this message of course as 
I am still on moderation on devel-. On the ubuntu-gnome mailing list I 
had tried to provide some feedback that was met with hostility, as it 
usually is. I was never banned there but just left. The next message 
someone writes is "How can we better promote <...> in order to draw in 
more users?"

First you kick someone out or become hostile to someone's contribution, 
and then you wonder how you can draw in more people. How ironic.

The way you treat people is the best publicity you can have, or the 
worst, depending on what you do. You must first practice what you 
preach, and you are not doing that.

This is not exclusive to Kubuntu and in fact it is rampant across the 
Linux ecosphere although there are some more established places that are 
more tolerant.

Saying this is reason enough to be put on moderation.

Ubuntu practices a policy of don't let anyone know that there are people 
who don't like us. Hide the dissent. Project an image of overall 
happiness by hiding any contrary voices.

Organisations are typically not democratic structures. Decisions are 
final. Dissent is squashed. This is true across the globe, from Google 
to Quora to here. Private organisations have taken over public discourse 
and if Google decides to ban your account based on nothing at all, you 
are left without a voice. There is no way to appeal. There is no one 
independently looking at it. The corporation that runs the platform has 
the final say, and the only say, and often their image is more important 
than your freedom.

And no matter how .... corrosive.... this message might be (I hope you 
know what I mean) I just mean to say: you must practice what you preach.

If your image of being nice and friendly is more important than being 
nice and friendly, you will be not-nice and not-friendly in order to 
protect that image of being nice and friendly, and that is the irony.

I have had moderators on IRC tell me they are God.

I say you are not god, they say you are wrong about that.

If dictatorship is the vision you want to spread, you are doing a good 
job.

I don't disagree with your goals but I notice you are clinging to the 
past.

You can't spread an image by enforcing it in lieu of something real, or 
quenching disagreeing voices about it. A lot of Linux is invested in not 
ever letting the truth about Linux come out, because they want to sell 
it to people.

And those Linux people want to sell it using promotion. They are not 
content with letting the product sell it self, they will say so. So they 
engage in partial reporting. Politicians do so also. They will say what 
is good, but not what is bad.

They will say the pretty, but not the ugly. And they communicate a 
half-truth, or a quarter-truth, as Putin once called it, very recently I 
believe, in fact not more than 3 days ago. If you study the elections 
currently you will see that both parties, but particularly the media, do 
nothing other than that, and mostly also consistently from the 
Hillary-supporting side, since the Trump side has not much to 
misrepresent.

And if you ask people why they are doing that they say they do it 
because they love their country. They consciously lie and smear other 
people because they love their country.

And so people lie about Linux and smear other people or other systems 
because they love Linux... It's their duty to promote Linux in that way, 
they feel....

I have seen people promote or reveal the superiority of the Vi editor by 
saying that it is a better editor because its copy-paste operations are 
more logical to the mind because "p" means "put" and "y" means yank. 
Which obviously only holds true in the English language.

People will come up with *anything* to claim that theirs is the better 
product but this is not an honest way of doing business and leads you to 
try to control the communications of other people that try to say a 
different thing.

Now it becomes a matter of who controls the communication channels and 
this is what I see happening a lot.

And if you think you can create a bright new future by controlling the 
communication channels such that competing voices are not heard, and 
that this is an acceptable sacrifice for the greater good, I think you 
are deeply mistaken.

I mean that if your goal is "openness and fairness" but you feel that 
being "closed and unfair" is a proper sacrifice for achieving that goal, 
I think you are mistaken. You cannot achieve open and fair by being 
controlling and dictatorial.

You cannot achieve a better tomorrow by doing more of the same. And I 
think a lot of people believe that they can.

You see in the presidential elections of the United States of America 
currently that all principles are going out the window in order to 
_save_ the principles that they are throwing away in order to save them.

And it doesn't work. It is a moral bankrupt.