was: "I hate you" ;-).

[Xen]

In public places where there is recognised authority, they have to comply 
with certain rules.

One of those rules is that they can only exert their normal powers that 
they have by way of their function, when they are recognisable as part of 
that function. In other words, they must wear a uniform or in some other 
way be distinguisable from other people.

The reason for this is explained by the simple fact that otherwise people 
could mask as police officers and demand anything from anyone, while 
claiming to be in the authority of law. And this can never happen. This is 
why there are laws and rules against that.

What you do in the IRC channels is throw away that distinction and that 
knowledge and that rule, and assume both roles at once, obfuscating what 
needs to happen.

What I see you doing is acting as user first, and moderator after, in the 
same discussion.

Because communication in good manners can only happen between equals, this 
is called the SNAFU principle, explained as precisely that -- because of 
that if you mix roles as a moderator, and assume both user status and mod 
status at the same time, you are guaranteed to mess up any debate you are 
having with your superior access to tools to guarantee that you win any 
factual disagreement.

I am sure you understand this. But let me explain a little.

If there is factual disagreement and one of them, precisely the moderator, 
has any ego surrounding the issue, that person might get offended by the 
disagreement.

People who get offended by disagreement typically try to force the other 
to shut up in whatever way. Normally, people have very little recourse to 
do so. In a technical system like this, when one party has these powers to 
silence another, this power will be used to win arguments of a factual 
matter.

The same happens when you are locked up in e.g. psychiatry or even a real 
prison. The one with the stick wins the debate. Always. I haven't been to 
real prison, but I have been locked up in a psychiatric establishment for 
a long time.

I now expect personal attacks from you based on that admission.

What you see happening in your channels is that disagreeing with a 
moderator who was acting in the capacity of a regular user, leads to a 
ban.

The only way to avoid it is to suck up to the moderator and say "oh yeah, 
sorry, you are right". Then the mod is happy and you are allowed to stay.

They call this power abuse. They call this power corrupts. They call this 
might is right. You really think you are impervious to that?

In police terms. They have different terms for "question" and "request". 
By law, a person is allowed to reject compliance with a question. By law, 
a person is compelled to agree with a request.

When police says "Would you like to step out of the car?" that is a 
question and has a different legal status from "Sir, I order you to step 
out of the car."

What you do as moderators is make these question-like non-obligatory 
statements and then when a person says "No, I would not like to do that" 
you silence or ban them when they speak again.

This IS power abuse.

No matter how much you can say it isn't, if ANY lawyer or attorney, judge 
or person of wisdom would look at this from regular society? They would 
agree with these sentiments because they are encoded in law and have been 
for a long time.

And then you say "You were asked to do this thing."

Pardon me? If it was just a question, I was allowed to say no. That is the 
basis of human conduct.

And now you make it appear as if the opposite is true. That if any person 
asks you to do a certain thing, you have to comply.

And why? Because, and here it comes: "your conduct should not change 
depending on whether a moderator was around". So it is no longer about 
authority. Now it is about morality. These moderators do not just claim 
authority over the channel. (Which actually they don't). They now claim 
authority over the morality of all people residing in the channel.

As such they do not perform the function of keeping order. They perform 
the function of keeping people in line with what they think people should 
act and behave as.

Note particularly the word behave. They are moderating behaviour, but not 
keeping order. Not as such.

They are not moderating acts. They are moderating behaviour, and this is a 
distinction.

Call me primitive again now, please. I beg of you.

They are not responding to deeds. They are responding to questionable 
behaviour.

According to them, of course.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

By now you may wonder why I am saying this because there seems to be a 
disconnect between my previous communication and my present one.

If police were to act the way you do, and of course they often do 
especially in lesser developed countries, but in my country there would be 
public hearings about it. "Sir, you were asked to step out of the car, you 
didn't, and now you're arrested."

That sort of thing is illegal but it is what you do.

I am going to keep this short now, I think I have spent enough time on 
this. This is about my third or fourth rewrite. Yes I have trouble writing 
and being clear.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

I will just repeat the following with an example to show what I am talking 
about:

A #debian moderator tells me not to use "service networking restart" or 
"systemctl restart networking" because: networking is not a daemon and as 
such it cannot actually be restarted.

A completely pretentious distinction without practical relevance.

That moderator subsequently went on to ban me when I disagreed.

"service networking restart" does its job the way it is intended, and 
moreover, there is no other way to do it (that I know of).

So I questioned his statements the way I would do with any normal person. 
I said "Well apparently it does something, doesn't it?" "It kills my 
network link" (I actually had an error in my interfaces file, apparently 
resulting from a Debian upgrade). I said "Maybe it does something."

Because why on earth would someone feel the need to tell me not to use a 
certain feature only out of principle?

It happens more. In a recent thread on SystemD someone told me not to use 
ifconfig to acquire network device status.

He told me to use "ip -o a" which gives a vastly reduced set of 
information and is not useful to be parsed by a human.

And he said "I hate that distributions have not deprecated it yet" 
(ifconfig).

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Linux people often have this habit of telling you what to do.

They are also telling you how to do a certain thing, as if there is only 
one correct way.

The English phrase applies. There is more than one way to kill a cat. But 
to many this thought is not acceptable. No, you will use THE way that we 
have all agreed on is the only way that should be used.

I consider this deeply offensive. I am not to be told by random strangers 
how to live my life.

Yet when I make an issue ouf of this in any IRC channel manned by Linux 
people, I get into a fight with a moderator, because it is most often 
moderators (that you cannot identify) making such statements.

And even if you could identify them, the way it is (because of past 
experience for example) -- this is not acceptable human conduct. Telling 
people how to behave, what to do, is not acceptable human conduct.

I was going to say "how to act" but they don't actually tell you what 
choices to make. You are right about that. They leave you free in your 
choice, but they still try to curtail what you /DO/. You are allowed to 
make the choice to pursue a certain route, as long as you don't use the 
commands that are necessary for it, so to speak. Useless distinction? Not 
so.

When I first got into trouble in #ubuntu it was with a person called 
Ikonia. She would remember. I am a 1000% sure it is a woman, because no 
man would behave like that.

Some have identity disorders though, but that aside.

First I didn't know she was a moderator, but that shouldn't have mattered. 
She was aggressively pursuing a path of dissuading a person to do a 
certain thing that she considered the "wrong" thing to do. "Do it right." 
she said. She said "I disagree. Do it right."

The person was relaxed about it and toyed with it a little. He said "Well, 
the more objections you give, the more stuff I think of I need to do 
before I reboot". She was complaining that he was still talking about the 
issue she thought she had cut short.

She had said "Maybe technically it is possible, but it is not acceptable."

"The risks are not acceptable."

Pardon me? You can decide for another what risks are acceptable for him?

The issue, namely, was a choice between driving a few hours to a remote 
server location and doing things at site, and performing a risky operation 
that, if it failed, would end up him having to drive there anyway. So the 
worst case scenario would be him having to drive there anyway, which he 
would need to do regardless if he didn't attempt it. There was no risk. 
There was no loss. There was no danger.

I am trying to find my IRC log of it (yours). Thus far, check out this one 
if you will:

http://irclogs.ubuntu.com/2016/01/01/%23ubuntu.html

And search "Ikonia". Exact same behaviour. Different person. Exact same 
behaviour. In Dutch we call that "schofferen". It appears to translate to 
"violate, desecrate". She is ordering that person around, the other person 
chimes in and also starts ordering him around to avoid a discussion. That 
person was not hostile like I may have been. That person was patient and 
at first said polite things such as "You realize you are not helping me?" 
And Ikonia responds "Your attitude is not acceptable to me."

I am reminded of "In order to be a master, you first have to serve." And 
Ikonia is not serving here, she is just ordering around.

This person is a terror.

And I know for a fact people are going to belittle this now the way I have 
written it.

In the end that person posted the requested fdisk output after which 
Ikonia immediately lost interest. By complying with her demands, the 
momentum was lost and everyone lost interest.

Apparently they coudln't solve it. But they also did not try. They just 
tried to achieve the system they wanted without actually being interested 
in his question.

By my standards this current document is a horrible email as I have 
suppressed most of my emotion to begin with, which is why it will seem 
extremely disconnected.

You may not understand why I am writing this at all, and I understand 
that. I am tempted to delete the whole thing.

Yet I am going to send this now and say "fuck it, fuck everything".

Sometimes you have to not care, right?

Maybe in the end something will come out of it, but don't expect it of me, 
please.

Oh yes and I was going to say I apologize for not having put in a header. 
That could be considered a misconfigured email client.

I mean a subject header. See ya, and ruin my day if you can.

You people are good at it anyway.