What to do about intellectual dishonesty at the Trisquel forum

It made me laugh and at the same time, it's 100% percent justified.
Thank you for this!

It isn't just number of posts. I can scroll through my Trisquel mailbox and see every thread and subthread that has blown up into a mess. There is only one individual present in every single one of them, and it is the same individual who joined the forum immediately before this became a common occurrence.

It is particularly concerning that users who have joined since then are receiving the impression that such behaviour is normal for this forum.

https://trisquel.info/en/forum/free-software-foundations-problems?page=1#comment-128506

"And although I am a new user, but I think that I learned from user's conversation that a user can post a off-topic sometimes. I can find those off-topic posts."

This is not to say that heyjoe has not made any valuable contributions. The latest Abrowser update appears to be partially in response to the issues he raised in the web browser thread. Every new tab (not just the first one opened since the update) now contains a set of privacy settings (see screenshot), including all of the ones that result in automatic connections. It is clearly explained why users might choose to enable some of these features to improve privacy or security, but disclosed that they require automatic connections. With the default configuration, tcpdump shows no third party connections upon opening or closing Abrowser. Freedom 3 in action!

However, the frequency with which discussions here have been derailed lately does seem to be a problem. You make a good point that the release of Trisquel 8 will bring in some new members, and it is important that the level of discourse has returned to normal by then so that they can receive support without distractions.

That said, making sure that this happens is the role of a moderator. I'm sure that David is paying attention and will make the right call. I can understand why heyjoe might have gotten under your skin. He has been nastier to you than to anyone else here. However, I think the healthy thing to do is to let it go. Your presence is an important one in this forum. You helped me a great deal when I was migrating to free software, and I have seen you help many others as well. Trying to reason with some people is like trying to decapitate a hydra, and your time is more valuable than that.

Alternative media, alternative truth, alternative FSF, alt-freedom and alt-right.

They hate the liberal left which is FSF in their mind.

To put it in their own parlance: "Fake News". Are we winning yet?

Magic Banana said:
Good illustration of what intellectual dishonesty is. Thank you for that.

What I'm about to say is directed to the character "heyjoe"

HeyYOYO you talk to much barbarity, you are a personal disgraced and you are a classic "INSIPID" , RETAIN BY YOUR OWN intellectual disorder and dishonesty.

Sorry Magic FOR MY WORDS, i AM ON YOUR SIDE!

I would go so far as to say that using GoogleAnalytics to spy on users, even after the privacy consequences of doing so have been pointed out, is reasonable grounds for being banned from this forum. I know of no justification for anyone who cares about software freedom using GA, and no reason why we should allow this forum to be flooded by aggressive trolls who clearly don't care about software freedom. To put my clicks where my typing fingers are, I will be down-voting every comment I see by "heyjoe" from now on, unless they make a valuable contribute to the discussion.

I don't like witch hunts. I prefer to ignore the users I deem dishonest, boring or simply dumb, as far as they don't threaten my beef and my values.

>I would go so far as to say that using GoogleAnalytics to spy on users, even after the privacy consequences of doing so have been pointed out, is reasonable grounds for being banned from this forum

No, it is not, they have not broken any forum rule

>It is perfectly ok to see him repeatedly troll at a new member of this forum, starting from day #1 since he joined

He never did that with me or with any other user that has respected the forum rules. Le Bannanna Magique is good folk. nun_shame.png for you!

>troll

You both misuse the word. I guess you don't really know what a troll is. I recommend Jodienda, the benevolent mastertroll, explains it to you right away. Dear Jodienda, can you explain to these gents what a troll is?

>hypocrite

Not really. Maybe Joe or Anchovi or whatever the name of Le Guitarra Jose is doesn't give a fuck about the privacy of others, only his own personal privacy. That doesn't make them a 'hypocrite' but rather a very selfish individual.

BTW, I am not defending Le Jose Guitarra. I think he can defend himself just fine, just as he can derail and bait you into developing neverending threads. That's still not trolling though.

I will now tcpdump all of you in order to find out who can stay and who must be banned! ;-)

> I don't like witch hunts.

Witch hunts are cruel and barbarian efforts to kill innocent people for reasons that are even factually wrong.
What happens here has nothing to do with a witch hunt.
heyjoe doesn't get killed, he just gets called out for all the shit he pulled, and rightfully so.
Also there is solid evidence for why people are mad at him.
He just completely fucked up. Seriously, i think this forum was very patient with him. Others would have started to yell at him way earlier...

Calling this a witch hunt is much like calling illegal sharing something like "piracy". It's not.

Honestly, I haven't seen any particular change with heyjoe coming along. This forum has always been a mess. Heck, there have always been people around spreading disorder.

I think the real question is, what can be done to make the forum more organized and coherent?

I wouldn't make a comment here, as this is an ad hominem topic dedicated to mobbing and personal attacks. The very creation of such a topic is against every ethical rule in my book.

But then I thought it is an opportunity to express some of my concerns with the Trisquel forums as a whole. What I will say has nothing to do with heyjoe, but has everything to do with the general code of conduct that dominates Trisquel forums.

Please don't ignore the fact that people are not coming here for random chat. They are coming here because they are somehow attached to the FOSS philosophy, so I think they shouldn't be alienated for not obeying concrete viewpoints of the lot. Actually, freedom itself is inherently antonymous to meekness, and FOSS encourages questioning everything and challenging the status quo. Yet if someone questions Snowden or RMS or Moglen or FSF, he can be singled out as persona non grata - a black sheep. Personally, if one of my beliefs / decisions / sacred values was not challenged, that would make me feel *extremely* uneasy. I would really be glad to see that my ways are challenged hard, and can stand against the challenge. I *need* that challenge to be comfortable with my values and decisions. And I am sure all the prominent figures heyjoe had questioned would not mind it at all. But any newcomer challenging anything sacred to FOSS in these forums can be subjected to mobbing, subtle psychological violence, kind of being shouted down. Yes, it is effectively *shouting down* someone. To some extent, this even goes for old timers.

One needs to walk on eggs in order to discuss something sensitive. For instance I was supposed (actually given my word) to discuss corruptibility of the FOSS movement, but I will not, as this forum is demonstratedly not suitable for unrestricted thinking. You have to keep your "inconvenient" thoughts to yourself, or you risk mobbing at the least. You may call it exaggeration, but this is how I constantly have felt in this forum, from the very start to this day. I can't count how many times I had self-censored myself because of this.

Let me give a striking example. For instance you can't question any possibility of the prominent "saints" being bribed by NSA to shepherd FOSS movement in a certain direction, can you? You see, heyjoe questioned the unquestionables and ended up here (the *real* reason why he ended up here). It is a taboo, unquestionable, ironic in a free world. (Not that I question it at all - I am a good sheep.)

When I first read the GPL, I couldn't believe my eyes and re-read it maybe 10 times in my bed, dreaming, re-reading, re-dreaming, throughout the night. I didn't sleep that night and the next morning I was an instant FOSS proponent. I loved the ethics of GPL, and I recognized and respected the genius of its author. But FOSS, the philosophy, is one thing, the whole lot of organizations and prominent figures leading the movement is another thing. I respect them, but I am not bound by them, nor I regard them as ultimate authorities. Authority and freedom is an oxymoron.

When I first registered here, I had questioned the status of firmware (still an open issue due to "undiscussability of the sensitive") and suggested a novel approach to Trisquel development. I had gotten similar defensive, authoritative, irate and rigid responses, but it didn't escalate because I didn't talk back and didn't press on. I suspect I would have ended up being another "heyabdullah", had I pressed on.

There are certain taboos here, so serious that you can only joke about them. This is not what freedom was supposed to be. And this overly defensive attitude potentially alienates a good deal of potential users.

Frictions particular to heyjoe versus the community are beyond my current scope. My main scope is the general code of conduct overshadowing this forum: Overly defensive and rigid attitude. Undiscussability of the inconvenient. Alienation. Mobbing. Intimidation.

Unfortunately it is more or less the same in most platforms. But Trisquel forum is particularly shining in this regard.

Just for the record, I'm not comfortable with this topic either. We have a user who is dishonest and often wrong, but that is no justification for drawing attention to and personally attacking him in this way. I'm especially not comfortable with the idea of ousting members because of their views alone.

>I wouldn't make a comment here, as this is an ad hominem
>topic dedicated to mobbing and personal attacks. The very
>creation of such a topic is against every ethical rule in
>my book.

But you did. I suppose it is like heyjoe and his extreme concern for privacy, free software and security, until it comes to using GA and Gmail.

>Yet if someone questions Snowden or RMS or Moglen or FSF,
>he can be singled out as persona non grata - a black sheep.

Kindly show me any such questioning based on facts and logic that singled out anybody as persona non grata. Libeling people is not questioning them. Refuting using fallacies is a waste of time and potentially tricks new users to the forum.

>And I am sure all the prominent figures heyjoe had
>questioned would not mind it at all.

He is free to e-mail them if he wants to question them. If he writes about them in a forum with no proof, insinuating they are plants then he is not questioning, he is libeling.

>But any newcomer challenging anything sacred to FOSS in
>these forums can be subjected to mobbing, subtle
>psychological violence, kind of being shouted down.

What is "sacred" about FOSS? Will your next post contain "Gnuleluya's" as heyjoe's disrespectfully and childishly did?

>Let me give a striking example. For instance you can't
>question any possibility of the prominent "saints" being
>bribed by NSA to shepherd FOSS movement in a certain
>direction, can you? You see, heyjoe questioned the
>unquestionables and ended up here (the *real* reason why he
>ended up here). It is a taboo, unquestionable, ironic in a
>free world. (Not that I question it at all - I am a good
>sheep.)

Both you and Joe introduce your doubts about Snowden and show no proof of it. Meanwhile, he risked his life and made many inconvenient secrets public for the NSA and now lives in exile in Russia. It's not that I don't think there's a possibility he is being bribed by the NSA, just as if you told me that a teapot orbits the Sun somewhere in space between the Earth and Mars. Neither of these assertions can be proven wrong, therefore the burden of proof is on you. In the case of Snowden, having absolutely no proof (that you have showed me) and implying he might be a plant is tantamount to libel.

>One needs to walk on eggs in order to discuss something sensitive.

Funny, it doesn't seem to me either heyjoe or yourself walk on eggshells in the past few weeks since you started posting (since he joined and since you became a frequent poster).

>There are certain taboos here, so serious that you can only
>joke about them.

Kindly list what you perceive as "taboos" so we can know what you're talking about.

------

I find it difficult to believe that after reading all of heyjoe's posts anyone did not come to the conclusion that he mainly expresses himself with fallacies and is pointless and time-consuming. It has nothing to do with the strictness of this forum, it has to do with his purposeful use of fallacies, manipulating conversations and keeing them going ad nauseam.

Finally, if you don't want to be singled out, it may be a good idea not to take over a forum within the first few weeks you joined it. Particularly if your posts are going to be full of fallacies and illogically critical of the central topic of said forum. Basic understanding Abdullah.

Edit: Typo.

As (almost) always, I've been following the recent discussions at the forum that involved some heated arguments between people who mostly weren't wrong but sat on different sides of many issues. As other times, I've seen those threads evolve from their intended original intent into some very time-consuming affairs which at some point or another end up showing the worst of some or all of those involved.

It's not easy to keep track of who's been "worse", who's been more disrespectful or who's ultimately right and hasn't done anything wrong when most of those involved are to me interesting, insightful people who just happen to not necessarily like each other's way of expressing their ideas or just disagree on many aspects of those but still share some common goals and ideals with most of the Trisquel community.

It's also not easy to keep productive a forum that has always been very open to different ideas and which features very vocal advocates of strong ethical, technical and even philosophical positions. Arguments get heated (and frustrating) easily, sometimes by misunderstanding, sometimes because of the varying amounts of knowledge between those arguing and sometimes just because we're humans, we react and we like to "win".

I don't think that anybody likes to write thinking about how each one of their words may be de-constructed, analysed and used to prove a point in another person's post. Many of the themes we talk about here are complex enough to warrant complex (and error-prone) writing and if we add the fear of being subject to nitpicking, some useful ideas will probably remain unwritten. Many of the community members are also very competent arguers and challengers, something which is great for the free software cause but doesn't particularly help with getting conflicting points to rest.

I know that as some other times before, my words may sound too naive and superficial, but I've seen many similar conflicts arise in the past and the best outcomes we've arrived to have come from trying to put ourselves into each others' shoes and finding in our common ideas the strength to remain calm about the ones we don't share.

I'm aware that as many other areas of the project, there is room for improvement in the handling of these forums. We've always taken a particular approach to moderation given our freedom ideals and once we were able to avoid spammers and such, we've tried to limit mod interventions because most of the conflicts end up being resolved by the participation of a strong community. Sometimes I've regretted waiting too long for arguments to get productive but my experience tells me that trying to silence an ongoing discussion does not usually work well here. Also, talking to those involved personally works many times, but it comes with the inconvenience of removing the conversation from the grounds it started in.

I personally take great pride in the community that has formed around these forums and mailing lists with the years, and even if things can (and hopefully will) be improved, I think part of the circumstances of this community have given it a rather unique quality. We've got the best not-actually-Trisquel-users helping newcomers, we've got the most adamant Trisquel users understanding why others would rather use other distros, we're not always so rude when someone doesn't understand or know enough about the free software ideals and I think we even have the best part-time trolls!

We've also got a certain categorizing problem with forcing people to decide whether a new thread fits at the trisquel-users forum or at some place called The Troll Lounge, so I'm (again) at least temporarily renaming this forum as "Miscellanea", to avoid bad connotations when something is just too off-topic to be at trisquel-users. You can still troll a bit in a civil (and ideally isolated) manner and meanwhile I'll think about the best possible categorization for the next iteration of the site that we're working in.

This thread may not have been the best idea, but I think we still can get to a positive outcome overall if we focus on the good things that have come from being critical with each other. It could also be a good idea to rescue some of the best things to come from those derailed threads and try to keep a more productive conversation from now on.