[ale] [Kinda OT] The "TalkMaster", Freedom and Free Software

[Jim Kinney]

Having met the as..., er, man, he is an entertainer first and little else
second. He drank his own kool-aide a long time ago.

The freedoms yelled for by his minions (as well as those of RLimbaugh on a
national scale) are a subset of those we are all supposed to enjoy.

As per usual talk show host style, they will take an idea or sound-bite
that does have some validity and twist it and pound on it until it no
longer resembles the original stated problem. Then they turn their
followers loose on it.

As with all show hosts, they push what pays them. Does Microsoft buy
product placement on his show? I would not be surprised if that were the
case.

There is no way in hell the conservative talk show pundits could EVER
mention the open source products, platforms or process in any light but
negative. What we do is viewed as socialism because there is a perceived
cooperation between developers. These show followers will only support
competition (i.e. Microsoft monopolies making a crap ton of money, Apple
monopolies making a crap ton of money, Cisco....). To cooperate to make a
better product is anti-American in their little minds.

Never mind that once the bidding for a new
bomber/highway/fighter/gun/school/bridge/etc. is over it's a cooperative
effort to build it between the multiple groups doing the work.

Never mind that taxpayer money has gone into such open source projects as
SELinux and PostgreSQL and OpenVista (hospital records) and Spacewalk (open
sourced from contracted Satellite Server).



On Mon, Jan 30, 2012 at 1:53 PM, mike at trausch.us <mike at trausch.us> wrote:

> I don’t know how many of you actually spend (waste?) time listening to
> talk radio, but I do on occasion.  One of the things I spend (again,
> waste?) my time listening to in the car or when I think to fire up the
> stream on my computer is Neal Boortz.
>
> Now, he seems to take the position that freedom is paramount and that we
> should all exercise it.  He constantly complains, for example, about
> “government schools” and how they do not really provide an education,
> much less equip our young to exercise their freedom.
>

Schools are more about "control" than education. That dictate comes from
the the same crowd that listens to his kind of drivel. "Zero Tolerance"
also translates into "zero progress". School kids have no freedoms.

>
> However, he seems to spend an awful lot of time pushing products for
> Windows in the spots on his show.  I have never even once heard him or
> any of his sheep call in and mention that there is free software which
> enables people to exercise their fundamental freedoms with regard to
> their computing platforms.  In fact, it seems that his platform is
> nothing more than a façade, where he is quite happy to push things that
> cause people to become less free as a result of the use of the things
> that he pushes.
>

Free as in beer is anti-American. Free as in speech is becoming similar.

>
> I find myself wondering:  Is this because he doesn’t know about it?  Or
> is he insincere?
>

Clueless AND insincere? Add in apathetic because Open Source stuff won't
benefit his bottom line.

>
>        --- Mike
>
> --
> A man who reasons deliberately, manages it better after studying Logic
> than he could before, if he is sincere about it and has common sense.
>                                   --- Carveth Read, “Logic”
>
>
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-- 
-- 
James P. Kinney III

As long as the general population is passive, apathetic, diverted to
consumerism or hatred of the vulnerable, then the powerful can do as they
please, and those who survive will be left to contemplate the outcome.
- *2011 Noam Chomsky

http://heretothereideas.blogspot.com/
*
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