A wise boss of mine, after reading a set of threads that I wrote like this, asked me to go think for a day on the difference between "being right" and "being effective."

Some of the things you say in these threads might be "right" but I can assure you that many of them are not effective, which is counterproductive to the goal you are trying to achieve.

You can stand by things you said but also learn from them/from people’s responses to them…. For instance, you declare someone’s response virtue signaling… This hit me in a funny way, partly because it’s valid, it’s true, there is a lot of signaling that goes on you learn to see, virtue and otherwise… but also because of how insidious a criticism it is, because it reframes a debate away from correctness and towards who said it, whether they’re posturing…

I think it’s a category error and an ad hominem attack to bring it up in a debate with someone. It doesn’t mean your wrong or can’t still beleive they were virtue signaling, if that’s what you mean by standing by what you said, but more than one thing can be true and that being your reaction is not honest engagement with the criticism… I don’t care think it’s about the joke very much, it’s not especially funny but not all humor has to be, and I don’t love their reaction to it either, but I think you’re confusing the feedback you’re getting here and there and probably elsewhere that your opinions should change… a sibling comment spoke of being right vs effective, and there’s something to that, but there’s also being right vs having a growth mindset, about being open to genuine conflict that sometimes brings new perspective or insight… But that doesn’t happen when one side shuts down the other with ad hominem attacks or uncharitable assumptions. To be fair, it doesn’t happen online in mailing lists or discussion forums at all very often. Maybe you only get these kinds of reactions here and when people seem more real to you in person you engage differently… I know most people engage differently online than in person, and different pseudonymously than using real names. Someone else here compared you to Linus, and there’s probably something there? There’s no doubt you brought some vision and insight to both these projects, as he did, but something changed for him some years back that was a growth moment and caused him new perspective on how he engaged with people online. The same could still happen for you, and it wouldn’t mean you were giving in to a “woke mind virus”, it would mean you were growing.

If you think this is a correct communication style for someone who thinks they're a leader, I suggest getting an assistant to write your correspondence, or maybe some socialisation bootcamp.

This is grim.

If you stand by it I'd say good.... luck, yeah, good luck, you're singlehandedly the gravest enemy of the project.

> The woke mind virus, more formally postmodern neo-marxism, is the greatest threat to civilization today.

"The woke mind virus" really? You used that non-ironically? This is not something a serious or sane person would say for real.

Holy shit. I’m a long-time admirer of freenet and you just single handedly destroyed any positive view of the project I may have held. Get a fucking grip and seek help if you can’t.