On 5 May 2011 21:12, Kurt H Maier <karmaf...@gmail.com> wrote: > I'm not telling anyone what they're allowed to do. I'm telling them > what they're doing is stupid shit, and that founding principle of > suckless is basically sound.
Who's likely to behave more intelligently, a person who experiments and finds out what works and doesn't work for themselves and understands from experience why things work or don't work, or a person who religiously follows the preaching of some overcompensating jackass? There's nothing wrong with being passionate about a certain viewpoint, and there's nothing wrong with strongly criticizing people who are persistently stupid. Stupidity however is not an opinion, it is a behavior. What you're doing is attacking an opposing opinion with fruitless vitriol. You're not constructively criticizing an opinion, you're not providing any form of argument as to _why_ an opinion is flawed, you're just throwing fallacious remarks with the apparent aim of pressuring your opponent into submission. There are people in this world, like Theo de Raadt, who through their passion and frustration come across as assholes to the people at odds with them, but still provide a constructive argument, and then there are angry nerds who just come across as complete jackasses. How you say something doesn't alter the substance of what you're saying, and it is the substance that provides merit. There is no substance in calling somebody stupid without explaining the why.