http://www.independent.com/news/2017/mar/23/trump-making-soc...
"By cannibalizing expanded Medicaid coverage to the tune of $880 billion, Trump and the Republicans can justify massive tax cuts for a group who needs them the least, the very wealthy and reasonably healthy. [...] Trump and the Republicans have seized upon a much bolder solution: Cut costs by making health care accessible to those who need it least — the young, healthy, and rich."
https://www.jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/trump-is-the-candi...
"So what do I do? I agree with nearly everything he is for, but I’m better qualified to make it happen. I avoid some issues, but I go for his most popular ones and say, yeah! Want that! And I can make it happen better than he can. I’ve got the experience of working in government, but I’m not the establishment any more than Mr. Trump is. Heck, I’ll offer him a cabinet post. I could use his energy in my administration." -POURNE
http://voxday.blogspot.nl/2016/04/jerry-pournelle-on-donald-...
"But he has never wavered on his desire to fill the Supreme Court with Justices as near in scholarship and view to Scalia as possible; that alone would be enough to get me to the polls for Trump if he’s nominated." -POURNE
"One thing that is known about ARPA: you can be heaved off it for supporting the policies of the Department of Defense. Of course that was intended to anger me. If you have an ARPA account, please tell CSTACY that he was successful; now let us see if my Pentagon friends can upset him. Or perhaps some reporter friends. Or both., Or even the House Armed Services Committee." -POURNE
"The man has learned nothing from his presence on MC and sets a bad example of what people might potentially accomplish there. I'd rather recycle his account for some bright 12-yr-old...)" -KMP
Nice to know the internet hasn't changed that much.
1) A group of individuals apparently incensed at some minor infarction by their target.
2) It is not entirely clear why the behavior of their target is wrong, or why it should merit excommunication.
3) The group displays incongruous rage at their target given the apparent wrongdoing, using terms that focus on the target's character rather than the nature of his putative wrongdoing.
4) Certain members of the group are unable to contain themselves and let slip references to the real source of their rage.
5) The expulsion is done by a minor player who does not necessarily take part in the discussion.
6) The summary reason given for the expulsion is different from, and even contradicts the original issue.
R.I.P Jerry Pournelle. Fearless, and always first into the fray.
It was not politically motivated (I am in that thread from 1985). Pournelle was a pain in the neck when drunk. And a blowhard (which is hardly a crime, but doesn't make people sympathetic when you call them assholes and then tell them to do things for you).
As for the proxmiring: he was one of the common offenders; he loved to talk archly about how he was part of the insider elite, while claiming that that was proof of his democratic ideals.
FWIW I did read some of his novels.
I don't remember if the official MIT AI Lab Tourist Policy was written down at the time POURNE was flushed, of if he agreed to it and signed it like the rest of us tourists did, but it's pretty clear he violated it with his anti-social behavior and bad attitude, he took advantage of the MIT AI Lab for his profit making enterprise BYTE Magazine, promoted his books on SF-LOVERS, he never hesitated to espouse his political beliefs, and he threaten to exploit his political connections for revenge. So flushing him was completely justified, regardless of his politics.
http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/text/tourist-policy.html
>"A tourist sponsored by a laboratory member would generally receive some guidance and tutelage concerning acceptable behavior, proper design techniques for hardware and software, proper programming techniques, etc. The expectation on the laboratories' part was that a large percentage would become educated in the use of the advanced computing techniques developed and used in our laboratories and thereby greatly facilitate the technology transfer process. A second expectation was that some percentage would become interested and expert enough to contribute significantly to our research efforts."
>"13. Any use of the MIT ITS machines for personal gain, profit making enterprise, or political purposes is not a legitimate use of the Laboratories' computer resources."
>"14. These specific statements of policy give a minimum of how a tourist ought to behave to be a responsible user on the MIT ITS system. They are not a complete list of all the ways tourists should or should not behave. Just because some particular anti-social behavior is not listed does not mean that it is acceptable. What a tourist should do is cultivate a good attitude: make a positive effort to anticipate and avoid actions that would interfere with other users. If you cannot tell whether a certain course of action can interfere with any one, find out from someone else before trying it."
When KMP said "The man has learned nothing from his presence on MC and sets a bad example of what people might potentially accomplish there. I'd rather recycle his account for some bright 12-yr-old...)" he could have been referring to good tourists like Rob Griffith:
https://archive.org/details/getlamp-rgriffiths
"I believe on one trip we were touring the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab, and we saw some people gathered around this terminal. And we inquired what they were doing, and out of that came this game Zork, and my friend, since he was at MIT, had us get an account, and we were able to log in and figure out what to me looked like an extremely arcane set of commands to actually get this game running. From then on we were pretty much hooked from the first time we actually saw it. I believe we saw it when we were walking through the MIT AI Lab. I was a guest. Even back then there was some pretty amazing stuff in there. To see all these students and professors huddled around this terminal. What are the doing? They had all these incredibly cool Lisp Machines with big gorgeous displays, and a bunch of people were huddled around a machine that's got text. And we were sort of intrigued. I believe that was the first time I actually saw the game, so to speak. You know, I never got names, so I don't know. I was a petrified little 15-year-old kid walking around the MIT lab, so it was a bit of a feeling of "Am I supposed to be here?", and if I am supposed to be here, I'm pretty sure I'm not supposed to talk, so perhaps I'll just be quiet and observe."
"Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free."
A quote from my all-time favorite science fiction author, RAH, also seems appropriate:
"TANSTAAFL - There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch!"
If you think anything you listed was "free", you're delusional. :-)
You're also laser-focused on one minor incident in a very long, productive life.
Their whole argument is how he shouldn't speak in public about ARPANET and that (quoting exactly): "The more attention you (and other people) draw to non-blow-em-up use of the arpanet the more likely some Proxmire type is to start inquiring into its operations.".
So, let's keep it to our small boys club.
Fuck them. If anything Pournelle's exposure of it helped it get into more people's minds, and open sooner.
Pournelle was a GUEST USER of a system at MIT, accessing it through an ARPAnet dialup node (of which he did not have official permission to use).
The admins of said system requested that he not talk about non-official use of the ARPAnet in his BYTE column (so that the government people funding the network, not ask "why does this scifi writer have access to these systems?").
He persisted, and then he decided to be rude and mouth off to the people that ran the system he was a guest user of. When they got tired of it and locked his account, he threatened to use his contacts / influence to make things difficult for them, and falsely claimed it was due to politics and not his own entitled attitude.
How is that not being a huge jerk? Honestly, that's well into a-hole territory in my opinion.
I get all that -- I even quoted where they suggested the non-military it should be kept from the military guys.
What I say is that not having it kept
>How is that not being a huge jerk?
First, those people weren't the creators and payers of ARPAnet. The US government and the "military guys" were. So he wasn't "their guest" to begin with.
They just administered it. The admins of a system are not owners -- nor are their pals who they let in covertly.
Second, (and this holds whether you are a guest or not) if you're invited somewhere and see guys keeping a good thing to themselves and not wanting it to get noticed by the masses, you're not a jerk to dismiss their "radio silence" rule, and tell others about it.
They're the jerks for being silent about it (even if that was just out of fear from having it shut down).
Clearly the ARPAnet needed to open up to more people -- and eventually get to something like the internet.
Keeping silent about the "non-official use" because you are lucky to be in would be cowardly and selfish (I'm in, screw the masses, they don't have to know such a thing exists and people could potentially get join if we opened it up).
You think the only people who built the internet were "military guys"?
You think the ARPANET and MIT AI Lab should have been opened up to all of Byte Magazine's users, instead of Byte starting their own private commercial BIX network, and that MIT AI Lab staff should have supported all of those clueless newbies as well as the drunk and belligerent POURNE himself, instead of performing the research and development that was their day job?
You're totally off base, entitled, and have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. So educate yourself with the facts:
Read the MIT AI Lab Tourist Policy [1], which POURNE clearly violated.
[1] http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/text/tourist-policy.html
Then read POURNE's own gushing flattering words about how RMS took his own time to suffer him by teaching him about TECO and EMACS, and actually wrote him free software on demand to his specifications [2].
[2] https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reviews/bookmonth.html
>"I first met Richard Stallman (he called himself RMS in those days) when he was a graduate student at MIT and I was just learning about the ARPANET. He was immensely helpful to me in those days, patiently showing me things about emacs — his full-screen editor that he wrote in TECO, and the less said about TECO the better — as well as adding some special code to take care of things I wanted to accomplish. I learned then that RMS and I have a common failing: We don't suffer fools gladly or indeed at all, and we are sometimes wrong about who is a fool. But that's another story for another time."
And finally, read the words [3] of an anonymous MIT-AI Lab member who spent much of their own time helping POURNE and I as well as many other tourists. Even though POURNE isn't around to defend himself, I feel obligated to post this in response to the crass misunderstandings and misstatements of the facts in your attempt to smear the MIT AI Lab and its members (your own words: "Fuck them."), and because I agree with the point that "If he didn't want to have this as his enduring legacy, he had plenty of opportunity to make amends. And the offensive acts were not private ones.", and also with the points about asymmetric audience and the responsibility to do well by one's celebrity:
[3]
>We definitely had seen a great many "tourist" users, and it seemed to me that they would come away enriched. People spent a lot of time with Niven, Fuzzy (his wife, as I recall), and Pourne, showing them around the place, including them in the social aspects. ____ and I had him use the Lisp-teaching program. He used mailing lists to engage an interested audience.
>Then later, as I recall, he wrote publicly in negative terms about the whole of society that had welcomed him in, as if these were all abuses. As if he had a secret he was compelled to share, but not really a secret since so many knew. As if any community shared was just grist for the mill if it could be turned to buy celebrity.
>But the entire justification of tourist use was that the machines would otherwise sit idle. Any time I spent, and I suspect others spent, talking to him were unpaid. They made better use of resources than if those resources were used strictly as planned. But he didn't see it that way.
>That's his right. But it's my right to see him as neither courteous to his former hosts nor visionary about how the world works and should work, at least from those experiences. (I never got to reading his books, in part because of these other experiences. It soured me to the need.)
>But our public personas, the places we take a stand, are are our enduring legacies. It is our afterlife. I am not religious, and so what I do in life is a preparation for how I will be perceived when I am not around. I hold him to a like standard.
>If he didn't want to have this as his enduring legacy, he had plenty of opportunity to make amends. And the offensive acts were not private ones. They were ones he used his stature in the community to magnify in a way that those of us who were implicated had no similar way to respond.
>This, by the way, is the underlying basis of things like libel that make them differ from slander. I'm not alleging either slander or libel here, but I am saying that the key issue in libel is not just untruth, it's about the access one has to broad audience. If you say something in print and the person who needs to respond has no similar access to print, then your words have asymmetric effect in public conversation. The core issue is not print vs non-print, not paper vs word, in case you get confused about whether the internet is print. The core issue is audience. And even on the internet there is the issue of asymmetric audience.
>Asymmetric audience is prone to variations on the Peter Principle, where a good writer can gain audience that allows them to speak on other topics. There is considerable value in that, but also considerable responsibility to do well by one's celebrity.
Second, the network was for official government approved use only, which mostly meant research and communication between researchers. Everything else was an open secret, but officially under the radar.
At the same time, USENET was running on UUCP over TCP, which meant that the majority of traffic was alt.binaries, and a big chunk of that was porn.
So, yes, having an overly entitled jackass publicly embarrass them was something most admins feared. (My brush with greatness was Cat Yronwode and the cs.utexas mail to news gateway. But that was a decade after this.)
One of us.
"How Jerry Pournelle got kicked off the ARPANET" http://www.stormtiger.org/bob/humor/pournell/story.html
However, I enjoyed his writings, both SF and his column in BYTE. Rest in peace, Mr. Pournelle.