Jerry Pournelle has died

In spite of the fact that many of those people who he accused of being "communists" went far out of their way to spend their precious time patiently answering his questions, tutoring and helping him (RMS even personally wrote some free software for him at his request -- how communist is that??!):

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."

But POURNE certainly threatened to use his political connections as a weapon against them. POURNE is the one who made his own politics an issue, who told John McCarthy (the computer scientist, not Joseph the commie witch hunter) that he thought MIT was run by a bunch of communists, and who posted ranting threats on BIX.

Re-read the sputtering mis-punctuated threatening screed he posted to BIX, and decide for yourself if you think he was drunk, or if he just acted that way all the time purely because of his political beliefs:

    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.

http://newsgroups.derkeiler.com/Archive/Rec/rec.arts.sf.writ...

I certainly hope for your sake that you're not in Texas or Louisiana or Florida, up to your neck in water, waiting for the climate change deniers in the government to bail you out.

MIT never sent me or POURNE a bill for the all the networking and computer services, personal guidance, tutoring and support we received pro-bono from the MIT-AI Lab staff, so it was free to us, and I for one appreciated it and am grateful.

RMS even custom wrote POURNE some free software at his request. You can't put a price on this: "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."

https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reviews/bookmonth.html

But they did send me an official MIT AI Lab Tourist Policy that I had to promise to abide by in order to use their machines, which I gladly signed and returned and followed. And POURNE was flushed because he clearly violated it, not because of his politics.

http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/text/tourist-policy.html

>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.

It's so ironic you're trying to Gish Gallop with tired talking point against big government, which funded the ARPANET, and which is currently busy dealing with a series of natural disasters, while you are trying to smear the MIT-AI lab as a bunch of communists. My failure to respond to all of your posts within your expected time frame is because they're simply not worth responding to.

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Gish_Gallop

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.

1) Niven didn't co-write any of the CoDominium novels, as far as I know. Mote had some historical references to it, but it was set hundreds of years after the CoDominium had collapsed.

2) The CoDominium weren't the "good guys" in those books.

3) Pournelle was not an "admirer of Mussolini".

Inaccurate to the point of being dishonest.

You're quite aggressive in this thread about someone who just died in a multitude of comments, and it's not like JP will rise up to defend himself. I don't like his politics either and I'm sure that some of what you wrote has merit but please have some respect. This simply isn't the time.

Japan is a great ally. I lived there for over a decade, and I can say that I love the Japanese people. But I will admit - and their people of the WWII generation would too (although - sadly they are (have been) passing too quickly), it took a solid kick in the teeth to get them to calm down and cooperate.

Sometimes, with intense nation-state disagreement, things are settled at the point of a gun. Where there is a winner and a loser.

I like diplomacy as much (or more) than the next guy ... but it is irresponsible for a nation to be unprepared for when that doesn't work.

N.B. Fighting back after Pearl Harbor is a different kettle of fish than exporting democracy by force. We have no business doing the latter. It's obscene.

EDIT: I didn't downvote you. I appreciated your take on the query posed.

Yet ironically, so many of those very same people who once argued that are now enthusiastically supporting and carrying the water for Trump's total capitulation to Putin. Makes you wonder if they really mean what they say, or if they just lust for power and hold party over country. Hmm...

> It is claimed by apologists for the Reagan administration that, whatever the exaggerations in capability, some of it intentional, SDI was responsible for the collapse of the Soviet Union. There is no serious evidence in support of this contention. Andrei Sakharov, Yevgeny Velikhov, Roald Sagdeev, and other scientists who advised President Mikhail Gorbachev made it clear that if the United States really went ahead with a Star Wars programme, the safest and cheapest Soviet response would be merely to augment its existing arsenal of nuclear weapons and delivery systems. In this way Star Wars could have increased, not decreased, the peril of thermonuclear war. At any rate, Soviet expenditures on space-based defences against American nuclear missiles were comparatively paltry, hardly of a magnitude to trigger a collapse of the Soviet economy. The fall of the USSR has much more to do with the failure of the command economy, growing awareness of the standard of living in the west, widespread disaffection from a moribund Communist ideology, and - although he did not intend such an outcome - Gorbachev's promotion of glasnost, or openness. Ten thousand American scientists and engineers publicly pledged they would not work on Star Wars or accept money from the SDI organization. This provides an example of widespread and courageous non-cooperation by scientists (at some conceivable personal cost) with a democratic government that had, temporarily at least, lost its way.

* I know Sagan isn't exactly a historian, but I'll choose his assessment of space war technology over other people's.

Regardless, other SDI technologies such as Brilliant Pebbles and Brilliant Eyes are direct predecessors to current, successful, military technologies. There have also been many spinoffs benefiting civilians.