[conspire] (forw) conspire unsubscribe notification

[Rick Moen]

And one more thought I hadn't quite fleshed out:

> For the record, I certainly didn't wish Ruben to unsubscribe. 
> I was just attempting to convince him to stop doing things that are 
> known to be stupid and justifying them with transparently bad reasons.

Eric S. Raymond made a comment in one of his bits of advice to suits.
Paraphrased, it was:  'It's a tactically bad idea to tell clumsy lies to
technogeeks, because they tend to take it personally.'

Eric's assessment is spot-on.  Ever since joining the workforce, I've
noticed that, at many firms, it is expected that employees will politely
disregard occasional obvious whoppers from management, _but_ the
technical employees will nonetheless act like they never got that memo,
tending to _resent_ being treated as if they were really stupid.  It's a
common cultural difference between our crowd and the general population.

Ruben's a friend of mine, but he's shown a consistent pattern of
reacting, to being told that something he's doing's a bad idea, by
countering with some elaborate justification that (when looked at
squarely) makes no sense whatsoever.

Once, twice, three times when this sort of thing happens, you overlook
it, but eventually the bullshit starts to look like a pattern, and you
suddenly think 'Ruben, why are you treating us as if we were all really
stupid?'

More than a decade of noisy, emotionally operatic misbehaviour across a
dozen or more Linux-community mailing lists, all of it with elaborate
ideological justification -- usually wrapped up in 'for the good of free
software'.

But then, it turns out he's running for his public discussion groups a
ridiculously obsolete and _proprietary_ mailing list manager.  Because
'I hate Python.'

Seems to me, that's _really_ having your head up your ass.