> I agree that Stallman is probably not the best PR person for the FSF, but that's not what this is about.
I truly don't understand this. I am neither autistic or even a 10x programmer.
RMS is such a genius dude who can match an entire Symbolics programming team that had genius and legendary hackers. His math skills are superior even among the elite math students at MIT(source at end [1]). RMS wrote the first version of gcc and many other utilties and *yet* despite all of his talents and genius gifts he started FSF and choose to remain poor because of his strong belief in freedom. This is immensely inspiring.
Its very rare to see a genius and who scarifies their life for a cause in a single person. The people i can think in this category are Noam Chomsky, Aaron Swartz.
How can any other person being the face of FSF a better fit?
> As thoughtless teenagers, we made crude SC/ST jokes. Here’s one: at a urinal in a government recruitment center, there is a line marked on the wall with the note, “if you can pee above this line, you get the job.”
This was unnecessary considering the dalits commiting sucide after joining IIT or other elite colleges due to harrasment from the Brahmins community students. Even if you give the benefit of doubt on this one simply as telling a story, look for the next quote.
> .. but I am enough of a free-speecher to acknowledge that it has a right to
This... This is the mindset of the upper caste Brahmins. They don't want the reservations based on caste but at the same time they don't want it to go away, simply because it provides birth entitlement at the cost of the other castes.
That blog post is quite long, If you read the entire post you get the impression that after all caste system is not bad, just the implementation had gone wrong. In fact any one who says caste is not that bad especially in USA, it is very likely they are from upper caste brahmin community.
If there anything that Audactity can do which blender can not ? I plan to learn video editing using blender and don't want to learn another tool if blender can do everything Audactiy does.
It reminds me of the quote from SICP whenever i a domain specific languages frameworks etc
"Establishing new languages is a powerful strategy for control-ling complexity in engineering design; we can often enhance ourability to deal with a complex problem by adopting a new lan-guage that enables us to describe (and hence to think about)the problem in a different way, using primitives, means of com-bination, and means of abstraction that are particularly wellsuited to the problem at hand." -- Harold Abelson
> I think a technocratic single-party system (however terrible for liberty) would have never worked in India.
True. Not for the reason of colonialism. In china majority(98% plus) believe they are descendants of the Han dynasty. This unified view of belonging is what allows the single party system.
Total opposite is with India. The Hinduism religious vedic books dictates to segregate the society in the name of varna system(its successor modern day caste system) and even goes as far to restrict the education to only the priestly caste. This is the reason India is far behind in terms of education before the british era. Only after the conquest of British slowly everyone had access to education. This is the reason almost 95 percent of people are first college goers in India.
Much of what you say about "Caste" is either Church propaganda or Caste politics.
Large parts of India was under islamic occupation for 300-700 years followed by 100-300 years of Christian occupation. Both were quite destructive, destroying universities, burning down libraries and destroying/looting temples.
Hindus pray to trees, animals and consider everything divine. The misinterpretation of the Varna is a devious christian evangelical agenda.
This flies against the face of numerous example of leaders of the Hindu society and authors who are not part of the clergy.
The whole caste system which originates in Europe was transplanted to India to divide and rule.
> Hinduism religious vedic books dictates to segregate the society in the name of varna system(its successor modern day caste system) and even goes as far to restrict the education to only the priestly caste
Which vedic books? Can you provide a source? I have skimmed some vedic books, but never came across such restrictions.
> Only after the conquest of British slowly everyone had access to education.
Rigveda and later codified through Manu smriti which codified this Varna and Jati system and made a class of untouchables [1].
This is one of the reason father of Indian constitution gave up Hinduism and became Buddhist. Current Indian govt actively promotes jati and Varna and perpetrate communal divisions to stay in power and people justify those divisions.
Both Manu and Ambedkar were extremely unreliable relays of anything Vedic. They both had their own agenda for propping up some castes at the expense of another. Consider that the Rig Veda is written in a language that hardly anyone understands, there is no reason to believe Ambedkar could have faithful translated even one sentence of Rig Veda. Currently, the most authoritative source on RV is Jamison & Brereton's translation. I don't have access to it at the moment, but as I recall, there are just passing references to the varnas, shudras, etc.
There is a large body of evidence and research available for systemic exploitation based on Jati and varna's and the legitimacy of it claimed through vedas and manusmriti. May be go through wikipedia and other research sites can find an evidence of this system coming from vedic age and than subsequently developed into more repressive schemes. [1] [2]
Again, Manusmriti is not a vedic source. Mentioning it will only serve as a distraction and weaken your argument. The paper by Dipankar Gupta is junk. It does not cite the specific verse numbers of specific vedas. Apparently, Gupta has a lot to say, but gives the impression that he is simply making up stuff as he goes along.
The Wikipedia article is better. But you will notice the article citing the book I mentioned earlier: 'Stephanie Jamison and Joel Brereton state, "there is no evidence in the Rigveda for an elaborate, much-subdivided and overarching caste system", and "the varna system seems to be embryonic in the Rigveda and, both then and later, a social ideal rather than a social reality"'.
If there is really a "large body of evidence", I am still waiting for something concrete that you would cite, so that I can go look it up, in the Vedas.
I truly don't understand this. I am neither autistic or even a 10x programmer.
RMS is such a genius dude who can match an entire Symbolics programming team that had genius and legendary hackers. His math skills are superior even among the elite math students at MIT(source at end [1]). RMS wrote the first version of gcc and many other utilties and *yet* despite all of his talents and genius gifts he started FSF and choose to remain poor because of his strong belief in freedom. This is immensely inspiring.
Its very rare to see a genius and who scarifies their life for a cause in a single person. The people i can think in this category are Noam Chomsky, Aaron Swartz.
How can any other person being the face of FSF a better fit?
[1] https://sagitter.fedorapeople.org/faif-2.0.pdf