Let's see:

1. You were the one who questioned my judgement first and dragged Debian into the mix turning the whole discussion into something totally different from the article under discussion knowing fully well that I am a Debian user and for the sole purpose of upsetting me.

2. You are the one who keeps questioning my motives no matter what I write about and seem to have a habit of following my posts on this forum.

3. You were the one who turned this whole thread into a distro-bashing thread which it was not meant to be.

4. You were the one admitted you liked to see me distressed on the forum and took deliberate potshots at my character and enjoyed the reactions (calling me a "whiner" etc.).

I will certainly not accept that you have innocent motives in discussing this article - rather I must conclude that you are using a random stranger on the internet for your own personal amusement. And that, I must report as a violation of LQ rules.

Come on man.

Laugh a little.

Life is too short.

And now back on topic --

Let me explain the article's context - the point of the article was completely missed in the first instance -- that there's politics in Linux that transcends distro politics - like FSF vs. OSI, DRM, software patents, GPL vs BSD, politics within FOSS as a whole and so on and so forth.

I certainly don't say Debian is politics free -- being a community driven distro, it certainly has more than its fair share and although I'm a passionate Debian fan it doesn't automatically imply that I agree with everything they do, but it's kind of idealistic to think that other distros are immune from politics of any kind and that the Linux community as a whole is politics-free.

And another point of the article was that some amount of politics is certainly beneficial because it makes the users focus to some common goal.

Thanks for the advice. :rolleyes:

I think this is getting a little too personal. I'd like to ask that everyone step away, breathe and move on please, or this discussion will be closed.

my personal opinion on politics is that they are what they are. sometimes they're good for the cause and sometimes they're not. all politics start with good intentions as most things do. but, do to human nature a few things enter the picture of politics. ie: greed, envy, jealousy, fear, personal gain etc. which then turns whatever truth that started to turn into idiocy. isn't the term "politic's" a shortened or slang for "policy" anyways? even voicing our opinions turn into a matter of politic. "should i say that now or keep it to myself out of respect for his position" or "for the project i'll let it slide for now, but later he'll realize blah blah blah" politics/policies are everywhere and unavoidable. if you don't believe, step back and look at your own household. you'll politics there and even policies too. it's a fact of life these days and you just roll with it and choose your own battles/politics/policies whatever. just mho.

Sorry, tricky. I'll try and avoid getting dragged into this kind of thing in the future.

I also ask members generally not to drag my personal beliefs into a topic where they're not relevant. I don't mind discussing ideas, as I said before, but if the purpose of a discussion is solely to get me to react to things based on something I wrote in the past, I believe that's contrary to the spirit of LQ.org.

I certainly don't go after people just to score points against them.

Regards.

My big question is, what is "politics"? Political Science as defined in my head is "The study of interaction between sentient beings". Which means that as soon as there exists more than one sentient being in the universe such that they can interact, you've got politics of some sort or another.

Everybody complains how bad politics is bad, but nobody thinks about good politics directly. People do talk about "cooperation", and that could be a term for good politics.

you've got a point and a good one. it's just that the bad political crap we see on tv and read about and hear about overshadows the good. so, unfortunately no one sees or comments on that. unfortunately, that's all people (newspeople that is) thinks that's what we want to know about. so we're being bred to look for the bad and not the good. imho. i remember where i grew up the local news team would do a daily spot on something good that happened that day, now it's murder, sports, and weather. look at this forum. the rules or politics about posting a thread is great. those are the good politics that we don't normally see unless someone else points it out to us.