More flame war stupidity
Robert Seiner (publisher of TDAN) and Fabian Pascal are now claiming that Computerworld approached Bob and asked him to do something about the false charge that I personally engaged in censorship. To the best of my knowledge, they’re both lying. It was just me, and me alone, who approached Bob, which is exactly what one would think, if for some odd reason one cared about the matter at all. I don’t have the faintest idea why they fabricated this story, or what they think it demonstrates — but they did.
Seiner also picked a title for an article of mine he published, then published one by Fabian attacking me for the title. Classy.
Bob also made two promises in the matter which he didn’t keep. Nor did he have the courtesy to inform me that he’d changed his mind, nor did he really address it when I called him on it.
I wondered why Seiner kept on publishing Pascal’s stuff, even for free, when most of Fabian’s other publishers have dropped him. Now I have a better idea. They’re soulmates.
A pity. Partway through our discussions, Bob sounded eminently reasonable. That’s why I jumped at his suggestion I write an article for him. Oh well; live and learn.
And for the record — no, I won’t respond to Pascal’s critiques point by point. He typically attacks straw men, rather than restricting his barbs to my actual opinions. In those areas where we do actually disagree, I haven’t hesitated to publish follow-on arguments, repeatedly and at length, here and elsewhere. I’ve given that relative nonentity much more attention than he deserves.
Also for the record — even though I don’t respond to every nasty shot Pascal and his associates take at me, I’m of course not conceding that his other libels and opinions are actually correct. I just think that by and large he’s a waste of bandwidth, because even his coherent ideas are quickly sidetracked by highly illogical fulminations. Even in articles where he’s otherwise making enough sense to respond to, he usually goes off on some extremist semantics-related kick that doesn’t mesh well with his own imperfect command of the English language.
(I really want to respond to his film contracts example from a three-year-old anti-XML diatribe. But the article gets bogged down with various “definitions” that are not easily reconciled to normal usage of the words, and it’s too much trouble to sort through them all. Maybe I’ll respond to the idea without linking to the article itself, when I get around to it.)
Exception to the above slam at Pascal — he recently posted a good interchange he had with Hugh Darwen, which I’m referencing in another post in this blog. His side was wrong, but both sides were well-presented.
| Categories: About this blog, Data models and architecture | 2 Comments |
Typical bogosity — the “censorship” furor
Fabian Pascal and Alf Pedersen are complaining endlessly about Computerworld having censored some comments of theirs, in response to blog posts of mine (the first of which was a response to Alf’s blog post in response to my August column). They even seem to have gotten Tom Kyte worked up about it.
So let me be very, very clear.
1. I never had the right or ability to edit or censor comments.
2. I opposed almost all the editing and censoring that did occur.
3. I vehemently opposed the policy of editing comments (mine or anybody else’s) without a posted notice to the effect that they’d been edited, because that amounts to putting words into somebody’s mouth they didn’t actually say. This is the prime reason I no longer blog at Computerworld. (Had Computerworld had a posted warning about the likelihood of editing, as newspapers have on the Letters to the Editor page, I might have felt less vehement. But they have no such notice, or if they do it’s buried out of sight in a long legalistic Terms of Service page somewhere.)
4. I don’t recall ever suggesting the removal or editing of any comment whatsoever, except for one garbled non sequitur that wasn’t in a DBMS2-related thread.
5. I have a pretty good idea of why some posts were censored, based on direct communication with the editor in question, and it had to do with tone and nastiness and promotion of people’s websites, not with the substance of their comments. There’s only a slight chance I’m wrong about that. Indeed, I’m pretty sure he doesn’t have the technological knowledge to understand, for example, the main differences between Pedersen’s opinion and mine.
Let me stress that all this applies only to the blog editor, who’s a very different kind of person from the other editors it has been my pleasure to work with at Computerworld.
| Categories: About this blog | 6 Comments |
Restarting this blog; comments policy
I was going to let this blog sit idle until I could get around to dressing up its look and feel more. But I don’t want to wait for that, nor take the trouble to do it quickly, so what you see is what you get. Please excuse any dust or exposed girders.
For now, we’ll go with a very simple policy on comments.
1. I reserve the right to delete any comment at any time for any reason, without notice. The same goes for closing off comments, in a thread or overall in the blog.
2. If I EDIT your comment and still leave it up over your name, I will post a notice saying I’ve done so. I feel strongly about this; the blog editor’s refusal to adopt the same policy is the principal reason I no longer blog at Computerworld, despite the high regard in which I hold the print publication and almost everybody on the staff. (I continue to be very happy as a columnist there.)
3. The usual no-nos are forbidden here — plagiarism, spam, death threats, etc.
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Welcome to the DBMS2 blog
This is the first blog I’ve ever administered, and it was launched in a hurry so that I could follow up on my column introducing the DBMS2 concept. In other words, it’s very much under construction.
Please forgive the exposed girders, loose wires, missing amenities, and dust.
If you need to reach me directly, try curtmonash at monash.com. Please put “DBMS2” in the note title so that I can pick it out from among all the spam.
If you just want to check out who I am, my Computerworld landing page is as good a place to start as any right now.
| Categories: About this blog | 2 Comments |