Celebrity advice

[Lulu of the Lotus-Eaters]

|Eric Raymeond at http://armedndangerous.blogspot.com/
|""There are some books so bad, but so plausible and influential, that
|periodically trashing them in public is almost an obligation. The really
|classic stinkeroos of this kind, like Karl Marx's Das Kapital

|Lulu can correct me if I am wrong, but links from Lulu's site has led
|me to understand him to be an avowed "otherwise intelligent person".

I make no such avowal.  I just post missives from the land of the
lotus-eaters.   And I sometimes find my ideas in everyones' heads[*]

That said, I'm probably one of fairly few list contributors who owns the
complete standard edition of Marx and Engels' writings (except an
unfortunate gap at 1857, and in some of the letters)... and who has read
a substantial chunk of it.[**]  I imagine ESR has not so read.

|advice to a new programmer to eschew Raymond...

I would certainly never urge anyone to eschew reading ESRs essays.  I
would urge them to find the essays a little bit silly--this applies as
much, actually, to the "Homesteading" and "Cathedral" essays as to the
gun-nut stuff.

But then, Raymond is a bit of an amateur in the areas I studied as a
profession (political philosophy, economics, sociology, etc).  I'd
certainly give him high marks in one of my erstwhile classes.
Nonetheless, I sure wouldn't want his job as "Official ideologue of Open
Source"... it's way too much work.  And he writes mostly true things,
even if for the wrong reasons.

Yours, Lulu...

[*] Who the heck put the 'post' in post-Situ?!  OK, I protest too much,
since I know it was a delightful writer named Hakim Bey, whom I saw
speak a couple weeks back (after reading his books some years earlier).

[**] Although I confess I never quite made it through Volume Three, I
know some certain persons who have.... and discovered that my own little
village (literally) in Western Massachusetts, called Turners Falls
(after a local mass murderer of the prior locals), appeared by name in a
nice turn of phrase about cutlery.

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