>% I can't let this pass. Stalin is NOT a cool name and there weren't
>If you plan to avoid a product because it has a name used by an evil >bastard, then you might consider avoiding other products based on past >associations.
No, not really. The objection is not that Stalin is a name used by an evil bastard, but that it was the name of a truly evil bastard. (Not his birth name, but the name he used for most of his adult life.) Stalin was alive not all that long ago; my father was in B-17 missions over Europe partly because of Stalin's support for Hitler (which ended sometime on June 22, 1941).
>A short list:
>Volkswagen -- The Hitler mobile
The *name* means People's Car.
>Mitsubishi -- Built the planes that bombed Pearl Harbor
No, that would be Aichi and Nakajima. Mitsubishi built the fighters that provided air cover at Pearl Harbor.
>Mercedes -- The engines in most of the Luftwafte planes >BMW -- The rest of the engines
With above, the makers of various weapons used in war. Big deal. Weapons don't commit war crimes, people do.
>General Electric -- Maker of nuclear weapons >Westinghouse -- ditto
So what's wrong with nuclear weapons? Not that I want one used again on this planet, you understand, but I think they've overall made this half century more peaceful.
>Names are pretty meaningless in and of themselves. I don't know what >motivated someone to name a product "Stalin". I find it hard to >imagine it was because he approved of the actions of a long dead >malevolent dictator.
Names have power. Emotional power. I don't really care why somebody named a product "Stalin", I just don't want to use it. His actions had a real impact on my father's life (and a heck of a lot more impact on lots of people's father's lives), so it's not like naming something Genghis Khan.
Do you think there's a reason that you don't see products with names like "Plague Rat" and "Human Excrement" in the supermarkets? The name "Stalin" gives me similar feelings.
On Fri, 27 Nov 1998 18:35:02 GMT, thorn...@visi.com (David Thornley) claimed or asked:
% Do you think there's a reason that you don't see products with names % like "Plague Rat" and "Human Excrement" in the supermarkets? % The name "Stalin" gives me similar feelings.
"Chocolate covered crunchy frog". Monty Python.
So the name Stalin is offensive to you. I'm fine with that. I don't seem to find myself bothered by human atrocities. I'm not saying I condone such things. I'm just not going to worry about something that happened before my lifetime. I had a grandfather in WWII (Pacific). No point in holding any grudges. It just isn't healthy. Look at you. The name "Stalin" gives you the same feeling as pouring a bowel full of human excrement for breakfast in the morning. That can't be good for you.
I'm sorry to make light of your deeply held convictions. I just find the whole topic silly.
* hjst...@bfr.co.il (Harvey J. Stein) | Except that development and operations were largely funded by the DoD, | AKA The Department of Defense, whose budget in those days was hugely | bloated by cold war concerns.
since the U.S. doesn't really have public funding of research, ARPA, now DARPA, has had a seminal role in the development of "public" research in the U.S. all the stuff coming
O'Reilly does many fine things for the computer community, but they are _not_ historians, and they make all kinds of simple mistakes that real historians unlearn in their early years, such as believing hearsay and tertiary sources without confirmation from primary sources. go see the RFCs, instead. (sorry, I don't have time to guide you right now, but the Index is a good start. the central repository is ftp.isi.edu:/in-notes.)
in particular, the "survive nuclear attack" part is a _commentary_ on the success of the project, not a stated goal at any time in its history. that O'Reilly repeats it as such is just an examle of what I'm talking about. another example of their confusion is "DARPAnet" -- it was never called that, even when the ARPA changed name to "DARPA".
consult historic documents or historians for the history, or you yourself contribute to the dilution of facts in the history that others will read.
#:Erik -- The Microsoft Dating Program -- where do you want to crash tonight?
* thorn...@visi.com (David Thornley) | Do you think there's a reason that you don't see products with names like | "Plague Rat" and "Human Excrement" in the supermarkets? The name | "Stalin" gives me similar feelings.
there is a whole series of candy and sweets for kids in Norway with names like that. the kids love it.
#:Erik, FWIW -- The Microsoft Dating Program -- where do you want to crash tonight?
thorn...@visi.com (David Thornley) writes: > >A short list:
> >Volkswagen -- The Hitler mobile > The *name* means People's Car.
The *name* Stalin means "one of steel".
-- Hrvoje Niksic <hnik...@srce.hr> | Student at FER Zagreb, Croatia --------------------------------+-------------------------------- Predestination was doomed from the start.
thorn...@visi.com (David Thornley) writes: > In article <365fdc98.11542...@news.newsguy.com>, > David Steuber "The Interloper" <trash...@david-steuber.com> wrote: > >On 23 Nov 1998 19:00:28 GMT, v...@ix.netcom.com(Steven Vere) claimed > >or asked:
> >% I can't let this pass. Stalin is NOT a cool name and there weren't
> >If you plan to avoid a product because it has a name used by an evil > >bastard, then you might consider avoiding other products based on past > >associations.
> No, not really. The objection is not that Stalin is a name used by > an evil bastard, but that it was the name of a truly evil bastard. > (Not his birth name, but the name he used for most of his adult life.) > Stalin was alive not all that long ago; my father was in B-17 missions > over Europe partly because of Stalin's support for Hitler (which ended > sometime on June 22, 1941).
Stalin was an evil bastard and many (millions) "ex-soviet" citizens truly suffered and died because of its actions.
Yet, this does not condone simplistic representations of history. I suggest you go to the nearest bookstore and fetch "The Age of Extremes" by Eric J. Hobsbawm. Truly marvelous reading (as his own "The Age of Revolution", "The Age of Capital" and "The Age of Empire"). Next look carefully at the picture of FDR (the greatest US President), Winston Churchill (who won the war and lost the election to the Labour Party) and Josiph Stalin, sitting in Yalta after having defined a "modus vivendi" which at least prevented major wars (where the term "major" should evoke mushroom shaped clouds).
Let's remember that if Stalin and the Russian Communisms had truly be supportive of Hitler (or, as some ignorant commentator has written recently, they were "the same" as Nazism), we would have had the Nazi armies in Vladivostock, by the time the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbour (or, as John Belushi in the role of John Blutarsky said in "Animal House", the Germans). Not a pretty thought. Luckily for us all, the Nazi armies were stopped in Volgograd, a city then known as Stalingrad (a name which was a monument to the stupidity of a totalitatian system).
As far as my family, AFAIK, one of my grandfathers was a fascist, as hundred of thousands Italians were at the time (never met him, he died before I was born); the other one was probably too meek to "get involved"; my father was 18 in 1945 and the only thing he did was maybe some black market (I heard a story of a pig being raised and made into delicious sausages in hiding). The women of the family were all too busy trying to get some food on the table.
I ended up writing Java code and hacking Common Lisp. Quite an history, isn't it?
In article <qhC72.1179$764.4632...@ptah.visi.com>, thorn...@visi.com
(David Thornley) wrote:
> Names have power. Emotional power. I don't really care why somebody > named a product "Stalin", I just don't want to use it.
Would you really understand it if noone watched "The Truman Show" in Japan or bought a "Teddy" bear in the Philippines or boycotted Johnson&Johnson in Vietnam ?
Unfortunately, not everyone is American or has the same kneejerk responses to the same words e.g. 'smoking' or 'abortion'.
If someone else names a compiler Stalin, you could at least try to understand why. And of course it is your prerogative not to use it (especially if you don't write in Scheme) although it is a very good compiler.
In <3121124251099...@naggum.no> Erik Naggum <e...@naggum.no> writes:
> incidentally, I think calling a compiler "Stalin" is cool. it _could_ be > that I've grown used to referring to the extremes in anal retentiveness > as "stalinistic", as in "stalinistic typing systems", but it's hard to > tell. calling a compiler "Hitler" or "Pol Pot" might cause some valid > objections, though.
Erik, please explain to everyone why Stalin is cool for killing millions, for which you apparently see no valid objections, but Hitler and Pol Pot are uncool for doing the same thing? Perhaps the Stalin program should begin execution by displaying an montage image of the rotting corpses at Katyn, showing the bullet hole in the back of each skull and the hands still tied behind their backs. Extremely cool indeed.
* v...@ix.netcom.com(Steven Vere) | Erik, please explain to everyone why Stalin is cool for killing | millions, [self-serving moronic drivel deleted]
that wasn't what I said, and you know it.
the only _important_ property of evils of the past is that they not be repeated in the future, in any way, shape, or form. by refusing to accept humor about past evils, you lend them an importance they do not deserve and which will ultimately destroy your _own_ future, while those of us who can distinguish what we learn from the lessons where we learn it, can hope to find a future that doesn't need to have reruns of past evils with new names as the only difference just because some _morons_ can't learn from the past.
it's people like you who keep the wars going on in the world, long after any possible perpetrators are dead, buried, and irrelevant to the future.
shut up, get over whatever your problem is, and go write som Lisp code.
#:Erik -- The Microsoft Dating Program -- where do you want to crash tonight?
In article <3121124516634...@naggum.no>, Erik Naggum <e...@naggum.no> wrote: >* trash...@david-steuber.com (David Steuber "The Interloper") >| Never mind that much of the technology you are used to using sprang out >| of the cold war. That includes the Internet.
> this latter sentence is false. the ARPAnet was built to share computing > resources, _not_ to survive a nuclear attack, as some would have it. the > cold war had very little impact on the development of the ARPAnet and > even less on the Internet the ARPAnet became.
The ARPAnet was not itself built to survive a nuclear attack, but it _was_ proposed and designed as a prototype for a network that could. Sharing computational resources was just considered a useful thing for this research network to be doing while it provided a testbed for researchers to work out redundancy and routing issues.
I don't recall offhand whether it's in one of JCR LickLider's papers or one by Bob Taylor, but there was most certainly a claim that they wanted to design a network that could continue to function "even if one or more nodes were subjected to temperatures of several million degrees Kelvin."
As for Stalin, it's pretty clear that the name was a matter of choice -- any number of other names could have been formed out of the putative basis words.
David Thornley wrote: > >Names are pretty meaningless in and of themselves. I don't know what > >motivated someone to name a product "Stalin". I find it hard to > >imagine it was because he approved of the actions of a long dead > >malevolent dictator. > Names have power. Emotional power. I don't really care why somebody > named a product "Stalin", I just don't want to use it. His actions > had a real impact on my father's life (and a heck of a lot more impact > on lots of people's father's lives), so it's not like naming something > Genghis Khan.
I'd guess that the author (JMS) was neither malevolent not ignorant in chosing this name (i.e. I don't believe that is was just a coincidence either).
Taking into account the hebrew-looking comments at the beginnings of many of his files, the chance that he might be ignorant about (or even might have any sympathy for) Stalin, Hitler or anybody else of that bunch is pretty small.
Raffael Cavallaro wrote: > In article <3121448153177...@naggum.no>, Erik Naggum <e...@naggum.no> wrote:
> >it's people like you who keep the wars going on in the world, long after > > any possible perpetrators are dead, buried, and irrelevant to the future
> Just because the perpetrators are dead and buried, doesn't mean they're > irrelevant to the future.
> Raf
> -- > Raffael Cavallaro
Yes, I'd have to agree that, just becuase the perpetraitors of crimes against humanity are long gone, doesn't mean that we should forget about them, or discount the importance of remembering what happened, so we can prevent such horrors ever happening again.
In article <3121448153177...@naggum.no>, Erik Naggum <e...@naggum.no> wrote: >it's people like you who keep the wars going on in the world, long after > any possible perpetrators are dead, buried, and irrelevant to the future
Just because the perpetrators are dead and buried, doesn't mean they're irrelevant to the future.
In article <lo8u2zu8cs1....@shell2.shore.net>, Andrew Shalit
<a...@shore.net> wrote: >We decided, like you, that using the name would be inappropriate, >and stuck instead with our portmanteau based on an old english >mythical character.
> > In article <3121448153177...@naggum.no>, Erik Naggum <e...@naggum.no> wrote:
> > >it's people like you who keep the wars going on in the world, long after > > > any possible perpetrators are dead, buried, and irrelevant to the future
> > Just because the perpetrators are dead and buried, doesn't mean they're > > irrelevant to the future.
> > Raf
> > -- > > Raffael Cavallaro
> Yes, I'd have to agree that, just becuase the perpetraitors of crimes against > humanity are long gone, doesn't mean that we should forget about them, or > discount the importance of remembering what happened, so we can prevent such > horrors ever happening again.
Which is why the Spanish prosecutor Garzon should be allowed to ask questions to general Pinochet. Or why Ocalan should be tried in an international court.
* Josh Gardner <jg...@dowco.com> | Yes, I'd have to agree that, just becuase the perpetraitors of crimes | against humanity are long gone, doesn't mean that we should forget about | them, or discount the importance of remembering what happened, so we can | prevent such horrors ever happening again.
the key issue is to prevent evils from recurring. by focusing too hard on the _people_ who committed them, you lose sight of recurrences of the patterns _before_ you get yet more _people_ to focus on. "history repeats itself", they say, and the reason is that many people don't learn anything constructive from it, they learn to hate other people from it. thus, those who remember people too well are the cause of repetitions.
how did Stalin or Hitler og Pol Pot or Pinochet get in position to commit those evils? I'd venture a guess that the reason some blame the leader is that they recognize all too well that there is something in the _culture_ that led to the contemporary _acceptance_ of these people that gave them the ability to seize power and function as _leaders_ of lots and lots of their own kind. instead of looking into their own minds and habits and cultures with an eye to change and to learn from horrible experience, it is much better for the moron to hate whoever exposed the evil in himself than to purge it, and if it was some "other" people, preferably an identifiable group, so much the simpler to deal with for the useless mind.
the leader himself is irrelevant. it is _how_ he became leader that is relevant to preventing recurrences, _before_ they happen. if you lose track of the goal, again: to prevent recurrences of past evils in any way, shape, or form, some other person will be able to garner support for his cause and build an organization that will, _again_, surprise people and cause morons of the future to get upset over yet more _names_.
but who am I talking to? there are two kinds of people¹: those who attach stigma to names and those who don't. I would have _hoped_ that those who were smart enough to see that "Lisp", the name, is not the cause of the problems associated with it by the _other_ people, would be smart enough to realize that "Stalin", the name, is not the cause of the evils associated with it. hope, however, is the mother of frustration.
#:Erik ------- ¹ apart from those who divide people into two kinds and those who don't -- The Microsoft Dating Program -- where do you want to crash tonight?
Erik Naggum <e...@naggum.no> writes: > shut up, get over whatever your problem is, and go write som Lisp code.
Which reminds me, is there any Lisp code available implementing the SOM (Self-Organizing Map, aka Kohonen map) algorithm? -- My nose feels like a bad Ronald Reagan movie...
>Stalin was alive not all that long ago; my father was in B-17 missions >over Europe partly because of Stalin's support for Hitler (which ended >sometime on June 22, 1941).
And partly because of shameful Munich pact, and partly because of allies offensive treatment of Germany after World War I. Any of these added much more fuel to the fire of war than so-called 'Stalin's support for Hitler'.
> > PS: In case anybody wondered, Rexx stems from VM/CMS, which uses "(" > > as an option prefix character, like "/" in VMS and "-" in Unix.
> ...and besides, if it bothers you, you can supply the matching ")" -- > it will be happily ignored.
Yeah, when the school moved from TOPS-20 on a PDP-10 to an IBM running VM/CMS, it bothered me enough that I decided to graduate instead of using it :-)
