Vladimir Putin = GOOD
It is true that Putin has corrupted and destroyed democracy in Russia and runs a corrupt and repressive regime, but war is not the way to deal with that.
*Navalny poisoning forces Merkel's party to ask: how do we hit back at Putin?* Here's a suggestion: switch to renewable energy as fast as possible. It's vitally necessary anyway, and it will eliminate demand for Russia's key exports (fossil fuels).
Bullies like Erdoğan, Putin and the conman use threats and shakedowns to get what they want, but they are no one's friend or ally.
Moscow Police Arrest up to 200 Ahead of Election Protest. Putin openly visits contempt on democracy as an act of intimidation, like what the bully does in the US.
The cheater tried to set up a hotel deal in Latvia with businessmen linked to Putin, and also to corruption. This particular proposed deal was not necessarily wrongdoing on the cheater's part, but the long list of situations where he has been involved with associates of Putin adds up to a pattern of support for a foreign tyrant.
The circumstances of the so-called "Symbolics War" of 1982-1983 depend heavily on the source doing the telling. When Symbolics executives noticed that their latest features were still appearing in the AI Lab Lisp Machine and, by extension, the LMI Lisp machine, they installed a "spy" program on Stallman's computer terminal. Stallman says he was rewriting the features from scratch, taking advantage of the license's review clause but also taking pains to make the source code as different as possible. Symbolics executives argued otherwise and took their case to MIT administration. According to 1994 book, The Brain Makers: Genius, Ego, and Greed, and the Quest for Machines That Think, written by Harvey Newquist, the administration responded with a warning to Stallman to "stay away" from the Lisp Machine project.Ibid.: 196. According to Stallman, MIT administrators backed Stallman up. "I was never threatened," he says. "I did make changes in my practices, though. Just to be ultra safe, I no longer read their source code. I used only the documentation and wrote the code from that."
Whatever the outcome, the bickering solidified Stallman's resolve. With no source code to review, Stallman filled in the software gaps according to his own tastes and enlisted members of the AI Lab to provide a continuous stream of bug reports. He also made sure LMI programmers had direct access to the changes. "I was going to punish Symbolics if it was the last thing I did," Stallman says.
Such statements are revealing. Not only do they shed light on Stallman's nonpacifist nature, they also reflect the intense level of emotion triggered by the conflict. According to another Newquist-related story, Stallman became so irate at one point that he issued an email threatening to "wrap myself in dynamite and walk into Symbolics' offices."Ibid. Newquist, who says this anecdote was confirmed by several Symbolics executives, writes, "The message caused a brief flurry of excitement and speculation on the part of Symbolics' employees, but ultimately, no one took Stallman's outburst that seriously." Although Stallman would deny any memory of the email and still describes its existence as a "vicious rumor," he acknowledges that such thoughts did enter his head. "I definitely did have fantasies of killing myself and destroying their building in the process," Stallman says. "I thought my life was over."
It is true that Putin has corrupted and destroyed democracy in Russia and runs a corrupt and repressive regime, but war is not the way to deal with that.
Richard Stallman Calls Edward Snowden a 'Great Hero'
