Martin Steigerwald <mar...@lichtvoll.de> writes: > Ian Jackson - 05.01.19, 18:17:
>> Very competently toxic people will calculate precisely what they can >> get away with: they will ride roughshod over weak victims or in >> situations with less visibility; when challenged by an authority who >> can impose consequences, they will lie and obfuscate and distract as >> much as they can get away with. They will turn the dispute about their >> personal bad behaviour into a big poltical fight so as to increase the >> cost of enforcing the rules against them. And if that fails they will >> do precisely as much as is needed to avoid further punishment. > Have you actually really seen such kind of behavior? Yes. Worse, I was young and stupid and didn't recognize what was going on, so I let myself get taken in by it and made excuses for them and thus became part of the problem. I've hopefully gotten better at recognizing the signs earlier now. I don't think this is a problem that Debian is commonly plagued by, but there are absolutely people in this world who I don't want to have anything to do with, and if they join a community I'm a member of and that community won't eject them, I will leave. Because life is too short to be on edge all the time, to be in a community that I cannot trust at all, or to pour my emotional resources into that kind of scary black hole. Hopefully eventually they'll realize how much they hurt other people, but they can work on realizing that somewhere far away from me and anyone and anything I care about. I just want to have some fun working on free software and maybe changing the world a little bit, hopefully in the company of some people I can call friends. At no point in that process did I sign up to be part of a community psychological counseling effort for dangerous people. I am, to be clear, saying this in the abstract, and please don't read particular people from the current discussion into this comment. But you asked a general question about whether such people truly exist in the world, and the answer is yes, they do. Also, to be clear, if you're reading this and thinking "shit, am I one of those people?", you're not. Almost by definition. I have never seen anyone who acted that way ask themselves that question. One of their most defining characteristics is that nothing, *nothing* is *ever* their fault (although some of them can fake convincing apologies). -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>