Don't equate veterans with assholes please? Yes there are asshole veterans.

However:

1) Forced conscription is a thing in many countries
2) Even in volunteer forces, there's lots of carrots on a stick they put out to get young people who don't know better to join.
3) People often force their children to enlist
4) Some people enlist because they have no other means to escape a horrible situation
5) Not every veteran flies the flag, is even patriotic, etc.

@bitchfox this is a reference to DS9 which features a space station that's basically a combination war outpost and space mall

AND:

https://gcc.gnu.org/pipermail/gcc/2021-March/235091.html

This excellent email sums things up nicely as to why RMS shouldn't be in charge of anything more sophisticated than a hot dog stand.

RMS announced at a talk he's releasing an unofficial GNU C manual:

>I have written a manual for GNU C, and the Free Software Foundation is going to publish it in not-too-terribly long. Now, why do I say it's a manual for GNU C? It does not try to describe the C standard — because that would be tremendously complicated, and tremendously hard to use.

(cont)

>And indeed, C inevitably is full of wrinkles and more complex rules, but I've tried to express them in ways that make it easier to understand C programming. And part of what enabled me to do that is forgetting about the standard.

(cont)

>It's not just that there are a lot of details in the C standard. It's written in terms of abstractions. Instead of telling you what the program means, it tells you what the program is permitted to mean. So you need to think at a second-order level to make sense of the C standard. Well, the purpose of this manual is to enable people to learn C, and also to enable them to look up the details of what C constructs mean...

(cont)

This is disturbing because:

* He didn't notify the GCC mailing list, he just announced it at a talk
* He hasn't contributed to GCC in 20 years, and it's in C++ now, a language RMS neither uses nor likes
* RMS is clearly bypassing mechanisms of accountability to push his views, which likely don't reflect those of the actual maintainers of GCC
* If you read it based on his past history, he clearly is claiming ultimate authority over GCC, and dictating GCC policy unilaterally, bypassing the SC

>Now, GCC follows the C standard. It will be quote "conforming" if you specify certain options, which you don't actually have to specify. But by only describing what GCC does — and not all the other possible things some other compiler might do without violating the standard, it makes the manual much simpler and clearer. So I hope that once this manual has settled down, people will adapt it to cover other languages that are more or less of the same category.

(cont)