by DonHopkins | 2026-01-30 10:53:29+00:00
It's odd that Bradford DeLong copied my original file of email that I put together and originally published without giving any attribution or provenance where it came from, and stripped the introduction I wrote that contextualized it, then omitted the first email from Chris Stacy to 11 different people including Pournelle, which established the actual context.

DeLong is a UC Berkeley economics professor and former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Treasury under Clinton, whose widely-read economics blog should hold him to higher standards than stripping attribution from compiled primary sources.

Here is the original file he copied without credit (without his unreadable css):

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/copyleft/pourne-smut.html

DeLong's copy:

- Removes my authorial framing without attribution

- Omits the January 1984 email which provides crucial administrative context

- Strips formatting that helps establish authenticity

- Presents it as his own curation on his blog

The missing 1984 email is particularly important because it shows the guest account policies were already being tightened before the Pournelle incident, making the eventual account termination part of a broader pattern rather than a purely personal vendetta.

The January 1984 email he omitted was sent to 11 recipients including Pournelle himself, which shows he was directly informed of the TACACS policies over a year before the incident.

I wrote about the MIT AI Lab Tourist Policy here:

https://donhopkins.medium.com/mit-ai-lab-tourist-policy-f73b...

Regarding ylee's post and the filfre.net discussion: I was there, I personally know the primary actors, and I'm the one who compiled the original document that DeLong plagiarized. The interpretation in stepped_pyramids' comment and Yeechang Lee's defense of Pournelle in the filfre.net comments are both wrong.

It wasn't about "mentioning ARPANET in Byte" or politics. It was about behavior.

GUMBY (David Henkel-Wallace), an HN regular and old friend who founded Cygnus Support (the pioneering open source company that developed GCC, acquired by Red Hat in 1999), was in the original 1985 thread and stated flatly: "It was not politically motivated. Pournelle was a pain in the neck when drunk. And a blowhard."

The irony of quoting Pournelle complaining about "a handful of people" causing "most of the irritation" on online forums is rich - Pournelle WAS that handful of people. He was the irritant. He was widely known in SF fandom as a belligerent drunk at conventions, and he brought that behavior online.

Pournelle literally asked to be kicked off: "If you have some authority to order me off the net, do so. If not, leave me alone." They did. He got exactly what he demanded.

RMS personally wrote custom software for Pournelle and patiently tutored him. Pournelle's thanks? Telling John McCarthy that MIT was "run by a bunch of communists."

Pournelle violated the MIT AI Lab Tourist Policy on multiple counts: commercial use for his BYTE column, promoting his books on SF-LOVERS, and anti-social behavior. The policy explicitly stated: "Any use of the MIT ITS machines for personal gain, profit making enterprise, or political purposes is not a legitimate use of the Laboratories' computer resources."

His response to getting called out was threatening to sic his "Pentagon friends," "reporter friends," and "the House Armed Services Committee" on grad students running a free service he was abusing.

The poetic justice: JGA suggested the account termination message should read "Think of it as evolution in action" - Pournelle's own Social Darwinist catchphrase from Oath of Fealty.

KMP's assessment stands: "The man has learned nothing from his presence on MC and sets a bad example of what people might potentially accomplish there. I'd rather recycle his account for some bright 12-yr-old."