IESG restructuring (Re: Example of the One Liners out of context)

[Keith Moore]

> But what an engineer who says he "hates politics" means is, I think,
> more often related to an image of "politics" where the underlying
> logic is that of  splitting a fixed-size pie; in order to win, I have
> to make someone else lose; if someone else benefits, it means that I
> have less.

I've always thought of engineers' hatred of politics as a distaste for
some of the practices considered necessary in political activity in
order to accomplish what needs to be done -- such as pretending that
things are different than they really are in order to avoid offending
some powerful person or group, or manipulation of people and groups
using power, coercion, propaganda, ego-stroking, etc.  None of which
means that you can't end up with a win-win situation, but the dishonesty
inherent in such practices makes it difficult to see what a win-win
situation might look like.