[please direct replies to -project] At 2023-08-18T14:39:00-0400, Thomas Ward wrote: > This is no longer appropriate for Debian. Fortunes-off binary package > has been removed: can we remove the data files, please. > > These were questioned by upstream as early as 1997. They contain > ethnic and homophobic content and also Nazism quotes from Mein Kampf - > none of these would fit Debian Codes of Conduct today. A complaint has > been raised.
I find the complaint defective. It cites no particulars. A quotation
cannot be objectionable simply due to its origin. Neither content nor
context alone are determinative: human communication is too complex to
permit elimination of either factor in interpretation.
At least one of the following quotations may be from (an online English
translation of) Mein Kampf. Which of these--_necessarily_, by dint of
its origin under the reasoning applied in the bug report and your
re-prosecution of this issue--constitute violations of the Debian Code
of Conduct?
A. It was the first church I had ever entered, and I heard with awe the
voice of the priest and the fervent responses, but I understood not
a word of what was said.
B. He had no trade or calling of any dignity or stability whatever on
which he could subsist while carrying out an intellectual labour
which might spread over many years.
C. As a boy it had seemed to him that the position of the parish priest
in his native village was the highest in the scale of human
attainment; but now that the big city had enlarged his outlook the
young man looked up to the dignity of a State official as the
highest of all.
D. I never darken a church door because I hate hypocrisy almost as much
as I love the character and teachings of Jesus Christ. Christianity
is a beautiful faith. The only trouble is that there are so
pitifully few Christians in the world.
> This is not yet removed if I read the changelog from Debian.There are
> additional components in the source code which quote these that
> suggest it may be prudent for a complete deletion. Downstream in
> Ubuntu, this package was removed due to violation of the Ubuntu Code
> of Conduct [2], and as the package in Ubuntu and the package in Debian
> are identical to each other, it may be prudent for the Debian
> community to remove the package in Unstable and Testing for similar
> reasons.
Would you _quote the reasons_, please? A charge of CoC violation should
be particularized, not merely referential (and deferential) to the
findings of an independent, and formally unaffiliated, body. Debian
should make its own decisions using the brains of its own deliberators,
and if any such decision is to be externally delegated, then the content
of that decision, fully including its support for its reasoning.
> However, this was extended to the source package as the *source
> contents* contain the offensive wording, etc.
In situations like this I think it is wise to use the active voice.
Declare who made the decision and quote their reasoning. If you're
familiar with the language of appellate court briefings and decisions
in the U.S., for instance, you will see this form of argumentation
practiced rigorously. I have also observed it in legal literature from
the U.K. and Australia. I submit that this tradition has arisen largely
because it works to maintain social acceptance of the judicial process,
the parties to which tend to be heavily invested in the outcomes. When
decision makers depart from that tradition, they come in for criticism
and threaten the legitimacy of their institution as perceived by those
who are bound by its rules.[1]
> Can we put this package into the 'considered for removal' list or
> simply remove the package as violation of the Debian Code of Conduct
> from all releases?
We _can_. Why are either of these the correct remedy? Which is
preferable to the other, and on what basis? How do you measure their
respective impacts for the goal you want to attain? What is your
argument for either one being preferable? Is there a third result that
would be satisfactory? How do you know, and by what standard would you
evaluate it compared to the others?
I find your complaint vague. It sounds to me like you want the Debian
Project to "do something" because other people are "doing something",
and, significantly, you want the project, or yourself, to be _perceived_
as "doing something".
Being seen as "doing something" is not a productive route to the remedy
of injustice, of the social sort or others--it is political performance.
Makeweight activities of this sort are too often a currency for esteem
and advancement within socio-political movements whose force is
dissipating.
As a rule, if you want to protect victims of prejudice or discrimination
from harm, the most fruitful actions you can take are those that come at
some risk to yourself. Shelter Jews from Nazis. March with Black Lives
Matter advocates, particularly in areas where white supremacists have
vowed to show up in counter-protest and/or where the police are known to
be cranky and vocally dedicated to an ethos of "busting heads" to
control crime. The less your advocacy costs you, the less it matters.
It's okay if you're not up to exposing yourself to such danger. We
rightly celebrate (and, often, commemorate after the violent deaths of)
people who do. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s writings and speeches are
deservedly well-remembered.[2] But we must remember that he got out and
marched at risk to himself, frequently. He was imprisoned for this; I
urge you to read his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" from start to
finish. It connects speech with action more eloquently than I can. Let
us also not forget that when the forces of evil finally took him out, it
was while he was in Memphis in solidarity with striking garbage workers.
At 2023-08-18T21:09:11+0000, Andrew M.A. Cater wrote:
> As the person who raised this on debian-project in November 2022 - see
> the archives for debian-project for November/December 2022
[...]
> There was unfortunately no consensus on removal on debian-project and
> G. Branden Robinson filed an ITA - intent to adopt - for this package
> at the time.
Thank you for the reminder, though I have not forgotten. I postponed
this activity until groff 1.23.0 was released and packaged for unstable;
thanks to Bertrand Garrigues and Colin Watson, that's happened.
I admit to some procrastination on my follow-through. I expect to
receive abuse from people who struggle to distinguish anarchists from
racists and Nazis, for instance, and such derogation would appear to be
in the offing--see below. That such personal attacks would, it seems,
be carried out in the name of championing the Debian Code of Conduct is
an irony that I do not find pleasant in its familiarity.
> In the absence of any apparent package, this should possibly be
> added to files considered for removal: in some sense, it would still
> have been easier to do this prior to Bookworm release, but, hey, you
> can't do everything :)
For the moment, I reiterate my ITA (adding the bug's -quiet in CC for
this purpose only). As often happens in software development, I think
changes by small increments make larger adaptations tractable.
I therefore propose the following course of action for myself.
1. Adopt the package as-is and upload to experimental.
2. Rename fortunes-off to fortunes-nsfw and upload to unstable, with
the fortunes-nsfw package description rewritten to suggest its
purpose: the avoidance of encounters with the Human Resources
departments of businesses, NGOs, and other institutions where the
Debian distribution might be deployed.
3. Add explanatory material insular to Debian (history, content) to the
source package, specifically including references to our mailing
list discussions of it. Last year's thread is an obvious choice,
but whatever records survive of former DPL Bruce Perens's decision
to segregate the "fortunes-off" package and contemporary responses
to it from other Debian Developers would also be valuable for
edification of the younger generation of Debian contributors.[3]
4. Begin to audit the package for objectionable content according to my
personal taste as suggested in last year's thread. I venture this
metric not out of egomania, but because I am skeptical that I can
fairly represent anyone's taste but my own. To summarize last
year's lengthy discussion, I expect I would take out material that I
think has become stale, or where I find a rebuttal to bigotry
insufficiently witty or forceful.
5. Add stuff that I think is interesting. Again recapitulating last
year's discussion, I believe that the acquisition of competence in
so-called "higher" mathematics is an ennobling practice and a much
needed remedy for the minds of those who embroil themselves in what
is popularly termed the Culture Wars. (To my simple mind, much of
this warfare reduces to the age-old struggle between authoritarians
and their putative subjects, but played out at the periphery rather
than the core of official political operations.)
6. Address _particularized_ and _specific_ bug reports about the
package's content as and when they arise. What was said? Who is
harmed, and how? I pessimistically assume that I'd get appealed to
the CoC committee in nearly every case I rejected the report, but at
the very least I'd try to get a concrete record before the committee
regarding what, _exactly_, someone wanted removed. I predict that
this would make their job easier. See above regarding judicial
processes.
It does occur to me that the above plan is, arguably, violative of the
Debian Code of Conduct if any of the content of the (source) package is,
so does this mean that some sort of disciplinary procedure should
commence simultaneously with step 1, or precede it?
At 2023-08-18T17:27:55-0400, Roberto C. Sánchez wrote:
> Also, if quoting Mein Kampf or anything else from Hitler is
> problematic, then perhaps fortune-anarchism (source package
> blag-fortune) should also be considered for removal.
It's been a while, but if fortune-anarchism is going to be removed, then
it should be specifically on the grounds of the author of the Anarchist
FAQ being utterly incapable of correctly using "op. cit" and "loc. cit."
in bibliographical references. Trim your eyebrows and learn Latin, you
lazy ****!
> It includes quotes from numerous individuals who have themselves
> engaged in terrorism or other violence toward individuals and groups,
> supported those who have engaged in such activities, or been otherwise
> complicit in such.
The moneychangers at the Temple of Solomon didn't like that one bit.
At 2023-08-18T23:43:03+0200, Dominik George wrote:
> > So, let's at least be consistent.
>
> Totally agree with that.
>
> Debian is not a collection of harmful content, it is an operating
> system.
"Debian is not X, it's an operating system" is an old trope,[4] to which
an old rebuttal seems adequate.
The mission you have chosen for yourself, then, is to identify all those
things in the Debian distribution that are not constitutive of an
operating system.
If you object that you're being misinterpreted, and that you mean only
that "harmful content" should be removed, then your statement is an
empty slogan--facile and offensive to the intelligence of your reader.
Fortunately for you, slights to a person's intelligence, as opposed to
their ethnicity or gender identity, are not violative of the Code of
Conduct. And a good thing, too, or we'd have to refuse support of
DebConf from every sponsor with a non-zero advertising budget.
> But, unfortunately, there are too many people in the project who
> think, in the name of "free speech",
Free speech is a social convention (I won't say "right") to be prized.
So is freedom of association. If you have a community with a member
that aggrieves others beyond endurance, expel them. There is no single
right amount of toleration for objectionable speech that we can apply to
all organizations. Each has to find its own way; exogenous factors
aside, those that choose well will thrive. Those that don't, dissolve.
Some would also want to keep Corinthians 12 in mind.
> protecting racists, nazists, and anarchists
Yes, exactly, those 3 things go together perfectly. *rolleyes*
> is more important than protecting PoC, jews, or other minorities.
You might want to count up how many Jews, persons of color, and other
minorities are represented by their quoted speech in the former
fortunes-off package. The answer would, I suppose, surprise you.
Regards,
Branden
[1]
https://www.vox.com/scotus/2023/8/13/23822822/supreme-court-establishment-clause-church-state-separation-carson-bremerton
[2]
https://inthesetimes.com/article/martin-luther-king-jr-day-socialism-capitalism
[3] Some of these deliberations may have occurred on debian-private.
And as I recall, a decision to "de-classify" the archives of that
list passed by GR, was not implemented, and then was repealed by GR
11 years later. Do any surviving Debian Developers from the era
(somewhere in 1996-early 1998 I think) care to extend permission for
their views on Bruce's "fortunes-off" decision to be quoted?
[4] https://people.debian.org/~bap/dfsg-faq.html
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