Jose E. Marchesi writes: > The main reason why my talk violates the current policy is that it mocks > and somewhat ridiculizes the very rich aristocratic people, including > their appearance and the affectionated manners usually associated to > them [1].
I was so offended that I dropped my monocle. Seriously, I don't know what it is like where you live, Jose, but it is not a pretty thing being a rich person in America today. There is a deliberate attempt to stir up an "us versus them" against the rich, regardless of their innocence or guilt in any moral sense. The "99% versus the 1%" is all about divide and conquer, us versus them. People who believe themselves part of "us", "the 99%" are led to think that they need not care about "them", the 1%. By definition, they are not looking for solutions that work for the 100%, i.e. everyone; they don't care if their policies step on the lives or the rights of 1% of the populace. Poor activists are blind to the irony of denouncing the "greed" of the rich, while the same activists greedily seek to take other peoples' wealth for their own projects. And it's not just yakety yak, there are real consequences. Once that attitude became established here, politicians started increasing taxes on only the rich. At its worst, this attitude caused the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution; and caused the national police in Guatemala to systematically kill off most of the educated people in the country, over 30 years of ugly, murderous civil war that only ended in the 1990s. In the US, the big lie is that "the rich don't pay their fair share". If you look at US federal income tax, 40% of the adult population pays no income taxes at all! (In 1984 it was less than 15% of the people who paid nothing, but things have changed.) The lower income 50% of the people pay less than 4% of the income taxes. The upper income 50% pays 96.5% of the income taxes. And the top 5% pay 55% (with the top 1% paying 35% all by themselves). Figures like these are easy to find online, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_tax_in_the_United_States#Distribution https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e0/2010_US_Tax_Liability_by_Income_Group_-_CBO.png http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2704794/posts So, in actuality, the rich (and the 1%) pay far more than their fair share, unless the word fairness has lost all meaning. So, perhaps you thought you were speaking to a crowd of poor people, who would all cheer when you demonize the rich. But a few of us in the free software community, like me, actually learned how to make money writing and giving away free software, making money from supporting it and extending it, and ended up rich. (And also inspired a thousand follow-on projects and companies, that support themselves and/or make money writing and supporting free software -- more power to them!) I am not ashamed of making money or having wealth, nor do I think I am making the world more evil by doing so. So, you are correct in supposing that you should revise your offensive speech, or should stay away from the meeting. Thank you for noticing, and for volunteering to leave. (I would prefer that you stayed, and just eliminated the deliberate slurs against persons of wealth.) Ludovic =?utf-8?Q?Court=C3=A8s?=w said: > I can sympathize with the rejection of institutionalized political > correctness that (I think) JosÃ's message is about. After all, the GHM > audience is small and should be able to address problems through > discussion, without resorting to a lawyer-jargon policy. I am no fan of censorship. And I donate annually to TheFire.org, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, which has spent a decade working to eliminate "speech codes" at government-run universities, most of which are aimed at suppressing poorly-defined "hate speech" or "speech that offends somebody". FIRE defends students and professors who get kicked out of school over such issues, for example. So I know the issue pretty well. But, because we are not a government, it is our right as a voluntary community of interest to decide on our own standards of behavior. And to decline to participate with people who violate those standards. Because hacker culture historically came largely out of universities full of relatively young, socially naive, largely male people, hacker culture has been a hotbed of unconscious sexism. We have unknowingly suffered from testosterone poisoning. The GNU project's roots are deep in hacker culture; Richard Stallman embodies the stereotype remarkably well, despite the decades that he has spent learning to be more persuasive to broader audiences. It takes a constitution of steel, or a principled rejection of relentless input from outside, for a woman to survive and thrive in yesterday's hacker culture. But because it is OUR culture, we can shape it to be less abrasive. Both less deliberately abrasive, and less unconsciously abrasive. And every strong or self-sufficient woman who comes in, can slowly help teach us to make it more welcoming to the next rank of women, who are not quite as strong or quite as isolated. The true spirit of free software is as much at home in estrogen as it is in testosterone. The mere fact that we are having this discussion means that the policy is having an effect, and probably a positive one. As you review your slides and your draft speech, if you get a twinge about a racist, sexist, ageist, or cashist comment or image that you were planning to use, consider how you could rewrite it to make your point without putting anybody else down. Some people climb to the top of their field on the shoulders of others. It's a much slower climb if you spend your time stepping on their toes instead. John Gilmore PS: As this discussion has noted, perhaps the GNU project should revise some of the sexist jokes on the website, too.
