Romain Beauxis <to...@rastageeks.org> writes: > Le Monday 29 December 2008 17:21:16 Theodore Tso, vous avez écrit :
>> I do feel quite strongly, that aspirational goals, if they are going to >> be in Foundation Documents, must be clearly *labelled* as aspirational >> goals, and not as inflexible mandates that _MUST_ be kept. In >> politics, can have aspirational ideals such as "a chicken in every pot >> and two cars in every garage" which get used in campaign slogans, but >> you don't put such things as a MUST in a country's constitution. > Freedom of speech is a constitutional disposition, and I don't think it > is something that could be acheive. It really is a constitutional act. Which constitution? I don't see any reference to it in Debian's constitution, and the constitution of the country in which I live doesn't guarantee anything at all about someone's ability to use project mailing lists. It only constrains the actions of the *government*, not private projects and their use of their own resources. I've stopped working on other projects in the past because this idea that anyone can and should be able to say anything that enters their head at any time, no matter how uncomfortable or miserable they made it for other people working on the same project, became so prevelant that the atmosphere became so hostile that it became impossible to have a reasonable conversation about any even mildly controversial topic. Debian isn't there now, and maybe it's not in imminent danger of degrading to that point, but I've watched it happen and know that it *can* happen. It's not a theoretical scenario. People like to advocate the merits of personal filtering as if it solves all of these problems. I used to do that myself before I lived through one of those collapses of good will. Personal filtering is not a bad answer to individual people who are widely ignored. It does nothing when the tone of conversation degrades to the point where polite conversation is drowned out by multiple people yelling at each other. It's also rather hard to just ignore people when they start calling you things like pedophile out of the blue (yes, this actually happened). I'm not, at present, wholly convinced that a Code of Conduct would help or how it would work. But this dedication to free speech inside a working project is, in my opinion, a nasty bit of blindness. I've seen that ideal rip people to shreds and tear apart previously working communities. I think one can possibly make an argument that Debian is unlikely to be susceptible to that, but I think that argument has to be made. The problem can't be casually dismissed -- it's happened elsewhere. > It is also why I am against the Code of Conduct. Freedom of speech is an > utopism that I support for Debian, and a Code of Conduct, or whatever > you call it, is a way to shut those who do abid to the > politically-correctness way of expressing oneself. > As Orwell noticed it 50 years ago, restricting expressiveness is also > restricting though. I'm in the middle of a study of Orwell's fiction and non-fiction writing and therefore can say with quite a bit of confidence that Orwell would not have supported the position that you're taking. Political correctness is apparently what people now call basic human politeness when they want to ridicule it. *There's* your Orwellian Newspeak. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/> -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
