Re: Suggestions of David Nusinow, was: RPSL and DFSG-compliance - choice of venue
On Wed, Aug 25, 2004 at 03:00:56PM +0100, Matthew Garrett wrote:
> > My goal here is to convince you to stop labelling your opponents in
> > reasoned discussion extremists and thus unworthy of debate.
>
> My goal is to maintain Debian's standards of freedom at the point that
> they are and where I believe they should be. You believe that those
And in order to do so, you're labelling everyone with an opinion
different from yours "extremists", trying to get them ignored, and
telling them not to argue their position. [1]
> standards should be in a different place. Given the fundamental
> difference in viewpoint, I'm not convinced either of us is ever going to
> convince the other of anything of significance.
Convincing the other isn't important; what matters is whether Brian's
arguments convince the rest of the project, or whether your counterarguments
prevent them from doing so. The fact that you're favoring ad hominem
so frequently recently suggests to me, at least, that you don't trust
your real arguments to do so.
> Exactly. It's a common standard of freedom that we all (theoretically)
> agree to, despite it not necessarily being in exactly the right place
> from a personal point of view. Except...
DD's agree to uphold it, not to agree with it. If they had to agree to it,
nobody would ever be able to propose functional changes to it. You can't
agree to agree to something; individual opinions change over time, and you
simply can't agree to maintain an opinion. You can easily agree to uphold
something, though, even if there are details that you don't entirely agree
with.
Saying "you can't hold that opinion! You promised you wouldn't!" is
ridiculous, and expecting people to promise to maintain an opinion is
insane.
[1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2004/08/msg00539.html
--
Glenn Maynard
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