Re: Announcing miniDebConf Montreal 2020 -- August 6th to August 9th 2020
Daniel Lange <DLange@debian.org> writes:
> "active apartheid regime" is politically loaded lingo and shows where you
> stand.
This is another way of saying that it clearly communicates a political
point of view. Perhaps that was the goal. If one holds the position that
this is an inherently political decision (as Ian stated and which I also
agree with), stating an opposing political position is a reasonable part
of that conversation.
> Employing it disqualifies rational arguments, if you had any.
Why? Rational is not the same thing as apolitical. I object to reserving
"rational" for only political viewpoints that agree with the speaker's.
The Debian Project made, through its delegated processes and procedures, a
political decision to host DebConf in Israel. That decision was made on
the basis of various good, well-intended, and entirely reasonable
arguments, including (quite significantly in my opinion) expressing
support of the project members from Israel regardless of one's opinion
about the actions of their government. Speaking as someone who also lives
in a country whose last two national governments have taken numerous
actions I find reprehensible, I find that argument persuasive.
That decision was also opposed on the basis of good, well-intended, and
entirely reasonable arguments about the impact of Israeli government
policies, on the efficacy of boycott by analogy to other historical
struggles, and on moral arguments about what obligations the rest of the
world has towards oppressed peoples. Obviously, those arguments also rest
on facts which are in dispute by multiple parties, but just as with the
arguments for holding DebConf in Israel, they are largely made in good
faith.
Both positions are *inherently* and *inescapably* political. The Debian
Project is also not going to somehow reconcile those positions and arrive
at a consensus political agreement on a political problem that has
challenged the world's most adept diplomats for well over 70 years.
This discussion is unavoidably political, and there's no point in trying
to argue that we can or should leave politics out of it. All positions
that one can take carry political ramifications. We might prefer that the
project somehow manage to stay out of issues like this, but I'm afraid
that's not possible; both accepting and refusing to consider a bid for a
conference in Israel are political positions. And whatever way the
project decides, it is certain that groups in the project will continue to
(strongly) hold the opposing view.
Politics is not a dirty word. Politics is how large groups of humans
argue and coordinate. It's inescapable among large groups of people. All
we can do as a project is to decide what political positions we're willing
to take, how to mitigate the effects of those decisions where appropriate,
how to manage the effects of those decisions on members of the project who
disagree with them, and how to provide enough space in the project for
opposing views such that political positions that are not *intrinsic* to
the project cause as small of an impact on project unity as possible.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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