Re: inappropriate racist and other offensive material
[ removing the cross-posting nonsense ]
On Thu, Mar 14, 2002 at 12:15:37PM +0800, Crispin Wellington wrote:
> On Thu, 2002-03-14 at 02:04, Lazarus Long wrote:
> > On Wed, Mar 13, 2002 at 12:47:25AM -0700, Adam Conrad wrote:
> > >
> > > > -----Original Message-----
> > > > From: Lazarus Long [mailto:lazarus@overdue.ddts.net]
> > > > Sent: Tuesday, March 12, 2002 5:55 PM
> > > >
> > > > Yo family's so black, when they hold hands, it looks like a
> > > > stretch limo.
> > > >
> > > > There's no excuse for racism in Debian.
> > > >
> > >
> > > So, your take is that Debian should censor upstream so we can be more
> > > politically correct? If you don't appreciate the author's off-colour
> > > humour, then don't use his script(s).
> > >
> > > When Debian starts making decisions about what is and isn't appropriate
> > > for our users to see, that's when I stop contributing. We should not be
> > > about censorship.
> > >
> > > ... Adam Conrad
> > >
> > > (PS: Yo mama so white, when she gets naked, yo daddy's retinas burn
> > > clean off)
> >
> > Again, there is no excuse for racism in Debian. Other packages have
> > elided the inappropriate material in the past, as they should. An IRC
> > client has no business being racist. Debian is a distribution that
> > specifically caters to children; note the debian-junior project. As it
No it does not. Debian-junior is a sub-project.
> > stands, your package is inappropriate to be on the box my daughter uses.
Then don't install it there. Simple!
On a side note: the way one develops a thick skin is through the creation
of scar-tissue.
>
> It has been said that racism continues to thrive when good people choose
> to do nothing. Speaking out against this is the imperative of all good
> people.
There is a great deal of difference between speaking out and taking action.
Taking action in the form of censorship should not be considered lightly.
There are far worse things than racism; one of them is censorship, for it
leads to ignorance, which can easily spawn racism.
The current situation seems relatively harmless. The joke sucks, but that's
not a crime. Personally I think people pull out the "racism" card entirely
too much; it is almost as bad as using the ad hominem, in a reasonable
debate. In fact I'm having a lot of trouble understanding how the joke
reflects poorly on African-Americans. And if we are going to go so far
as to call it racist, then perhaps we should call it "familyist" too since
it mentions that---or it could be biased against stretch limos even.
I am not pro-racism; I am anti-censorship. It is very easy to make blanket
statements such as "Everyone should speak out against racism" but what do
you say when it comes down to "Racism should be censored"?
I think it just goes to show that nothing is just black or white.
(was that a racist statement? or just a stupid pun? ;)
--
; Matthew Danish <mdanish@andrew.cmu.edu>
; OpenPGP public key: C24B6010 on keyring.debian.org
; Signed or encrypted mail welcome.
; "There is no dark side of the moon really; matter of fact, it's all dark."
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