Re: Bug#138541: ITP: debian-sanitize (was Re: inappropriate racist and other offensive material)
On Sun, 2002-03-17 at 03:19, Jamie Wilkinson wrote:
> This one time, at band camp, Jeff Licquia wrote:
> >Remember the point about legislating the value of pi? As you yourself
> >note, it's dangerous when people confuse moral, legal, and technical
> >questions. It's just as much of a mistake to resolve a technical
> >question via moral means as it is to resolve technical questions via
> >legal/moral means.
>
> Uh, tautology. Did you mean "It's just as much of a mistake to resolve a
> technical question via moral means as it is to resolve a moral question by
> technical means"?
Uh, yeah. Sorry. :-)
> In which case, isn't debian-sanitise itself a technical solution to a moral
> problem?
I don't think so. The technology isn't really germane to the problem;
it's not that difficult to create a polling mechanism and report
results.
The real meat of the package is the list, and the method used to
determine that list. Those are moral issues. For example, the very
existence of the list is itself a moral issue, as is the existence of
one list instead of several (as has been proposed) and the fact that it
is determined democratically rather than by fiat.
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