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Re: Some Comments on Sexism in #debian



On Tue, Mar 23, 2004 at 10:09:48AM +0000, MJ Ray wrote:
> On 2004-03-22 21:52:52 +0000 Andrew Suffield <asuffield@debian.org> 
> wrote:
> 
> >I don't want people to say "this might be suboptimal" instead of "this
> >is crap", because then I won't be able to tell the difference between
> >things that are crap and things that are suboptimal. I *want* to know
> >when something is crap, because it needs priority attention.
> 
> Actually, both statements are about as useless, on the level of "I 
> like this book because it is good". I want to know why something is 
> bad, because then we can fix it.

Well, obviously. I'd expect that to follow. It's orthogonal, though.

> >Everything else follows from there. People who can't call
> >things by their real names are not useful.
> 
> Some people disagree about what is the real name for a thing. However, 
> this isn't about that.

Indeed, this is about asking people to deliberately call things by
different names in order to follow some arbitrary notion of
"politeness", which I reject on every level.

> >[...] I get far
> >too much mail from idiot users already.
> 
> I think you are so abrasive that only an idiot user would send you 
> mail. They don't all have the rhino-hide that DDs are expected to 
> grow.

I get plenty of mail from users that aren't idiots too, and most of
them get useful responses. But I could *really* do without the
idiots. I'd save about an hour a week if I could just get rid of the
people who bounce my replies because they don't know how to configure
an MTA; replying to them is a complete waste of my time.

Being "abrasive" is generally an effective way at reducing their
numbers.

-- 
  .''`.  ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield
 : :' :  http://www.debian.org/ |
 `. `'                          |
   `-             -><-          |

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