Re: Censorship in Debian
On Thu, Dec 20, 2018 at 4:46 PM Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> wrote:
>
> Daniel Pocock <daniel@pocock.pro> writes:
>
> > and I reply with the strongest possible evidence, personal experience
> > and scientific research.
<snip>
> In other words, you immediately turned the temperature up as high as you
> could go and called on other people to attack your fellow Debian
> developers on the grounds that their work is a violation of UN-recognized
> human rights (!!).
I think this response was as much an escalation as the initial post.
Daniel, have you contacted the anti-harassment team about the abuse you
have experienced?
<snip>
> I have no idea personally what set off Norbert's removal from Planet
> Debian. When I said irrespective of the merits of your argument, I really
> meant that. But *this* bothers me far more: this kind of brutal approach
> to Debian politics is hostile, nasty, and deeply hurtful to the project.
I think this is probably where we should have started. The initial removal was
by Chris Lamb for "referring to Sage Sharp as an 'it'" in one of his
posts [1]. It
appears that was replaced with "their", which Norbert believed was sufficient to
have his blog re-added, and Chris reverted the commit a few days later. I think
Chris handled it very well by documenting the issue and providing evidence.
Later, the blog was removed again [2][3] and again[4] by anti-harassment team
members citing an "anti-harassment team decision". There is no indication of
how much interaction there was with Norbert on the decision (if any).
I think the heart of the issue is that the removal is public, but the
reason does not
appear to be. Perhaps we need more transparency as to the why when the
anti-harassment team makes a decision as drastic as removing content, along
with the evidence? Then, at least we could know what we are arguing about here.
AFAICT, rule number 2 ("try not to annoy people")[5] for planet debian could be
the justification for removal (I'm assuming the issue at hand is the same post
that caused the initial removal, but I don't see it referenced in his
blog feed[6]
anymore). A cursory glance at the feed didn't yield anything appalling to my
sensibilities, but I'm not good at finding a single offensive word in an entire
blog.
<snip>
> > Having been rear ended by a utility van, thrown off a motorbike half way
> > across a roundabout and having also received abusive and threatening
> > messages from people within the Debian community, I feel that the
> > physical pain caused by the latter was more than the former. Those
> > people should be ashamed of themselves.
>
> Yeah, no shit. Your lack of awareness that *you* are that person who
> should be ashamed of yourself because that's what *you* just did is
> honestly mind-blowing.
Bad behavior does not condone more bad behavior. This comment seems
a little mean-spirited. It is OK to disagree with how he brought his issue up,
but being abusive to someone because you think they were abusive just
makes the problem worse.
A lot of technical people are not that great with social interaction
(I believe it is
the reason many people are drawn to those fields; for me computers are more
predictable than people). I think we would do ourselves a great disservice by
not recognizing this and just pushing people away for the crime of not knowing
how to interact with others. We should be teaching them instead, by example
if nothing else.
[1] https://salsa.debian.org/planet-team/config/commit/216930f1f3f906ef4cc28457b94d10ba844e3074
[2] https://salsa.debian.org/planet-team/config/commit/99662c1548fac57813e5288002e3c6eeccf25ec6
[3] https://salsa.debian.org/planet-team/config/commit/d2d7125b53dc4a2e832a5780013e29518c2420bc
[4] https://salsa.debian.org/planet-team/config/commit/04651823388de3a573d25158b2d59dce62a24540
[5] https://wiki.debian.org/PlanetDebian
[6] http://www.preining.info/blog/feed/?lang=en
--
Eldon Koyle
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