Re: Censorship in Debian
Martin Steigerwald <martin@lichtvoll.de> writes:
> Ian Jackson - 05.01.19, 18:17:
>> Very competently toxic people will calculate precisely what they can
>> get away with: they will ride roughshod over weak victims or in
>> situations with less visibility; when challenged by an authority who
>> can impose consequences, they will lie and obfuscate and distract as
>> much as they can get away with. They will turn the dispute about their
>> personal bad behaviour into a big poltical fight so as to increase the
>> cost of enforcing the rules against them. And if that fails they will
>> do precisely as much as is needed to avoid further punishment.
> Have you actually really seen such kind of behavior?
Yes.
Worse, I was young and stupid and didn't recognize what was going on, so I
let myself get taken in by it and made excuses for them and thus became
part of the problem. I've hopefully gotten better at recognizing the
signs earlier now.
I don't think this is a problem that Debian is commonly plagued by, but
there are absolutely people in this world who I don't want to have
anything to do with, and if they join a community I'm a member of and that
community won't eject them, I will leave. Because life is too short to be
on edge all the time, to be in a community that I cannot trust at all, or
to pour my emotional resources into that kind of scary black hole.
Hopefully eventually they'll realize how much they hurt other people, but
they can work on realizing that somewhere far away from me and anyone and
anything I care about. I just want to have some fun working on free
software and maybe changing the world a little bit, hopefully in the
company of some people I can call friends. At no point in that process
did I sign up to be part of a community psychological counseling effort
for dangerous people.
I am, to be clear, saying this in the abstract, and please don't read
particular people from the current discussion into this comment. But you
asked a general question about whether such people truly exist in the
world, and the answer is yes, they do.
Also, to be clear, if you're reading this and thinking "shit, am I one of
those people?", you're not. Almost by definition. I have never seen
anyone who acted that way ask themselves that question. One of their most
defining characteristics is that nothing, *nothing* is *ever* their fault
(although some of them can fake convincing apologies).
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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