Adrian Bunk wrote:
In this discussion here we have two pretty distinct groups of people:
The first group has the opinion that Debian should honor various
minorities, and that Debian in general should have also a political
mission.
The second group is unhappy with people being honored by Debian for
non-technical reasons, and wants Debian in general to be a non-political
technical project.
Easy to miss, but obvious once you are aware of it:
I wish to posit the existence of a third group who are not partipating
in this discussion.
This group are simply too exhausted and bored of making the same
refutations in these debates and have long given up trying. Indeed,
they likely find themselves too physically and emotionally numb to
invest in -project or lists outside their niche interests. They may
have even made steps to distance themselves from Debian entirely due
to low-level feelings of fatigue that they cannot put words to,
compounded by having no desire to be associated with a certain
retrograde culture that they perceive the Project projects.
If asked to charecterise this thread, they may attempt to be objective
by pointing out that dissecting the minutæ of (say) Hispanic culture
or the «Historikerstreit» is a distraction at best, and might even
charitibly concede that the thread is a dry satire of the "just asking
questions" or the "tired arguments presented as an insightfully novel
rebuttal" genres. However, the majority of their response would frankly
not be to its advantage, let alone repeatable in polite company.
This is all to say that I would issue a not-insignificant caution to
all from making crass or otherwise premature overgeneralisations about
who constitutes this esteemed Project.
Regards,