On Tue, Jul 02, 2019 at 09:21:47AM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
> I think this thread has mostly run its course, but there's a point in here
> that's extremely important to me that I can't leave unsaid.
same here.
> Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> writes:
>
> > and btw, just about celebrating hispanic heritage... the Spanish were
> > responsible (with a bunch of other European countries) for destroying
> > several cultures in the Americas (and elsewhere), slaughtering people
> > and what not and you want to celebrate this? (Same for most other
> > European cultures...)
>
> > And, for the love of baby jesus^wdevil, please dont even think about
> > celebrating religions.
>
> The intent of recognizing the Hispanic heritage of project members, if
> that's meaningful to them, is not to sanction everything Hispanic or
> Spanish people have done in history. The intent of recognizing a
> religious day of significance to some project members is not to endorse or
> celebrate the religion. It's to celebrate and support the *people* in the
> project for whom this matters.
I think it's basically impossible to seperate this. Maybe you can, maybe
I can, but I'm sure this is not how it will be seen by everyone. eg I
dont think 'celebrating the USA' would be seen as celebrating the people
who are happy to live there, but rather (also) as celebrating the
current guy in the white house.
> I want it to be possible to simultaneously be troubled by or even outright
> disagree with something that is significant to someone else, and also
> celebrate with them the positive and affirming aspects of what that thing
> means *to them*, and how it enriches their lives.
I want to be in a place where I can smoke and others can enjoy their
right of smoke-free air but thats just not possible.
> For example (chosen because I think it may be less common to some readers
> and therefore a bit less loaded; apologies in advance if I botch something
> I'm not personally that familiar with), I'm personally an atheist. For
> various reasons, I have extremely strong feelings about religion and its
> role in history, and they're not very positive ones. I also have some
> strong feelings about some aspects of the cross-section of religion and
> politics in India at the moment. But I still want to make space for
> project members to celebrate Diwali in a way that's meaningful to them,
> and support that, and I want to support that in areas of shared
> universality: food, beautiful displays of light, and so forth. It doesn't
> mean that I agree with everything they may believe. It means that I see
> the human being in my fellow member of the project, I see that person as
> an individual with cultural and religious traditions that are important
> *to them* even if they aren't to me, and I want them to feel welcome and
> seen as their whole selves.
so you would also be happy if the project would celebrate christmas,
christianity or satanism? I wouldnt.
> This can be a tricky balancing act, to be sure. Religion, politics,
> humor, offense, discrimination, identity, bigotry, history, and oppression
> are all tangled together and incredibly complex and fraught. But, to me,
> asking people to leave their moments of celebration outside of the project
> and to limit their project presence to purely technical contributions is
> essentially to ask them to cut off all of the parts of themselves that do
> not fit into the stereotypical norm of a Debian project contributor. And
> that stereotypical norm is not politically neutral. It looks a lot like
> the base beliefs of a white man from Europe, the United States, Australia,
> or Canada.
while I see your point here for the reasons I tried to explain above I
don't think we as a project can do this balancing.
For diversity, we voted on https://www.debian.org/vote/2012/vote_002 so
I think we agreed on this. And then this immediatly very tricky as this
vote can also be read as welcoming christians, satanists, racists etc as
long as they work constructivly in our commutity :/
> I have lost track of who said this, but some wise person once said that
> one's politics are defined by what you don't think should be political.
> The things I find perfectly normal and ordinary and that I am astonished
> that anyone would disagree with are, in some foundational way, my core
> political beliefs. By asking people to confine themselves to that set of
> behavior, I'm not being politically neutral, even though it feels like
> that to me.
agreed.
(I guess we can now just agree to disagree.)
--
tschau,
Holger
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