At 2022-11-19T23:07:50+0100, Dominik George wrote: > > Right, and has has been discussed before (more times than can be > > counted, most likely) having some sort of content does not imply that > > the ideology itself is promoted. The presence of the texts of the > > Torah, the Christian Bible, the Quran, and other holy books in Debian > > does not mean that Debian as an organization supports all of the various > > ideologies entailed therein. > > You should probably take a history book and look up again what the > author of Mein Kampf did, and compare that to what the authors of the > other texts you mention did. You should probably read Numbers, Joshua, and Judges (attend particularly to the fate of the Midianites), as well as the centuries of history of Christian and Muslim expansion and global colonization. > Then, should you still find that murdering 6 million Jews in what is > known as the Holocaust can be compared to ideas of anarchism, > Christianity or the Islam, I fail to assume good faith. It's a good thing we take so little time to remember the non-Jewish victims of the Holocaust, isn't it (non-heterosexuals, Roma, Slavs, the mentally ill or disabled, communists, labor organizers, and non-conformists of many sorts). Let's pay particularly little attention to those that might be going on today. I concede that anarchists have made a poor showing in the slaughter sweepstakes of global history. As in Spain from 1936-1939, we usually find that liberal capitalists, authoritarian communists, royalist revanchists, and the Roman Catholic Church, all frequently in conflict with each other, can come rapidly to an ecumenical consensus, even under circumstances of war, that democratic socialists and everyone to the left of them need to be expediently liquidated and utterly forgotten. On that note, to indulge in recollection of institutional memory here, I believe it was our second DPL Bruce Perens who first decreed that "fortunes-off" needed to be excised from the formerly monolithic cookie collection for the fortune(1) program; it was not thus segregated by our upstream. His rationale was that the Debian distribution badly needed to be made more palatable to the tender sensibilities of corporations that might otherwise find no excuse to make a deal with Red Hat Software instead. Debian's "apt", now widely recognized as a terrific innovation in package management due to its automatic dependency resolution with cycle-breaking, was forcibly renamed at Bruce's direction from "deity", which he also thought might unduly alarm the tender-hearted philanthropic sensibilities in C suites throughout Silicon Valley. By autocratic pronouncements such as these, many years ago the Debian distribution was molded and reshaped to make itself more congruent with the demands of U.S. tech sector capitalism. The problem with this is less that it situates Debian more comfortably within what we might term a militantly centrist Anglo-American politics (with Schumpeterian "creative destruction" for tech entrepreneurs and venture capitalists followed by pervasive rent-seeking and financialization as a firm matures), than that people don't critically examine these processes and acknowledge them as themselves inherently political. This very paragraph, if uttered aloud in a Fortune 50 workplace in front of the right (or wrong) ears, might mark one as "not a team player" and unfit for professional advancement. (At the same time, if you share your ideas for market disruption or rent extraction discreetly to the right management consultants who can then vouch for you, the sky's the limit, if you have a way to cash out your options/cryptos before the people higher than you on the pyramid do.) Debian can discard fortunes-off if it wants to; I'm not sure I could motivate myself to vote in a GR regarding that question if it came to pass. But if any Debian contributor thinks that by doing so we make Debian somehow more "ideologically neutral", or less encumbered by political doctrine, that person is as self-deluded as anyone who finds a Rosetta stone in _The Protocols of the Elders of Zion_. Regards, Branden
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