"G. Branden Robinson" <g.branden.robinson@gmail.com> wrote on 20/11/2022 at 00:22:29+0100: > [[PGP Signed Part:No public key for D19E9C7D71266DCE created at 2022-11-20T00:22:22+0100 using RSA]] > 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, I'm personally fine to defend the "less neutral" position we take by dropping fortunes-off which is total garbage. -- PEB
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