At 2022-11-20T11:41:56+0100, Pierre-Elliott Bécue wrote:
> I'm personally fine to defend the "less neutral" position we take by
> dropping fortunes-off which is total garbage.
"Total garbage." Have you _read_ it?
Running "fortune -o" myself a few times, I get the following results.
These are in the order they came back from my shell prompt.
"... mid-eighteenth century America had a smaller proportion of church
members than any other nation in Christendom...."in 1800 [only] one
of every fifteen Americans was a church member"
[Richard Hofstadter, _Anti-Intellectualism in American
Life_, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974, p. 89]
This quote is from a well-known book from a widely (if not universally)
respected author. It is surely in the "offensive" category because it
merely _mentions_ religion, not because it lays out an authoritarian or
anti-Semitic political program. Several of the messages in this thread,
including the one to which I replied (and of course my own), are equally
offensive by a metric of _mentioning_ religion, and include parties on
both sides of the "rip out the package" debate.
Granted, about 20 years ago, political conservatives in the U.S.
occasionally expressed offense at mere mention of Hofstadter (but not a
lot, as most of their audience had no idea who the guy was), as the
Rupert Murdoch/Roger Ailes program of _cultivating_ anti-intellectualism
as aggressively as possible was just taking root in the G. W. Bush
administration amid the exciting adventures of the Iraq War and the
jailing of a _New York Times_ journalist.
"The most winning woman I ever knew was hanged for poisoning three
little children for their insurance money."
-- Sherlock Holmes
I've read the entire corpus of A. C. Doyle's Holmes stories more than
once and don't recall this line, but again, the foregoing sentiment is
neither garbage nor does it promote fascism. I suppose it is in there
because it mentions a reprehensible crime.
"FORTUNE PRESENTS FAMOUS LAST WORDS: #4
Socrates: I DRANK WHAT!?!?
Tarzan: Who greased the grape viiiiiiiiiiiinnnneee........
Al Capone: There's a violin in my violin case!
Pilot, TWA Fl. #343: What's a mountain goat doing 'way up here?"
These are old jokes. Again, there are references to death. (A web
search reveals that TWA Flight 343 does not appear to be a reference to
a real-life air disaster. TWA _was_ a functioning commercial airline
back before some Debian developers were born. CFITs are a regrettably
common class of air accident.[7])
The next one is lengthy.
"Well, it's a little rough... it might not be necessary to drag him 40
blocks. Maybe just four. You could put him in the trunk for the first 36
blocks, then haul him out and drag him the last four; that would certainly
scare the piss out of him, bumping alone the street, feeling all his skin being
ripped off..."
"He'd be a bloody mess. They might think he was just some drunk and
let him lie there all night."
"Don't worry about that. They have a guard station in front of the
White House that's open 24 hours a day. The guards would recognize Colson...
and by that time of course his wife would have called the cops and reported
that a bunch of thugs had kidnapped him."
"Wouldn't it be a little kinder if you drove about four more blocks
and stopped at a phone box to ring the hospital and say, 'Would you mind going
around to the front of the White House? There's a naked man lying outside
in the street, bleeding to death...'"
"... and we think it's Mr. Colson."
"It would be quite a story for the newspapers, wouldn't it?"
"Yeah, I think it's safe to say we'd see some headlines on that one."
-- Hunter Thompson, talking to R. Steadman on C. Colson,
ex-Marine captain, now born again, of Watergate fame.
This is a discussion of violence, so maybe that's what makes it
offensive. Hunter S. Thompson is immensely enjoyable to read, and Chuck
Colson was a snake of a man complicit in crimes in high office. Once
imprisoned, he found God, and was instantly and thoroughly forgiven his
transgressions by conservative Americans who would never extend such
grace to a young person of color who stole goods from a convenience
store. Colson outlived Thompson by 7 years.
"Science was tearing through the 'fine-spun ecclesiastical cobwebs'
to behold a new cosmos, in which our Earth is merely an 'eccentric
speck'-- a world of evolution 'and unchanging causation'. It invited
new ways of thinking. It demanded a new rationale for belief. With
science's truths the only accessible ones, 'blind faith' was no
longer admirable but 'the one unpardonable sin'."
[Adrian Desmond, "Huxley", p. 345]"
This one is yet another example of something being categorized as
offensive because it challenges a dominant belief system, namely the
Calvinist, vaguely Catharite, anti-empirical strains of Protestant
Christianity which all polite discourse, in the U.S. of the 1990s,
anyway, was compelled to accommodate. After a couple of decades of
conservative Christian triumphalism in my home country, this may no
longer be the case[1][2]. (Australia's doing even better! :D [3])
I'll stop here. That's 5 out of 5, none of which advocates the
oppression of any group based on ethnic or ideologic categories. One of
them is rough on Chuck Colson, but like Hitler, he's a specific person
with crimes for which he was inadequately held to account. (Likely
Henry Kissinger, an even worse figure who also served under Nixon, has
blood on his hands from Cambodia to Chile, and is still alive at age 99,
will by contrast die wealthy and celebrated.[4])
That's a better much proportion than I was expecting. The worst of
these is the "famous last words" one, and that mainly because of its
stale, generic content, not because it offends any but the most timid
and censorious dispositions. The remainder of the quoted figures all
promise to reward further reading (in 3 cases, I can aver such myself).
I also ran "fortunes -o -m Hitler" to see what turned up. One of these
is of unclear provenance but popularly attributed to him, in an
expression of what in the U.S. used to be called "family values".
"There is a road to freedom. Its milestones are Obedience, Endeavor,
Honesty, Order, Cleanliness, Sobriety, Truthfulness, Sacrifice, and
love of the Fatherland."
Not as pithy as "Travail, familie, patrie!", is it? How many of these
adjectives shall we classify as offensive because they were purportedly
endorsed by one of the worst figures in history?
Most others were quotations to damn the man with his own words, or were
quotes _about_ him by his opponents (spoiler alert: the man was no
feminist). These opponents include Winston Churchill, who, while widely
celebrated in Anglo-American culture, turns out to be a pretty dark
figure if you read something other than the works of his hagiographers
(or self-serving memoirs).[5] (The U.K. electorate themselves
understood Churchill's limited utility at the time.[8])
I do observe that if we fear charges of anti-Semitism for having Hitler
quotes in fortunes-off, even if they (spoiler alert again) reveal him to
be a hateful ass, we could add offsetting ones from, say, the late Rabbi
Meir Kahane, whose admirers in the Israeli Knesset have been
key partners in the coalition returning Benjamin Netanyahu to power.[6]
Thank you for, perhaps inadvertently, compelling me to review some of
the content of the package. I can now say that I am certain there is
material of worth in the fortunes-off package and support its retention
in the Debian distribution. A review process for individual entries
that are incompatible with the project's values is manifest in the BTS.
Regards,
Branden
[1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/248837/church-membership-down-sharply-past-two-decades.aspx
[2] https://news.gallup.com/poll/341963/church-membership-falls-below-majority-first-time.aspx
[3] https://www.abs.gov.au/articles/religious-affiliation-australia
[4] https://archive.vanityfair.com/article/2004/12/kissinger-declassified
[5] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2002/04/the-medals-of-his-defeats/306061/
[6] https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-722026
[7] controlled flight into terrain
[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1945_United_Kingdom_general_election
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