At 2022-11-20T15:34:51-0800, Steve Langasek wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 20, 2022 at 12:28:59PM -0600, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
> > 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.
>
> > 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.
>
> So are you volunteering to adopt the package and do the work of fixing
> it up to remove the garbage that our users SHOULDN'T be subjected to
> through our archive?
I'm considering it, yes. Or was.
> This isn't Sodom and Gomorrah; the package shouldn't be spared from
> death because you found 5 good fortunes in it.
I think the God of Abraham's magic number was originally 50, but crafty
old Moses bargained him down to ten.
But I appreciate the analogy. You, Mr. Cater, and Mr. Dowland are
carrying out a divine genocide against the irredeemably corrupt and
sinful fortunes-off package, except that unlike Yahweh, you won't be
talked into sparing it no matter how much of worth may remain there.
Fair enough--ain't none of y'all ever appeared to me as a burning bush.
But you seem to forget that I said that the ones I quotes were the first
five that "fortune -o" returned to me. For the statistical likelihood
of that, see below.
> This package is a fossilized collection of fortunes that some random
> people on Usenet found funny or otherwise worthy of inclusion over 25
> years ago.
True.
> There are subcollections of fortunes in this package that are
> explicitly *categorized* as racist, homophobic, and misogynistic.
This I didn't notice until I wrote a pipeline to count them up. I have
no need for such sentiments (as I assess them) and no desire to
promulgate them without some sort of framing or context. (The
"fortunes" package, even without its "-off" component, has never served
as a "daily affirmation" or a source of feel-good pabulum.)
Personally, I'd like it if the package were _more_ intellectually
challenging, particularly in the presentation of surprising mathematical
facts. More items from the other Hofstadter (Douglas) and Martin
Gardner could increase its value tremendously. A broadened mind is an
improved mind. Glib aphorisms in the school of methodological
individualism from, say, Robert Heinlein, are an adolescent affectation,
and illuminate little.
> The package IS garbage.
By your metric, so is the Hebrew Bible. For all the slaughter,
xenophobia, and ethno-religious supremacism in it, there's some good
stuff as well. I find the exasperated jeremiads of some of the later
prophets relatable and applicable to modern life, though I acknowledge
that my interpretive frame would alarm many practitioners of faiths that
hold that work as sacred.
The package is a mixed bag. If you can't distinguish the worth of the
statements of William Hofstadter from Adolph Hitler or those of Emma
Goldman from Anita Bryant then in my opinion you disqualify yourself
as a cultural critic. I trust you can do better than this.
> I've looked at those files, the categorizations are not incorrect, and
> there is no redeeming value in shipping such things in Debian.
That just leaves the other 23 categories.
So let's have a quantitative look, reminding ourselves that '%' is a
separator, not a terminator (so we can't just grep and count, we need to
add one--not that this will substantially affect the result).
$ grep -Fcx % /usr/share/games/fortunes/off/{hphobia,misogyny,racism}.u8 | cut -d: -f2 | awk '{ sum=sum+$NF+1 } END { print sum }'
107
$ grep -Fcx % /usr/share/games/fortunes/off/*.u8 | cut -d: -f2 | awk '{ sum=sum+$NF+1 } END { print sum }'
7021
(I didn't include "misandry.u8" as offensive because (1) you didn't
mention it as contravening Debian's values and (2) presumably no serious
person would forward the proposition that it does. Retaining that file
along with Raymond's firearm fetishism in the "inoffensive" fortunes
leaves one's cookie corpus with the curious ethics of the captive
society in the film _Zardoz_: "The gun is good! The penis is evil!"[1])
Anyway, 1.52%. No wonder I got nothing shocking in five draws with
replacement from that bag of stones. Admittedly, I'm hard to shock even
with the contents of the files you derogated--I grew up in the Southern
U.S.[2] and thus have heard it all before, to the point of actual
nausea, frequently drawled from the mouths of "respected members of the
community".
> If someone wants to sift through the contents of fortunes-off to
> separate the wheat from the chaff, fine, let them do it.
This was already done by the process that created "fortunes-off" from
"fortunes" in the first place. Did I not make myself clear that I found
that process deeply flawed?
> But the presence of some good fortunes in the package doesn't compel
> anyone to keep it, nor does rightly pointing out the garbage that's in
> it incur an obligation to do the work to filter out only the stuff
> that conflicts with the project's Diversity Statement.
You don't need to quote §2.1.1 of the Debian Constitution to me.
I acknowledge that adding any fortune cookies by J. K. Rowling, Margaret
Atwood, or Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie would be a fraught process even if
the chosen sentiments would survive scrutiny if unattributed. (Rebecca
Tuvel is right out--right?)
Whatever the (further) outcome, every decision made regarding the
content of this package constitutes political action. Sam doesn't want
the job and after a brief experience of seduction by Steve M., I don't
think I do either. I suspect my own politics as being out of sync with
the Project as it stands today (if indeed they were ever otherwise), but
I am profoundly uncomfortable with the idea of producing something
constitutive of _prescriptive_ politics for the Debian Project (or for
anyone else).
If we assert that we've thrown out all that is offensive, a claim we
made when fortunes-off was first segregated from its counterpart, then
we have necessarily implied that whatever we have retained is not.[3]
I don't want to be that sort of gatekeeper, a role which I fear would
mean I'd spend much of my time arguing with "wokes" and "anti-wokes"
over content, but there's a fate even worse than that--it's to somehow
_succeed_ and end up with something that enjoys passive acceptance. It
would then be at risk of ossifying for _another_ 20+ years. The
implication that the cookies in the "non-offensive" fortunes package are
all unobjectionable is untenable, as I tried to point out with my
institutional memory post.[4] I guess that effort failed. Nevertheless
I caution anyone of the wisdom and the worth of such an endeavor.
I'll close with a fortune I _would_ include.
"Too long have the workers of the world waited for some Moses to lead
them out of bondage. He has not come; he never will come. I would
not lead you out if I could; for if you could be led out, you could be
led back in again." -- Eugene V. Debs[5]
Regards,
Branden
[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070948/quotes?ref_=tt_ql_sm
[2] Maybe that's where I got my tendency to write at Faulknerian length.
[3] People have labored mightily over these issues--surprise!
https://www.ala.org/aboutala/governance/policymanual/updatedpolicymanual/section2/53intellfreedom
[4] https://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2022/11/msg00030.html
[5] https://www.marxists.org/archive/debs/works/1906/060310-debs-glimpseintothefuture.pdf
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