At 2022-11-21T07:58:29-0700, Sam Hartman wrote:
> >>>>> "G" == G Branden Robinson <g.branden.robinson@gmail.com> writes:
>
> G> By your metric, so is the Hebrew Bible. For all the slaughter,
> G> xenophobia, and ethno-religious supremacism in it, there's some
> G> good stuff as well. I find the exasperated jeremiads of some of
> G> the later prophets relatable and applicable to modern life,
> G> though I acknowledge that my interpretive frame would alarm many
> G> practitioners of faiths that hold that work as sacred.
>
> I appreciated your first messages in this thread.
Thanks, Sam. (And Tomas, to whom I have an unfinished reply lingering
in my postponed folder.) It's a personal victory condition when anyone
derives value from my epistles. Especially meaningful to me is when
someone is entertained or follows a link that they enjoy more than my
own superficial scratchings. That's partly why I include them.
> I think perhaps you have continued in the same style without fully
> considering the implications of doing so.
Fair. Old dog performs old tricks.
> Trying to create a reduction like you did above particularly on a
> topic like religion or like the worth of someone else's sacred text is
> going to (as another person pointed out) start a culture war.
Maybe; I would point out that as far as I know no one has (recently)
proposed dropping the "bible-kjv" package and I would oppose such
removal if they did, despite my own ill-treatment at the hands of its
exponents. Too bad the copyright holders in the NRSV[1] don't place
their modern translation under a Free license; I think doing so would,
in the long run, undercut the King-James-only movement, which is
dominated by reactionaries dedicated to the production and
retransmission of material of the sort fortunes-off is being removed to
discard. But I digress. The point is that these scriptures retain
presumptive value in our distribution, whereas everything that _is_ of
worth in fortunes-off (R. Hofstadter, H. S. Thompson, A. Bierce, E. St.
Vincent Millay, A. Einstein [yes], W. LeoGrande, S. J. Gould, G.
Carlin, ...) was already deprecated by dint of the term "offensive", and
I will point out yet again how dubious the curation process was in the
first place, but now it's just plain gone. You may perhaps understand
how one could perceive this as maintaining Judeo-Christianity's regnant
status in the Debian distribution.
I propose a research project for a courageous volunteer. Count up how
many women, non-whites, and Jewish people quoted in fortunes-off whom
Mr. Dowland muffled in the name of anti-racism, anti-sexism, and
anti-Nazism.[2] Of those, how many expressed _any_ of the attitudes he
objected to?
> Your point will be lost in the strength of others reactions.
I have always found this sort of thing difficult to manage. I might buy
electrons by the barrel but when discourse degrades to sloganeering I
feel I lack the tools to cope, and tend to lose interest. (As impolitic
as it is to say, that includes some expressions of support. I have been
informed by close friends that I am difficult to please in some ways.)
> I do think there are constructive things you could do:
>
> * Maintain the package with filtering if you believe that's best.
>
> * Maintain the package without filtering if you believe that's best;
> take the position of being a maintainer and force those who disagree
> with you to fight the uphill battle of overriding a maintainer.
>
> * State your support to be counted in any determination of consensus
> and leave it at that.
I only have so many fights in me. Cajoling man page authors to use a
new "MR" macro to put hyperlinked cross-references in their documents, I
expect to take the preponderance of my feeble persuasive energies for
some time.[3]
If I had unlimited resources, I'd adopt "fortunes" and discard some
items. I might keep some of the stuff like the ugly quote from Anita
Bryant--but with contextualization--because she is nearly forgotten (at
least by hetero folks in the U.S.) and yet she was a newsworthy figure
who illustrated how high you could rise with smug homophobia in the late
1970s and at the same time how swiftly and effectively a community
opposed to bigotry could organize against her even in the Carter
presidency. Less than 10 years after Stonewall, Anita got cancelled
before it was cool^W^Weven had a name.
It was not a downhill glide from there, though...in 1981 the Reagan
Administration swept in, packed from top to bottom with homophobes who
welcomed the advent of AIDS with undisguised glee, greeting it as a
scourge that would cleanse the land of gay folks who invited God's
revenge for the incorrectness of their desires and private conduct.[4]
There's an organization called Working Class History[5] that shares a
daily historical calendar on some social media sites. You don't have to
be a Marxist to infer that the history of the working class is a bloody
one, with much savage victimization of ordinary laboring people, so
these sites frequently censor, de-promote, downrank, etc., WCH's posts
because they might discomfit people or bum them out such that they are
less receptive to advertising. They also feature noteworthy
anti-fascist figures like Mildred Fish, Hannie Schaft, or Nina
Lobkovskaya; the latter two assassinated people "just" for being Nazis
or Nazi collaborators in a military occupation. WCH profiles are often
capsule biographies summarizing the varying fates of these people.
That's the style with which I'd like to supplement quotations that some
would categorize as hate speech and in response to which they
reflexively reach for the censorship button. Any quotation that
resisted such contextualization, I expect I'd throw away.
Apart from cool math (within the tight constraints of terminal emulator
typography--but the HAKMEM memo[6] was fit for that decades ago), that's
the kind of thing I'd like to see more of in our fortune cookies. But
already I can foresee a Jonathan Waltheresque[7] figure nodding to
himself sagely at Jonathan Dowland's action and deducing a precedent for
excision of "hateful" figures like Schaft and Lobkovskaya. And at some
point the tankies will show up to speak from behind facebrush mustaches
with honeyed venom of how my anti-fascist editorial slant is so mild as
to be counter-revolutionary.[8]
I don't know that I have enough spoons for those sorts of BS.
But, since you asked, that's my sketch for a future fortunes-nsfw or
whatever. (Let's please be honest enough to admit that the original
purpose of the package's segregation was attempted avoidance of
interactions with U.S. corporate HR departments.)
> But please don't fan the flames.
Fear not; I feel my resolve flagging apace. I should see a doctor about
my inability to sustain a flame war. There may be a drug for me.
Regards,
Branden
[1] http://nrsvbibles.org/index.php/licensing/
[2] https://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2022/11/msg00062.html
[3] https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/groff.git/tree/NEWS?id=eac39afe3e7a86f3adbfb02ff5e33bfd69d4c224#n224
[4] https://www.sfgate.com/opinion/openforum/article/Reagan-s-AIDS-Legacy-Silence-equals-death-2751030.php
[5] https://workingclasshistory.com/
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAKMEM
[7] I drop this name with reservations because I think the guy is safely
long gone; were I as plugged in to Debian's current events as I used
to be, I might be able to think of a contemporary example.
[8] I stole a bit from Andrei Codrescu, who writes better than I do.
https://www.npr.org/2003/01/15/921847/commentary-mustaches
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