Re: inappropriate racist and other offensive material
On Wednesday 13 March 2002 04:50 pm, Warren Stramiello wrote:
> If there is no dissent on that particular joke being racist, then the
> course is fairly obvious- fix the matter.
The course is by no means obvious. Not to sound reactionary, but once we
start down the slippery slope of censorship, where does it stop?
<sarcasm>
Do we start editing the kernel sources to remove all the swear words in
there?
Do we start auditing the code of *all* packages to make sure there are no
potentially offensive words/phrases/ASCII art/etc?
Should we start auditing all the dict files to remove potentially offensive
words in there?
While we're at it, we'd better contact the author of bitchx and get him/her
to change their program name or just summarily dump it from Debian.
Or perhaps your suggestion was that *racist* words or jokes were somehow
*more offensive* than just plain old cuss words. What if there are ethnic
jokes in some of the Debian packages? Should we leave those? How about fat
jokes/ugly jokes/old people jokes/smelly people jokes/etc?
Uh oh -- what if there are religious terms in Debian packages, such as the
dreaded "Christmas" word or even "Jewish". Wow -- those could certainly
offend. Better chuck those too.
Phew -- this is getting complicated. I know, we should establish a chart
that maps potentially offensive terminology to a "censor" line so people can
clearly see at what point Debian will step in and bitchslap you to bring you
back in line.
</sarcasm>
Or, do we just accept the fact that everyone has a right to their own
opinions and those opinions aren't always going to nicely coincide with your
own?
--kurt
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