Re: rampant offtopic and offensive posts to debian-user
On Tue, 22 May 2007 10:25:25 -0400
Douglas Allan Tutty <dtutty@porchlight.ca> wrote:
> On Mon, May 21, 2007 at 10:46:09AM -0400, Celejar wrote:
>
> > I see your point about offensiveness, but I'll point out that the OT
> > thread I started (Good, evil, etc) was a response to a sig that I felt
> > attacked religion unfairly. Many people use quite provocative sigs,
> > ridiculing (often wittily) political or religious views they oppose. If
> > we demand that posts be inoffensive, I counter-request that people cut
> > the offensive sigs.
> >
>
> Agreed. Further, I would argue that a request to change a sig is not
> OT; it is overhead of maintaining a healthy user environment that
> everyone should read and not filter out as OT. It shouldn't make for a
> long thread. For example:
>
> A's sig:
>
> How many Queen's students does it take to change a lightbulb?
> One to hold the bulb while the world revolves around him/her.
>
> B:
> I'm a Queens' grad and I find your sig offensive.
>
> A: Sorry.
>
> A's new sig:
>
> How many psychiatrists does it take to change a lightbulb?
> One, but the lightbulb really has to want to change.
>
> End of A and B's thread.
I see your point, but I'm not sure that really solves the problem;
we've just offended psychiatrists ... In a more serious vein, you're
taking (as you do in other posts), the "multicultural" (for lack of a
better term) view that the appropriate resolution for an offensive
comment is claiming offense and asking for a retraction /
clarification. While that may be the Canadian way (as I think you
implied in another post), it's not really the American way; we
generally place no legal restrictions whatsoever on one's right to
offend, even intentionally, believing that such restrictions would
unacceptably inhibit free speech. We believe (I know this is an
oversimplification, and that there are certainly non-legal pressures
against uninhibited free speech) that the remedy against bad speech is
more speech, i.e. rebuttal of the bad speech, which is what I meant to
do in most of my OT stuff.
The purpose of this soliloquy is to explain my conduct, and to attempt
to illustrate how different people's attitudes to some of the OT stuff
may derive from their respective political cultures. I certainly respect
your views on this matter, but I'm not sure that I see that the
"multicultural" approach is self-evidently the correct one for the
list. Perhaps it is; I'll have to think about it.
> Doug.
Celejar
--
mailmin.sourceforge.net - remote access via secure (OpenPGP) email
ssuds.sourceforge.net - A Simple Sudoku Solver and Generator
Reply to: