On Thu, Sep 04, 2014 at 02:18:14PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
I do not care what Linus's personal opinion about what is appropriate is.
He's free to hold whatever opinion he wishes; that does not affect me, and
it only has a secondary effect on the community. What I cannot tolerate
is his *behavior*, which is aggressively nasty, hostile, and destructive
to the community, and which can cause real damage by demoralizing and
driving away people who otherwise could be part of our community. And
which is, beyond that, just unacceptable treatment of other human beings.
What if someone felt that your stance requires overmuch scrupulosity in
making sure not to offend, and that such an environment is also
destructive and demoralizing? You're writing as though you're operating
under a fundamental/consensus moral imperative rather than on your own
opinions and beliefs. For myself, this is some of the unease I feel
toward these code of conduct discussions: what is seen by some as a
mandate for people to tone down the flaming on the mailing lists is seen
as others as a much more sweeping mandate for a declaration of
fundamental human rights (or something; I don't really want to
mischaracterize anyone's position so much as illustrate the impression
I take from it).
This has nothing to do with a difference of opinions.
...
discussion of the problems with this argument on-line. The summary is
that, while you can technically define intolerance of bigotry as bigotry
using a fine parsing of the dictionary, this is not a useful definition
and it's not what people intend by the term.
I think it's an astonishingly bold statement to declare that using a
word according to a common definition is invalid or not useful. I think
the most that you can state is that it isn't what *you* intend or that
*you* give the word a particular connotation. Debian is a large community,
but you seem to be treating it as synonymous with a much smaller
community that has come to a consensus on ethics and jargon which the
larger community simply has not.
It only leads to digressing
into pointless meta-arguments, which interferes with addressing the actual
problem.
The actual problem, as defined by you, not the the problems that other
people have, which are not valid? This seems to be exactly the behavior
described by the definition of "bigot" which you consider invalid. (I
wonder what word should be used instead since that word has been
co-opted?) At some point, no matter how politely you wrap up the
language, it comes across as disrespectful (by some definition of
respect) to simply dismiss what other people are saying. So what is the
real scope of the CoC? That people are consistently polite? That nobody
is fearful for their safety? That consensus must be reached? That nobody
is offended? That every opinion must be given equal consideration? I
honestly am less sure than ever following this episode.
Mike Stone
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