4 ms·

To call it a joke is a bit of a stretch, more like a turn of phrase or wink to the reader. As far as explicitly inserting one's politics into communal tools, t

by lsh 8y ago

To call it a joke is a bit of a stretch, more like a turn of phrase or wink to the reader. As far as explicitly inserting one's politics into communal tools, this case is so mild it's hard to fathom any grounded person wasting time on it. However, there is a case at the moment of the author of the BFG tool for git adding a paragraph of text about fighting trump at the end of his tool's output. He won't get rid of it until he's out of office. Another case where Atlassian was putting in LGBT rainbow stuff into the output of a successful push. Really obnoxious stuff. I don't mind devs having a personality but develop a sense of decorum. As weak as the RMS line was, best keep any snifter of politics out of your tools. It's just lame at the end of the day.

RIMR 8y ago
Or, if you're going to be subtly political (as GNU often is), at least be current. That joke was 20-something years old. It ran its course. Also, as far as calling LGBT rainbows "political", I would have to disagree. You either view LBGT people as equal, or you can be a hateful person. There's no good reason to pander to the latter, but plenty of reasons to stand up in unity with the former. There are some concepts that need to be aggressively viewed as truths rather than opinions. The civil rights movement was won by people standing up and putting their own enrichment aside to say "You are wrong and we stand up in unity with the people you view as subhuman". No reason to shame anyone from doing that again today.
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  It's kinda evergreen, as the global gag rule is, to notable controversy, retracted or reinstated with each change in Presidential party since Reagan, most recently reinstated last year by the Trump Administration. Of course, it's still inappropriate for glibc docs.
  - smsm42 8y ago
    What's the global gag rule you are referring to?
    - geofft 8y ago
      The US government does not fund overseas organizations that provide or promote abortion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexico_City_policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexico_City_policy (The fact that this reference is so unclear is probably a reason that, everything else aside, the joke is not very good. The glibc maintainers have offered to replace it with some clear text about censorship in the US.)
      - smsm42 8y ago
        Thank you for the explanation. This indeed is pretty obscure, and if that it what it is aimed at, the joke is also not well constructed - US govt does not ban anybody from promoting abortion with this rule (I assume we accept the joke's premise that talking about this function is "promoting abortion") - it just withdraws US governmental financing. But that would imply that otherwise GNU project is financed by US federal government? Not sure this is the impression RMS would want to make... OTOH, given RMS's politics (as I understand it), maybe he wouldn't mind it at all if that were true.
- lsh 8y ago
  LGBT* is most definitely political - I think you just proved that.
- d1zzy 8y ago
  I don't understand your logic. You say that putting LGTB rainbows in a tool is not a political act and then go on to compare it with the civil rights movement, one of the major political storms of its time. Is it political or is it not? As to political activism in computer tools... there is a time and place for everything (almost?) and I personally disagree that a computer tool is a place for some random political activism.
- derefr 8y ago
  > There's no good reason to pander to the latter "Pander", no. Avoid offending when "offending" would require active effort and "not offending" would just require doing nothing, yes. Let me talk about professionalism for a moment. The whole concept of "professionalism" is that it's a set of artificial etiquette that allows people who absolutely detest one-another to get along for long enough to complete a joint venture. I think we forget what professionalism is; a relatively-isolationist country like the US (in terms of where its citizens go on holiday, not in terms of its foreign policy) has little need of it. For most countries through most of history, though, professionalism is the thing that you're expected to show when your country decides to ally with that country you were just at war with, and you have to work with people who had just been shooting friends of yours. We expect—and depend on—our tooling enabling professionalism in this sense. That means obvious things like not having insults toward the French in ARM ISA references; but it also means not using religious iconography in a country with multiple religions; not including the Battle Hymn of the Republic as a default ringtone on phones; etc. We want to ensure that we don't accidentally, through coincidences of technology, destroy a negotiation or cause a diplomatic crisis.
- vbezhenar 8y ago
  I was raised in a country with very hateful views against LGBT. While I, personally, developed a tolerance against LGBT, a lot of people around me did not and those people often work as developers. Showing them any sign of LGBT propaganda is a great offence to them. I'm not lawyer, but I suspect that LGBT propaganda might even be against a law. I guess, the same could be said about abortion jokes. Some people might take them too personal.
  - keiyakins 8y ago
    Fuck 'em. I'm not going to bend over backwards to coddle people who hate me for daring to exist. As for laws, I think the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said it best: "I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws."
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- bigleagueposter 8y ago
  Nope
jcranmer 8y ago
The joke is confusing if you're not well-acquainted with US abortion politics, and, if you read the entire email thread, there were actually quite a few people who didn't get the joke properly (you can include myself in that list as another example). RMS's stance is quite galling here. First, he's making it very adamant that the entire purpose of the joke is political commentary. Second, he's resisting any mechanism to actually make it clear that it is political commentary. Finally, he's effectively trying to use dictatorial powers to make his views go through over the strident objections of the consensus view of the maintainers.
- hermitdev 8y ago
  Except, I don't think RMS intended this as a "joke". I honestly think he was dead serious, but worried that other people would interpret it as a joke and thus be inclined to remove it, hence his "do not remove" comment. Technical documentation and reference is really not the place for political commentary. It adds nothing and is distracting. Technical documentation should be just that: documentation; not political diatribe. The politics would be better left to a blog post or something of the sorts.
  - keiyakins 8y ago
    If he was dead serious, he's an idiot. There was never any proposal to ban all usage of the word 'abort' in the sense of 'bring to a premature end because of a problem or fault' or as a noun meaning 'an act of aborting a flight, space mission, or other enterprise'.

by lsh 8y ago

RIMR 8y ago

Or, if you're going to be subtly political (as GNU often is), at least be current. That joke was 20-something years old. It ran its course. Also, as far as calling LGBT rainbows "political", I would have to disagree. You either view LBGT people as equal, or you can be a hateful person. There's no good reason to pander to the latter, but plenty of reasons to stand up in unity with the former. There are some concepts that need to be aggressively viewed as truths rather than opinions. The civil rights movement was won by people standing up and putting their own enrichment aside to say "You are wrong and we stand up in unity with the people you view as subhuman". No reason to shame anyone from doing that again today.

dragonwriter 8y ago
It's kinda evergreen, as the global gag rule is, to notable controversy, retracted or reinstated with each change in Presidential party since Reagan, most recently reinstated last year by the Trump Administration. Of course, it's still inappropriate for glibc docs.
- smsm42 8y ago
  What's the global gag rule you are referring to?
  - geofft 8y ago
    The US government does not fund overseas organizations that provide or promote abortion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexico_City_policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexico_City_policy (The fact that this reference is so unclear is probably a reason that, everything else aside, the joke is not very good. The glibc maintainers have offered to replace it with some clear text about censorship in the US.)
    - smsm42 8y ago
      Thank you for the explanation. This indeed is pretty obscure, and if that it what it is aimed at, the joke is also not well constructed - US govt does not ban anybody from promoting abortion with this rule (I assume we accept the joke's premise that talking about this function is "promoting abortion") - it just withdraws US governmental financing. But that would imply that otherwise GNU project is financed by US federal government? Not sure this is the impression RMS would want to make... OTOH, given RMS's politics (as I understand it), maybe he wouldn't mind it at all if that were true.
lsh 8y ago
LGBT* is most definitely political - I think you just proved that.
d1zzy 8y ago
I don't understand your logic. You say that putting LGTB rainbows in a tool is not a political act and then go on to compare it with the civil rights movement, one of the major political storms of its time. Is it political or is it not? As to political activism in computer tools... there is a time and place for everything (almost?) and I personally disagree that a computer tool is a place for some random political activism.
derefr 8y ago
> There's no good reason to pander to the latter "Pander", no. Avoid offending when "offending" would require active effort and "not offending" would just require doing nothing, yes. Let me talk about professionalism for a moment. The whole concept of "professionalism" is that it's a set of artificial etiquette that allows people who absolutely detest one-another to get along for long enough to complete a joint venture. I think we forget what professionalism is; a relatively-isolationist country like the US (in terms of where its citizens go on holiday, not in terms of its foreign policy) has little need of it. For most countries through most of history, though, professionalism is the thing that you're expected to show when your country decides to ally with that country you were just at war with, and you have to work with people who had just been shooting friends of yours. We expect—and depend on—our tooling enabling professionalism in this sense. That means obvious things like not having insults toward the French in ARM ISA references; but it also means not using religious iconography in a country with multiple religions; not including the Battle Hymn of the Republic as a default ringtone on phones; etc. We want to ensure that we don't accidentally, through coincidences of technology, destroy a negotiation or cause a diplomatic crisis.
vbezhenar 8y ago
I was raised in a country with very hateful views against LGBT. While I, personally, developed a tolerance against LGBT, a lot of people around me did not and those people often work as developers. Showing them any sign of LGBT propaganda is a great offence to them. I'm not lawyer, but I suspect that LGBT propaganda might even be against a law. I guess, the same could be said about abortion jokes. Some people might take them too personal.
- keiyakins 8y ago
  Fuck 'em. I'm not going to bend over backwards to coddle people who hate me for daring to exist. As for laws, I think the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said it best: "I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws."
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
bigleagueposter 8y ago
Nope

jcranmer 8y ago

The joke is confusing if you're not well-acquainted with US abortion politics, and, if you read the entire email thread, there were actually quite a few people who didn't get the joke properly (you can include myself in that list as another example). RMS's stance is quite galling here. First, he's making it very adamant that the entire purpose of the joke is political commentary. Second, he's resisting any mechanism to actually make it clear that it is political commentary. Finally, he's effectively trying to use dictatorial powers to make his views go through over the strident objections of the consensus view of the maintainers.

hermitdev 8y ago
Except, I don't think RMS intended this as a "joke". I honestly think he was dead serious, but worried that other people would interpret it as a joke and thus be inclined to remove it, hence his "do not remove" comment. Technical documentation and reference is really not the place for political commentary. It adds nothing and is distracting. Technical documentation should be just that: documentation; not political diatribe. The politics would be better left to a blog post or something of the sorts.
- keiyakins 8y ago
  If he was dead serious, he's an idiot. There was never any proposal to ban all usage of the word 'abort' in the sense of 'bring to a premature end because of a problem or fault' or as a noun meaning 'an act of aborting a flight, space mission, or other enterprise'.