Hello, On Sat 05 Jan 2019 at 04:24pm -0500, Scott Kitterman wrote:
> I think that's pretty close to it. Cool. > My bottom line is that today is a very divisive time in the world with many > forces trying to drive wedges between groups and force people into one camp or > another and then 'hate' the other tribe. We'll be better off in Debian the > more of that we can ignore. Let's focus on the things we need to focus on to > make Debian great and ignore the rest. I think it might be more useful to think in terms of toleration of difference, rather than the act of ignoring difference, even if for many practical purposes the way to tolerate difference will be to ignore it. Doing nothing more than ignoring difference might lead to a reluctance to take positive steps to address some group being tacitly excluded from participation in Debian. I'm thinking of those who argue that there is no discrimination against women in Debian. They often say that they simply pay no attention at all to the gender of the people sending them patches. But those of us who would like to take steps designed to increase the number of women participating see this as besides the point. The difference is between ignoring something because we have some practical end in mind, like an "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" situation, versus tolerating difference out of respect for the intellectual and moral capacities of the other party. (Yes, I appreciate I've mixed together differences of political opinion and differences of gender in this e-mail, but that's because I take it to be good for us to be diverse along both of those axes.) -- Sean Whitton
