Hi!
> On 02.07.19 22:21, Adrian Bunk wrote:
>> On Tue, Jul 02, 2019 at 08:14:40AM -0400, Sam Hartman wrote:
> Every country has its own conventions, problems and solutions.
> But these are often specific to one country, and not applicable
> to other countries or global projects.
> People should be expected to research movements that are relevant only
> in a handful of countries with < 10% of the earths population for being
> allow to discuss on Debian lists.
> Let's look at some non-obvious but possibly relevant differences:
>
> People in the US are used to minority quotas in various places.
>
> In most European countries it would be considered unacceptable racism
> if skin color would play any role in university admission.
This sentence sounds nice in theory, but does unfortunately not tell us
anything about actual racism, social differences, disadvantages and
discrimination that minorities do experience in Europe, not only in
universities.
Your sentence makes it look like discrimination does not exist, so I'd
like to invite you to read up a bit before making such a bold statement.
- How is one's origin linked to social class?
- How is one's gender linked to class?
Search engines might help with the search term "social reproduction", as
coined by Bourdieu. [1]
So surely, on paper, universities do not discriminate, but structurally,
there is discrimination against minorities, and this can be seen in all
sorts of statistics (wage differences between women and men, actual
student numbers with "migratory background" [2] as being
not-born-from-German-passport-holding-parents is called in German
administrations).
> Children in the US grow up learning that they are living in the greatest
> country in the world, an example for the world.
Sigh. It happens that cultural hegemony is often inadvertedly exerted by
some people socialized in the USA (or France, or Japan, or Germany or
Russia or ${country}). Sometimes people are unable to see that people
who grew up elsewhere have not the same cultural references as them.
Let's point it out to them, when it happens but let's not make it a
binary opposition in a world view which goes along the lines of good and
evil.
The image that you depict of the world opposes one (supposed) value
system to the other, however, I would argue that it is a matter of
socialization, not of any immovable cultural difference.
> Children in Germany grow up learning that "I am proud of being German"
> is an unacceptable antisemitic expression, nearly synonymous to
> "I am proud of the holocaust".
This might be true, in particular for the generation whose parents and
grand-parents were alive during 1933-45. But the issue is not about
coming from a country with the nazi past. Remember? other countries had
similar movements, from the Italian fascists, Spain had Franco, France
had the Vichy government under Pétain. The issue is instead that it is
totally absurd to be "proud" of a nation, whichever it is.
> In this discussion here we have two pretty distinct groups of people:
>
> The first group has the opinion that Debian should honor various
> minorities, and that Debian in general should have also a political
> mission.
>
> The second group is unhappy with people being honored by Debian for
> non-technical reasons, and wants Debian in general to be a non-political
> technical project.
>
> Easy to miss, but obvious once you are aware of it:
I certainly believe that there were more peole involved in this thread
than German and English native speakers.
> The people with English as native language are in the first group.
> The people with German as native language are in the second group.
Uh. No. As a German native speaker am definitely not unhappy "with
people being honored by Debian for non-technical reasons, and wants
Debian in general to be a non-political technical project" and I think
you should refrain from making such assumptions.
On a sidenote, I noticed that ~98% of the people who expressed their
view on this thread are white heterosexual (to my knowledge) males. What
does this tell us?
> It is likely not the language itself and causes might be different
> from what I outlined above, but it looks pretty clear to me that
> language/cultural/geographical differences are the root cause of
> these disagreements.
>
> And this makes you appear very offensive, and it might even drive people
> out of Debian, if you try to push your groups opinion in Debian
> mistakenly thinking people who fundamentally disagree with you would
> only be uninformed.
I agree with Sam, and I think this thread has really nothing to do with
debian-project anymore.
I am very surprised at how the above mentioned 98% people who have
voiced their rejection here, fear that politics might enter a technical
sphere. (As if this sphere was autonomous from the rest of the planet!
Spoiler alert: it is not. Your computer parts come from Kongo, Taiwan,
China. Our conversations go through globally operated undersea cables.
The protocols we use are made by diverse people, even though one cannot
exactly pretend that the Global South or the civil society is part of it
[3]. The software you create is used on the entire planet, at least do I
hope so.) Putting up this logo, to get back to the origin of this
discussion, is a super tiny act. It's about living together and
respecting each others differences, without opposing them to each other,
but seeking similarities.
Cheers,
Ulrike
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_reproduction
[2] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Migrationshintergrund
[3] https://www.ietf.org/blog/china/ RFCs by country of author
