On Wednesday 13 March 2002 04:50 pm, Warren Stramiello wrote: > If there is no dissent on that particular joke being racist, then the > course is fairly obvious- fix the matter.
The course is by no means obvious. Not to sound reactionary, but once we start down the slippery slope of censorship, where does it stop? <sarcasm> Do we start editing the kernel sources to remove all the swear words in there? Do we start auditing the code of *all* packages to make sure there are no potentially offensive words/phrases/ASCII art/etc? Should we start auditing all the dict files to remove potentially offensive words in there? While we're at it, we'd better contact the author of bitchx and get him/her to change their program name or just summarily dump it from Debian. Or perhaps your suggestion was that *racist* words or jokes were somehow *more offensive* than just plain old cuss words. What if there are ethnic jokes in some of the Debian packages? Should we leave those? How about fat jokes/ugly jokes/old people jokes/smelly people jokes/etc? Uh oh -- what if there are religious terms in Debian packages, such as the dreaded "Christmas" word or even "Jewish". Wow -- those could certainly offend. Better chuck those too. Phew -- this is getting complicated. I know, we should establish a chart that maps potentially offensive terminology to a "censor" line so people can clearly see at what point Debian will step in and bitchslap you to bring you back in line. </sarcasm> Or, do we just accept the fact that everyone has a right to their own opinions and those opinions aren't always going to nicely coincide with your own? --kurt
