Unacceptable behaviour
Posted by George Wright Mon, 21 Jul 2008 21:38:00 GMT
I’m not usually one for jumping on flamewar bandwagons, but after seeing this, I felt I had to say something.
After having skim read the comments (there are a lot and most of them repeat each other), I did notice one disturbing thing; the people backing up the original post tend to be male, and the people objecting to the image are female. Or at least, that’s what I can muster from the usernames.
This is a horrendous rift in the community. There’s a big debate taking place on the original post’s comments section which basically involves two disjoint arguments, but I think that the majority of them are missing the point entirely.
Most of the supporters are simply pointing out that it’s legally fine, whereas the opposers are pointing out that morally it’s unacceptable. In the end, neither of these matter because whether you feel it’s acceptable or legal or not, this is pushing women away from the open source community and the comments in the post reflect this. If you don’t believe me, ask a few women how they feel about the post and I’m sure you’ll find the majority will find it offensive.
I’m not going to get involved with giving my opinion on the picture or the surrounding text as, quite frankly, the opinion isn’t what matters. How we perceive it is irrelevant; how the rest of the world perceives it is what really matters, and being a public blog that represents the community, this matters to us as a whole.
Ridiculous outcry about a pair of legs.
Get over it already, okay? Jesus…
As I said, missing the point.
Someone got their blog hits :) who cares, the moment anyone starts to voice an opinion on any of these subjects on a planet the original post just hangs around for longer and gets more hits.
Well it’s a general problem on the Internet. Once you are mostly anonymous you will do/say all sorts of things that you would probably never try to pull if you were in the middle of a crowded park. Even if you are the type of person to forcibly and intentionally embarrass or harrass someone or a group of people there are ways to deal with that in meatspace with proper procedures. We need a set of procedures to deal with them as a community. Griefers are Griefers. They exist. Simple question is do we deal with them and if so how.
Wow. Anyone who thinks that is appropriate to post to a syndicated blog has problems. I don’t care if it’s legal or not.
In fact, all the people arguing if it is legal are not… Yeah, they also have problems.
I’m glad that most of the people in the open source community that I deal with aren’t like this.
Most people who are ‘supporters’ (this is your black/white definition of it) talked about how the real perversion is trying to see the devil in each human action (I’m quoting one of the reactions literary).
In fact is the argumentation about the legality of this not very often used, at all.
So you are actually lying publicly to back up your own argument.
Your argument is that females are being pushed away by this single event or by males posting pictures of a female’s legs. You claim that I should ask a few women about this and you promised that they would all find this offensive.
That means I must have a quite specific taste in females (I don’t believe that, btw) because of all the females I asked, none of them found it offensive.
I kindly invite you to back up your argument better instead trying to do this holy war of purism using stupid propaganda slogans like the ones you posted here (females being pushed away because somebody posts some photos of a female’s legs).
It’s always the same with you hypocrites. On all of our community places (like forums, mailing lists and IRC) you guys go on and on about how great you guys are because you can point to people who said or did something wrong to . And at the same time making this false picture of how much better it would be if this or if that about social interaction would be like how you want it to be.
Fact is that we are talking about human behaviour and that human behaviour is not black and white. Therefore neither is social interaction among humans.
Let humans be humans and let them interact in a normal way. Stop trying to make the people within the many opensource communities perfect robots that behave exactly the way you or your ideology want. It wont happen. Get over it.
Because THAT behaviour of YOU is pushing away much more people than posting one photo of a female’s legs is. Your attitude of dictating people what is bad and what is good is also pushing away females.
What I think is pushing away females really a lot is holy boys like you telling people how we should take special care of delicate feminine sensibilities of females. Females just want be treated equal.
I’ll quote one of the few female coders in the GNOME community:
“The idea that women need to be treated as delicate sensitive creatures just makes me feel patronized and separate from the rest of the community”
This indeed doesn’t mean that we must all start posting photos of females’s legs. It also doesn’t mean we have to start trying to find the devil and evil in each and every questionable action of all of the community members.
Because that’s exactly what you guys are doing. And it truly is sickening.
Please start your own community of purity if you want that. And don’t invite me.
I was simplifying massively because I have better things to do that to give a detailed statistical analysis of the comments posted. Accusing me of lying is, quite frankly, outrageous given that my statements are, in fact, true. Maybe ‘most’ was a little too strong a qualifier, but I’d certainly say a significant proportion are debating the legality.
In any case, this is all irrelevant as I said because I don’t care about the content. What I do care about is that people are offended by this and nobody seems to have spotted that.
I’m not trying to be some “holy boy” or even trying to treat women as “delicate flowers”. I’m simply unhappy that a significant proportion of people are offended by this post and that nobody has even remotely apologised yet.
This isn’t one person who’s upset. It’s an entire group of people.
Maybe you should read my post more thoroughly before replying.
And resorting to personal insults? Poor show.
@pvanhoof
I think your definition of “treating women equally” is off if you think it includes posting photos like that of your fellow developers.
Yes, I know the photo wasn’t of a developer. But it sounds like that’s what you think what treating women equally is?
Honey, try that with me and I’m hurting you.
agree with everything that pvanhoof said
ugh. I’m glad kde developers seem to be more socially developed than the twits defending that blogger… but now some poor woman has an embarassing photo of her up on teh intarwebs and it’ll probably be there forever. hope she doesn’t find out. and now I’m more paranoid about wearing nice clothing in public. it almost makes me want to go back to wearing sweat pants and baggy shirts so that I can pass as a guy. :P well, I guess at least we live in an age where I’m allowed to do that :P ugh.
blauzahl,
we don’t really want to take pictures of you…
I find it slightly worrying that people are commenting in this way and obviously haven’t got the point of this post.
Either that, or they’re quite happy to annoy a lot of people and use free speech as a justification for it.
What you are basically saying is that if you want to be part of a opensource community, you have to become a perfect robot that behaves exactly like how you want the person to behave.
Because otherwise it affects the community as a whole.
Right?
This is propaganda and bullshit. Fear uncertainty and doubt.
In case you will reply with that I didn’t read your blog, here’s what you wrote that is specifically related to this:
“How the rest of the world perceives it is what really matters, and being a public blog that represents the community, this matters to us as a whole.”
1) You are aware that not all of the people who end up being syndicated on the planets asked to be policed by people like you, right?
2) Why would the world perceive this as representing the community, at all? Please elaborate (because I disagree and I don’t believe you, at all).
3) Why does it mean that being syndicated on a planet you also have to be robot-perfect. Actually, ‘perfect’ is the wrong word for it. What you really seem to aim for is perfect according to George Wright. What makes you think the community as a whole agrees with your point of view of what is perfect?
Hint: I seem to disagree, yet I sometimes do some opensource code myself. Nothing much, just small things. Nonetheless I don’t feel persuaded to join you on your opinion of what you think is perfect or rather the right behaviour towards females or rather having the right attitude when posting.
Nobody needs to tell me what I can write and what I can’t. Nobody except me, myself and I needs to police my behaviour, my actions and my writings.
You, George Wright, don’t.
I never said everyone should be perfect; stop exaggerating what I said for your own benefit.
All I am saying with this blog is that people are upset and that people should be civil to one another.
I should think that is fairly obvious if you read the post, but you’re clearly trying to find little technicalities to trip me up with (such as debating over the definition of “world”), and failing to see the whole picture.
Of course if you don’t want to be civil to other people then that is your right. Just don’t expect any respect in return.
Now that’s a good idea. Fight people’s blog content with your own personal respect for the individual and let people decide for themselves individually.
Instead of policing in blog items and comments what people can and what people can’t write in their own personal blogs that accidentally happen to be syndicated on one of the planets.
Try that instead of speaking on behalf of a group of people.
@pvanhoof
“Nobody needs to tell me what I can write and what I can’t. Nobody except me, myself and I needs to police my behaviour, my actions and my writings.”
You can write whatever you like. I don’t really care. I, however, reserve the right to not flirt with you at parties. :D
But if your behaviour or actions infringe on me or anyone I care about, I’m coming down hard on you.
No, this post of his will NOT take females out of FOSS. I am a female, and I don’t give a damn about the “incident”. I don’t feel insulted, and I won’t delete my ubuntu partition over it.
In other words George, you and everyone else, are overreacting. Get over it. Don’t expect a Balcan person, or a Chinese person, or an Amazonian tribal person to have the same behavior as you do – even if the moral code is the same. These are different cultures and respond differently on the SAME moral values. Meaning, that Nicu knew it was wrong, but it was alright, because his social experiences allow him to do that.
Sure, Nicu could have removed that post from the planets, but if Nicu has never lived abroad he can’t guess the western taboos. For all he knows, all the porn he rents is all made in the west.
And that girl, if she didn’t want perverts, she should have worn something longer. I was young once, and I was careful what I was wearing, exactly because: “This. Is. BAAAALCANS”.
I never said anything about my own personal respect; I used a general case whereby I said that if you are not going to be civil to people, then you should not expect respect in return.
Unfortunately, in this case, he’s acting in an uncivilised manner which is reflecting on the community and it will be the community which loses its respect as well as him.
If the guy has accidentally been syndicated (I find it hard to believe it was an “accident” but fine, let’s go with that), then it is up the people who added him in the first place to remove him if he doesn’t want to accept the responsibilities of not pissing people off by acting in an uncivilised manner. Unless of course, those people don’t mind him angering their readers, but I can’t see why they’d want that.
ps. (@George) And no, you don’t need to protect females against blog items. They can take care of themselves just fine.
And if you truly want equality, you better let them take care of it themselves.
After thousands of years of human interaction among both males and females, have both genders developed surprising interesting strategies for dealing with the typical behaviour of members of the other gender.
If you really respect the female gender as much as you seem to want to show respect, you would instead of over protecting them be puzzled by their ingenious strategies in dealing with things like male arrogance. Let them play their game.
That means allowing a certain variety of behaviour among human beings.
Perhaps until one human being hurts another human being. In which case the law system is hopefully more capable at handling the problem than any of us is.
@blauzahl: Yep, it’s your right (and probably a good strategy) to ignore my presence me at such parties.
If my intent would be to hurt somebody, I would likely accept that this somebody or somebody who cares about the person is going to come down hard on me.
My instinct might try to escape, though.
The original post had no intention of hurting anybody personally. So that is not related to this case in my opinion.
Eugenia: It won’t push out those already in it, because, hey, I already know that most people aren’t like that. But newbies? Do you really want that to be how your community is perceived? I think the comments have been more telling than the original post.
And, yeah, I could wear a burqua, but some days I really don’t want to. Having other people force you to wear something because “they can’t control themselves” sucks. And that’s a really stupid argument. Unfortunately, it does play out that way to some extent…
Maybe I’ll blog about it. Maybe not.
Oh, and “western taboos”? From his post it was clear he knew that what he was doing wasn’t considered “ethical” and that it was something she would have disapproved of.
This is stupid. Perhaps you should stop the non-sense and delete this blog-post because it’s counter-productive.
Any regular post can be liked or disliked by people. Love it or hate it.
Women like to be appreciated. Nothing wrong with a pair of legs. We all (erm..) have legs. Chill out. You see that everywhere on the internet, on the TV (music video clips?), on the real life.
You guys are acting like you have something against women. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misogyny
You see naked chicks on deviantart.com along with anime and other stuff. Nobody complains about that.
Take it as it is and stop whining about useless things and get something real useful done with your precious time.
Citing human evolution as a reason to not be civil to people (in this case, females) is ridiculous.
You keep pulling my statements out of context and making up more over and above what I’ve been saying.
If you don’t agree that people should be civil to one another then I fear the sort of world you’d like to live in.
The fact is that a proportion of people are offended by this post (I know that for a fact, given private conversations and looking at the public outcry), and you’re sitting here hurling insults at me for pointing this out.
I haven’t expressed any opinions one way or the other about the original image posted or the text surrounding it, nor do I intend to. All I did was merely point out that it is causing a rift in the community and that arguing over such things was irrelevant and that what does matter is that people are offended and that this is a problem.
And yet you seem to have extrapolated all sorts of bizarre and creative things about my worldly view and attitude towards other humans (amongst many other things) from what I can only think is your imagination.
George, you seem to be stuck in a backwards way of thinking, akin to the idea of men dueling one another for the honor of a maiden, and quite frankly, I find that offensive in and of itself.
This is the 21st century. Women have fought hard to not be seen as weak and sensitive and needing to be taken care of by men. It is not people who take lewd pictures of women that threaten this evolution, it is people like you who refuse to recognize the change.
Furthermore, I disagree with your claim that the commenters who side with the poster seem to be male, and the commenters who are offended seem to be female; in fact, I would say that it seems to be the other way around to me, in that more planet-syndicated women have voiced non-offense than what you’re suggesting, and the vast majority of the offended are clearly male.
The woman chose to wear the clothes she wore. She obviously had a reasonable expectation that people would look at her legs, since they are completely visible. Male passers-by who admire their legs are a given. Women admire physical traits of men just as much.
The picture in question has no identifiable traits that could lead anybody to guess who the woman is; if the woman herself were to see the picture a week or a month later, even she probably would not recognize herself. As far as anyone is concerned, the picture has no identity.
Now quit trying to drag us back to the feudalistic era and grow up.
That’s nature. If I go out shopping naked, there will be a lot of men who won’t “control themselves”. In the west they might just leave the matter to a few cellphone photographs, but in the East might get you raped on the spot.
This woman knows that.
So it’s not about YOU, here in the US or UK or whatever. It’s about HER in Romania. She knows the world she lives in, and she HAS to adapt, or she will get eaten alive. If she doesn’t like it, she should move to the west. I DID. I don’t like the Mediterranean/Balkan mentality any more than you do, but I have come to accept how things are run over there.
And there you come, a westerner to tell this person that he was wrong and that you are angry at him. Sorry, but this is not right. You know nothing about this person, about his society’s values, about how things work over there, about what’s acceptable over there or not. You judge the case with YOUR values and that’s just not fair.
And nobody said to wear a burqua, let’s not be silly here. But challenging men to “contain themselves” is not logical either. It’s like you have this very aggressive male goat, and you go poke at his eye all the time, and then you are actually WONDERING why the hell he hit you with his horns.
Sorry, but that’s how it is.
You have also managed to miss the point of my post.
I will spell it out here in a much condensed version:
“There are people offended by this. It doesn’t matter if you think it’s acceptable or not. A significant proportion of people think it’s not. You have a duty on a publically syndicated blog not to be offensive.”
You have also fallen into the trap of stating that I, apparently, have tried to heroically defend women here. I haven’t. As I said in the original post, I haven’t (and will not) express any opinion about the image or text.
What I have done is pointed out that everyone is missing the point and that it’s irrelevant whether you think it’s acceptable or not, given that people are offended and nothing is being done about this, which I find rather sad. I also pointed out that it seems that many of the people who are offended seem to be women, and that many of the supporters seem to be men. I even went so far as to say this is a dodgy statistic.
So maybe people should look at what I’m actually saying before they jump to conclusions. I am not simply stating what everyone else has said, because I deem it all irrelevant.
I’m also disappointed with the number of personal insults that have been directed at me as a result of this. This is another area where the open source community fails it, in much the same respect as the original blog post, because people seem incapable sometimes of being civilised.
Thanks for cutting right to the point!
So far nobody has really stood up and said “this is wrong because…” …and given the right reasons. George did. You’re saying he should stay out of it because he’s male? “Women can take care of themselves… hold on while I grope another.” Come on! Plenty of guys are offended by this attitude. (As shown by a few irc channels I’m talking in.)
Saying that “women want equality, therefore we should , otherwise you are medieval” is the wrong argument to use. Do you even see the irony?
Eugenia: So if the blacks in the States didn’t like racism, they could’ve just moved, right?
>You have a duty on a publically syndicated blog not to be offensive
Have you ever thought that for Nicu and his peers this was not offensive and so he didn’t see the need to censor himself in the eyes of the westerners?
I am sure not.
You know, if aliens ever land on this rock, how are you going to deal with their normal behavior for them of “eating of old”, “killing the opposite sex during sex”, or “smell like pigs”?
“Civilised”. You keep using that word. It doesn’t mean what you think it means.
And it isn’t your job to be the censorship police. It isn’t your job to protect people from being offended. There will always be someone offended by something, and if they’re loud enough, they can cause more trouble than they prevent.
>So if the blacks in the States didn’t like racism, they could’ve just moved, right?
Racism is different. It does not come from naturally endorsed sexual endorphins, but from society. In our case you ask men to battle their nature while challenging them constantly. In racism is just a social thing that is developed later in life in some societies.
And besides, you honestly think that many blacks haven’t moved to avoid racism? They have! They moved to different cities, states, neighborhoods. It’s not a nice thing, but it has happened. Until the society straights up, this might be the only thing left to do.
You can’t just change a society in a day, neither you, who lives so far away from Nicu’s world, have the right to straight up a person who all his life knows no better.
So, don’t change the subject to racism, because I could start saying the same things about how the westerners see muslims and how they despise their way of life. Unless you learn to embrace other cultures, get to THEIR SHOES, I suggest you let this go.
Well almost never agree with you Eugenia, but in this case you’re making a whole lot of sense.
I don’t see anything wrong with an anonymized picture of someone’s legs. As has been pointed out, if your skirt is that short, then you have made the conscious decision to have your legs viewed up to the point where your skirt covers them. Nothing is visible in that picture that was not intended to be made visible (and in fact, since her face is tactfully not shown, even less is visible than was intended).
Sure, some people were clearly offended. So be it. Many cultures and religions have values that are easy to offend, and trying to dance around them is fruitless and regressive. See the controversy over the Mohammed cartoons. The sooner we can all freely make fun of everything equally, the better this world will be.
That said, nicu would have done a lot better to tag the post in such a way to avoid having it syndicated on the planet, mostly because it just isn’t OSS related. I’m equally bored by people posting about what they made for dinner, as someones random pictures from the subway. Luckily planetkde seems to have much less of these trivial posts.
How can the Westerners control their nature?
I’m not trying to change a society in a day, I was hoping that after 20 years of change it would at least not become worse. I know Nicu’s world, and that’s exactly my problem. That’s why I say it’s typical Romanian stuff, I’m sure he doesn’t see a problem with it.
And “embrace other people’s culture”? Really. While trey’re trying so hard to be “European”, now that they’re in the union. Is that the image you want to portray? Ah… boys will be boys.
There are many people like him who knew no better and have changed. Even without moving. Staying in Romania does not give you a free pass to be a jerk, I’m sorry.
Eugenia: From nicu: I didn’t had the guts to reach my backpack and take out the SLR with really big lenses
I think it is very clear from this line that he knows it is not a proper thing to do. And it sounds like if he’d done so, she would have done something. So I’m imposing my morals on him? If anything, I’m stating my morals, as I’d like other prospective women out there to know that not all FOSS developers are jerks — most of the guys are very sweet.
Otherwise, I don’t know what to make of your post. It sounds like:
Burquas? Don’t be silly, but otherwise you’ll get raped, kthxbai.
And Greek, and Turkish, and whatever in the region. It is “typical”. So if it’s “typical”, why are you even offended from it? It’s normal – for them!
Excuse me, but do you have any evidence that Nicu himself gives a flying monkey about the EU? Or that it cares about your moral values?
Actually, it does. That’s the part you don’t get. As I said earlier, if you don’t like the ecosystem there as a woman, you move out. It will take years and years to change it, so there is absolutely no reason to sit down and be “offended” about it. You just ignore it.
I mean, come on. It’s just some meat. Jeez. I have some, you have some. What’s the big deal about it?
My “moral values”? Haha. Cute. Thanks for the reply, but I’m out of this. I’ll forward your post to any relatives I have there.
Eugenia: Men can “control themselves” whether they like to admit it or not. I’ve “controlled myself” for 24 years now with no problems. Anything else is an excuse. Are you really trying to claim that Nicu was helplessly drawn to sneaking a picture of the woman’s legs?
Nicu knew it was offensive as well, he said so himself: “I didn’t had the guts to reach my backpack and take out the SLR with really big lenses” So while it’s nice to blame the controversy on those evil westerners with their values the fact is that nicu isn’t that innocent. :P
I know that! And I even wrote about it on my first post. But that’s not the point. The point is that he can get away with it, because that’s how his society is structured. I clearly wrote on my first post that different cultures will behave differently on the SAME moral values. Because their society allows, or disallows, certain behavior.
This is a classic free speech issue. What’s more important, the right to say whatever you want (within reason) or the image of the community?
As a liberal, I tend to think free speech is pretty important - this week it’s a pair of legs that is offensive, next week it’s any type of criticism of KDE, and the next week it’s everything except the talking points put out by the PR team.
There always has to be a balance, of course, but really this strikes me as pretty tame. I mean, an anonymous pair of legs? Really? Maybe the people getting offended here should get some thicker skin, because I can pretty much guarantee this is not the worst thing they’re ever going to see.
If people want to stop his blog from being syndicated in the future, then so be it. But I’m not sure he deserves this public witch hunt that some people seem to be on.
my my. i’ve no problem with people posting pictures like that, i don’t even mind the religiously inclined to speak up - i just don’t want to see it in a software dev related planet. in the context of the planet this post was published, it’s just wrong. this whole moral/legal debate is just annoying. morality is what you make out of it - best thing to really bash your heads in. and it’s beside the point. let people publish what they want. having a post syndicated is .. wee-ell .. something different. after syndication, a blog post is presented as part of a developer community. and that’s where the guy just stopped thinking what kind of light he sheds on fedora. to be quite honest: one childish blog post later and the guy should go back to hiding and mature like a good cheese (several years please). this is godwin all over again - you freaking can’t debate morality.
I’m amused that all the women in Romania were just told to move out.
I completely agree with your original post George – this kind of behaviour pushes women away from involvement in open projects.
The poster’s behaviour promotes an image of himself as an immature horny teenager – not exactly the kind of person the average lady would feel inclined to invest her free time working with.
I hope at the very least he gets a stern warning from the syndicators. If he insists on posting that kind of material, it should be tagged so that it doesn’t appear in an official community blog planet, or he should be de-syndicated.
I don’t believe free speech comes into it; he still has the freedom to say whatever he wants, but I don’t think that stuff like that should be syndicated.
And to those muttering the word “censorship” I emplore you to look up the meaning of that word.
It’s just a pair of legs.
You keep presenting this issue as if everybody secretly knows that Nicu’s act was bad and that everyone suggesting otherwise are a predominantly male minority of pedantics, misfits and bullies trying to cover up the holy Truth.
If anything, the reality is that hardly anyone is focusing on the legality of this matter and plenty of members of the community, male and female, have stated that they do not find Nicu’s particular post offensive.
There is nothing indicating that Nicu’s photo is pushing women away. There is nothing indicating that Nicu’s photo makes the rest of the world perceive our community as bad.
Just get over those freaking legs already (and yes, it really is just legs on that particular photo, even if the legs physically belong to a real woman).
Just because some people have stated they’re fine with it does not mean that it’s acceptable. Many people have also said they’re opposed to it. Are you saying that somehow because of your belief that these people are wrong their opinions don’t matter?
George Wright: When have I ever said that?
You implied it. I asked for confirmation.
Why didn’t this “Nicu” ganster just ask the woman out?
They could be off having a nice drink, and a little bit of kissing, and it would have saved us from having a retarded flamewar.
George Wright: I did not imply anything. You were the one making the argument that ”How we perceive it is irrelevant; how the rest of the world perceives it is what really matters”.
Now show us what the rest of the world perceives, in light of the fact that both males and females have stated they do not find the post offensive.
Plato: Hopefully, that’s what happen in most cases.
Just because you’ve found some males and some females who don’t find it offensive does not mean that EVERYONE does not find it offensive. I have stated that a significant proportion of the people who have commented on here and the original post (as well as other places like mjg59’s blog) have found it offensive. This is enough to make it a problem.
Just to repeat one last time: just because some people are ok with it does not mean everyone is.
Personal blog. Who gives a shit? If people don’t like it, DESYNDICATE. I hope someone posts goatse one of these days.
George Wright: Who have suggested that everyone is okay with it? (and no, I didn’t suggest it - I didn’t ‘imply’ it either)
Just to repeat one last time: just because some people are not ok with it does not mean everyone is.
So don’t speak on behalf of the community as a whole.
Thanks and don’t invite me to your opensource community of purism. I’m not interested in fanatic people - that includes the religious ‘free software or die’ idiots -. The fanatics are just wasting people’s time.
Most people who are into any of those opensource communities start with the core concept that with the right freedoms you can do better engineering.
They attach to that a bunch of morals and cultural values. Which is fine and human.
But act like a fanatic and I’ll ask you to leave me alone.
Puristic behaviour like condemning each and every act that isn’t 1000% according to your holy values and/or spreading propaganda like that it affects our community as a whole is perceived by people like me as stupid and false.
Now get back at your editor and do some more engineering in freedom.
I’m a bit surprised that you seem to keep blowing my statements out of proportion. I will repeat again that I have not expressed any opinion on the act in question; I have simply said that there are people who are upset about it, and that this is unacceptable in itself, whether or not the act is unacceptable in your eyes.
I’m not speaking ‘on behalf’ of the community. I’m simply pointing out what is there to see, plainly, but which nobody seemed to have picked up on.
You keep using such words as purity and fanatic, but yet I have not said anything about the act. I do, however, think that an apology should be forthcoming given that a lot of people are upset about it.
In this case, not everyone needs to be upset about it; if a significant proportion are offended then that is enough. It does not work the other way around; a significant proportion of people not being offended does not signify that it should be fine or acceptable to behave in this way.
As for ‘acting like a fanatic’, I fail to see how it is ‘fanatical’ to expect a bit of common courtesy in public places. I wouldn’t care if it was a private blog, but since it was syndicated in public in a place which reflects the views of the community then it is unacceptable. It is unprofessional at best.
I also still do not care for your personal insults. They are unwelcome and in a very similar vein to the complaint I have made here.
One final thing; where have I condemned “each and every act that isn’t 1000% according to [my] holy values”? I would like to see evidence of me complaining about “each and every act”.
I find it hard to take you seriously after you hurling several personal insults and making accusations up on the spot. It reads as if you’re clutching at straws.
Why would this person have to apologize for something that is, according to what you are now trying to explain, not wrong?
As if the people reading the planets are the ones who can dictate the content.
As if those (few) people who complained are worth apologizing for.
But it gets even better. According to what you just said, the blogger DIDN’T do anything wrong but JUST BECAUSE a bunch of whiners complained he HAS to apologize for something that was not wrong in the first place?
Dude … that’s not just fanatic, that’s sick.
Bloggers who are syndicated are not like gladiators who must die for the pleasures of the public.
Let me remind you that gladiators where slaves that had no human rights and had to perform until death.
In MY culture, George Wright, is slavery much more immoral than taking pictures of a female’s legs.
So NO, nobody must do any apology.
The fanatics just need to stop whining about something that was not a problem in the first place and they need to stop trying to pump their holy cultural values in our arses.
Because clearly, we’re not accepting them.
facepalm
Please, please, ‘pvanhoof’ or whoever you are, go back to school and learn how to present a clear and consistent argument.
You’re embarrassing yourself.
So you’re denying that the act isn’t unprofessional in itself?
I suspect most companies would disagree with you on that one.
I never said it’s not wrong; you’re ignoring the concept of context. Things can be fine in certain contexts but unacceptable in others. This is what I’m driving at, but you’re too busy claiming “religious fanaticism” to see this.
If it was a private blog your arguments would hold some weight, but unfortunately it’s not. It’s a syndicated blog on a free software technology blog site. As such it not only voices his opinions but is also perceived as those of other projects.
You’re quick to point out that only a “few” people have objected to it. I would like to see hard statistical evidence of this; at the moment you’re extrapolating hypotheses from a sample size that is statistically irrelevant. Because of this, the worst case scenario situation applies and in the interests of the community it should be assumed that a significant proportion of people have been offended.
I find it a real shame that you’re quite happy to pull conclusions and arguments out of thin air with no evidence to back them up whatsoever.
And one final thing: planets who syndicate private blogs don’t change the statute of the private blogs into a public ones.
It just means they syndicate.
If you want to complain, complain to the maintainer of the planet aggregator software. Not to the individual who has a private blog.
Doing that is just being aggressively offensive towards the individual’s rights to freely express his personal opinion, feelings and whatever on his personal online space.
My aggressively offensive I mean that you act as if only your culture should be the one in this world defining what can and what can’t be written.
ps. And by your culture I don’t mean: the UK. In the UK there are millions of subcultures.
The blogger obviously knows he’s syndicated. With the privilege of being syndicated comes responsibility.
If he doesn’t want to take those responsibilities he should request to be removed.
George Wright:
Of course it does exactly work the other way around - there is nothing magical about people who are easily offended that somehow grants them more rights than those who aren’t.
And would you care to elaborate on why your take on responsibility is more true than his? And don’t say ‘because some people are offended by his post’, because there is plenty of people who are offended by your inclinations at censorship as well.
Bullshit. The blogger has to do nothing and the planet maintainer should show gratitude for the free content the blogger provides.
The funny thing is that nearly ALL of the planet maintainers do this and that ONLY the holy boys who constantly whine about what we can and what we can’t write are the ones who think that it’s the bloggers who should have gratitude.
In fact, both the bloggers and the planet maintainers usually have a fairly good understanding already. They do just fine.
If you think you can do better, that your policing would be better performed, then please start a planet.gwright.org and stop whining about other people’s planets.
That’s called a free and competing market. My and your country, and therefore our cultures, are big supporters of free market values.
Doesn’t mean you must strictly share that opinion, because both of our countries, and therefore our cultures, are big supporters of freedom of thought, expression and speech.
Now please let humans be humans.
It’s called damage control. I would like to think that getting more people involved in the OSS community is one of our aims, and so offending and/or angering as few people as possible is obviously a consequence of this aim.
In any case, everyone I have spoken to (about 20-30 people so far) have agreed with me that this behaviour is unacceptable in a public forum (a fair few of them did not have any objection to the act itself but think it’s not right that such a post was made publically). 20-30 people is about 10-15% of the core KDE team, for example (assuming there are around 200 active contributors) and that is significant at this point. I know these statistics are very dodgy but it does put things vaguely into perspective.
An analogy to your argument would be that one should be allowed to start a brawl in a shop and the shop keeper should be grateful for the person’s custom.
No, it doesn’t work that way. People have a responsibility to exercise common decency when interacting with one another. If you don’t think that then I would not want to live in your world.
It’s not up to you to do damage control on behalf of people like me (on behalf of communities). Please stop doing that.
I’m doing just fine.
In fact, your damage control is causing more damage.
You see, you are damaging our communities by trying to inject the meme that having fun and the possibility to freely express and share your thoughts is something that should be limited.
I philosophically disagree with your meme. In fact I believe that we should not limit people at all, or at least not at all as far as you want to limit people in this.
Therefore you have not been given my vote to be the person to decide what people (like me) can and what people (like me) can’t write on their private blogs that happen to be syndicated on various planets.
In fact I would rather vote against you, against your principles and against your so-called moral values. I’m in fact in disagreement with them. Philosophically in disagreement.
So stop playing a role that was not given to you. I don’t want you to police anything on behalf of whole communities that I belong to and frankly, I don’t want to belong to any community that has given people like you that role.
Are you getting what I’m saying?
Finally?
You talk of freedom and yet you are trying to remove my freedom to express concern over someone’s actions.
I have not attempting to force him to remove anything; I have simply stated this is unacceptable.
Maybe you have double standards for things you agree with and things you don’t agree with?
Finally, I feel your responses to my blog are indicative of some of the unwelcoming nature of the open source community (personal insults when you disagree, lots of profanity, general abusiveness and accusations).
I’m not trying to remove that freedom, I’m criticizing your opinion.
We can go turtles all the way down on this one if you want.
Just as it is your freedom to express your opinion, should it be mine to criticize it.
And since I disagree with you, I am criticizing it.
That’s not the same as removing your freedom of expressing.
Again, you are making propaganda out of this: oh nooo! be afraid of this pvanhoof dude! He tries to remove my freedom to express my opinion!!
No he doesn’t. He’s criticizing your flawed point of view on moral values, on a blogger having to apologize while he didn’t even do anything wrong, on how you think planets change the statute of a private blog into a public one, of …
“Again, you are making propaganda out of this: oh nooo! be afraid of this pvanhoof dude! He tries to remove my freedom to express my opinion!!”
I’m afraid you’re the one who’s been guilty of that far more than me. You have accused me of attempting purification, holy wars and many other things in this blog.
All I have said is that this has offended a lot of people and that it deserves an apology. You, yourself, have started this entire argument on morality which I deliberately avoided from the start due to the fact that it is irrelevant.
You have failed to see this. If you continue to attempt to argue this point I will continue to say it is irrelevant, as I have said right from the very start.
It almost reads as if you are creating arguments then claiming I am using them in order to disagree with them. Either that or you’re jumping to many conclusions which I have not said.
“It’s not up to you to do damage control on behalf of people like me (on behalf of communities). Please stop doing that.”
That looks very much like an attempt to “shut me up” rather than an attempt to criticise me.
A truism, but you still fail to justify how a community based on censorship will offend less people than a community based on free speech.
(I’m not pretending free speech can’t produce crap, but the converse will offend people - many people)
This is not censorship. Stop throwing that word around; I am simply stating that such a post is out of place in a technology blog.
Imagine what the public outcry would be like if such an entry was made in a respected scientific journal.
And again, the fact that it offends some people does not mean that it deserves any apology. That is among the items in your opinion that I am criticizing.
Again, blog writers are not gladiators who need to serve their lives for the readers of the planets that their private blog happens to be syndicated on.
It’s not the readers of planets who dictate the content of the private blogs, it’s the blog writers who decide for themselves.
Those items are exactly the ones that I disagree with.
No, but common human decency should be such that people aren’t unwelcoming and offensive to people. As I keep saying, a significant proportion of people were offended by the post, irrelevant of content.
Similarly, a lot of people would be offended if I were to post a blog, for example (this is an extreme), denying the holocaust. In much the same way, the content does not matter, but I would issue an apology if I had done so because it would offend a lot of people, even if I genuinely am not offended with what I say. That does not make those who find it offensive “easily offended”, nor does it make their opinion invalid or wrong.
All I’m asking for here is a bit of common human decency, but clearly you’d rather hide behind a huge curtain of “free speech” to avoid being civil to people.
And about “damage control” vs. shutting you up:
As soon as you claim to act on behalf of other people you should expect those people to be extremely critic if you do it wrong.
In my opinion you have been doing it completely wrong and caused by that you are causing real damage to the very communities you tried to protect.
So I asked you to stop doing that.
If you want to continue doing that, then please mention that you do it for whoever you are doing it for except for *me*.
Because I disagree with you, because I didn’t vote for you and because I never gave you permission for this.
I don’t think you should apologize if people would be offended after you blog that the holocaust didn’t occur.
I would think you are an idiot (because there’s plenty of proof that it did occur) and that would be sufficient for me.
It’s not because a large amount of indoctrinated people are offended, that these people “deserve” an apology.
It just means that a large amount of people are indoctrinated.
Again, I disagree and I will keep disagreeing on this because your opinion doesn’t make sense at all if your value and moral is true freedom of speech.
You can’t have true freedom of speech if you have to accept the ‘truth’ from the opinion that the majority of people have.
In fact are the majority of people usually quite naive when it comes to the truth.
Actually, it’s all just bullshit. No one really mature even bothers getting dragged into moot discussions like the topic. Every mature person just ignores entirely such things, especially without writing shitty nonsensical blog posts about them.
George Wright:
Demanding someone to retract a previous statement or expression is exactly censorship.
And the only one hiding is you, behind your blurry whatever-supports-my-view-conceptions of common human decency.
Freedom of expression is not opposed to common human decency. Freedom of expression is common human decency.
There continues to be no evidence, explicit or otherwise, that a demand for retraction will appease more people than it will repulse.
George seems to keep getting back at the argument that ‘it doesn’t belong on a technical blog’.
But George is not the owner of the blog being questioned. In fact, he as not one single thing to say about that privately owned blog.
He tries to cover that fact up by saying that since the blogger is syndicated on a technical planet, that he should adjust his writing style to that planet.
Which is, of course, bullshit.
It’s the planet maintainer who is responsible for filtering content, not the blogger.
Nonetheless does George enjoy blaming the blogger for inappropriate content for the planet.
Since the maintainer of the planet did decide not to filter it, it means the maintainer of the planet decided that the content was not worth filtering.
If you disagree so much with that, George, then just start your own planet.
You are wrong that the blogger should change his writing style, behaviour or whatever just because you happen to prefer purely technical content.
If you dislike the nature of the planet that you are reading, then stop reading that planet and make a better one yourself.
Well, the reasoning is probably something like this:
The “community” has said that it wants more women to join. It has also analyzed the situation (actually asking women – fancy that!) and found that the most important property of the community that is making the women not want to join is behaviour like this.
Now, George notices such a behaviour and points out that given the wish that more women join, this is counter productive.
If the “community” didn’t have such a wish, it would probably be no big deal, even if I personally thinks that it shows that this blogger is immature.
But given the fact that the “community” does wish more women to join, the picture is counter productive to the wish of the community.
As for my personal views, I think George is right. I also think that he as every right to point out behaviour that is counter productive to the goals of the community. Further, I think that pvanhoof is uncomfortable with this (probably because he is also a person that is involved in counter productive behaviour) and wants to sensor George. >:-)
Inge Wallin:
Has it really? Where are these studies documented? Why is no one referring to them?
Oh, and let me guess: people who are against the war in Iraq are most likely radical Muslims themselves, right?
The community didn’t analyze anything. I’m puzzled at why you think anything got seriously analyzed.
I’ve seen a few pseudo scientifically sounding blog posts about the subject.
But so what? Is that ‘the community’?
A bunch of individuals once made a report and correlated things (usually out of context, or by incorrectly interpreting statistical data) to come up with a bunch ‘ideas’ of why they believe females stay away from opensource contributing. It seems some decided to put that in some sort of HOWTO to make it look as if it’s serious knowledge.
Problem is that probably none of the people who were involved in all that had any knowhow about psychology.
Nonetheless some people try to portray these ideas as facts. Which is of course silly.
I don’t believe one picture of a female’s legs has pushed away any lady who was about to contribute.
The only thing this specific picture might have done to some females was to show them that among the large group of software developers, at least one likes to watch the legs of females.
What a surprise!
What people like George have been doing, though, was once more explaining females that without ‘his fantastic help’, they are defenseless in our communities.
Which is simply not true at all.
In fact, there’s no problem. Maybe there’s a problem in some people’s minds, yes. But not a real problem.
If a female software developer involved in an opensource community would have posted the legs of a male, nobody would have whined. Now that the legs where female, suddenly a bunch of “lady protectors” need to jump the stage and start whining about moral values bla bla bla.
If they’d treat females equally to males, they’d let the females handle this one themselves individually. They wouldn’t try to act as if they are the boys who’ll protect the poor females against vicious attacks from the bad bad boys.
They wouldn’t scare away females by doing as if there’s a problem here.
This argument is going around in circles with van Hoof and I’ve actually got better things to do than to repeat myself over and over again because he’s too stubborn to reason sensibly and instead feels it’s better to resort to insults.
I will say, though, that if you feel it is fine to act in an unfriendly, unwelcoming manner in the name of free speech then you are thoroughly mistaken and, whilst it may be your right to do so, you will not get any respect from me and a lot of people I know.
Asking for an apology is not censorship and anyone who thinks it is is throwing keywords in to stir up an argument.
I’m not sure why people are assuming that people are religious prudes if they object to nicu’s post. That is missing the point, and going for a personal attack. You can show me all the naked photos of women you like, I won’t care.
I still think this is a silly argument:
“women can defend themselves, therefore it is ok if we kick them”
Furthermore, I’d like to back up George’s claim on statistics. All of the women across two irc chat channels full of developers were annoyed at nicu. As were all of the men. Or at least, if any of the guys on the one channel actually approved of nicu, they *didn’t feel comfortable saying so. Because they knew they’d be attacked by the community. And /that/ is what should be happening here.
It isn’t the person who is syndicating a planet’s job to police, its the community. As a woman**, which community would you rather be a part of? The one where they will attack a jerk? Or the one where they give a jerk a free pass and say “boys will be boys” and then attack anyone who disapproves of the jerk?
Funny how you yourself falsify the statistic that you make.
You say that didn’t feel comfortable saying so because they knew they’d be attacked. You append to that “by the community” but I pretty much assume that just a few people were probably bullying others to take that point of view.
Which basically means that your statistic is worth shit.
Scary is that you say: “And /that/ is what should be happening here”
No, that’s /not/ true. That is exactly what a healthy discussion wouldn’t be like at all.
Anyway, I’m starting to think you must be ironic or sarcastic. Because your arguments are not making any sense.
(My footnote formatting messed up the first time I posted this, I figure G can delete the messed up version when he wakes up, and I’ll repost this for clarity.)
I’m not sure why people are assuming that people are religious prudes if they object to nicu’s post. That is missing the point, and going for a personal attack. You can show me all the naked photos of women you like, I won’t care.
I still think this is a silly argument:
“women can defend themselves, therefore it is ok if we kick them”
Furthermore, I’d like to back up George’s claim on statistics. All of the women across two irc channels full of developers were annoyed at nicu. As were all of the men. Or at least, if any of the guys actually approved of nicu[1], they didn’t feel comfortable saying so. Because they knew they’d be attacked by the community. And /that/ is what should be happening here.
It is not the job of a person who is running a planet syndication to police, but the community’s job. As a woman[2], which community would you rather be a part of? The one where they will attack a jerk? Or the one where they give a jerk a free pass and say “boys will be boys” and then attack anyone who disapproves of the jerk?
[1] I highly doubt this, it went up in flames among everyone who was active at the time.
[2] Hell, even as a man. Why be sexist here? Besides, I’d want to be in the group with more women! And it won’t be the latter.
That is exactly what should never happen and it just shows which moralized and depraved discussion climate you are calling for with your thought policing and forcing certain segments of people to apologize for their opinions.
You set out wanting prove the popularity of your moral policy and then go on to supply data from an IRC channel where the detractors may have been intimidated into silence by that very same policy. It’s preposterous. It also shows how your policy is censorship, of the worst kind - keywords my fat ass.
Accusing me of falsifying statistics and wild speculation and accusations claiming that I bullied people into saying things? Low, van Hoof.
If outright lying and profanity is all you have now then quite frankly your opinion is pretty much worthless.
My argument is, and always has been, that the poster offended people and shouldn’t have done. You have then extrapolated this into some wild religious flamewar which seems to be fuelled by self-interest and personal vendetta.
If my argument doesn’t make sense to you it is because you are either reading too much into it (I assure you, it is very simple) or you don’t believe in human decency when interacting with others.
The impression I get from your posts is that you’re quite happy to upset as many people as you want and use your right to freedom of speech to justify it. You believe in actions without having to deal with the consequences, because apparently the consequences are invalid because you have a right to freedom of speech and as such others should accept what you have to say and if they are offended by it then tough.
What a selfish attitude to take.
I’m astounded so many people are trying to defend a freakish stalker twat.
What, is he some really good programmer or something? Why does he deserve everyone jumping to his rescue, after he’s done something completely twat-like?
@Anders Feder: Agree
The kind of atmosphere blauzahl is calling for, is exactly the kind of atmosphere GNOME currently is not and is exactly the kind of atmosphere I want to avoid seeing becoming created within communities like GNOME’s.
If they (George? and blauzahl) want this atmosphere, they can go ahead and fork communities. They don’t need to worry about inviting me because I’ll flat out refuse joining that kind of group anyway.
Mostly because in every psychological and philosophical way it contradicts my morals and the choices I want to make. I wont make that choice. Yet I’ll be fully consious and aware of the choice that I made, being the choice not to choose for that.
Just only the part where blauzahl writes: “Because they knew they’d be attacked by the community. And /that/ is what should be happening here” indicates that blauzahl wants a society where the naive majority’s opinion counts as truth that must inevitably be accepted by all. This invites for fanaticism. Especially as soon as one clever person devices a way to convince this majority opinion of his or her’s ‘golden opinion’.
History of mankind documents how this happened countless times with religions but also with sects and dangerous groups who are out to hurt people who disagree with their quite limited point of view on live.
History of mankind and human knowledge shows us that most of the times it were the people who didn’t agree with the majority opinion (the world is not flat, humans are evolved out of monkeys, etc) who turned out to have the best explanation of how things are, in reality. I prefer the scientific method over whatever blauzahl came up with for seperating his truth from lies (if the community sais ‘a’ and an individual says ‘b’, then according to blauzahl they should make the individual feel guilty or not comfortable to continue expressing his opinion).
To say, literary, that it should happen that a community of people attacks somebody for having a different opinion, basically means for me that me and blauzahl are in the most philosophically possible disagreement known to mankind.
Right now, the only way to stop me from having a completely different point of view than blauzahl’s that I can imagine would be to make my brain stop functioning. Perhaps Alzheimer’s disease will bring my brain in a state of not caring about it first? I doubt that even with my brains in that state, I would agree.
So basically, no. I don’t agree with blauzahl at all. And I will not accept his methodology of discussion in group nor of his methodology to form consent.
And I will strive to make sure that people can and will express alternative opinions within our opensource communities.
If the only consequence is that sometimes somebody feels offended by somebody else, then that’s by far worth the trouble of NOT having the kind of society as proposed by people like blauzahl.
I disagree and I don’t accept these so called moral values.
Plato: I could care less about Nicu but I could care even less about freedom of expression. I don’t believe thought policing makes for good development and I don’t want to be affiliated with a community which advocates it to any noticeable degree.
@Anders: there are some times when it’s valuable to defend freedom of speech, and some times when you are just being moaning twat and not doing anything constructive.
There’s plenty of space in between too, but it seems to me that you’re falling pretty much to the lower end of this scale.
@pvanhoof: OMGZ CENCORSHIPZ FREEDOME OF SPEACH VIOLASHUN!!!
http://pvanhoof.be/blog/index.php/2008/05/04/god-save-the-queen#comment-28880
I really don’t understand what’s happened to this thread. The original post doesn’t talk about censorship, or thought-policing. But several people are criticizing George as if he’s proposing a ‘clamp-down’ on things he disagrees with. I’ve read and re-read his original post, and it really doesn’t say that.
He makes the observation that the audience will make their own judgments on what they see, and the community ought to realize that and behave accordingly, where “ought to” implies little more than a recommendation in his opinion.
I don’t think this is particularly wrong or even controversial. It seems quite logical and correct.
Am I missing something?
@pvanhoof “If they’d treat females equally to males, they’d let the females handle this one themselves individually. They wouldn’t try to act as if they are the boys who’ll protect the poor females against vicious attacks from the bad bad boys.”
I want you to consider this situation: you want to make jam tarts and gossip over knitting needles, and to that end decide that, as a modern man, you should join the Women’s Institute (I apologise now for the rather stereotypical picture of the WI). But you are the only man there. The group is full of of talk about women you don’t know or care about, the nice young man who started work at the shop down the road, obs./gyn., shaving legs and armpits and whether one should dye ones hair as one starts to go grey.
You are treated as a “nice young man” by some people, and basically ignored. Others treat you with contempt, distrust or open hostility, because this is a Women’s Institute. A few decide they could do with a man like you, despite the fact that you’d never go near them in a million years, and besides you already have a steady girlfriend. The worst, though, are those who take pity on you, and patronise you in the process, treating you as if you don’t understand anything about baking or knitting.
This is a rather contrived example, because it’s actually quite hard for a man to be put in a situation with women where they feel uncomfortable and looked down on, while it is quite common for women. But the point is to help you perhaps understand a little better why women are so seldom seen in these waters.
Now, obviously, you have to adjust some of the proportions when applying the situation to what women face. There are more leerers, ignorers and patronisers and fewer openly hostile men, but the net effect is the same. You have to be quite committed to stick around.
nicu’s post probably comes under the “leerers” group. I have no doubt that he meant no disrespect, but it’s the sort of thing that makes women feel uncomfortable. You don’t need statistics and vox pops to realise this. You just have to realise where women in male-dominated communities are coming from.
And, even as a man, as much as try not to judge (and usually succeed to a reasonable degree), it would make me think less of a community to see such a post on a community outlet.
Maybe that doesn’t matter to you. It would matter to me, and to a lot of people, if such things surfaced on the KDE planet. One of KDE’s strengths is the inclusiveness of its community. Offensive (to many, even if not to you or your friends specifically) attitudes would belie that, and put people off. It’s for a similar reason that I don’t syndicate my entire blog (look at the Religious Views category).
As George said originally, legality and morality are irrelevant. It’s the impression it gives out of the community, one that hopefully is incorrect.
In case it wasn’t obvious, I AM female. Let me repeat: NONE of the other females on irc approved of this guy. The guys were all horrified.
And really, if someone did approve of him posting that to a planet, I’m sure they would have started a nice flamewar on one of the channels. They didn’t. We don’t have that kind jerks in at least those irc communities. We have nice friendly people that are a joy to work with.
p.s. If you think I’m some kind of stick-in-the-mud prude, you don’t know me.
Anders: Could you clarify what you mean in #90 when you say “I could care less…”? Linking to a page which explains the ambiguity of the phrase was interesting but not fantastically helpful in understanding what you were saying…
Summary:
George: This was unfortunate, because either way you look at it, someone has upset a lot of people with his actions.
Everyone else: I’m a complete cunt
This is growing all out of proportion now.
The entry in question pretty clearly didn’t belong on the planet, because it doesn’t have anything to do with KDE.
So, is it Nicu’s fault for putting that on his (syndicated) personal blog? Or the planet maintainer for not screening it?
I agree with George that it would be nice if people could self-censor themselves to keep inappropriate material off their blogs. But realistically, that is just not going to happen. For many reasons, beginning with the fact that some people are simply jerks and ending with the fact that different people have different opinions and can’t be expected to know everyone elses.
You can complain about fundamental human nature all you want, but the ONLY WAY to solve a problem like this is to have a gatekeeper that approves all the content going on the planet. And then, you’ve simply narrowed it down to a single person you have to trust. They can still make mistakes.
Come on Matt, some giant censor isn’t the answer. Although I suspect that if I started posting lots of naked photos of guys to Planet, I’d get pulled real quick. :D
People should be adults and should act like adults. Otherwise, we should treat them like toddlers.
It is if, like George Wright, you think this was “unacceptable behavior”. Complaining to the blog writers isn’t going to accomplish anything except getting people riled up.
Personally, I think this whole thing is ridiculous. I’ve seen more “offensive” things in children’s movies like Shrek, IMHO.
The behaviour to which I refer as “unacceptable” is that the chap knows he’s offended a lot of the community and hasn’t so much as uttered a single word of apology. That is what I find unacceptable.
Is he really so arrogant to believe that his point of view must be correct and that everyone should have the same?
“Is he really so arrogant to believe that his point of view must be correct and that everyone should have the same?”
There seems to be quite a bit of that going around on both side, it seems. :)
I thought it was the posting of something that others found offensive that you found unacceptable. Are you saying it is only the apology which you need?
I’m not a big believer in forced apologies where it is clear that one side doesn’t mean it, but in cases like this where it blows up out of proportion I suppose they can be useful.
It’s all quite ridiculous. No one should feel obliged to apologize for their opinions.
To conclude, the solution to all this is a community where people can freely respond to each others posts - it’s not something that’s going to happen at a higher organizational level than that. Maybe peer moderation of some kind of the planets could work, but I don’t want to get into that.
blauzahl:
As if it makes any difference what your gender is. Your comment showed just fine what kind of community it is you want - “if we can’t make them love us, we’ll force them to pretend they do with threats of exclusion”. Jesus.
jlp:
No, not really. It’s quite obvious from my other statements what I’m saying.
Mr George Wright has taken alot of heat lately, he got himself in deep waters, tried to bring light to something he honestly and emotionally thought was an issue, this action triggered a thread in which his views offended many.
pvanhoof, Im sorry you couldnt change his mind earlier, Im afraid we just may have to ignore him in the end, but I too would prefer he learn a lesson.
Mr George Write, let me inform you that when you logged on to your local ISP and typed your way out of your little living room where-ever you live - you entered the real world, where you actually have to deal with people and their opinions and reactions, let me inform you that I have not personally appointed you dictator of what is and what is not acceptable behavior, youll get the memo when I do !
I am not offended by the original legs post, it was a little childish, and reflects this way on HIMSELF.
I am not offended by the original replies,protests to the post, prissy in nature as they may be.
I am offended that you (who are you again Mr Wright ? have we worked together on some software ?) come in and say that Mr Joe Blow took on some kind of severe responsability when his blog was syndicated, that it had to be somehow politically correct or be about free software.
Man guys am I heated or what after reading your posts for an hour, I have to say SOMETHING !
Im sorry but at this point, I think is the best moment for us to have a competition of who can post the hottest pair of legs on planet, and the judges have to be comprised of gnome chicks !!! (view it in a new light, gnome needs to be percieved as a community with lots of hot hacker chicks !) ok a little breather ? lets take it easy now ?
The moral of the story, in the real world, you can get away with a little horsing around, but Ill be damned the day I allow you walk in to my own living room and tell me otherwise.
Cheers, -Tristan Van Berkom
@randomguy3: I understand what you are trying to say, but I don’t think this specific photograph was offensive enough to fit in that story of yours.
And of course you can stir up some females to start thinking that it was offensive and then query their feelings about it.
That just tells me that either you are good at convincing people with propaganda or you live in a culture where females must cover all of their body with clothes.
Our communities are distributed over the world and in a lot of the cultures where our software developers live, females don’t need to cover all of their body.
Cultural inclusiveness and understanding goes in both directions.
In case of your story I would want to be treated equal. Overprotecting females is not the answer and being overprotected is not what I would want in your story’s situation either.
I simply can’t believe that this has been allowed to continue. This is George’s blog. It belongs to him. He pays to maintain it. At least have the decency to drop the point once you’ve made your opinion clear!
If this were my blog, I’d have blocked pvanhoof as soon as it became clear that he’s uninterested in holding together a rational discussion, and I’d have done the same for anyone on either side of the discussion. Those that are incapable of basic social decency force the rest of us to apply restrictions.
What I simply can’t believe is that there’s so much opposition to asking people to be vaguely nice to one another.
Apparently the open source community is unwelcoming.
What a fantastic image to give out.
Van Berkom seems to have missed the point entirely. I’m not some sort of self-appointed fascist dictator who’s walking into other people’s living rooms and demanding they behave in a way that I deem correct.
I posted this on my own blog. It happens to be syndicated on Planet {KDE,GNOME} and I deemed it to be on-topic and relevant to both.
You chose to come here, read the argument for yourself, and reply. As I have said previously, I am not trying to force anyone to do anything. My writings have not been offensive; I have simply suggested that if we want to further our community we need to stop giving off such a negative image.
However, what you are doing is saying that I have no right to write on my blog, which seems a bit hypocritical given your stance on the subject matter, no? This smells like a case of double standards to me.
I did not ask that the chap censor his blog, or take on severe responsibility - or even write only about free software. I myself write many articles which aren’t about free software.
However, I do believe that the chap has a responsibility to not behave in such a way as to offend large numbers of people and give further evidence to those who perceive the open source community as a bunch of elitist nerds who hurl abuse at newcomers and can’t handle other opinions without resorting to accusations and insults.
Unfortunately, that’s the impression many of my friends have got from their brief interactions with open source coders. This, in itself, is completely unacceptable.
Surely it is in everyone’s interest to further the open source community and encourage others to join? If not, then no matter how good you are at coding, you’ll be doing more negative damage to the community rather than helping it.
Paul, I’m a big supporter of free speech so I do not censor my blog (including banning people) unless it’s spam.
Unfortunately, it seems Van Hoof does not hold such values as highly as he would like people to think (I refer here to comment #91).
oh la la, I received a full investigation on my behaviour towards freedom of speech!
You guys are really into me. Thanks.
The comment that I removed on my private blog which you are referring to was a death threat.
I decided that I don’t have to accept those on my private blog.
I think it was the only one I ever removed (with the exception of spam).
I think that person #91’s opinion was perfectly valid tbpfh
GW, you write : “My writings have not been offencive”. Who exactly are you to tell if your writings are (or are not) offencive ? Did you ask the whole world’s population to check on the sensibilities of everybody ? Your writings are pretty offencive to me.
Particularly the part where you say that the behaviour/postings of a single person, be it syndicated on a Planet, reflects on the entire community.
And the part where you talk about “common human decency” without defining what you mean by that (and good luck with an accurate definition by the way.
Roland Barthes has a good one about “common sense”, which is close enough to “common human decency” and is basically defined as “the truth as spoken by the one who speaks it”. A useless truism then). And many other parts in this long thread that I won’t bother enumerating.
Van Hoof pretty much has the point. You want a nanny community, self-censorship in the name of “common human decency” and hereby declare that we as a community should care more about a few whiners than about the (arguably also few) people who would, actually, feel attracted by the general easy-going, live and let live attitude that not caring about this photo would have promoted.
I personally never love Torwalds as much as when he goes into his famous rants and coloured expressions such as calling BSD developers a bunch of masturbating monkeys. That’s not offencive, that’s fun. I don’t think (and I bet, neither does he) that BSD people really are a bunch of masturbating monkeys, as everybody knows monkeys need the fingers of both their hands and legs to randomly type on typewriters and write both openBSD and the complete works of Shakespeare. But I love the verve, the style, the panache, I would say, of Torwalds. Be him right or wrong. And it does make me closer to the community.
A self-censored, Winnie-the-Pooh community obsessed with not-hurting-the-feelings of anyone makes me yawn and despair. So how is that for the perception of “the rest of the world” ? Your post hurt me. Now if you’re coming along my point of view, you’ll just tell me “well that’s life boy, can’t please everybody, anyway that’s my blog”. If you stick to your own point of view, please appologize to me, and show a little more “common human decency” next time by avoiding posting anything that might hurt me. Tell you what, I’d be happier if you’d just follow my point of view…
Has sometimes good comes from bad, it makes me realise that I might have been bitten by the following (dating 2003 !) bug : http://osdir.com/ml/gnu.aspell.user/2003-03/msg00008.html
and I let aspell change my offensive to offencive… Or is it really offencive in English ? I’m a snob French who can’t accept to use enUS locale and prefers using enGB.
Now if that’s not a “back to chart” post, then what is ?
George, you’re right to call this out, thanks for pointing it out to me.
It’s interesting to read the comments on this post. George keeps making rational, sensible statements, and his contenders keep making outrageous, personal attacks without logical arguments. I’d recommend to George to simply stop debating the point with these folks, because to a neutral third party, it looks like you’re intellectually boxing with children.
George, its been discussed to death on d-d-l - planet gnome is our living room, a portal into the lives of developers and contributors of gnome.
Planet gnome is not the official face of gnome - thats why we are comfortable blogging in our living room.
I am not ashamed that a childish sorta guy who takes pics on the bus of a sexy pair of legs is also a contributor, I am proud that he is contributing somehow and that he can do so without the fear of being persecuted.
I think we are grown up enough to live in our own living room without drawing out a rulebook on the wall, otherwise, like pvanhoof, I’ll have to find myself a new living room/community, where people can live and let live.
In my posts Ive used some dramatic expressions and sensationalism, that is only due to my passion for living freely with common sense and without rulesets, people in life need to be exposed to the real world and not shealtered by police figures, i.e. you learn to swim in the water, this is how we build a stronger culture for the future.
My posts were not posted with the intention of bashing your ideas, I have better things to do than to put someone down for my own personal fame, I am truely moved George Wright that you really have these strong opinions and it will sincerely break my heart if we cant, as a community, step in and change your mind.
Thankyou, -Tristan
If you think that asking people to be nice to each other is “offensive” then you have some seriously messed up priorities.
Maybe people aren’t getting the point, because there is none. Neither here nor there.
Asking someone to be nice, privately “man to man” is quite another thing than suggesting in public that we should implement some kind of censorship wrt the planet - I dont feel that I am represented by the personal views of a particular poster, I do feel on the other hand; represented by the policies of our gnome community.
When we start talking about what is and what is not appropriate material for the planet, we clearly leave the boundries of asking somebody to be nice, we are now talking about how the community should behave with regards to some childish or silly posts on the planet.
You telling upskirt poster that you thought the content was offensive, is not offensive to me at all.
Tell us that we should all share your views as a group on what is offensive, and implement a framework to at least help moderate/censor the planet content, is in fact, to me, offensive.
I think that without jumping the gun and moving to a fascist regime in gnome, we can agree that intolerant people will just have to be tolerant until enough people are intolerant against a certain behavior, and if its serious, we will revoke his syndication - Im certain that in this case if enough people thought it was serious, his syndication would have been revoked.
The whole flamewar is certainly offensive.
I’m leaving now.
I believe the KDE dot is implementing slashdot-like voting against comments soon, in an attempt to reduce the volume of hurtful and unproductive comments.
I wonder if a similar system for the planets would be well received?
@Paul: comments on private blogs are the responsibility of the owner of the private blog. Not the responsibility of the readers of a planet nor of the community.
At this moment aren’t comments on the private blogs visible on the planet of GNOME. If you want to read comments, you need to pay a visit to the private blog’s actual own site. I think this is the only and right way for planets wrt private blog comments.
If for normal blog items a system like Slashdot’s is needed, then you have a serious problem with trusting your community members. I hope KDE is not planning to implement that. It wouldn’t be picked up by GNOME, or it at least sounds extremely unlikely that such a thing would be.
@Tristan: You say “planet gnome is our living room”. I don’t buy that. Disclaimers to the contrary notwithstanding, planet gnome is an official part of the gnome project, and as such, content placed there affects the public image of the gnome project (and the same obviously holds for fedora planet too). In my own living room, amongst friends, I value the right to say what I like. However, if I had a camera in my living room, and I knew the video stream was being broadcast semi-officially by my employer (or some other public-facing organisation of whom I was a member), I would certainly consider whether I should censor myself, since I don’t want some of my own personal thoughts and beliefs to be associated with my company – and further, if I did not do so, I would feel it was my company’s right and perhaps even their responsibility to censor me.
So, to the case in point: Nicu, in a surreptitious and underhanded manner, took a photo which (as far as he was aware) he would not have taken / been able to take, had the subject known she was being photographed. The photograph was sexual in nature (after all, that’s why he took it); not explicit, but intended to, at least mildly, arouse. And some people found this to be an immoral act (understandably, societal norms vary in a global community). He then published the image and bragged about the act on a Fedora-endorsed website. And Fedora have done nothing, though presumably their web team are aware of the situation.
So far, this makes Fedora look amoral to those people upset by the image (myself included). Well, fair enough. Had he posted a satirical picture of Mohammed, I wouldn’t necessarily expect planet fedora to remove his syndication, or demand an apology, or whatever. But I would /like/ them to, as a good faith gesture to the people in the affected community.
A community response of “this seems reasonable to me” acts to further alienate those members of the community who found the original post inappropriate. Again, free speech, blah blah, whatever – some people don’t understand that the right to free speech comes with a responsibility to use it appropriately, or perhaps don’t care about the responses of others.
But the point really seems to be this: when an incident of this type occurs, a community can take one of two stances:
On the one hand, there’s the “we don’t care about people” attitude which seems predominant across open source communities – arrogance mixed with a lack of empathy and considerating – and part of your community can decide they don’t want to participate any more.
On the other hand, there’s the “if you can’t play nice, play somewhere else” attitude, which I’ve only seen in a handful of open source projects, but they’re uniformly the ones which have a pleasant, smart, friendly community, of mixed gender and ethnicity.
As far as I’m concerned, the problem here isn’t what Nicu did or whether it was in some subjective sense right or wrong. The problem here is that it has been fairly thoroughly proven what type of community Fedora is fostering. And it’s not one I want to be a part of.
@Richard: That’s fine for you, I don’t want to be in the kind of political correct community you seem to want, which means we better each go our own way. For now GNOME fits my way just fine, and has been fitting a lot of people just fine. Looks like we have no incentive to change to your proposed culture then, right?
You for example portray the GNOME community as our employer. This is just blatantly wrong, inaccurate and bullshit. You portray GNOME as an entity that has a video camera installed in our living rooms. This is wrong, stupid and bullshit too.
I even predict that if GNOME would be like that, GNOME would probably only have five or six slaves left. Its culture would be completely different from what it is now and I sure wouldn’t want to work there. In fact are the kind of rules that you try to impose on the entire GNOME community the kind that not even a single one of the companies involved in GNOME impose on their employees. Probably because if they would, their employees would quit the job and start their own company or move to another employer.
As for censorship this would have to be discussed by the whole community, not decided by you nor any individual alone. Right now the consensus seems to be that instead of censoring syndicated people, we are just going to trust them. Notwithstanding a few discrepancies this turns out to work fine. In fact we seem to get larger amount of supporters who are pro the freedoms the syndicated people have on planet GNOME, than we get people (like you) who are against it.
I will in any case be a voice in the GNOME community who’ll ask not to turn GNOME into this kind of culture. I will also persuade the people involved in the planet of GNOME not to switch to censorship, or if the community would drastically grow to an amount where censorship is inevitable, that the act of censoring somebody’s blog item would have to be discussable by the whole community (the relevant people, contributors and foundation members). Not an individual.
In the end is loosing a contributor a bigger deal than pissing off somebody once per month or even per week. Censoring an individual is not something ‘nice’ to do, and you can be sure that a lot of developers wouldn’t want a culture where this is the case. The current maintainer of the planet of GNOME seems to understand this (and he’s among the people who’s not pro censorship. In fact has he allowed quite a lot of harsh criticism towards himself on our planet. It’s important that we can indeed do that, and can keep doing that).
I also question that your ‘rules’ change anything about any community. In the end are your rules all about ‘pretending to be better’. I think you are just ‘thinking’ that your ‘rules’ create a better environment. You sure have a lot of imagination, but that doesn’t tell me anything. Especially not that specifically your opinion is the truth.
I too can make two LI tags in HTML where one is basically insulting communities that don’t follow your rules, and one is basically praising the ones that are. That doesn’t mean it’s either truth or meaningful.
The way you portray the two is indeed rather ridiculous and insulting. The typical “I’m more holy than you guys” bullshit.
May I advise you to indeed start a new community?
@pvanhoof sigh Deliberate misinterpretation is a pretty low form of argument, you know…
In reply to a few of your points: “Looks like we have no incentive to change to your proposed culture then, right?”
Your “we” here are the people who are happy with the status quo. That’s fine, but you need to understand that there are people who aren’t in that group. I used to develop open source software, but for the most part I don’t any more, due to the attitude of your “culture”. Perhaps you keep more developers with your way than with mine. Perhaps you don’t. But I for one don’t want to be in a community which is run the way you want it to be run.
You say: “You for example portray the GNOME community as our employer. This is just blatantly wrong,”.
I said “(or some other public-facing organisation of whom I was a member)”. Did you miss this, or were you merely trying to make me look bad to somehow add weight to your side of the discourse? Also, how is this relevant to the discussion?
You say: “You portray GNOME as an entity that has a video camera installed in our living rooms. This is wrong, stupid and bullshit too.”
Oh really? You have your own private and personal blog, and GNOME is relaying it to the world under the “Planet GNOME” banner. Seems like an apt metaphor to me. This “living room” metaphor wasn’t one of mine… Please explain why you don’t think it’s an accurate characterization of the situation. You know, with big boy words rather than insults and evidence-free assertions that you are correct.
You say: “In fact are the kind of rules that you try to impose on the entire GNOME community the kind that not even a single one of the companies involved in GNOME impose on their employees”.
I find that very hard to believe. Certainly in the UK, no responsible employer will allow its employees to be intolerant of each others’ beliefs, or to be blatantly sexist in the workplace, for instance. An employee who insisted on taping an “upskirt” picture to his desk, visible to all who walked by, would get at the very least a verbal reprimand.
Also, I’m not trying to impose anything on anyone; I’m merely suggesting a possible alternative to the current farce that is the open source culture.
You say: “Right now the consensus seems to be that instead of censoring syndicated people, we are just going to trust them.”
Trust them with what? Do you mean trust them not to abuse their position as a syndicated blog? What, in your mind, would count as abuse here? Does the event in question count? Does anything?
You wrote: “In the end is loosing a contributor a bigger deal than pissing off somebody once per month or even per week.”
How many contributors do you think GNOME or open source in general has lost due to this “we don’t care if we piss people off” attitude you seem to be defending?
You wrote: “I too can make two LI tags in HTML where one is basically insulting communities that don’t follow your rules, and one is basically praising the ones that are. That doesn’t mean it’s either truth or meaningful.”
OK, I’ll be more direct. Friendly, tolerant, measured communities of software developers do exist. In my experience, they’re typically about 50% female. And more traditional, free-speech, don’t-care-about-peoples-feelings communities exist too. They’re typically >80% male. For me, that’s sufficient evidence that the latter is doing something wrong.
Here’s a suggestion: Sit in #haskell on freenode for a day, and observe the atmosphere. Do the same in ##c++. See if you can spot the difference.
You wrote: “May I advise you to indeed start a new community?”
Of course, your implication here is that they don’t already exist. They do, but they’re few and far between.
this thing is completely pointless, sure the picture was inapropriate to show up on a planet but you reaction is the same as some ultra conservative people who wonder how other will see their society because of porn magasine or the like. If we start to censor the blogs of a people because those will end up on a “planet” site for the reason it might give the community a bad reputation we are going down as a free and open community. Some people talk on their blog about their religious/political view and those end up on planet too and I personally find those blogs way more offensive and dangerous for the image of a community than a bad picture of somewhat nice pair of legs …
@Matieu:
this thing is completely pointless
What “thing”? Having a discussion? Why is having a discussion completely pointless?
you reaction is the same as some ultra conservative people
Err no. I don’t know exactly what the reaction of an “ultra conservative” would be, but I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t be to (essentially) say: “Bad things happen. Let’s try to not let them happen again”.
If we start to censor the blogs
Who mentioned censorship? This is just about choosing what is and what is not appropriate to publish in a certain place. That’s not the same as censorship.
I personally find those blogs way more offensive and dangerous for the image of a community than a bad picture of somewhat nice pair of legs …
Some people objected a bit to the image. But the real the issue here is that a lot of community members have come out and said “We’re going to do this. We don’t care if you don’t like it. We’ll do whatever the hell we like, because you’re prudes, repressed, facists, censors, and we love freedom and we’re easy going.”
and that’s just not very nice really. (Mostly because it’s intolerant in itself – you don’t come across as freedom loving, you come across as twats).
What’s funny with all this neo-puritanism that creeps everywhere in the western world is that if Nicu or anyone else had made, say, a post about the latest war game, GTA game or any brutal killing simulation of the like (which I kinda like too, I must admit), nobody would have raised an eyebrow. But showing an anonymous pair of legs ! Gawwwwd, the shame, the shaaaaame !
@Alban: indeed. It looks like there’s this anti-female thing growing in male’s brains.
As soon as they show a little bit of female beauty they all go ‘aaar arrh aaa! you showed a piece of flesh of a female body! aaaaar aach woaaah! You are a twat!’
Idiots.
If that’s what you think females want ‘to be respected’ then you seriously need to start having normal conversations with more than just the nuns that preach in the most conservative places of the U.S.
You can bullshit as much as you want about these fanatic anti-everything beliefs, the problem is that GNOME is done by mostly European software developers who have a much more open minded view on things like this than conservatives.
We don’t want this ‘nothing is allowed, else you are all twats’ bullshit.
If that’s the case, then fine in your eyes I will be a twat. Now please leave and let the serious people do their business.
Females and males are beautiful. The human body is beautiful. There’s nothing wrong about it. And the vast majority of females are NOT offended by showing an anonymous pair of legs.
Keep your extreme fanatic conservative views for yourself.
I definitely agree with those who say that what he did can be perceived as acceptable depending of the country you live in and the culture you this country has.
However, if I understood correctly, George Wright didn’t say he disagreed with that.
All he stated, and I think he is totally right, is that it happened to have offended some people.
Is it impossible to say “You see, in my culture, this is totally acceptable, so I still think what I did was not wrong (and I might do it again). However, I apologize to all the people that I offended.” ?
That’s just plain politeness. You don’t have to share the same moral values or agree on what is acceptable or not. But you have to assume that you might hurt some people and you can be sorry when that happens.
PS: don’t try to compare me to some “holy fanatic boy”. I didn’t say I found Nicu’s behavior unacceptable, and I could very well think what I stated and yet find his blog post the most natural thing in the world.
@bochecha : while I understand your point of view, and GW’s by the same way, I don’t think it’s acceptable, lest we’d spend our life apologizing here and there, as there always will be someone offended in a way.
Where is the limit ? Should I apologize for eating meat because it offends vegetarians ? Should I apologize for posting a photo of my wife not covering her hair because it might shock some Muslim ? Should I apologize for a post where I’d unfortunately talk about me having lunch of fish on a Friday because it makes a Catholic uncomfortable ? Should I apologize to post a blue photo because it’s makes Windows BSOD veterans sick ?
The list goes on. Answer is, of course, no.
@pvanhoof: Like I said before, not everyone who agrees with you is automatically a puritan, fanatic, conservative or even indeed a non-European. Stop making assumptions; they’re not helping your argument.
@bochecha: I entirely agree with you. Well put!
@Alban: Right, now we’re on to something:
If somebody had posted on his blog a picture of a murdered child covered in blood, and that got syndicated to Planet Fedora, I think that you, along with almost all the community would be offended, right, and ask Nicu for an apology? (Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think I’m safe in assuming that would be too far for you).
In which case, the question follows:
Where do we draw the “offensiveness” line and who decides?
Please answer that. It’s the crux of the issue.
@Alban: you’re totally right.
Of course, apologizing is only worth if you mean it. And keeping hurting people and apologizing later can only leads to one conclusion: you don’t care at all about the people you are offending and only apologize to let them think you do.
In this case, people will realize you’re a jerk.
If, however, you notice you often have to apologize for the same thing, you might as well evolve (I didn’t say “evolve to something better!”), and maybe you can start understanding those people.
Of course, you can’t just be sorry for everything. But people can be offended by potentially anything.
That’s why in real life, social groups are auto-created by people who share not only the same interests and feelings to each other (friendship for example), but also the same values, morality. Those groups don’t face the same problem, because everyone in it will think that some behavior is (or isn’t) acceptable, as social groups in real life tend to be relatively small.
The problem here is that we are not in one of those groups. We are in a very large community, that is not create spontaneously upon people’s feelings to one another, but apon a common goal (free software in this case). Any one who has this same goal will be a part of this community, no matter what are his opinions / values.
Thus, usual rules of deeling with people and behaviors in a real life group don’t apply to those bigger communities. And I sincerely don’t see how we could content everyone:
Matthew Garret said something very clever about that: http://mjg59.livejournal.com/94420.html
In a community as big as ours, and with people so different, no matter what we choose to do (or to not do), we will always exclude / hurt a significant proportion.
I wish someone could be clever enough to find out how we could deal with that. :(
That’s very simple, actually:
By not dealing with it.
Which indeed means that we will miss the opportunity to work together with some people.
But those people have such a narrow point of view about other cultures and other’s moral values that it would probably be too hard to work together with them anyway.
I don’t believe females in general are like such people. I have worked together with a lot of females in the past and I am working together with females today. Females have their own male-unfriendly behaviour too. They are in fact very equal to us already and they can defend themselves just fine.
The people who complained about the two anonymous legs where just hyper overreacting. To the point that it damages females’s equality more than that posting the picture did in the first place.
Just let Darwinistic evolution do its work.
@pvanhoof: I think you didn’t quite get my point.
What I said is that no matter what you do, you will offend some people.
In the present case, if you show a pair of legs, you will offend some people (who might very well be as you said “hyper over-reacting”)
Then what happens. If you punish the person who did it, you will offend him and his supporters.
However, if you let it go, you will also offend people: the ones who were already offended, plus the ones who will fear that something they might find offending in the future happens and no one steps up for them.
More generally, there will always be a subset of people who will be offended. And how can we work together if we offend each other. If I insult you personally, will you accept to work with me in the comunity after that ? I doubt it, and that’s totally understandable.
As we all want to collaborate and build free software together, the question is “how can we manage to not offend anyone?”
I truly dare anyone to respond that. :-/
@bochecha, You must not have gotten my point.
Because I did respond to that:
It’s a Darwinistic evolution process.
Read about Prisoner’s_dilemma on wikipedia if you want to learn to understand what I mean. It comes down to the game of Tit for tat that all animals, including humans, play with each other.
You can’t solve this, it solves itself.
You keep playing the strategy you are probably playing, which is tit for tat (not every human uses this for all the subjects he cares about, but most do).
Tit for tat between males and females is being played for thousands of years now.
A conservative point of view is not going to change that. It will just inject a few more players that play ‘defect’ more often.
Which basically means that we delay progress about this within our own community (because it takes some time before the ‘defect’ players die out).
Perhaps read a good book written by Richard Dawkins (The Selfish Gene). Don’t read the God Delusion, The Selfish Gene is his best book. It also explains this in high detail.
I’ll paste a snippet from wikipedia for the lazy people:
This strategy is dependent on four conditions that has allowed it to become the most prevalent strategy for the prisoner’s dilemma:
…
Against a variety of alternative strategies, tit for tat was the most effective, winning in several annual automated tournaments against (generally far more complex) strategies created by teams of computer scientists, economists, and psychologists. Game theorists informally believed the strategy to be optimal (although no proof was presented).
@bochecha: We can not manage to not offend anyone, its just not gonna happen.
If you are offended by someone and gnome doesnt do anything about it, you probably wont blame gnome, that would be rediculous, its a community, not the person who offended you.
If on the other hand you make a comment that somebody found offensive, and gnome somehow forced you to modify/censor your content, this is something that can offend you - this is the community that you are gracefully giving away free hours of labour - and now they are going to chalange your own personal view on your gnome blog site ? no no no…
Now Im sorry but when people feel they need to be “Stood up for” by others when handling conflicts in a community, this denotes a serious problem in thier own upbringing - This is a classic characteristic of a spoiled north american child, parents always scold one child when the other complains, children never learn to deal with their conflicts on their own, and what do you end up with ? a society of criticism where if anyone has a problem, they will make law suits and police reports, but god forbid living like civilized human beings and just asking the guy next door to just turn the music down a little please.
My god it makes me sick, lets not degenerate and make the same mistakes in our internet cultures.
Agree with Tristan here
@Tristan: instead of assuming psychological weaknesses in other people, perhaps you could answer the following question:
You would be offended by a picture of a bloody, murdered baby on Planet Fedora, and you would want it to be removed if it appeared.*
So where do we draw the “offensiveness” line and who decides?
[* I’m assuming you would be offended. If you wouldn’t be offended, sorry for my incorrect assumption]
I wouldn’t be offended, sometimes it’s good to show the atrocities of war (where this happens with babies) and parents who murdered their child.
It makes people aware that this happens on the planet.
For me if you’d frequently post pornography on your private blog then I think I’d be okay with the Planet GNOME maintainer politely asking to categorize those items, so that it’s easy not to have to show those on GNOME’s Planet.
I also think that filter would be appropriate and fair.
One single photo of an anonymous pair of legs where not even genitals are visible is not sufficient to go crazy about this.
It’s not even an incident worth discussing in my opinion.
I mean, I’m into Sauna. Sauna’s are mixed in Belgium. Children, males and females go there. I see naked people all the times. Children see naked moms and pops all the times. Both male children and female children. And it’s fine, seriously. And we, Belgians, are pretty sure that those children wont become rapists.
In fact, I believe those children will have a lot of respect for the female body. As they will have noticed that females are not all anorexia skinny with enormous breasts. And they will learn that some people do and some people don’t shave their genitals. Including men. And that this about the human body is like that, and that is like this.
There’s seriously nothing wrong with the human body and showing it is fine and absolutely not the act of a sexist.
That’s the POV where I am coming from. Now there are a bunch of people who are ‘offended’ by showing ‘oh my god’ a pair of anonymous legs.
Guys … it’s an overreaction.
Although I DO understand that in different cultures, different norms about female and male nudity are in effect. Like females not being allowed to show their hairs and neck in fanatic Muslim cultures.
Maybe in your culture showing the legs of a female is an amazing bad thing to do.
To be fair about the many Muslim people who walk in Belgian cities like Antwerp and Brussels: these people are extremely tolerant about our Western Belgian style of allowing females to show the beauty of their bodies.
Most (I do say most, not all) Belgians are equally tolerant about Muslim’s idea that they should cover their girlfriends and wives’s hair, neck and some even their entire face.
Both cultures are right, both cultures and styles respect females. Maybe one of the two is sometimes forcing young females to cover their face, but it’s not said that all of the females are against that culture.
What the people on these blog items have been trying to do is to force the GNOME community into choosing between fanaticism about whether or not our community members should be allowed to show any form of female nudity (the example being anonymous legs).
That’s the same as a Muslim telling me IN BELGIUM that I’m a rapist because I allow my girlfriend to wear sexy clothes at parties.
In fact, these people are not saying that. Yet they are often represented in Western media as not open to the freedoms that we cherish so much in our culture.
It’s a clear overreaction. It were f. anonymous legs. So what?!
Your protestations about nudity make it clear that you don’t understand anything about my personal opinions on the matter. And with good reason: I haven’t mentioned them; they’re irrelevant to the matter at hand, as George initially mentioned.
The point is that quite a few people were offended by something, and expressed that, and quite a few other people, like you pvanhoof, jumped down their throats. That’s just not very nice.
@Tristan:
About your critics of the “sue-everyone-for-anything-society”, I have to say I totally agree with you. And this is definitely not something that should be desired for an internet community (or any other one). Did I say the contrary anywhere ?
And by the way, “spoilt north american child” is a rather hilarious insult… You don’t know me, don’t try to guess who I am. :)
And by the way, “spoilt north american child” is a rather hilarious insult… You don’t know me, don’t try to guess who I am. :)
Indeed. They’re making up imaginary enemies.
@Plato : for your example of an hypothetical photo of a murdered child, assuming it would be gratuitous and not displayed as an illustration of a point (say, horrors of wars), I would most likely consider the poster as a jerk, and use my (limited) personal power to avoid further contact with the said individual, and I would probably set a filter in my agregator to avoid his/her posts.
And that’s it. @bochecha :
I never said we (individually) have to accept anything from anyone. But it’s our personal responsibility to filter by ourselves, with our consciences, and it’s certainly not a job for a Great Moderator that would arbitrarily decide for everybody what’s right or wrong.
Usenet works pretty well since ages on this principles. Each user can set his own bozo-list and fill it with whomever he decides not worthy of his time, and that’s that. It’s easy, it’s tested, it works.
So let’s get cracking on implementing client-side RSS filtering, and please, puh-leaase, keep it client-side, let people decide what’s good and what’s bad for themselves, not for the others.
@Plato: You would be offended by a picture of a bloody, murdered baby on Planet Fedora, and you would want it to be removed if it appeared.* So where do we draw the “offensiveness” line and who decides?
I would turn this around and ask you Plato where do you suggest we should draw the line ?
It’s impossible to not offend anyone so how can any line be drawn anywhere ? This isn’t a “one size fits all” scenario. By allowing any one person to “draw the line” you turn that person into the sole arbiter of what the whole spectrum of opinions finds acceptable.
The world simply isn’t like that. If you find the original posting offensive to you, filter the feed or develop a thick skin. Don’t try to turn yourself into the defender of decency for the entire community.
And George, if I find your opinions offensive to me, should you similarly apologise and withdraw your blog post ? If not, why not ?
@Ethelred: by raising the issue of “where do we draw the line” I was attempting to demonstrate to pvanhoof, Tristan et al. that there *is* a line to be drawn somewhere. They seemed to be working from the principle that anything goes on the internet.
I’m not claiming I know the answer, but just demonstrating that “we should be entirely free to do exactly what we want” isn’t a justified position.
blauzahl, amusing to see how you find that disrespectful, yet how often you and the rest of kde girls do rather inappropriate comments on kde boys.
Or do you actually believe that being on a blog or a chat (like irc), gives you freedom to say anythign you’d not dare doing in front of that person?
Life is hard.