Re: [rain1 at airmail dot cc] Delete abortion joke

[Alexandre Oliva <aoliva at redhat dot com>]

On May  3, 2018, Florian Weimer <fw@deneb.enyo.de> wrote:

> In most cultures, government restrictions on access to information
> which is specifically designed to enable people to commit illegal acts
> are not considered censorship.  I don't think you can list abortion in
> this context without taking sides.

There's law in the US that makes it a crime to publish information on
how to circumvent digital handcuffs, you know.  Even if you rationalize
it and frame it with another term to make it more palatable, it's still
censorship of information for practical use.

GNU is the software development branch of the Free Software social and
political movement.  We don't mind taking sides; in fact, if we didn't,
it wouldn't be a social and political movement.  Our raison d'être are
the essential freedoms over information for practical use.

The law criticized in the snippet under dispute is one that denies
people the essential freedom to share information for practical use.  It
is fundamentally at odds with the most essential core value of our
movement.

I'm very disappointed and baffled that an allusion to a taboo topic
that's two-levels removed, in a context in which the taboo topic is
already established and unavoidable, is enough for people to gang up
against not only the founder and leader of the movement, but also its
most fundamental value, and to take the opposite side, practicing
censorship and, by removing the criticism, taking the side of the
censors that established the denounced censorship law.

I'd have thought essential core values and the project leader's request
would trample aesthetic reasons, personal preferences and even the
discomfort of extending the coverage of a taboo topic.  But no, the
project has been taken out of the hands of its founder, and most of the
appointed stewards seem to think it's reasonable to disregard it, to
betray the core values, to practice the opposite of what we should stand
for, so that we can have bland, pasteurized, neutral purely technical
documentation that won't bring anyone any moral discomfort.  Way to go
to open sores hell: losing the moral backbone, standing for nothing,
giving up and betraying the essential freedoms.  What a shame!

-- 
Alexandre Oliva, freedom fighter    http://FSFLA.org/~lxoliva/
You must be the change you wish to see in the world. -- Gandhi
Be Free! -- http://FSFLA.org/   FSF Latin America board member
Free Software Evangelist|Red Hat Brasil GNU Toolchain Engineer