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

[Zack Weinberg <zackw at panix dot com>]

On Sun, May 6, 2018 at 3:01 PM, Zack Weinberg <zackw@panix.com> wrote:
> Now let's go back to the joke that we're arguing about.  In the
> description of the C library function named "abort," the manual has a
> box in which it warns that "proposed censorship regulations may
> prohibit us from giving you information about the possibility of
> calling this function."  Put yourself in the shoes of someone who
> doesn't know about the USA's "gag rule", but does know that the
> English word for intentionally terminating a pregnancy is "abort", and
> that this is controversial in many places, and, perhaps, has had to
> struggle with a decision to do this or not do this herself.
>
> Do you see that it can be read as _trivializing_ that decision, by
> comparing it to the actually-trivial decision that a programmer makes
> when they write code that calls abort()?

Maybe even more importantly, do you see how this trivializes _the
censorship_, by virtue of that same implicit comparison?

zw