[rain1@airmail.cc] Delete abortion joke

[Zack Weinberg]

On Sat, May 5, 2018 at 12:18 AM, Alexandre Oliva <aoliva@redhat.com> wrote:
> On May  3, 2018, Zack Weinberg <zackw@panix.com> wrote:
>> Nobody in the conversation has any particular power over anyone
>> else, and no decisions are being taken in secret or without
>> recourse.  I still won't back the patch out myself, but if you or
>> anyone else does, I can't stop you.
>
> I respectfully disagree.  The group does have that power, and it is
> wielding that power against its leader, while the leader attempts to
> resist with minimal support.  That's the struggle underway.
>
> Would you agree to name it an attempt at censorship?

No.  This is not any kind of censorship or attempted censorship.
This is an editorial disagreement among the coauthors of a document.

Again: to be censorship someone in the discussion would have to have
the power to force others to go along with their unilateral decision
or else suffer personal consequences, such as inability to speak one's
mind _anywhere_ that it might be heard, loss of employment, loss of
funding, or physical violence.  Nobody involved can do anything of the
sort.

(Part of why I have repeatedly refused to back my patch out is to
stand for the principle that the GNU Project Leader _shouldn't_ have
ex officio power to override a consensus decision of the active
maintainers of a specific piece of software.  He should have to
persuade us to change our minds, instead.)

> Given your accumulated experience at your day job, could you offer
> insights on personal trauma of people who suffered censorship, and
> how they might react to humor denouncing censorship?  That would
> probably be a far more valuable insight for the conversation at
> hand.

That's a big topic.  I will try to answer briefly.

Censorship is most likely to be personally traumatic when it directly
affects people trying to _publish_ material.  It doesn't have to lead
to jailtime or other such extreme sanctions to do that.  In fact, it
doesn't even have to be happening at all!  People can get very, very
upset just because they _think_ their website is being deprioritized
by a search engine for political reasons, or their social media
presence is "shadowbanned", or similar, even if what's really going on
is that nobody links to them because nobody wants to hear about how
the earth is flat.

In countries where there's been a lot of censorship for a long time,
we see "chilling effects" where people have an internal model of what
the censors don't want you to talk about, and they avoid those topics
themselves.  We also see this contributing to radicalization.  When
people are frustrated that they can't speak their minds to a general
audience, they will find quiet corners where they _can_ speak their
minds, and when the other people in those quiet corners tell them that
there is a government conspiracy manipulating everything, they'll be
receptive.

Humor denouncing censorship is common, enthusiastically received, and
often deliberately allowed to stand by the censors, because they know
that it serves as a release valve for tension that might otherwise
feed more effective modes of protest.  They also know that it is
relatively easy for humor that was _intended_ to denounce censorship
to instead read as if it is mocking the people who are getting
censored, which both plays into the censors' hands, and contributes to
the trauma of the censorship itself.

Let me give an example that isn't related to the argument we're having
right now.  A few months ago, the CDN company CloudFlare decided that
they no longer wanted to do business with the people responsible for a
major neofascist website (IIRC it was Stormfront, but don't quote me
on that).  A couple weeks ago, probably as a consequence of the SESTA
legislation in the USA, they decided that they also didn't want to do
business with the people responsible for an important advertising
venue for sex work (don't remember which one and can't look it up at
the moment).  Both of these are indeed acts of censorship in a broad
sense.  I've seen several attempts at mockery go by, in which the
authors attempt to make fun of CloudFlare for treating sex-work ads as
just as problematic as neofascism.  Some of them were actually funny.
Others wound up reading like "if only those sex workers were
neofascists then the company would have worried more about dumping
them", which is technically still criticism of CloudFlare, but imagine
yourself reading it from the shoes of the sex worker who's now in
significantly more personal danger: it comes across as blaming _them_
for not being neofascists, which is extra awful in this case because
they may well be in significantly more personal danger _from_ the
neofascists.

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()?

Do you see how _merely bringing the topic up at all_ could be an
unwelcome reminder for someone who had had a bad abortion-related
experience in the past, whatever that was?

zw