Re: Proposal: DNS change irc.gnome.org becomes A record and irc.gimpnet.org starts getting phased out.

[Tristan Van Berkom <tvb gnome org>]

On Sat, May 11, 2013 at 2:07 AM, Liam R E Quin <liam holoweb net> wrote:
> On Sat, 2013-05-11 at 01:27 +0900, Tristan Van Berkom wrote:
>
> > Would you like to join a community where everything you say is
> > under strict scrutiny ? where you cannot freely express yourself
> > in your blog without being really careful to make all of your comments
> > "gender neutral" and politically correct ?
>
> Or would you prefer to join a community where you're made fun of on a
> routine basis, mocked, ridiculed, made to feel like shit, because you
> were born with one leg shorter than the other, or you were in a bomb
> blast and got injured?

I think you are exaggerating, to the extreme, even.

You are suggesting that people should take things out of context,
misinterpret the GIMP acronym, and be offended.

You seem to even suggest that the name GIMP is intentionally offensive.

The GIMP, is, and always has been to my knowledge,
the "GNU Image Manipulation Program":
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIMP

> What if we start jabber.gnomefags.com? or a message that says, "It's
> gone Dutch" when a device can't be mounted? Because some undergraduate
> thought it was funny in their dorm room to throw stones out of the
> window at the people who have to walk slowly.
>
> You can express yourself in your blog as freely as you like, subject to
> local laws, but if you claim to -- or are seen to -- represent the GNOME
> project as a whole then yes, you have a responsibility to be respectful
> of others in that context.

And the plot thickens.

If your blog is aggregated on planet.gnome.org, one could say that
you are representing GNOME.

One could even say that referring to the GNU Image Manipulation Program
in your blog is offensive... just because some people might misinterpret
what you said as something they understand as offensive.

This is going a bit far, I think.

To be clear, I do think that we should try not to offend each other,
I just don't think that we should expect that others will misconstrue
what we've said as something offensive, and I don't think that we
should scare off our contributors, those who would represent GNOME
in public, by holding them/us to such strict standards.

Cheers,
    -Tristan

> The problem is the way labels are used in some cultures as a way to
> exclude and discriminate against people - a practice that's so
> entrenched in US (and UK) culture (for example) that there are laws
> about it. This may be a cultural difference itself that doesn't
> translate into all other languages, I'm not sure.
>
> Liam
>
> --
> Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
> Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/
> Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org freenode/#xml