bug-gne
[Top][All Lists]
Advanced

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: [Bug-gne]Ideologies vs. Practicality in GNE


From: Mike Warren
Subject: Re: [Bug-gne]Ideologies vs. Practicality in GNE
Date: 22 Feb 2001 08:06:40 -0700
User-agent: Gnus/5.0807 (Gnus v5.8.7) XEmacs/21.1 (20 Minutes to Nikko)

Alexander Braun <address@hidden> writes:

> Mike, to answer your question, what should considered to be harmfull
> to other people: [..] But I give you an example of harming, which
> happened just a few weeks ago: In Munich a group of skins had beaten
> up a Greek person. Two Turks were helping him, so he did survive.

Yes, this is harm.

> Some days later a French site promoted to beat up or kill these two
> Turks. And this is definitely harming.

No it's not.

> The thesis that black and white people are different is just
> rubbish.

True.

> But it is not harming.

True.

> If the same thesis contains passages
> demanding to enslave blacks again, or "at least" to beat them, kill
> them or discriminate against them in any other form does harm.

The essay itself would not be harm; only if people acted on it would
it become harmful (and such people should certainly be punished).

> The bottom line of this project is to protect freedom. We can not
> protect freedom by protecting people fighting freedom.

Why not?

> It might be good to have a revisionist paper on GNE (if it would not
> be illegal), so a good historian could show the world why this is
> rubbish.

I agree.

> It's definitely not good to promote harm to people - that's why we
> here, isn't it?

I agree that it's not good to promote harm. I disagree that people who
*are* promoting harm should be silenced. Should we publish such things
at GNE? If we do not, then we are inflicting editorial control on the
GNE repository, and I think the only place where such control should
exist is at the classifier level. This gives people who disagree with
``our'' editorial policy the chance to make their own.

If we were to inflict a single editorial policy on GNE, then what's
the point? Why not just merge with Nupedia and get our editorial
opinions heard there?

> Of course you are right, that it might be a quite subjective
> manner. So the only solution (imho) is to discuss some basic rules
> which people have to follow, if they want to post their articles.

This would be a useful discussion for a classifier project.

> We did this on the technical area by preferring only-text articles
> against M$-Word articles.

But this doesn't silence anyone, or force them to use different tools!

> I can't see why the use of a non-free tool producing non-free format
> should be worse than promoting to kill people. It would lead the
> project ad absurdum.

We shouldn't care what tools people use. But if we accept formats
which we cannot convert using free software, then our freedom is
compromised. As has be pointed out re: .GIFs, it might indeed be
possible to accept them and use a free-software program to convert
them to PNGs for storage. IANAL, though.

> GNE got it's rules about linking. it got it's rules about formats
> and these rules are not only good they are necessary [..]

The are necessary only as far as freedom is concerned.

> so just let's take the rules Tom made up,or the one I made up or
> both and discuss them. (Personally I like Tom's rules more - they
> emphasize the same aspect but sound quite more free)

I don't like the rules which limit articles based on their content
(obviously beyond getting rid of clear unreadable (i.e. binary)
garbage).

--
mike [at] mike [dash] warren [dot] com
<URL:http://www.mike-warren.com>
GPG: 0x579911BD :: 87F2 4D98 BDB0 0E90 EE2A  0CF9 1087 0884 5799 11BD



reply via email to

[Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread]