| |||||||||||||
GNOME finalizes its speaker guidelinesGNOME finalizes its speaker guidelinesPosted Jul 6, 2010 23:47 UTC (Tue) by martinfick (subscriber, #4455)In reply to: GNOME finalizes its speaker guidelines by mjg59 Parent article: GNOME finalizes its speaker guidelines
"The aim is to make people think before they stand up in front of an audience, and also to avoid lengthy and entirely pointless arguments about whether or not somebody's unhappiness is logically justifiable."
Hmmm, so the speaker must think about how he might offend people who are illogically unhappy? How is one supposed to figure this out by thinking? "Think hard about how illogical people might react?" Why is the speaker held to a higher standard than the audience? Or should I ask instead, why should the speaker lower himself to the standard of some minority in the audience? This is not a recipe for creating conferences which involve critical thinking, it is a recipe to create conferences which only talk about known agreed upon things; what a waste of a conference.
"Don't deliberately offend people, and if you accidentally do so then apologise and attempt to avoid further offense".
And what if I make an extremely important ethical point (not just some random joke) that accidentally offends some people, am I suppose to apologize because they hold unethical beliefs and were offended? I might be offended at their beliefs, should they apologize to me?! What if I am offended at your guidelines (I am), should you apologize to me? There is no end to this circular logic.
The reality of political correctness is that it is not about being offended, it is about which particular subjects one may or may not be offensive about!
* It's NOT OK to be offensive about race, sex or religion.
* It IS OK to be offensive by potentially advocating a particular political point: free software vs opens source, or that you may or may not (ethically) use proprietary software. It is OK to be offensive by telling people their software lacks important features or is buggy/insecure. It is OK to be offensive by ridiculing older not so well designed software. It is OK to be offensive by telling people that they didn't think before speaking. It is OK to be offensive by insulting large corporations at which many in the audience might work, by claiming that they do not contribute their share, or to speculate about the evil reasons they may have done something...
Political correctness is hypocritical agenda pushing which in itself should be viewed as offensive.
(Log in to post comments)
GNOME finalizes its speaker guidelines Posted Jul 7, 2010 2:56 UTC (Wed) by maco (guest, #53641) [Link]
I think the reference to logically justifiable is in terms of making apologies. It's not appropriate to make someone give a mathematical proof from first principles of why they found something offensive before one apologises. Simply accept that the person was offended, that it's your fault, apologise for it.
GNOME finalizes its speaker guidelines Posted Jul 7, 2010 3:45 UTC (Wed) by martinfick (subscriber, #4455) [Link]
Absolute ideas like this are pure nonsense. You missed the point, perhaps they deserve to be offended (this is purely an example, no relation to the RMS story). It very much is important WHY someone was offended. If someone holds highly skewed offensive unethical values, they might be offended by the proposition of ethical values. Should the person proposing ethical values bow to the offended person holding unethical ones? Should the boy who pointed out that the emperor has no clothes apologize for offending the emperor? Why should the emperor not be the one apologizing? No one has yet apologized to all the people offended in this thread, should they, should you?
GNOME finalizes its speaker guidelines Posted Jul 8, 2010 11:45 UTC (Thu) by ariveira (guest, #57833) [Link]
> Political correctness is hypocritical agenda pushing which in itself
> should be viewed as offensive.
+1
|
|||||||||||||