Summary/Minutes from today's FESCo Meeting (2014-03-05)

[Adam Williamson]

On Fri, 2014-03-07 at 12:17 +0100, Petr Viktorin wrote:
> On 03/07/2014 10:59 AM, H. Guémar wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > I don't think that worrying about perpetuating offensive stereotypes
> > is specifc to the US, we have similar controversies in Europe:
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banania#Controversy
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zwarte_Piet#Controversies
> 
> Well, read the second article. "92% of the Dutch public don't perceive 
> Zwarte Piet as racist". I'm not saying it is or is not, or that it 
> should or should not be fixed; I'm saying that there is a culture where 
> this is not perceived as a big deal, as opposed to USA where political 
> correctness is a big deal.

Please, keep the term 'political correctness' out of it, as it is an
inherently problematic term. It was invented by one side of the
meta-debate as a stick with which to beat the other side, so its use in
any ostensibly unbiased evaluation is inappropriate.

> > Anyway, the line between what is acceptable and unacceptable in Fedora
> > should be that no one should be offended by something that directly
> > refers to him or his origins in a negative or hurtful way.
> 
> My point is that the list "him/her and his/her origins" seems rather 
> arbitrary. Why is e.g. "his/her religion" not on the list?

There is at least one starkly obvious difference there, which is that
you choose your religious beliefs and affiliations; you do not choose
your race/color/general genetic origin.

Still, drawing a line that simple would imply we could go around
joyfully insulting religions left right and centre, and mostly people
tend to refrain from doing that out of politeness if nothing else. But
still, it seems like an important factor to consider.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net
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