[gmx-developers] FW: Gromacs quotes

[ms]

Thanks for your excellent post, Szilárd!

On 19/12/12 23:49, Szilárd Páll wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 19, 2012 at 7:58 PM, Mark Abraham <mark.j.abraham at gmail.com
> <mailto:mark.j.abraham at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     Thanks for the discussion - let's close the topic and keep the list
>     focussed on GROMACS development :-)
>
>
> While I respect your call for no flaming, I personally don't feel that
> the discussion is closed and I think that this is a topic that, although
> it's neither about science nor about GROMACS development strictly
> speaking, it *does  matter* and is very relevant to GROMACS.
>
> Honestly, I would love to have the gmx-dev finger shown (why not in a
> "Linusian" manner) to all users bothered by the mere existence of some
> sentence in the gcq DB that they might find offensive and I'd be tempted
> to take the time to tell them to mind the science and use the env. var.
> if a quote with obviously no harmful intentions bothers them so much. As
> I said before I am *strongly* opposing self-censorship driven by nothing
> else but a way to adhere to the cultural, ideological, or emotional
> state (all in all the "world view") of some user(s). In fact, I'd rather
> spend time with removing some boring quotes than arguing about this,
> there have been way to many of them showing up lately :) ! However, this
> seems to be a real concern for some, including developers, so in order
> to avoid tension and internal conflicts, I think it's better to take all
> the anger and frustration out here and now, decide something, and *then*
> move on.
>
> This might sounds harsh, but let' be honest, "killing children"
> "irrespective of context" -- (*facepalm*) which shows that it's a purely
> personal and emotionally driven opinion  -- is only disturbing if
> actively misinterpreted. On the other hand, picking special
> interpretations is easy, for instance: the quotes mentioning God or
> Jesus can be disturbing to some sensitive believers, and the ones
> mentioning "strike" or "torture" (both from Pulp Fiction quotes) could
> easily upset sensitive people who've had enough of both, possibly not so
> long ago -- and they would have all the right to request removal of Pulp
> Fiction quotes, after all few orders of magnitude more of their children
> have been killed (it's just that their stories are not turned into tv
> shows -- sorry slightly offtopic).
>
> Although I'd be angered and supportive of removal if any of the quotes
> would turn out to have an obvious agenda of spreading hate or clearly
> and intentionally disturbing some people, I have to agree with Christoph
> that as a community respecting everyone draw their own lines and
> adhering to it is silly.
>
> I hope at this point we can agree that unless we have a consensus that
> something is not appropriate (and such a consensus can be simply driven
> by gmx-devs community's own peculiar world view), blindly accepting
> personal requests for removal is a questionable practice.
>
> And as any rules, this one also has a potential exception: if some user
> would start spamming or systematically annoying people because of a
> quote, in the lack of simple and effective defense I'd personally
> approve the removal just to save our time.
>
> Cheers,
> Szilárd
>
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>
>
>


-- 
Massimo Sandal, Ph.D.
http://devicerandom.org