[OT] who wrote this

[Dave Curry]

On Sun, Nov 25, 2007 at 10:03:30PM -0600, eBoundHost: Artur wrote:
> 
> Wow neal, that's very nice of you.  are you saying that hitler didn't do any of these things?  I'm not even going to respond to you here, just going to re-post your words to show that there are still people like you out there...
> 
> And as far as your sage to the moon quote, don't think too much of your own sagedom, there is always someone younger and smarter.  You would be better off being a little less "sagy" and a bit nicer.
> 
> Now to the rest of you who are for some reason turning this into a Censorship issue.  It's not.  I'm asking to replace the text on the HTML front page with a completely unnecessary reference to hitler.  We're not talking about pruning the quotes database for controversial speakers.  having hitlers name there does nothing positive for the project and polarizes the viewing audience because it offends the vast majority of people, 99% of whom are not going to spend an evening writing to a mailing list to have the issue fixed. They won't think about the deep philosophical reasons why this should be there in principle.  They are going to read the page and think to themselves that the freebsd community are a bunch of jerks. 
> 
> There are far better ways to express the thought than by simply saying "hitler quotes".  For instance it can be replaced with "controversial persons" or something similar.  He was not the only such person in history, so we should not be focusing only on him.

Since this point has been raised already I won't stick with it too long.  It has been pointed out multiple times that this is not the proper forum to debate this point for one.  For two if you have submitted your request for the revision to the 
proper people then _the community_ can take your suggestions under advisement and decide if it really is improper to be using "Hitler quotes" as opposed to some other phrasing.  As it is, I think you've extensively made the point for why 
it was a good choice.  The reaction to Hitler should not be such that simply being associated with the name justifies people taking offense.  On the flip side of this, saying that it being a Hitler quote doesn't automatically make it offensive
doesn't lessen the terrible impact that he actually had, and as such doesn't warrant censorship (Despite your protestations to the contrary, censorship is the very act of removing items deemed offensive to a body).  Unless you can come up with
a legitimate reason that "Hitler" should be removed, you're not going to bring much sympathy to your cause. 

--- 
David Michael Curry (Dave)
<dave at ysarro.com>

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