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Re: [Ghm-discuss] The posh talk does not complain with the policy


From: John Gilmore
Subject: Re: [Ghm-discuss] The posh talk does not complain with the policy
Date: Tue, 12 Aug 2014 14:24:37 -0700

Jose E. Marchesi writes:
> The main reason why my talk violates the current policy is that it mocks
> and somewhat ridiculizes the very rich aristocratic people, including
> their appearance and the affectionated manners usually associated to
> them [1].

I was so offended that I dropped my monocle.

Seriously, I don't know what it is like where you live, Jose, but it
is not a pretty thing being a rich person in America today.  There is
a deliberate attempt to stir up an "us versus them" against the rich,
regardless of their innocence or guilt in any moral sense.  The "99%
versus the 1%" is all about divide and conquer, us versus them.
People who believe themselves part of "us", "the 99%" are led to think
that they need not care about "them", the 1%.  By definition, they are
not looking for solutions that work for the 100%, i.e. everyone; they
don't care if their policies step on the lives or the rights of 1% of
the populace.  Poor activists are blind to the irony of denouncing the
"greed" of the rich, while the same activists greedily seek to take
other peoples' wealth for their own projects.

And it's not just yakety yak, there are real consequences.  Once that
attitude became established here, politicians started increasing taxes
on only the rich.  At its worst, this attitude caused the Reign of
Terror during the French Revolution; and caused the national police in
Guatemala to systematically kill off most of the educated people in
the country, over 30 years of ugly, murderous civil war that only
ended in the 1990s.

In the US, the big lie is that "the rich don't pay their fair share".
If you look at US federal income tax, 40% of the adult population pays
no income taxes at all!  (In 1984 it was less than 15% of the people
who paid nothing, but things have changed.)  The lower income 50% of
the people pay less than 4% of the income taxes.  The upper income 50%
pays 96.5% of the income taxes.  And the top 5% pay 55% (with the top
1% paying 35% all by themselves).  Figures like these are easy to find
online, for example:

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_tax_in_the_United_States#Distribution
  
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e0/2010_US_Tax_Liability_by_Income_Group_-_CBO.png
  http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2704794/posts

So, in actuality, the rich (and the 1%) pay far more than their fair
share, unless the word fairness has lost all meaning.

So, perhaps you thought you were speaking to a crowd of poor people,
who would all cheer when you demonize the rich.  But a few of us in
the free software community, like me, actually learned how to make
money writing and giving away free software, making money from
supporting it and extending it, and ended up rich.  (And also inspired
a thousand follow-on projects and companies, that support themselves
and/or make money writing and supporting free software -- more power
to them!)  I am not ashamed of making money or having wealth, nor
do I think I am making the world more evil by doing so.

So, you are correct in supposing that you should revise your offensive
speech, or should stay away from the meeting.  Thank you for noticing,
and for volunteering to leave.  (I would prefer that you stayed, and
just eliminated the deliberate slurs against persons of wealth.)

Ludovic =?utf-8?Q?Court=C3=A8s?=w said:
> I can sympathize with the rejection of institutionalized political
> correctness that (I think) JosÃ's message is about.  After all, the GHM
> audience is small and should be able to address problems through
> discussion, without resorting to a lawyer-jargon policy.

I am no fan of censorship.  And I donate annually to TheFire.org, the
Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, which has spent a
decade working to eliminate "speech codes" at government-run
universities, most of which are aimed at suppressing poorly-defined
"hate speech" or "speech that offends somebody".  FIRE defends
students and professors who get kicked out of school over such issues,
for example.  So I know the issue pretty well.

But, because we are not a government, it is our right as a voluntary
community of interest to decide on our own standards of behavior.  And
to decline to participate with people who violate those standards.

Because hacker culture historically came largely out of universities
full of relatively young, socially naive, largely male people, hacker
culture has been a hotbed of unconscious sexism.  We have unknowingly
suffered from testosterone poisoning.  The GNU project's roots are
deep in hacker culture; Richard Stallman embodies the stereotype
remarkably well, despite the decades that he has spent learning to be
more persuasive to broader audiences.  It takes a constitution of
steel, or a principled rejection of relentless input from outside, for
a woman to survive and thrive in yesterday's hacker culture.  But
because it is OUR culture, we can shape it to be less abrasive.  Both
less deliberately abrasive, and less unconsciously abrasive.  And
every strong or self-sufficient woman who comes in, can slowly help
teach us to make it more welcoming to the next rank of women, who are
not quite as strong or quite as isolated.  The true spirit of free
software is as much at home in estrogen as it is in testosterone.

The mere fact that we are having this discussion means that the policy
is having an effect, and probably a positive one.  As you review your
slides and your draft speech, if you get a twinge about a racist,
sexist, ageist, or cashist comment or image that you were planning to
use, consider how you could rewrite it to make your point without
putting anybody else down.  Some people climb to the top of their
field on the shoulders of others.  It's a much slower climb if you
spend your time stepping on their toes instead.

        John Gilmore

PS: As this discussion has noted, perhaps the GNU project should revise
some of the sexist jokes on the website, too.



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