Bigotry (you win, I give up)

[Antoon Pardon]

Op 22-04-17 om 13:17 schreef Rustom Mody:
> On Friday, April 21, 2017 at 2:38:08 PM UTC+5:30, Antoon Pardon wrote:
>> Op 20-04-17 om 17:25 schreef Rustom Mody:
>>> But more importantly thank you for your polite and consistent pointing out to
>>> Ben Finney that his religion-bashing signature lines [many of them] and his 
>>> claims to wish this list be welcoming are way out of sync.
>> I don't know. I think a concept like welcoming is too complex, to draw such
>> simple conclusions. First of all we have to make a choice about the public we
>> want to be welcoming to. I'm rather confident we can agree we don't want to
>> be welcoming to bigots on this list.
>>
>> ...
> Generally agree
> [though I wonder how you will decide what constitutes a 'bigot'. Look at the
> suggestion in the very subject of these threads]

Well that's a tough one off course since research seems to suggest we are all
bigots to some degree. So if I see behaviour that looks biggoted, I tend to
wait to see how the person reacts after others have pointed out the possible
problematic nature of his behaviour.

Of course there is the problem of how sensitive we should all be. Is it so
problematic if I use an idiom like: "How could I have been so blind". Is
such an idiom really a slight vs blind people?

>> Do you think critising any idea in one's signature is enough to conclude that
>> this person doesn't wish this list to be welcoming?
> Lets try a thought-experiment:
> A: Islam is glorious
> B: Religion is garbage
> C: Christ is the best
>
> Will these statements get equal treatment as spam/as censure etc if they appear
> on this list?

That doesn't seem to be fair, since only one is being critical.

What about:
D: Homeopathy/Astrology is bunk.
E: Faith healing endangers the lives of children.
F: The earth is not flat.

There are people who may feel somewhat targetted with these
statements in someone's signature. Should we discourage people
from having such statements in their signatures?

Should such a statement be a reason to remove the message from
the mailing list?

> Note that from certain pov, religion-bashing or atheism-lauding are as
> much pushing some belief-system as pushing an (un)conventional religion
>
> More to the point will an anti-semitic view be treated with equal
> harshness to an anti-Islam/Palestine one?
> https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2017-April/720532.html
>
> Overall, even though it may be a blunt weapon: Why not just keep out utterly
> unrelated-to-python stuff?

I don't know, there seems to be a lot of unpythonic stuff to be going on
in the messages themselves. If that doesn't seem to be a problem, a
signature with unpythonic contend shouldn't be a problem.