Alexander Wirt (formorer), Wayward people & Debian censorship
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock.
Every few days somebody asks me what was the wayward word or comment that snowballed into Debian's $120,000 legal bills.
We know that in the case of Dr Norbert Preining, he was punished for using the word "it" as a pronoun for a person. Dr Preining's native language is not English and he doesn't live in a country where English has a significant role.
Back in the day, the German administration we came to know as Nazis was obsessed with both censorship and the micro-managing of language. Even in choosing a word for journalists ( schriftleiter) they were very conscious of the implications of the word that they chose.
When we talk about the Nazis in English, sometimes we use the original German word and sometimes we use an English word. For example, the Germans used the phrase Endlösung der Judenfrage and in English we translate it as Final Solution to the Jewish question. There was no "question" (fragen) as such, the phrase simply obfuscates the reference to genocide.
Alexander Wirt (formorer), an employee of NetApp, is one of the Debian mailing list censors. His role could be thought of like those journalists and newspaper editors who agreed to become trained and registered as good schriftleiter.
The word wayward is used in various contexts. For example, in an article about the racist Utopia, they tell us who would be exterminated and it wasn't just the Jews and gypsies:
These included, on the one hand, members of their own 'Aryan race' who they considered weak or wayward (such as the 'congenitally sick', the 'asocial', and homosexuals), and on the other those who were defined as belonging to 'foreign races'.
The word wayward is a very general adjective that can be used in many contexts. For example, it has also been used to describe people who are ethnically Jewish but don't identify as such:
Wayward Jews, God-fearing Gentiles, or Curious Pagans? Jewish Normativity and the Sambathions
... At stake was whether these people were Jews and the ways in which diaspora Jews and their host communities influenced one another ...
Back in the day, it looks like being wayward, whether Jewish or LGBT, would attract undue attention from the state.
Now, in some groups like Debian, it appears the LGBT agitators have taken things to the opposite extreme. Even referring to a wayward horse that I saw escaping last week would get me in trouble, just as this reference to wayward communication caused a knee-jerk fascist reaction from Debian censorship.
Is there some secret list of words that we are not allowed to use any more? When I heard about the defamation of Sony Piers by GNOME fascism and their refusal to tell us why they attacked him, I wondered if it was something trivial like this, did Sony use a word like "it" or "wayward" without permission?
When a family, workplace or community works like this, where people are attacked for things they had no way to anticipate, we use the metaphor that you feel like you are walking on eggshells. Metaphors have been banned too.
Subject: Re: Your attitude on debian mailinglists Date: Sat, 29 Dec 2018 14:59:04 +0100 From: Alexander Wirt <formorer@formorer.de> To: Daniel Pocock <daniel@pocock.pro> CC: listmaster@lists.debian.org
[ ... snip various iterations of threats and blackmail ... ]
> Hi Alex, > > Please tell me which email and which insults you are referring to <5c987a44-b6c6-ce21-020c-9402940f2fde@pocock.pro>
That is exactly that type of mail I was talking about. Starting with the subject and continueing with the body. I don't want to get too much into details, but phrases like "sustained this state of hostility" or "wayward" are not acceptable. Especially since I asked you to cool down and step back a bit. Alex
Alexander wants to create a fake community where everybody pretends to be happy all the time, even when we are targeted with insults, threats, plagiarism and other offences by the people who think they are holier-than-thou. █