From owner-freebsd-chat Mon Dec 17 1:46:36 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Received: from pogo.caustic.org (caustic.org [64.163.147.186]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 4CFCA37B405; Mon, 17 Dec 2001 01:46:02 -0800 (PST) Received: from localhost (jan@localhost) by pogo.caustic.org (8.11.6/8.11.6) with ESMTP id fBH9k2o90128; Mon, 17 Dec 2001 01:46:02 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from jan@caustic.org) Date: Mon, 17 Dec 2001 01:46:01 -0800 (PST) From: "f.johan.beisser" X-X-Sender: To: Greg Lehey Cc: David Greenman , "Jason C. Wells" , FreeBSD Chat Subject: Re: Political Correctness on -chat (was: Why no Indians and Arabs?) In-Reply-To: <20011217192503.P14500@monorchid.lemis.com> Message-ID: <20011217010244.I16958-100000@localhost> X-Ignore: This statement isn't supposed to be read by you X-TO-THE-FBI-CIA-AND-NSA: HI! HOW YA DOIN? MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.org On Mon, 17 Dec 2001, Greg Lehey wrote: > It seems that I have completely misunderstood at least the US members > of the FreeBSD project. FreeBSD represents a new social phenomenon, > and we've already discussed the demography in terms of male/female > (im)balance and age distribution. An obvious other one is cultural > distribution. agreed. > It seems that people in the USA have a hangup about this; sorry, guys, > I didn't want to offend anybody. I don't think there's anything wrong > in the question, though. As somebody else pointed out, there are > times when you want to recognize people by their appearance or > ethnic/cultural background. I don't agree with his criteria, but it's > an obvious thing to do. I grew up with a large number of both Arabic > and Indian friends (to the point where, at the age of 12, I spoke > English with a Tamil accent), so you can hardly claim I was > discriminating against them. I'm sure that most of my friends of this > time would be as surprised about the reactions to my message as I am. i've found it's mostly motivated by people feeling guilty and offended for noticing someones ethnic background. there is a certain amount of paranoia about race here in the US; after all, it's only relatively recently that the "Separate but equal" laws have been repealed or made unconsitutional. i have to admit, this thread did catch me off guard, not so much because of the reactions to it, rather the fact that this came up at all. while i don't doubt your intentions with this (how could i? this would be interesting data), i can see how some people would take this badly. > Why should that mean there's nothing to talk about? I now know of one > representative each of the groups I'm talking about. Why so few? right now, it may be a bad time to ask this kind of a question, being a mere 3 months since septemer 11th (i wish there were a better set of words for this, since naming something after a date is just odd). there is still quite a bit of racist reactions going on around here, and honestly, i can't blame anyone for not telling about their background or ethnicity. -------/ f. johan beisser /--------------------------------------+ http://caustic.org/~jan jan@caustic.org "John Ashcroft is really just the reanimated corpse of J. Edgar Hoover." -- Tim Triche To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message