Subject: bug#54691: fortune-mod propagates various non-nice things

From: Liliana Marie Prikler <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 20 Jul 2022 06:31:23 +0200

Am Dienstag, dem 19.07.2022 um 21:20 +0200 schrieb Maxime Devos:
> On 03-04-2022 19:26, Liliana Marie Prikler wrote:
> 
> > Am Sonntag, dem 03.04.2022 um 15:09 +0200 schrieb Maxime Devos:
> > 
> > > Hi guix,
> > > 
> > > fortune-mod currently propagates (in the non-technical sense)
> > > various non-nice things like objectification, misoginy, religious
> > > intolerance, anti-mathematician-ism (?) and date rape.  That is
> > > not an exhaustive list, these are just the first few things I
> > > encountered with "fortune off".
> > Well, the purpose of "fortune off" is to provide offensive "jokes".
> > As such, if you're offended by them, you're kinda getting what
> > you've asked for. If removing them falls under what our CoC states,
> > though, then so be it, I have no horse in this race.
> My point wasn't that some individual could accidentally install a
> package that offends them.  My point was that:
> > fortune-mod currently propagates (in the non-technical sense)
> > various non-nice things like objectification, misogeny, religious
> > intolerance, anti-mathematician-ism (?) and date rape. That is not
> > an exhaustive list, these are just the first few things I
> > encountered with "fortune off".
> More concretely, consider the target audience for such "jokes"
> instead of some random individual.
>  By including such jokes:
>  * we implicitly validate that such views are reasonable (people
> holding those views get validation, unknowing people are nudged into
> considering such views and people rejecting these views are
> invalidated)
>  * As such, we contribute to keeping those vile -isms intact and
> making them more common.
> I do not believe this to be a good course of action.
> Something can be said about the individuals too, w.r.t. internalised
> $BAD-isms, negative impact on mental health, possibly some other
> things too?). I don't believe inflicting those to be a good idea
> either.
I do get where you're coming from.  However, I'd argue that the issue
with the current fortune-mod is that it doesn't really have a code of
conduct, or at best a poorly conceived one.  Even if we removed
obviously bad stuff like misogyny, religious intolerance and date rape,
there are other points of contention.  For example, the user one you
mentioned was not even listed in off, even though it might be
classified as offensive (a harmless offense, if you ask me, but
anyway).  All sorts of "punching up" jokes against incompetent
politicians would also be offensive to those politicians and their
followers even if propagating them towards greater society would be a
good thing.  There's probably more to add here.

Thus, my point is that we ought to consider a code of conduct while
we're choosing which themes fortune-mod is allowed to propagate and
which not (in particular our own might be a starting point).  If we
find that patching fortune-mod is too hard as raingloom implied, we
might instead use a more CoC-friendly fork.

Cheers