Arch Linux Mirror Loli.forsale Removed After Name Complaint
lists.archlinux.org
lists.archlinux.org
But their response is what gets me. Boo hoo, free speech is dead because you don't want ostencibly-pedophilic jokes associated with your software.
I say if you're committed to an off-color joke or gag, this is a terrible attempt to save face. Just apologize with authenticity and go more subtle. Don't turn it into another *gate or whatever the hell.
Of course, I'm only indifferent because nobody got hurt. A similar but genuinely terrible situation would be the Python Pantyshot debacle...
Exactly, and this is so obviously a troll.
Look at the original feature request to even add the mirror:
https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/51870
You can see Pritz's hesitation at using "cuntflaps.me" as a mirror and his request to use a different name.
To which Alucard suggests "loli.forsale", instead.
So excuse the Arch maintainers for not allowing you to politicize their distribution, thereby polarizing their user base...
Here is the original complaint, https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=227998
And here is the admin's original request to use a mirror with the name mirror.cuntflaps.me where the loli.forsale mirror was ultimately accepted, https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/51870
"Unless its some illegal faggot shit, I will always store your loli pics, anon."[1]
I don't appreciate people putting their personalities (whether I generally appreciate their personality or not) into software. The project you are creating is, or should be, an intellectual endeavor and it serves no technical purpose to push your personality onto users. What's more, it lessens your credibility - if you don't understand not to put your personality into your project then I question what bigger mistakes you are making as well. It's the same reason I wouldn't trust savings to a banker wearing a clown costume, it's not about me hating clowns, they can be a clown in private all they want, just don't make a clown out of your own software.
You could argue that software displaying "Good Morning, <name>!" every first run of the day serves no technical purpose, and judging by the tone of your comment, it makes that software inferior and the developer who decided to include this feature - to be of ill mind and immature.
I like to say that seriousness, like fear, will make us do and say stupid things if we let it take over us.
Plenty will find that attitude offensive. Like, who do you think you are telling people what their project should be.
(This is why I'm not in charge of things, mind.)
I don't see how the RTFM mentality and what you call "laid back" mentality are compatible.
Imo, Arch is one of the more severe/strict distros and communities.
Guess it's all perception.
To people who are socially sensitive it can be very stressful to work with these folks. When I say laid-back I figure I mean that it is more tolerant/friendly to autistic behaviour. The low standard for social skills brings in a lot of people who do productive work, at the expense of the perception of people who don't work well with autistic types. More men and boys are autistic (or close to it) than women and girls, so you'll see an even bigger split here than usual.
Basically, this domain name is typical autistic weeaboo trash (in keeping with the weeaboo handle). It's obviously not a literal endorsement of child trafficking; probably a morsel of dark humour which is more offensive than humorous if you're sensitive; or perhaps it's a tool for his work at NCMEC.
Emotional sensitivity is effectively a cancer to these communities, because a large portion of the members are incapable of it. If it takes hold in the Arch Linux community, it could collapse almost entirely.
HN has a lot of sensitive/agreeable people, so (understandable) outrage in this thread has cost me ~50 karma. It's a matter of personality, whether you see this as a sign of a healthy community, or possibly the end of an era.
Seems like this guy has a history of being a grade too abrasive for different communities. I understand why he sounds so upset in his response here.
The only imaginable purpose of this domain name was to elicit exactly the reaction that he got, and/or to cause emotions in people that don't complain. Such an intent to inflict emotional harm is also not consistent with what is commonly thought of as autism, especially not if it succeeds. Indeed, autism is almost defined by an inability to sense others' emotions, and therefore also to influence then.
If anything, this behaviour resembles sociopathy more closely.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/autism-it-s-diffe...
We could have the same scenario with smart alecks committing code that has "fun" var and function names.
So it is okay to remove stuff just because somebody was offended? Why nobody is banning Rammstein concerts then? I'm pretty sure many people will find band's name offencive.
Yep.
Bands get to name themselves how they like. Concert venues get to decide whether they care about the name.
"Loli" is a reference to underage girls, usually in a sexual context. Some people will be offended by this, and it's up to any organisation whether they want to be associated with this.
Similarly, if you tell someone "smhost" is offensive, and describe _why_ and _how_ it's offensive, it's up to them to decide whether they want to continue to be associated with it, or if they want to change.
If someone gets offended, you look and say "Why were they offended". Ask yourself if it's reasonable, if the case is that the name is referencing trafficking underage girls then you might think, OK, maybe this is a joke, but it is something that a reasonable person might get offended by and if you want to foster a professional atmosphere then you would change it.
I think if you went to the the arch maintainers and asked them to change the name pacman because you were traumatised by nightmares of the game pacman as a child they would tell you to get lost. However, that isn't really what is happening here.
Because they choose not to. Each venue, organisation, or city which lawfully has influence over such events has the right to refuse. Neither case is "banning".
2001: "Rammstein were unable to play their show yesterday at the Astoria in London due to significant restrictions to their stageshow and pyrotechnics. The band feel it would be unfair to their fans, to see a show that would have become highly compromised. If these issues can be resolved the band promises to return to the UK later in the year for live shows. Rammstein apologize for letting their fans down due to a problem which was out of their hands"
At least in my original post, a key part of my argument is that no-one is requiring alucard to change the name of the mirror. The only question is whether the mirror will be listed. Thus, I think it is analogous to asking whether I would remove a link to ycombinator.com from a page I controlled if I were offended by the URL, or if I might try to hide posts from smhost if I were offended by his or her handle; and either of those seems like a reasonable response (even if taking offense itself would clearly be unreasonable).
Let me reword this then. Why should an entity remove something from their listings when the offended entity can remove it from the local listing on its machine? The thing is - in the first case we are talking about public lists available for everybody. Why should the majority of users be left without and additional source of distribution (for example)?
But yes, obviously it's up to Arch maintainers wether they want this to be there or not.
> But it would be a bit distasteful to use it as a new name. Especially if you use it intentionally with the intent of causing offence.
I think that your second sentence is an important qualification. I almost wished that they'd stuck with the name, just to emphasise that a bunch of terrorist asshats don't get to dictate what words others can use; I think that such a useage would have been (very mildly) heroic rather than offensive.
(I like to imagine all the children telling their parents they were going to London to "study with ISIS" causing huge parental conniptions until the penny dropped.)
I think the complaint is quite petty, and it doesn't really solve any problems. Approximately nobody is going to have a worse opinion of Arch Linux because of the content of a url in /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist, and it's basically a waste of time to address this as an issue.
It's just as much of a waste of time to defend it. Arch has hundreds of mirrors and dozens come and go every month. Dropping one takes less time than it took me to reply to you here.
If by "defend" you mean "not spend more money on registering yet another domain", then I'd say it's worth defending. A hundred dollars is worth at least a few emails, especially if it is at the expense of a productive community member, on behalf of some anonymous whiner.
PS, domain names on non-egregious TLDs are 5-10 bucks a year.
Am I right in saying that this guy works for the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (presumably in Portugal)? Because for some reason it seems particularly weird to me that someone in that organisation would find that domain name amusing. Maybe it is some kind of professional gallows humour?
Sometimes known as "vested contributor". This is a problem people need to be aware of. It's probably a bad idea to tolerate poor behaviour.
Somebody didn't like the joke about selling one.
I don't quite get the original choice of naming outside of perhaps the lack of awareness of cultural subtleties and connotations that underlie cultural appropriation, but it is apt, since choosing to dress in such a way is a voluntary choice to want to be seen and viewed as a (perfect) and very youthful doll more as something to be admired from a distance than to be interacted with—perhaps the notion of sexual immaturity was seen to reinforce Victorian prudishness and vice versa. The way things get verbally abbreviated in Japanese is that they tend to be abbreviated into abbreviations of 2-mora or 4-mora, roughly corresponding to 2 syllables or 4 syllables. Hence Lolita was quickly abbreviated to loli in casual speak.
From there, the usage of the word loli further evolved in Japanese anime-related media. "loli" probably started off as a not-very-common archetype of female character who looked like the idealized lolita dresser—a doll-like prepubescent person with "refined" manners. Perhaps with influence from the original meaning of Lolita, at some point loli was generalized into the (by now common) prepubescent female character archetype in anime-related media, regardless of whether or not the Victorian-motifed dresses accompanied it.
I argued in another thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14846562), but hope you won't mind my repeating here, the (tried but true) trope that free speech guarantees only the right to say what you want, not to have anyone listen. Not disseminating someone else's speech is not the same thing as suppressing it.