> 9Front And Surprise Auschwitz
What the actual fuck. At first I thought this was some joke in poor taste by the blog post, but in fact he is referring to the use of Nazi death camp imagery in the documentation. That's not cool.
What the actual fuck. At first I thought this was some joke in poor taste by the blog post, but in fact he is referring to the use of Nazi death camp imagery in the documentation. That's not cool.
From what I hear /g/ was a decent place to talk technology around 2010 or whenever and this is where the gross chan culture supposedly comes from.
Generally speaking, 4chan types read it as an endorsement, which sucks. More recently, people who are not assholes have also begun to read it as an endorsement, which is even more unfortunate.
I had a conversation on Mastodon with the author, where I explained some of this, but the author's followers filled my client with Nazi (and more) accusations, and then the author started demanding names of responsible parties and I didn't really feel like he was engaging in good faith. Probably could have gone better, but here we are.
This whole sort of thing has led to much confusion, which is why over the years the project home page has sprouted explicit anti-Nazi and Black Lives Matter links. As far as I am aware, there are no anti-semites (or other brands of racist) involved in the project.
and an edit: A couple of replies here ask the reasonable question: "why not just remove the image?" Bluntly, if we removed everything that confused or angered people, it would be a full-time job. It's more likely that we'll include some version of the above in order to further clarify our rejection of Nazi values and provide the context that was missing.
Besides, if we just delete the damn thing then the next message will be "9front devs are secret Nazis, look at archive.org" -- we've been down this road before with other contentious content.
Kurt, so good to see you again! As I said in: https://mastodon.social/@stevelord/105510076754785649
> Was it Uriel that committed that section? I could kind of understand not wanting to remove it if it was. If that's the case then context in the FQA might be helpful for people who stumble across it.
That's hardly demanding names, unless you're referring to somewhere else in the convo. In that case please feel free to point it out.
The whole vibe just felt like it was more about who did what than what any of it was supposed to mean, which isn't really how we operate in general.
Sure, I can see that and thanks for raising that. It wasn't intended that way but I can see how it came across. Some mediums are just poor for discussion and text is always poor for expressing context.
> The whole vibe just felt like it was more about who did what than what any of it was supposed to mean, which isn't really how we operate in general.
I got that sense from you at the time. I get that you've all been attacked heavily at different points. I don't think there's any way you couldn't have felt that vibe. I've seen people call you guys out to me since on a scale that I've not seen elsewhere.
The bit I didn't know is the how you operate in general. As an outsider that's just not info I have.
I genuinely had links and samples for Appendix L's C section - if you look at the post you'll see the drawing screenshot and references to building blocks. Not knowing how you guys worked, I perhaps wrongly assumed that this might've been welcome, but wasn't comfortable putting it in with that image there. I genuinely wasn't trying to gotcha you.
I'm sure you can imagine how I received that: "we don't care what you actually believe, we only care about appendix L of the documentation."
People have been calling us Nazis since day one -- we have several German developers so we make VW and BMW jokes about 'German engineering' and of course all the early-cold-war German rocket scientists. It's the reason we've got the photo of Bowie at Victoria Station -- photographed while waving to the crowd, he had to repeatedly deny being a Nazi afterward, because it sure looked like a Nazi salute in the photo.
Once the actual Nazis started showing up we had to get more explicit in our condemnation of their evil, and that's okay -- rejecting hate is the easy part. Defending ourselves against the people we agree with is much harder.
Yeah I can see that now. Thanks. I guess once you process the first bit that way the rest drops off.
By the no nazis bit not meaning anything what I meant there was that with everything else it can be hard to tell what's intentional on the site and what isn't.
I honestly don't care who calls you guys nazis or not. Even if I wanted to (which I don't, I gain nothing by doing so) I wouldn't need to. There are plenty of people doing that already. The harder thing to do is to try to understand without pre-judging. Thanks for clearing a lot of this up.
EDIT: I noticed this in another subthread:
> I do think the image should be provided with context.
I'm editing here because I don't want to add to the pile-on in the other thread. You mentioned this above:
> Once the actual Nazis started showing up we had to get more explicit in our condemnation of their evil
If you want to keep the picture, what would your thoughts be on a log of that condemnation linked from somewhere in the FQA? Not necessarily Appendix L. No skin off my nose either way but I thought I'd mention it in case nobody had thought of it.
Edit to respond to your edit: please can you commit to removing or changing anything else in your documentation that confuses or angers people? I think you have an understanding that having good quality, accessible documentation is important. So why not commit to having that? It's entirely what documentation writers are supposed to do. It doesn't have to be a full time job unless someone wants it to be, you can do the process of improving things slowly, one step at a time with everyone chipping in. Do you really want things to stop here where some of your documentation pages look like a twitter feed?
And I say this because I think it's somewhat of an inevitability -- over time, someone has to remove the memes and in-jokes. There is no way a newcomer is ever going to understand what they all mean. Yes people can look in archive.org but that's less important than what's actively on the website.
I am not 'ignoring this.' I am addressing it right here, and on Mastodon. I enjoy it when Internet people make throwaway accounts to accuse me of cowardice, but I'm confused about which 'guts' I'm lacking. Is it the one where I did something, took responsibility for it, explained my actions, and then engaged in conversation with people who were concerned about my motives?
If I rephrase it as "Let's keep the Nazi pictures that confuse and anger people because it would be too much work to remove them", does that help you understand why people aren't happy with your decision?
What a stupid cop-out. If you can't see how uniquely offensive this particular thing is, well, there's words to describe you.
My family is full of holocaust survivors. My grandmother passed through Auschwitz. 10 of her 12 siblings did not.
I am fairly heavily involved in 9front. I have never had any issues with anyone in that project -- certainly none to do with antisemitism.