Superstitious users and the FreeBSD logo
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I think that it's deeply unfair to compare the BSD daemon logo to a swastika, unless you believe that open source is communism that robs pro-America operating systems like Windows.
The woman at the hotel speaks of abuse from seeing this symbol, but who apologizes for my abuse at the hands of the deeply irrational? It's not my fault that so many people choose to take their spiritual beliefs so far past zealotry that something so inconsequential as a logo would upset them, and yet it's somehow my problem because I'm apparently supposed to be constantly on the lookout for opportunities to not offend people who believe in bullshit.
These people would never extend me the same courtesy if I asked them to remove their Christian jewellery. I'd be laughed off if I phoned the front desk of a hotel freaking out that someone put a Gideon bible in my drawer.
I live in a relatively sane place and I consciously avoid going to places where it's socially acceptable to burden rationale behaviour with uncontested religious observance. They can believe what they believe and I'll continue to sleep through Sunday mornings. But the apologists who are smart enough to know better? Those folks should know better than to fall into such an obvious slippery slope.
TL;DR: I'm an atheist and I want a refund because someone put a Christian bible in my hotel room. Why are you laughing?
If you tell the hotel that you are offended by the bible in your drawer they will most likely apologize, remove the offending item, then either put it back when you are gone or simply leave it under the counter in case another nutter wants it back.
If you deal with 20 customers who are representative of the US as a whole, you will deal with about 1 who has been severely mentally ill in the last 12 months. 1% of the adult US population is APD (Antisocial Personality Disorder, which includes psychopaths, and could otherwise be refereed to as Asshole Personality Disorder). About 1% are schizophrenic. About 1% are autistic. And about 18% have had an anxiety disorder in the last 12 months (probably more if you are in New York), and quite a few are religious.
You can't worry about treading on toes. People will complain, unless you are more boring than IBM. When customers complain, you politely agree, attempt to help them, then forget what they said.
They have the right to be offended. Fortunately, we have to right not to care.
Zing. Very good example.
and (as others stated all over these threads) no christian text says that the devil is a tiny red (arguably) cute comic figure. Even if you're a die-hard believer, it's about as hard to argue that this mascot is representing the devil as it is to argue that Harry Potter is about evil witchcraft or AD&D is about dark rituals and serving strange gods.
They instead go with a recent issue of Dwell and a copy of Don Miguel Ruiz's The Four Agreements. I read it and did not feel like killing anyone!
where was this said? I didn't find it in the thread.
I used to get the BSD magazine, and I got a puzzled look or two from the neighbors. I just said "oh that, it's a computer thing". No big deal.
But how would you feel if you ran into your neighbor at the mailboxes and they were getting magazines with swastikas on them? How about if you went to use the hotel network and the sign-in page said "Powered By" and a picture of a guy in a white hood standing under a burning cross? You might feel a little weird about it too.
There is a language of symbolism and iconography that exists in Western cultures. This image of a demon/devil/satan has a relatively coherent meaning. It developed this meaning long, long before some guys in a computer lab chose to use it to represent something completely unrelated, as some kind of visual pun. It's as if they were intentionally trying to be confusing.
So cut it out with all the snickering about "look at all the dumb superstitious people who can't wrap their heads around a daemon process".
This is the kind of antisocial behavior that gives nerds an image problem.
This image of a demon/devil/satan has a relatively coherent meaning.
When you bring those visual characteristics, redness, horns, a tail, a pitchfork, into play, you automatically bring the history of those characteristics with it. In which case the image could also represent some of the playful, naughty daemons in that history[1]. Opposing such images as being Satanic in nature is a display of utter ignorance that we shouldn't bow to. It has nothing to do with daemon processes or nerds.
[1] I must add that, with those associations in mind (the most benign I can think of), I have never understood the choice for this mascot. I feel it doesn't make FreeBSD look serious enough.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/90/GustaveDo...
Only difference with an angel is that the feather wings are replaced with bat-like wings.
I was going to say that the horns (and goat-legs) came from "demonizing" the Horned God/Pan/etc deities from Paganism. But looking it up (check Wikipedia on Satan, Devil, Pan, Horned God for references), it turns out that this demonization occurred mostly in the late as the early 19th century, while the image of a horned Devil occurs at least as early as the 13th century. Interestingly, the image of The Devil in the early 18th century Tarot of Marseille seems to have branched antlers, not horns.
And that's just a cursory investigation, the complete story is probably much more complicated than that :) There's some stuff involving the Knights Templar vs ancient Pagan imagery, but I'm done with Wikipedia for the moment :-)
The image that they interpret in their minds. Not what it says in the literal Bible, or on Wikipedia.
I'm sure there's a great deal of depth and diversity and religious scholarship on the topic of devils, Satan, etc.
What they all tend to agree is that this figure represents a direct conflict with God. All Christians (and plenty of other major religions) are thus in opposition to it, by definition.
I don't know a single religious person that would seriously take a cartoon character with horns to symbolize some kind of pact with the devil.
I do, however, know quite a few people who are offended by Christian religious symbols for all the cruelty they stand for, both historically and for them personally.
And by the way, ridiculing the devil has a great tradition, that has never meant to worship the devil. In fact, Satanists might well consider it antisocial to use the devil in this way.
I think calling any of this antisocial is totally bizarre regardless of any religous beliefs.
Then either you don't live in America, or you don't know many devout evangelicals.
know quite a few people who are offended
So that settle it: you're not keeping company with average "heartland" Americans. You self-select the people you know, so using people you know as a general population sample is usually flawed.
I live in New York. There are definitely crazy religious people here, but not enough of them that they can strut their stuff in public and carry on with the crazy nonsense that you see in the South or Midwest.
Also, we have enough cultural and religious diversity that fundamentalists dominating school boards or town/city governments wouldn't fly. (We get machine politics and union domination instead)
Evidence: http://www.barrowjournal.com/archives/6103-Adulterous-couple...
Not even an arrest for public indecency.
That hotel guest probably just wanted to make a political point (unless she was clinically insane).
You'd be surprised. Things many American evangelicals (of the TV-vangelist loving variety) believe:
1. Disney's Aladdin tells teenagers to take off their clothes: http://www.snopes.com/disney/films/aladdin.asp
2. The letter K or the letter U on a grocery product means the maker paid off the Jews: http://www.snopes.com/racial/business/kosher.asp
3. Proctor & Gamble's "man in the moon" logo proves they are Satanists supporting the Church of Satan: http://www.snopes.com/business/alliance/procter.asp
If you believe those, yet aren't clinically insane, then concern about a devil icon on an in-room pay-per-view machine (purveyor of filth!) seems positively normal.
Yes, as opposed to 15th century Spanish sys-admin villagers.
:)
Yes and no. Sure, the iconography has a history. No, "some guys in a computer lab" are hardly the first or only people to use the iconography for "something completely unrelated."
Do the same people who are offended by the BSD Daemon get all bent out of shape over the many devil and demon themed sports teams and other organizations that exist?
http://duke.fanatics.com/COLLEGE_Duke_Blue_Devils/browse/
Or by the existence of devil-themed consumer goods?
http://www.google.com/search?q=yellow+devils
Why should computer geeks be singled out for this sort of abuse?
Did your mother have any say in the acquisition of the vacuum, or was it a hand-me-down or something?
I take it she didn't write a letter to Dirt Devil complaining that she had been "abused" by being exposed to the word, though?
Sports mascots seem to be established as an exception. Sports teams seem to like to project an irreverent image. Duke, in fact, started as a religious school. Methodists are pretty cool about not getting "all bent of of shape" like that.
You don't have to go back in time very far to find people who wouldn't understand the idea of having a mascot for a computer operating system. Thus, it was not established as an objection.
I think the phrase is warranted in light of the story here.
The more I think about the mascot issue, the less sense it makes to me that a person who truly believed it was morally wrong to invoke the Devil would allow such an exception.
The fact that a crowd of 10,000 screaming fans is (arguably) doing something very much akin to worshiping the mascot just makes it about 100,000x worse.
This is a bit of history from DePaul, a Catholic university: http://news.library.depaul.edu/news/post/2008/07/How-did-DeP... "So next time you are out cheering for the red and the blue remember to cheer for our Demon too!"
Odds are this person is being ridiculous, and had no intention of actually paying for the $1,000 stay.
People seem to get offended by almost everything. It is not FreeBSD's fault if people are so intolerant to the point of running away from a hotel because they saw something that they don't even want to know what it means... this is called prejudice, and this is an even more antisocial behaviour than sticking to a friendly looking daemon logo.
Is it logical? No.
Is it the way the world works? Yes.
There is no reason that anyone should pander to these folks, except as far as it might affect your bottom line, if that so happens to be your primary concern.
You should try to see things from the other person's point of view, without necessarily agreeing or disagreeing with it.
And if you didn't know the Easter Bunny actually did originate from paganisim then you're simply uninformed. I can't explain why Western Christianity incorporates such symbols in some instances and would consider them "pagan idolatry" in others.
Btw, I'm quite aware that the Easter Bunny has pagan origins. Unlike you, I can also explain why some variants of Christianity coopt such symbolism and some abhor it. This has a lot to do with the continuing feud between Catholicism and some types of Protestantism. The Catholic Church a long time ago decided that it was better to "embrace and extend" the competing pagan religions rather than try to extinguish them.
Depends. If it was the actual red/white/black Nazi design, I'd definitely ask about it and he'd have to come up with a reasonable excuse as to why he is receiving these magazines--and then I'd believe him knowing that actual neo-Nazis never apologize or make excuses but will be frank and confronting about their beliefs and the ones that aren't also tend to make sure their neighbours don't see their propaganda mail.
However, you can't compare that to a cartoon devil in sneakers. If that computer screen had displayed Powered by <image of a pentagram with a goats head in a circle with occult symbols> then, yeah, I couldn't blame anyone for at least wondering if they might be Satan-worshippers :) And if fundie Christians want to get all offended and freak out at Satanists, I'm going to say, have at it. While actual Satanists are generally rather harmless, they are also generally enormous pricks. It might even give me short pause and wonder whether I'd reconsider staying at that hotel, but in the end the potential for hilarity would probably win out.
No, this is more like: Your neighbour receives a magazine with a swastika on it that doesn't actually have anything to do with Nazis, like maybe he is a Hindu. Just like the BSD logo doesn't have anything to do with the devil or satan, but is a play on the word "daemon". In that case, maybe you don't know it, you ask him, he tells you, and since the magazine says Modern Hindu Magazine (health & lifestyle for the modern Hindu!) and the swastika is yellow with orange, you figure that he's probably not a neo-Nazi.
Around here there are also large churches which put on "fall harvest festivals" as an alternative to Halloween. Makes it sound even more pagan if you ask me!
Coming from a country that sometimes gets a bad reputation for limiting free speech: I know at least one country part of the 'western culture' where swastikas are (generalizing) illegal. Please list a country where tiny horned figures are illegal.
I don't know about the 'white hood w/ burning cross' reference (I assume KKK?), but I guess those aren't a good example either.
Are you seriously comparing
a) a regime that killed millions of people and started the 2nd world war
b) a far-right, violent, terrorist (acc. to Wikipedia, depending on local legislation?) organization
with
c) a comic style image that might be connected by viewers with a fictional character representing (guessing here, didn't read the novel) all evil?
Everyone is free to have their own belief. But you sure overstate the problem here..
Yes, in the US South that is an unambiguous symbol of the KKK and racist violence. It's even recent enough to be in living memory for older people.
Are you seriously comparing a) a regime that killed millions of people and started the 2nd world war
No, I'm not comparing the acts of one party (the actual Nazis) with the acts of another party (programmers at Berkely) or with a mythological motif.
I'm saying that the programmers at Berkley chose a symbol which already had a specific meaning and was thus guaranteed to be confusing.
Nerds have a negative stereotype of being passive aggressive, pointlessly confusing, making inside jokes at others' expense, and generally making others look stupid.
Not "invoking Godwin's Law" if it's actually relevant. It'd be different if he'd have said "these fundie Christians are like nazis".
And the actual Godwin's Law is even different and isn't "invoked". Look it up.
I think comparison with a swastika is perfectly reasonable and not at all gratuitous, for being an icon/imagery that evokes strong emotions in many people (myself included). BTW that doesn't mean I agree with the comparison, because I don't, for similar reasons as you state. But referring to "Godwin's Law" in a discussion where the swastika actually is a relevant comparison pisses me off.
Also, there's a flaw in your comparisons. Nazis were real, and they killed millions of people. The KKK is real and they terrorized people for decades. Demons and devils are purely imaginary.
So, so different. Otherwise being a holocaust denier is no worse than being an atheist (a devil denier!).
One image relates to actual terrible beliefs and behaviours, one relates to supersticion.
There is a sizeable group of Christians who practice what is known as 'spiritual warfare.' Basically, this worldview sees the work of Satan in everything. Marital problems? "Satan, I bind you in the name of Jesus Christ." Financial woes? "Satan, I bind you in the name of Jesus Christ." Problems at work? "Satan, I bind you in the name of Jesus Christ." 'Binding' the devil apparently dispatches angels who 'subdue' the demons responsible for your problem. Just watch TBN for an hour and you'll see what I'm talking about. For the first few months of my conversion, this is the subculture I was in.
I remember one day visiting the FreeBSD website (this is after refusing to use a computer for 1 month because the Internet was obviously a part of Satan's diabolic ploy to entrap mankind), and closing the tab when I saw Beastie. You see, in that culture, there is a meme that certain objects 'attract' demons. Listening to certain songs invites demonic infestation. Watching horror movies practically guarantees it.
I vowed then that I would never use FreeBSD. Even though benchmarks showed superior stability and SMP performance than Linux, I couldn't knowingly invite demons into my life like that! By Beastie...Tux, here I come.
Thankfully, I deconverted a few months later. But I understand where she is coming from. If she was one the 'warfare' crowd, she'd probably have spent the entire night in fervent prayer, battling the 'forces of darkness.' My mom, for example, would NOT have stayed in that hotel. Wouldn't happen.
Oh man, do I have stories to tell!
For tidbits on my experiences on HN:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1062267 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=611122 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2202900
It's probably important to point out that the majority of religious people are not in quite as deep as you were. But they might still be a little bothered by it.
There are ~300MM in the US. If just 0.1% of them are nutty enough to pitch a fit over a cartoon character, that's still three hundred thousand nuts we have to deal with.
Meanwhile, the majority of US adults self-report as Christian. Most of these people are not nuts about depictions of demons, as evidenced by the fact that they aren't protesting DePaul (the largest Catholic university in the country) for naming their sports team "The Blue Demons".
For some reason I can't really explain, sports teams seem to make an occasional exception.
That would be an interesting experiment.
If you want to change that to the mid 15th century with small villages, superstition and and witches, different story.
“This is yet another reason why it was brilliant for Linux to have a Penguin as their logo. Up until then all Unix imagery was counter-productive to wide adoption: It was mostly wizards (a reminder that Unix is difficult to use and only understood by few) or devils (which is just plain confusing to the 99.99% of the planet that hasn't taken Operating Systems 101 in college).
This is not a new thing. This story is probably older than a lot of people on this mailing list: http://monster-island.org/tinashumor/humor/daemon.html
(and I heard Laura tell the story once in person)
Tom”
America makes all other rich nation's provincials look like Einsteins!
Self-censorship to appease the tiny number of people that are crazy is the worst form of censorship. There is no appeals process and you can't measure whether or not your censorship is effective. All you're left with is a world that consists only of fear, uncertainty, and doubt. I don't want to live in that world.
Don't change your personality because one person might not like you. Is it worth making the world a worse place just to get a measly thousand bucks?
Removing the "Powered By" makes the world a worse place?
I am inclined to agree with one of the later emails in the thread; "Powered By <blank>" doesn't really belong on end-user pages in the first place.
Little decisions like this are what make you human. Don't let your fears and inhibitions turn you into a robot because some interview with Steve Jobs said not to put "powered by..." logos on stuff. Do what feels right in your heart. Enjoy life first and figure out how to make money without compromising your humanity.
Steve Jobs appeared happy enough to have "Designed by Apple in California" inscribed on all Apple's products.
You've never experienced a door-to-door religion salesperson?
I think it depends on whether the person set to net a thousand bucks would agree with you on whether censoring a mascot makes the world a worse place, or whether they think censoring the mascot brings the world, such as it is, into relief.
It may not be that most people would care about the daemon turned devil. But that can be all the more incentive to just do what the vocal minority wants. No one else really cares, and that is as much about making the world a bad place as the person who actively insists on censorship. So why should you make an effort against a disinterested population?
I agree with you, but I think it is important to realize that there are varying degrees of both willfulness and jadedness that can make an argument like "you're selling the world out" fall flat. As much as I find a lack of resistance from people toward the censorship calls of others, apathy and jadedness are far more often the cause than agreeing that something ought to be censored.
Maybe finding a way to convince these apathetic ones that the world isn't beyond redemption would go a long way to convincing people that these things are worth fighting against, but I am still trying to find a reliable and repeatable way to do that. I will always be the seemingly naive optimist I suppose.
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-chat/2011-Novembe...
As a former fundie myself (brief stint, I assure you!), I do
have some sympathy for your hotel guests. Decades ago, in my
teens, before I was fortunate enough to snap out of it, such
a situation would have produced an *extreme* amount of
anxiety.
I can only feel sorry for anyone who has lived their whole
life that way.
There aren't many ways to help them, everything you say or
do is processed via an elaborate shell script that basically
amounts to this:
sed -e 's/outside help/trick of the devel/'
Poor people, really. If they weren't so dangerous &
annoying, we ought to have sympathy for them. It really was
a high-stress lifesytle. I'm thankful to have snapped out of
it early on, lots of others aren't so lucky. It really is
like a trap.
It's kind of hard to come up with a non-Christian equivalent, maybe something like travelling to Asia, visiting a Hindu temple, and completely freaking out about the swastikas, because obviously this means that all Hindus are in fact Nazis. Or even more direct, refusing to book a hotel owned by Hindus that prominently display some swastika emblem behind the counter (as a good luck/prosperity charm).
Now imagine living with this delusion, you actually believe this, everybody trying to convince you otherwise is either sadly misguided, corrupted, or "one of them" and these swastikas are quite prevalent in Asia. You'd be living in a constant state of fear of Imaginary Nazis!
It's one of those things that is both funny and sad and amazing and pitiful, all at the same time.
Maybe another comparison, I know a couple of people that can completely freak out from simply seeing a picture of a spider, as much that if it's large and unexpected enough they will actually jump out of their chair and panic. A big difference is of course that these people are aware that their fear is irrational--that a picture cannot hurt them (well, apart from any physical reactions they bring about their own, of course).
Customer's only need to believe it's so, much like the case presented in the internet being powered by the devil.
Anyways, off to brand "Holy Routers" with an image of Buddy Christ as our logo. "Why bother with other routers, ours have the divine connection."
Some example "demonic" products off the top of my head
- New Jersey Devils (NHL team)
- Dirt Devil (a vacuum)
- Devil's food cake (a popular dessert)
Take your Harry Potter example. The people who are anti-Harry Potter aren't really against it because it trivializes black magic. That's just a rationalization. These people certainly don't support something like the works of Aleister Crowley, even though they're much more serious about their treatment of the occult. They're against it because it contains -- in their view -- black, satanic magic.
(joke! joke-joke-joke! show tolerance before downvoting)
You are not responsible for their outrage.
'First they came for the hotspots with devil logos on them, and I did not speak up, for I am not a devil logo.'
"Some customers aren't worth having."
It might be more sensible to ask for simpler customization facilities than to ask a project to change or hide their logo for everyone.
There's nothing you can do about stupid people. They're always going to find something to object to.
First of all the logo: http://www.google.com/search?q=devil&tbm=isch Clearly an image of the devil. The pitchfork strengthens this meaning: http://www.symbols.com/old/encyclopedia/05/051.html
What is the devil?: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil
So, the thing in FreeBSD logo is clearly considered to represent personalized evil by a lot of people. Denying the significance of this meaning is stupid and counter-productive.
Some of people take the issue of opposing evil very seriously and personally. As we all should (according to our understanding) -- whether it is poverty, poisoning of air and water, unethical business practices, corrupt officials, etc.
Now I believe the main cause that this story made the news is the 1000$ (potential?) loss for the hotel and some other demands from the customer. Other than that I doubt it would be considered important by the many people posting here.
The customer is called "superstitious". It is also noted that the customer and the complaining hotel owner are both women, while the ISP owner and his tech support person are both male. So we see the cliché of superstitious and irrational women against calm and rational men.
So yeah... ignoring the obvious, looking down on people based on their religious beliefs and sex, ignoring them unless the issue involves money...
Get over it. If you want more people to like FreeBSD -- change the logo. If you won't -- don't complain.
Some people are on a crusade to rid the world of censorship.
Some people are on a crusade to rid the world of closed-source software.
/me makes popcorn.
1. USA has a very strong political power and exports its culture.
2. I am old enough to have witnessed the effects of state atheism personally and directly in my country. Atheism can be as stupid and evil as any other religion.
P.S. I come from Eastern Europe.
Also the pitchfork is an attribute of the devils in hell. It is not an attribute of daemons.
Seriously? The world does not have any other problems?
If we were to discuss every stupidity we encounter every day, we'd soon run out of bits.
Preach it brother!
Some people deserve a firm spanking, nothing more.
Mammon slept. And the beast reborn spread over the earth and its numbers grew legion. And they proclaimed the times and sacrificed crops unto the fire, with the cunning of foxes. And they built a new world in their own image as promised by the sacred words, and spoke of the beast with their children. Mammon awoke, and lo! it was naught but a follower.
from The Book of Mozilla, 11:9 (10th Edition)
http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Revelation+13...
Read the two and decide for yourself.
from The Book of Mozilla, 8:20"
OK I can see how that is similar to Genesis 1:31:
"God saw all that he had made, and it was very good."
Actually, it would appear the abstracted logo on their page is under a stricter license and requires permission to use, IANAL.
| Is there artwork that doesn't include horned creatures that might offend the ignorant or superstitious?
as in, I still want to offend her, but also want to change the logo?
For example, one of the old badges without bestie the mascot. http://www.antbomb.com/sources/powered_by_freebsd.gif
Personally, I think the logo has outlived its usefulness. The cartoon devil doesn't mean much to me, and vastly less to normal people, and the horned sphere is just... weird.