Quoting russell@coker.com.au (russell@coker.com.au):
I don't approve content-free hate comments. There were no comments about actual issues so none were approved.
I believe you, of course. Yeah, that's genuinely weird. I really have no idea why a bunch of deplorable types (sorry, joke from current USAian national politics) would be set off by that blog post with displays of culture-wars bigotry, as it's just a straightforward and well-written software tutorial.
https://mako.cc/copyrighteous/pledge-to-killfile-andrew-suffield
Hmm, key part of rationale was: However, since responses that quote unecessarily provocative messages are visible by folks who have ignored the sender, blocking email from a person (also known as killfiling) only works if done en-mass. Mistaken rationale. Please see 'Procmail Trollkiller - Filter to autodelete posts from a roster of trolls and all first-level replies unless the mail is addressed to you directly' on http://linuxmafia.com/kb/Mail/ . Further to that: http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/lexicon.html#edwards Edwards's Law "You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem." Nobody seems to know who Edwards was, but pretty much the entire system administrator profession rests on the implicit assumption that he/she was egregiously mistaken. This plausible-sounding but empty-headed dictum is most often referred to as "Edwards' [sic] Law" -— by the depressingly huge mass of semi-literates unable to correctly write possessives of singular nouns ending in "s". (In _no_ way am I expressing opposition to stronger measures, including in particular bannings. I'm just saying that the cited rationale for the case of Suffield rests on the assumption that one is not very good at effective use of killfiling.)
Andrew eventually chose to resign from Debian.
I'm sure Debian Project is better for that. It's better than the usual escalation pattern where people do as much damage as they're permitted before finally flaming out. Which is a second item on my 'lexicon' page. ;-> (http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/lexicon.html#moenslaw-murdersuicide)
Things really have improved. Anyone who doesn't think so probably doesn't know what used to happen.
Glad to hear it. I'm just an interested outsider and a Debian-using sysadmin.
http://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/as-a-vocal-male-feminist-im-offe...
I'm not particularly 'vocal' and certainly not offended at anything -- just really amused at being told I'm 'not a feminist' after 40 years' involvement with N.O.W. activities. But you have the same right to redefine words to suit your rhetoric as everyone else on the Internet, I guess.