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Hitler Quote Controversy In the BSD Community
New submitter Seven Spirals writes: Recently, the FreeBSD folks have removed Fortune with a fairly predictable far right 4chan condemnation. Then last weekend saw a lively debate on NetBSD's current-users mailing list about the inclusion of Hitler quotes in the Fortune database with dozens of posts falling on the left and right. The quotes themselves are fairly tame material probably intended as cautionary. However, the controversy and the reaction of BSD users has been real and very diverse. So far, the result has been to pull Fortune out of FreeBSD and to relocate the quotes into the "offensive" database in NetBSD's case.
Some people enjoy getting trolled, but I refuse to care about something so nonsensical as fortune. Is it stable? Can it be used to run exploits or escalate privileges? If not, then I don't care. For people who care, fork it or overload with -nohitler parameter.
The hacker community has always been full of people with a certain kind of personality. That kind of personality can laugh at Hitler. But hackers are a dying breed. Software development is no longer driven by that "hacker" personality, and the software development community now has to be much more sensitive and respectful of a more diverse population. Which means no more Hitler jokes, or casual swearing, or crude innuendos, or Monty Python references, or etc etc. Oh well, it was fun (for the hackers) while it lasted.
% fortune -m 'Joseph Stalin'
%% (fortunes)
A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.
-- Joseph Stalin
%%
Even God cannot change the past.
-- Joseph Stalin
%%
Gaiety is the most outstanding feature of the Soviet Union.
-- Joseph Stalin
%%
In the future, there will be fewer but better Russians.
-- Joseph Stalin
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
When categorize Nazi party as being left or right, rather than compare it to the communists, you could just as well compare the Nazis to the Weimar republic. You can't get consistent answers if you do that.
Personally, I think that labeling parties right/left (or even worse policies as right/left) engenders sloppy thinking and is often, if not usually, a tool for deceptive speech. In the case of labeling 20th century fascist movements as being right/left, you might as well try to categorize apples, grapes, and watermelons into right/left fruits. They are their own kind of thing and such simple binary labeling only serve to obscure what they are, and to obscure the nature of whatever they are being compared to.
Nazi stands for national socialist workers' party.
The Nazis were originally socialist, and had a strong socialist faction up until 1934, when the leader of that faction, Ernst Rohm, was murdered on Hitler's order along with many other "leftists". This consolidated Adolf's authority, and made it easier for him to work with German industrialists. All economies are a mixture of socialist and private enterprise, but after 1934, saying Nazi Germany was "socialist" makes as much sense as saying that China is "communist".