The thing which amuses me in the new Emacs drama about Eli Zaretskii e-mail from one of the Emacs maillists.
Everyone dramatizing that e-mail from the one Emacs maintainer obviously have (and had at least for decade) devices with Li-Ion accumulators inside - phones, tables, laptops, toothbrushes, you name it. And using it extensively.
And have zero reflection about real slavery that powers each electronic device with accumulator on the planet. Reasons understandable - it is easier to feel yourself a "irreconcilable anti-slavery fighter" fighting with words on the screen than fighting with problems of a whole country in the Africa. And it allows to continue to use Li-Ion battery-powered devices 😉
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2023/02/01/1152893248/red-cobalt-congo-drc-mining-siddharth-kara
P.S. At least it is a good example that Internet's mass-consciousness still unable to distinct in between reality/real-action and discussion of edge cases 🙂.
At least we have UN's right of free speech which frees such discussions from too much attention from the side of government (in Western countries at least), whew.
#emacs
@tfb @evgandr it’s even worse than that I think.
Lithium batteries are so commonplace that it’s hard to avoid them even if one wants to.
But he was given the hypothetical of slave labour that was completely optional. It would be trivial for him to avoid the product of slave labour. (Arguably, accepting the patch from an enslaved person would be *more* effort than rejecting it.) And yet he argues it would be wrong of him not to benefit from slave labour in this way.
@benjamineskola @tfb @evgandr@snac.bsd.cafe Somehow your replies are not visible in the Snac2 😒 , so I'll answer from my old account.
As I see from the next Eli e-mail:
> No, I don't tolerate slavery. I just don't ask our contributors how
they feel about slavery, or about any other injustices. Because if we
start asking them, we will be bogged in questions of what exactly is
slavery and what is genocide and what are all the other injustices.
And that is a death blow to our movement.
And I think that Emacs developers' concentration solely on developing Emacs and ignoring things outside of scope of programming/fixing bugs/writing documentation is a good thing. Maybe I became a bit cynical since 2019/2022, but I don't see proclamations and speeches against something bad as a good thing. Okay, people gathered and decided to proclaim something, but in real world this usually changes nothing. Only real actions (sending humanitarian help, army, money, etc) may change things.
As an example: I saw from the modern dissent history of my country that all these resolutions, proclamations and peaceful demonstrations changed nothing. Sole result - a lot of dissents became able to get a "political refugee" visas because they had a history of pursuing from the government.
Which happens when some programming-based project decided to go on "full political activism mode" I saw in LKML - when someone decided just to ban all users with e-mails ending in ".ru" before consulting with lawyers. As a result they banned some people with EU-residence, who didn't updated their e-mails :-D. Worth to mention Linus speeches about Talvisota.
And I afraid, that Emacs easily will fall in the same rabbit hole - first they start to ask about political views of contributors before accepting patches (worth to mention, that in some jurisdiction this may lead to jail sentence for such contributor, if it's views matched with "good views", allowed for Emacs contributor). And next the bans of people with wrong views will start. Or bans based on the nationality or country of residence of contributor, etc...
As Eli wrote about the same:
> That's true, but people rarely agree what is injustice nowadays.
Someone's terrorist is another one's freedom fighter. Someone's
justified war is another's genocide. Etc. etc. If we start down that
road, we end up as fragmented and fractioned as the current societies
and countries.
@evgandr@bsd.cafe But this wasn't about asking the 'political views', it was about literally materially benefiting from slave labour. There's a difference.
It would perhaps not be possible or practical to interrogate every ethical principle of every contributor to determine whether they had the correct opinions on every subject, but they were not being asked to do so.
They were simply asked: if the contributor was produced by slave labour, and you knew that absolutely, would you accept it?
And the answer was not only that they would accept it but that they would be ethically obliged to accept it. So in fact they not only think it's acceptable to tolerate slavery, they think it's wrong to oppose slavery. (Or, at least, to oppose it in any material way. You are allowed to say slavery is bad, but you are not allowed to actually take any kind of stand against slavery, because this would be a slippery slope to banning every opinion on every subject.)
@evgandr He's not arguing "necessary evil" he's saying is a good thing to have no moral compass. Which is unsurprising for a GNU maintainer, but people still think they're in favor of human liberation, not just an rms personality cult
But also, there are efforts to combat slavery in the physical supply chain. I have plenty of criticism of the UK's efforts there (for example). But the GNU position would be equivalent to arguing that one MUST accept all lithium sources and it's wrong to try to avoid slave labour products. Which is quite something.