Re: [rain1@airmail.cc] Delete abortion joke

[Zack Weinberg <zackw@panix.com>]

On Sun, May 6, 2018 at 4:18 PM, Alexandre Oliva <aoliva@redhat.com> wrote:
> On May  6, 2018, Zack Weinberg <zackw@panix.com> wrote:
>
>> (Part of why I have repeatedly refused to back my patch out is to
>> stand for the principle that the GNU Project Leader _shouldn't_ have
>> ex officio power to override a consensus decision of the active
>> maintainers of a specific piece of software.  He should have to
>> persuade us to change our minds, instead.)
>
> Do you agree, however, that the consensus was only apparent, because
> nobody else thought of asking him, and I, who was uncomfortable with the
> change, decided to only speak up after consulting him?

I am not sure if I understand this question.  If the following
hypothetical scenario doesn't answer it, please let me know what you
still want to know.

Suppose that last week, at the point when I committed the patch, I had
instead contacted RMS directly to inform him that we were considering
the removal of his joke and we wanted to know if he still felt it
should stay there.  Suppose also that he had replied more or less as
he actually did, saying only that he did want it to stay there,
without offering any more compelling of an argument for its presence
than what he has so far posted, and suppose that all the other people
involved took the same positions they actually did.

In that case, I would have given the discussion a few more days to
settle, but after getting to where we are today -- everyone's position
seems to have hardened and nobody is offering new arguments for or
against -- it would still have been my assessment that the consensus
of the active maintainers of glibc was to remove the joke.  I might
have left the final call to someone more centrally involved than
myself, though.

> Wait, is [abort] only for intentional termination?  I was thinking
> miscarriage throughout most of the entire conversation, and missed some
> of the possibilities of trauma for that.

In modern American English, yes, "abort[ion]" is applied only to
intentional termination of a human pregnancy.  I think I have read
older, possibly British, texts where it was used for miscarriage
caused by a bacterial infection...but that was in farm animals (cows,
sheep).

> We could have a note along these lines, sidestepping the humor, giving
> more information and still clearly taking the anti-censorship stand:
>
>   It is our belief that our providing information on how to call this
>   function, or what it does, does not run afoul of the unjust US gag
>   rule that punishes with financial strangling organizations that offer
>   medical advice or information about the possibility of interrupting
>   pregnancies.  If our understanding is found to be incorrect, we may be
>   forced to remove this piece of documentation.  That would be
>   unfortunate, but not as bad as being forced to withhold from patients
>   information that could enable them to decide more intelligently about
>   their own health and lives.

This seems plausible as a starting point for an editorial article
about the gag rule posted on the FSF's website, but it is still
inappropriate for the glibc manual, IMHO.

A trivializing comparison is inherent in bringing up abortion in the
medical sense in the context of a C library function.  I do not see
any way to avoid this with clever words; the only solution that
presently seems acceptable to me is for the manual to leave the topic
strictly untouched.

>> Do you see how _merely bringing the topic up at all_ could be an
>> unwelcome reminder for someone who had had a bad abortion-related
>> experience in the past, whatever that was?
>
> I do, but I also realize that the alternative would be to remove the
> documentation for abort altogether.

I don't see how that follows.  The problem is not with the _word_
'abort'; it has several senses and the manual _would_ be clearly using
it in the sense of "stop a mechanical process that has malfunctioned",
like you abort a rocket launch when it goes off course; that doesn't
have negative associations...as long as we don't bring up the
"intentional termination of pregnancy" sense.

(There _are_ words that are problematic in themselves to the point
where I would support eradicating them from the manual, e.g. 'slave',
but this is not one of them.)

zw