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Politics Off-Limits On use.perl.org

posted by pudge on 2004.04.01 10:53   Printer-friendly
use Perl
Because of recent complaints about the content of journals on use.perl.org, a No Politics policy will be strictly enforced on the site, henceforth. Read on for more details.
First: what defines politics, in the sense of this policy? Essentially, the answer is related to our government and its political parties. Anything that has to do with municipal, county, state, and federal government, where one party or figure of that party is criticized or lauded over another. In the case where independents or third party candidates are involved, they must be factored in.

For example, you could say "my favorite Presidents of the last 50 years are Clinton and Reagan," but not "my favorite Presidents are Clinton and Reagan," because you'd be excluding the Federalists and Whigs. Similarly, "my favorite Senators are Joe Biden and John McCain" unreasonably leaves out the Independents, populated by Jim Jeffords.

Similarly, if you would like to criticize the President for a decision, you must also criticize someone from the opposition party (preferably a Senator, past President, governor, or Presidential nominee [presumptive is acceptable]). It is not necessary in this case to also criticize Jim Jeffords.

You may evaluate issues, but not at the expense of a single party of figure of that party. And there is a new one-time rebuttal rule: you may evaluate an issue, someone may criticize your evaluation, and you get one rebuttal to that criticism. Your criticizer gets no further rebuttals.

Several issues are involved with this decision. One of the reasons it's been so long in coming is that I've been wrongfully accused, on more than one occasion, of deleting comments and journals, and the idea of deletions -- quite frankly -- scared me. The potential for crippling backlash was enormous.

This site has always been one where anyone could say whatever they wished. But it's become increasingly clear that most people who exercise that right can't do so responsibly, and most others can't responsibly deal with the aforementioned people who exercise that right; and those aforementioned people often can't, in turn, responsibly deal with the others who can't responsibly deal with the aforementioned.

So, bottom line, most of you are just dumb, irresponsible, immature, or a combination of the three.

But this isn't anything new; so why change now? As some of you may realize, the machine and network for this site is provided by OSDN, which runs Slashdot, and is owned by VA Software. It has come to my attention that the journals favoring certain political personalities can, over time, amount to an illegal campaign contribution.

We all know, as the Congress recently made clear -- and was subsequently supported by the Supreme Court -- that the First Amendment protects the right to free speech, except in the case of political speech (the ameiklejohnian theory of the First Amendment). It comes with a price tag, and this is it.

If you have any comments about this policy, feel free to discuss them here; just remember that the policy is in effect now, so make sure your first -- and only -- response is a good one.

The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.

Politics Off-Limits On use.perl.org 14 Comments More | Login | Reply /

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  • Happy April 1st to you, too, pudge. :)

    --
    J. David works really hard, has a passion for writing good software, and knows many of the world's best Perl programmers
    • Shut up! Shut up! Cut his mike!

    • We all know, as the Congress recently made clear -- and was subsequently supported by the Supreme Court -- that the First Amendment protects the right to free speech, except in the case of political speech (the ameiklejohnian theory of the First Amendment). It comes with a price tag, and this is it.

      I'm running a little web forum somewhere I won't call attention to and wrote up a little item for a FAQ on acceptable posting policy I never got around to putting on the site. It began like this: "We recogni

      --
      J. David works really hard, has a passion for writing good software, and knows many of the world's best Perl programmers
      • Does this count as a rebuttal? Can jdavidb further rebut my comments and then can jamiemccarthy add a rebuttal to jdavidb's comment? Is the rebuttal limitation rule (RLR) for the entire comments section to a post?

        Curious and idle minds want, nay, need to know.

    • Incidentally, you gave me quite a shock yesterday when I saw this, despite the fact that I knew full well what day it was. It wasn't until I got down into the body of the article that I was really persuaded it was a joke.

      Thanks for making my hair stand on end!

      Incidentally, did anybody else get the ThinkGeek new product email yesterday? For one brief second I wondered how in the world they could make that hunger suppression system, before I realized. :)

      --
      J. David works really hard, has a passion for writing good software, and knows many of the world's best Perl programmers
  • I never used to mind April Fool's Day, before the internet came along and I had to (for some definition of had to) wade through fake stories all day. ;)

    -Matt

  • Anything that has to do with municipal, county, state, and federal government, where one party or figure of that party is criticized or lauded over another. In the case where independents or third party candidates are involved, they must be factored in.

    I'm afraid that this article fails to pass this requirement. It refers to federal issues but mentions only American examples and fails to factor in examples of any of the other independent (at least in their own minds) countries of the world.

    Please remove

    • I'm afraid that this article fails to pass this requirement. It refers to federal issues but mentions only American examples and fails to factor in examples of any of the other independent (at least in their own minds) countries of the world.

      The requirement mentions governments, and goes up to the highest level of government recognized by the jurisdictions in which it resides, which natrually excludes anything above the U.S. government.
      • Even if the U.S. does not accept the possibility that the United Nations might be to some extent a higher level of government, Godel's incompleteness theorem is part of the study of mathematics, which clearly is a higher authority. (Although, I must admit that the self-invalidating rule is more directly related to Russell's Paradox than Godel's Incompleteness. However, that didn't give nearly as much scope for a clever subject line.)
      • Oh. That means there's no No Religion policy ?

    • Wonderful! Why isn't this comment modded up to +5? :D

      Please remove this posting at once. After that has been done and the new policy is no longer in effect, of course, feel free to resubmit the article.

      Warning: Deep recursion on subroutine "%s."
      --
      J. David works really hard, has a passion for writing good software, and knows many of the world's best Perl programmers
  • In other news, Perl and Python join forces.
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