[kstrauser]

I could not be less sympathetic on this. If you don't want people protesting your actions, don't, like, invade their country.

"But what if it was the US doing the invading?" Yes, even then. If some Iraqi author made an Xsnow that waved little Iraq flags, that's their right. Even if I disagree, it doesn't harm me, and it might inspire me to consider our actions.

"But what if it makes someone's boss get mad at them?" If my boss saw an Iraq flag on my screensaver, I'd say "huh, look at that! I guess that was added in the new version. I'll change it to another screensaver." And if you live in a country there the likely reaction is that your boss might execute you, your government are the baddies.

[sssilver]

Isn't there discrepancy between that and The Debian Linux team removing “offensive” quotes for the “fortune” application[1]?

[1] https://x.com/LundukeJournal/status/1952340426892984580

[striking]

I think there is in fact a discrepancy between displaying flags and advocating directly for gendered violence:

> Debian contributor "NoisyCoil" said that they had wanted to argue in favor of keeping the packages, but after looking at the content they had decided against it:

> > I went peeking at the package and, unless I'm completely missing something, the second offensive Italian fortune says that women's "no"s should be interpreted as "yes", while the third one explicitly calls for violence on women [1]. Like, it literally says women should be beaten on a regular basis. I'm afraid I can't help you here, sorry.

from https://lwn.net/Articles/1031750/, linked in the fine article

[LtWorf]

> I think there is in fact a discrepancy between displaying flags and advocating directly for gendered violence

NosiyCoil forgot to mention that I removed hundreds of fortunes containing racist/sexist jokes from the regular section, installed by default to every Italian user and displayed by default.

I basically grew up reading them and 20 years later, I forked fortunes-it to get rid of them and put them in the offensive section. And then Cater unilaterally decided to remove it.

But neither NoisyCoil, nor Cater, not anyone else stepped up to actually read the fortunes that were not tagged as offensive and were being installed and displayed by default.

One year later, I'm still the only person doing this work.

Archlinux is still using the pre-fork version where this content is still present in the main section.

That article is very one sided. The author spoke to Cater but did not think of reaching out to me for comments.

[LtWorf]

NoisyCoil is of the opinion that offensive stuff in the offensive section (not installed nor displayed by default) are worse than quotes from fascist writers that in 2026 still inspire people to beat up journalists in Italy, installed and displayed by default.

https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2025/07/msg00186.html

[GaryBluto]

Is there no project safe from these kinds of obnoxious neo-busybodies?

[kstrauser]

You'd have to ask the respective, different sets of people involved in each situation.

[croes]

What is offensive on the Ukrainian flag?

[sssilver]

I think the point of all this is that there is no absolute scale of "offensiveness". Different societies have different values. Obviously, enough people found the Ukrainian flag easter egg offensive enough for the matter to have landed on LWN and the HN front page.

[tryauuum]

> don't, like, invade their country

I did not invade any country

At least this app just displays the flags and not prints such accusations

[bjourne]

Not everyone who speaks Russian is a Russian or lives in Russia. It's like show a Palestine flag specifically to users with a Jewish calendar.

[kstrauser]

I didn't write that and I'm not arguing with you. I don't have skin in this game. That said, I think the likelihood of someone having their locale set to RU also being in Russia is substantially improved.

[LtWorf]

Looking at your comment history, it's odd how you feel this way about certain countries but not certain others.

[kstrauser]

Which countries have I not criticized for invading others? No, seriously, please let me know if I've missed some and I'll fix that immediately. I've certainly criticized my own country's misguided attacks on others who I don't think were a direct risk to us or our allies.

[alwa]

That may be, but if I do in fact live in a place where my "government are the baddies," why does it follow that open software should punish me—for nothing more than happening to be alive within that jurisdiction—by provoking my "baddie" government to visit its badness upon me personally? For speech I wasn't even trying to make—for speech that you kind of put in my mouth without asking me?

It would be fine if you gave me a beautiful and whimsical way to choose to express my feelings, and I took it. But when you're disguising the flag in code as an "EXTRATREE," that signals to me that you're trying to slip through a surprise without my noticing:

    #ifdef USE_EXTRATREE
          if (global.Language && !strcmp(global.Language,"ru") && drand48() < 0.3)
      tt = MAXTREETYPE;
          if (drand48() < 0.02)
      tt = MAXTREETYPE;
    #endif

I think it's great that you live somewhere—and enjoy a relationship to your working environment—where you don't have to worry about that kind of thing! I wish more people got to enjoy those kinds of freedoms. I don't think the way to make that happen is to rub individual people's faces in the crappiness of their predicament.

I'm reminded of a situation I encountered some years ago where a person opened a web browser in front of a classroom—no porn in their history, nothing untoward, just going to a high-profile mainstream news site or something in service of a classroom discussion—and all the targeted ads were for things like HIV medicines and mainstream campaigns choosing ad variants that depicted gay couples.

Not the time or the place, that person didn't ask for it, and it led to deep consequences for them—from "outing" on one side, to accusations of "grooming that classroom full of students" and "probably being riddled with AIDS" on the other—that this good, responsible, kind, wise person did nothing to invite.

The targeters probably thought they were doing something righteous or even "accepting" by "making sexual minorities feel seen" or something—but by putting words in the person's mouth without their consent or agency, they caused great unnecessary harm to somebody who didn't deserve it.

[kstrauser]

To be explicitly clear, I have nothing to do with Xsnow. I don't even use it.

That out of the way, I can't and won't sanitize my words so that they're perfectly inoffensive all the world around. I've made comments over the years critical of a great many governments. If the fragile leadership of those countries saw my words on a screen there, perhaps they'd get angry at the person reading my writings. I do feel bad for that person and certainly didn't try to get them in trouble. But neither am I going to not criticize a government that's behaving poorly — even my own — for the sake of a hypothetical situation that may never even exist.

[thesuitonym]

In that same file it also says

    # This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
    # but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
    # MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
    # GNU General Public License for more details.

[croes]

What exactly is the punishment in seeing a Ukrainian flag?

[croes]

Downvotes but no explanation.

What is the punishment in seeing a normal flag of a country?

It’s not like showing the swastika to people in Israel. More like the opposite.

[antonvs]

Don’t you mean Iran, not Iraq? Or are you hoping Dick Cheney’s ghost will see the flag?

[kstrauser]

Argh, yes. Sorry, for most of my life we've been mad at Iraq and pals with Iran, or vice versa, and today I got that backward.

[NooneAtAll3]

the problem isn't protesting someone's actions - it's supporting the other side

do you really want to support country that kidnaps its citizens off the streets and honorary reburied Nazi criminals?

[kstrauser]

It's well documented that Russia is kidnapping its citizens off the streets to send them on an invasion of a sovereign country, but I hadn't heard that they're honoring nazis now. I'm not sure I believe that.

[LtWorf]

They aren't talking about Russia…

[kstrauser]

It's not clear who else they'd be talking about, because only idiotic propaganda claims Ukraine supports nazis, so that can't be it.

[LtWorf]

Before the war started, every single western news outlet claimed it too though, so I'm not entirely sure it's fully made up.

edit: also, like Finland, they were allied with nazi Germany in fighting Russia.

[NooneAtAll3]

dude, go look up Polish news about this

reburial of the mass murderer of poles literally happened in the last month or so

[NooneAtAll3]

please learn to count to one. I'm not multiple people