The Big ACL Opening

Till Maas opensource at till.name
Sun Oct 19 14:28:16 UTC 2008


On Sat October 18 2008, Lennart Poettering wrote:

> And of course, "über-" is a very common prefix in the german
> language. In verbs, in adjectives, everywhere. But please, don't twist
> my words: I find it questionnable to use the prefix as kind of
> superlative in reference to the Übermensch. That is all.
>
> Let's end this discussion! Fedora-devel is not the place to discuss
> Nazi vocabulary. Toshio already agreed to change the term. So I am
> happy, no need for pointless bikeshedding discussions.

I guess you do not see the personal implications about your suggestion and 
reasoning. The uber prefix is widely used by a lot of people without the 
intent to promote inhumanity or to downplay the crimes of the nazis[1]. So if 
you tell that it is wrong for the Fedora Project to use it, then it implies 
that it is wrong for everybody else to use it, too. Because Fedora is 
maintained by a lot of people who use the uber prefix as I described above, 
you kind of attack them personally imho. Therefore they also deserve to 
defend themself.

If you did not want this discussion, you should have probably chosen your 
words a little bit more wisely. Proposing to change the groupname because it 
_may be_ misinterpreted (which it sounded in the first half of your initial 
posting) is a lot different than to change it, because it is obviously wrong 
(which it sounds line in the remaining messages).

Btw. my lexicon "Meyers grosses Taschenlexikon" from 1995 says, 
that "Übermensch" is a non-existing human beeing and that it is used by 
philosophers. I would say, that it is probably used in philosophical 
questions like "If an Übermensch would be involved in this discussion, what 
would he say?".

Regards,
Till

[1] 
You already told in your first posting that you know this, but here are also 
some references:

There are a lot of entries in the urban dictionary:
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=%C3%9Cber%201337

There are books called "Uberhacker" and "Uberhacker II" in Amazon
http://www.amazon.com/Uberhacker-How-Break-into-Computers/dp/155950207X
http://www.amazon.com/Uberhacker-II-More-Break-Computer/dp/1559502398
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