On 22/02/2008, Oldak Quill oldakquill@gmail.com wrote:
Conversely, it is deeply offensive to me that we are pandering to people who feel "fuck 'em, free speech" is a valid standpoint to hold in a project founded on *neutrality* and *editorial consensus* - we are in danger of just placating the kneejerk political views of a subset of our editors, I guess.
As far as I'm aware, we've had an image of Muhammad's face in our article for many years. A desire to maintain the status quo (which is based upon our NPOV and no censorship policy) and to stand by our policy is not "fuck 'em, free speech".
Yet we do have people arguing for the retention of the image on exactly those grounds (well, not in those words) *as well* as the more reasonable ones. Likewise, we have people arguing for the removal on sane editorial grounds, *as well* as the ones yelling blasphemy.
On both sides, there are reasonable people and unreasonable people.
My point is that if we call one position pandering to the extremists on that side, it's just as logical to call the other position pandering to the opposite set of extremists...
...in other words, *neither* position is "pandering". There are rational reasons to do either. The fact that there are also unreasonable demands to do either doesn't make picking one of them 'giving in'.
[As to the status quo being NPOV... I think this is a fallacious assumption to make on a binary issue, but that's another post. What we're seeing here is quite possibly an anomalous case where our normal approach to NPOV, which is basically to smooth things out, can't apply...]