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[WARNING:  This thread has now digressed pretty far out of NetBSD-land.
 It is not likely that further political content will accomplish much.

 You may wish to skip to the last paragraph of this post, which bears on
 the original thread.]

On Thu, 14 Mar 2002, sudog wrote:

>On Wednesday 13 March 2002 18:15, Jim Wise wrote:
>
>>   For what it's worth, I've come around to pretty much complete
>>   agreement with all of these points.  In particular, to make a parody
>>   of a famous image of people fighting and dying for liberty and
>>   democracy, and use that to represent people hacking and flaming for
>>   what in the end is only a codebase seems suboptimal.
>>
>>   NetBSD is cool.  But it is, of necessity, on a somewhat different
>>   plane than the raising of the flag over Suribachi.
>
>The Japanese are NOT a subjugated people. Cooperation with them
>necessitates that we come around to respecting how hard they worked to
>rebuild their nation in a cooperative, capitalist sense that benefits us
>and them on a much more peaceful, non-imperialist scale--both from trade
>and cultural exchange. I'm sure the American bases over there are quite
>enough without waving flags in their faces.

<political discussion>

Which is exactly my point.  Show me another nation in the history of the
world which fought to conquer half the globe, yet did so in the name of
liberty, and left NO subjugated people in its wake.

It's worth remembering that the US left the second world war with _less_
territory than we entered it with, by a very careful commitment to
anti-imperialism.

As for US bases in Japan, well, this is getting rather far afield, but
have you considered that there's a _reason_ that they haven't asked us
to leave?  If you lived next door to the `People's' `Republic' of China,
I think you'd want a superpower in your corner, too...

In fact, it could certainly be argued that Japan, like Canada, owes a
certain amount of its prosperity to the fact that it has so successfully
outsourced it's national defense responsibilities since the second world
war...

</political discussion>

>Why remind them that you kicked their ass in some battle? It seems
>ignorant to me. That would be like flying a logo repsentative of how we
>burned the White House to the ground.. so while I think it was a great
>idea and I'm glad we're not just another American state up here, I still
>think it'd be ignorant to trumpet how we've won every war we've ever
>fought against the Americans. We're friends now, so why continually remind
>
>History is important, and it's important to remember things like the
>Battle of Quebec: But reminding you of it out of a sense of Canadian
>patriotism is not only ignorant, it encourages resentment. See what I mean?

Which is the relevant point here.  While I have little sympathy for
anyone who is disappointed that Tojo and his thugs lost the second world
war, and while I have a great deal of pride in the accomplishments of
the US during said war, the proper venue for such pride is _not_ in the
logo of a software project.  As I said in the quoted post above,
parodizing a national (and individual) accomplishment of which Americans
are rightly proud is probably not an appropriate way to sell software...

- -- 
				Jim Wise
				jwise@draga.com
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