I can not tell you how disturbing Juerd's post is to me, and how much the post by an anonymous monk concerning PerlMonks integrity in the face FBI investigation linking Alex the Serb with terrorism scares me.

I had to downvote Juerd because while PerlMonks is a perl/techincally oriented site, a user's homenode is his little "home", his area to express his beliefs/views/opinions. If Alex associates NATO's policies with the Nazi regime, then we need to accept that fact, and hopefully try to understand where he is coming from.

I have to strongly disagree with Juerd, concerning the policy of "no anti-anything". What about rants concerning the extreme incompetence of management ala' Dilbert? No Dilbert because some manager might get his feelings hurt? And what if you decided to put an American Flag on your homenode? Well, alot of people see America as the enemy, and in many cases America is the enemy. Should your flag be removed? I realize the second example is less inflamitory because you are promoting one thing, not attacking another, but I am sure you would have a problem with someone flying the Nazi flag over their homenode.

A keyword throughout this discussion has been "community", and I fail to see how removing/censoring Alex the Serb's homenode will enhance the community at large. I personally feel that the more ideas that are expressed within a community, the more close knit and functional the community can be come, allowing for X number of close minded people.

My concerns regarding the integrity of PerlMonks are almost outside the scope of this discussion, but ... Let me preface this by saying I love the PerlMonks community and thinks it add infintissimle wealth to the the Perl community at large. These concerns go back to the censoring of some node involving DeCSS, which was entirely legal because the tables needed to decrypt the CSS were not involved, but that is OT. I firmly believe that this community is worthwhile because it is based on many different "things", the paramount of these "things" is the right to say anything to the point of absurdity. I believe with out this right, the community cannot exists, so to sacrafice it (censoring homenodes for example) to save the PerlMonks community (from the DMCA or the FBI) would also sacrafice the community.

In conclusion, I think a users homenode should be free from the restrictions of good taste, integrity, or technical validity.

In reply to Re: Friendly home node by smgfc
in thread Friendly home node by Juerd

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.