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Re: Reaction to T-shirts


--On torsdag, juli 10, 2003 09:21:14 -0700 hardie@qualcomm.com wrote:


At 2:17 PM +0200 7/10/03, Harald Tveit Alvestrand wrote:

At the risk of appearing completely straitlaced and out-of-touch.....
I am not unworried.

I am NOT very worried about this particular T-shirt or this particular
person. I AM worried that Steve, Randy, Ted and Ned all appear to think
that  there isn't more than one side to this issue.

In the note you forwarded, the person raised the stakes from "this was
offensive" to "the leadership should not express opinions".  My reaction
was and is that I didn't sign up for that and won't agree to it
post-facto.   That's the substance of my comment; I've never seen the
t-shirt and didn't comment on it at all.
On that particular point, you and I have absolutely no disagreement.
Our *duty* is to have opinions and express them.
But it's also our duty to make sure the way we express them does not hinder communication - for instance by making it *appear as if* we are not willing to listen to other people's arguments.

As a hypothetical, I can agree that there are cases where a t-shirt could
be sufficiently offensive that wearing it at meeting would be so
distracting or distressing that it would hinder work.  I can't imagine
any such t-shirt that actually related to the work of the IETF, but I can
imagine
a few (there are t-shirts worn by abortion clinic protesters that show
late-term abortions graphically, and wearing such a thing on a podium is
going to, at best, distract anyone who sees it).  If a chair in that
situation asked the person wearing the t-shirt to deal with the
distraction by covering the shirt or wearing something else, I would back
them.  But *only* if the reasoning was based on the hindrance of that to
the working group, not if it was based on a difference of opinion.

Thank you.