Workshop Booze Up VI - These Are Not The Potatoes You Are Looking For

[comrade_general]

[Jubal]

[Glaurung]

As a complete non sequitur after the assorted camelids, I've just worked out the Vatican City pope density. It's about 5.8 per square mile. I thought you should all know this

[comrade_general]

I don't get it.

[Glaurung]

Sorry. It's not a joke; the phrase "Vatican City pope density" is a little bit of eccentricity shared with friends. There is one pope (excluding "Pope Emeritus" as a difficult case), resident in the Vatican City; the area of the Vatican City state is 110 acres, which equals 0.17 square miles. Hence the pope density is 1/0.17 = 5.8 popes per square mile.

[Othko97]

It's much higher than the global pope density.

[comrade_general]

[Jubal]

I should write a forum bingo card to fill in any time I dare to question what people are posting, the responses are predictable as clockwork.

[comrade_general]

I don't have a problem with the nude decision. I have a problem with filtering other content because it doesn't agree with a certain political agenda. That's the whole point of free speech.

[Jubal]

Re picture thread? I wasn't filtering it, I was asking people to think about whether what they were posting was making people feel welcome. The point of free speech is that you're allowed to say what you like, and that I'm allowed to exercise my own free speech to question those choices. I'm not going to stop anyone posting that sort of thing, as I repeatedly and abundantly made clear, but freedom of speech includes the right for me, as long as I'm not stopping anyone doing anything, to criticise how other people use their free speech and vice versa. Freedom of speech means freedom from censorship, it doesn't mean freedom from criticism.

As it is, I think several people have made their feelings clear, and I think in future I'll probably just try and steer clear of some of these threads and bits of the forum where I don't feel at home any more.

[comrade_general]

And there's the core of one of the main world problems now: "Well maybe we shouldn't do that because someone, somewhere might not like it."

[Clockwork]

I feel like I've missed something.

[comrade_general]

I feel like I've missed something.

Make a joke about France surrendering and nobody bats an eye, make a joke about the refugees being terrorists and everyone loses their mind. White guilt, baby, woo! Also something with squirrels wtf?

[Clockwork]

Gotcha homie

[Glaurung]

I'm writing this wearing my Admin hat, hence the colour, or possibly my slightly grumpy old man hat. I haven't had to do this before, and I would like not to have to do this again.

Anyway, I came home from a day's work to find the preceding string of unhappy posts in this thread, and a few more dotted around elsewhere. I consider all the participants to be friends of mine; I think you're all friends with each other, mostly for far longer than I have known you, but if the current exchange continues then I fear you will not stay that way.

Therefore, I would appeal to you all to leave this subject alone for a day or two. I sense quite a lot of hurt and anger here, on all sides, and I think it would be good for people to step back for a while. We should probably have a discussion on freedom of speech, offensiveness, hurtfulness, and responsibility, but it's not this discussion.