Brazilian PLC 89/03

[Alexandre Oliva]

On Jul  7, 2008, Richard M Stallman <rms at gnu.org> wrote:

>     I guess US politicians managed to twist the meaning of terrorism such
>     that many people will assume it requires bombs or other physical
>     threats.

> That's what it means.

Erhm...  We must be looking at different dictionaries.

terror: an overwhelming feeling of fear and anxiety

terrorize: to impress with terror, to coerce by intimidation

terrorism: the act of terrorizing

> US politicians have stretched the term

After the publication of the press release, I got some comments along
these lines from fellow Red Hatters.  AFAICT the term has indeed
become useless and harmful for US audiences.  Oh well... :-(

It was also misunderstood as qualifying *all* senators as puppets.
I'll keep that in mind for the next time I write about this, and avoid
making room for this misinterpretation when addressing representatives
when the time comes for this project to be voted there, given that it
was just rushed to approval (after some minor wording improvements) in
the senate :-( :-(

July 10th, feels like a good day to start a revolution... :-/


I'd like to take this opportunity to publicly thank Luis Guzman for
staying up very late on Monday morning to help finish the translations
to Spanish.  Very appreciated!

-- 
Alexandre Oliva         http://www.lsd.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
Free Software Evangelist  oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}
FSFLA Board Member       ¡Sé Libre! => http://www.fsfla.org/
Red Hat Compiler Engineer   aoliva@{redhat.com, gcc.gnu.org}