This is very weird because fundamentally it stems from a failure of the moderators. If someone makes a sexist joke you don't just let them because you're "assuming good intentions", that clause means that you tell them it's not appropriate here, and if they apologize you assume they are sincere, and if they don't you swiftly boot them. But there is no substitute for good moderation, shifting words around won't help much.
Aside: Open source discussion opening with "My rationale for these changes are documented on Twitter: [link]" also seems somewhat crazy. And I love Twitter, it just seems very odd to link to a thread of tweets instead of restating your case in the proper medium.
The very core of the problem is that impact of anything on human minds is, in fact, not objectively measurable. Even formalized attempts to do this - e.g. psychology - suffer from a major replication crisis.
In that scenario, the situation degenerates into "he said - she said". Traditional response was "in dubio pro reo" = "in doubt, let the accused go free".
But modern woke movements generally hollow out this principle and replace it by "believe the marginalized / weaker / oppressed side" and "be strict and hostile against the privileged side", as defined by the contemporary academic ladder of oppression.
This leads to a very paranoid society and I think it will take at most 10-20 years to reverse again, as bad cases start to heap. One of the universal qualities of humanity is that we can all be manipulative dicks, regardless of gender, color and creed, and once you shift the balance of power to the accuser, you will empower manipulative people across the board. And they are perfectly able to poison the common well for everyone.
Edit: 2 downvotes within 20 seconds and zero attempt at rebuttal.
Isn't protected class an american legal term? Seems weirdly ameri-centric for a document of this nature. Not to mention that gay people weren't even a protected class in the usa until last year afaik. Not exactly a very inclusive definition.
Not to mention the implication that harrasment is somehow ok against people who are not members of the protected class? I appreciate minorities get a lot of shit that others don't, but its not like bigioted assholes are the only people who harrass other people.
CoCs themselves, and the wider identity politics culture war, are also extremely Ameri-centric.
> the implication that harrasment is somehow ok against people who are not members of the protected class?
There is a subset (I like to think that they're the fringe, but have no numbers to back that up) of those who engage in identity politics who do believe that bigotry does not apply when the target is the dominant demographic.
> CoCs themselves, and the wider identity politics culture war, are also extremely Ameri-centric.
An idea can be both a good one and political. And indeed a good idea while Ameri-centric.
The risk is that this might be a status play by authoritarians, who very rarely have good ideas and typically do a lot of damage once they get in to power. I suspect actual minorities & protected classes are more worried about authoritarians than racist jokes. If they aren't they should be.
I've never seen anybody suggest that you can't be bigoted against a dominant group.
I have seen it suggested that specific terms like racism and sexism are not generic terms that apply to any sort of discrimination along racial, ethnic or in the case of sexism along gender lines, but apply specifically to actions that maintain or reinforce the power of dominant groups and existing privileges and positions that advantage them, and that trying to expand those terms to describe all discrimination serves to obfuscate and minimize the existing structural and institutional power disparities.
Or to analogize, if my boss hates me, that's probably a big problem for me and my work. If alternatively hate my boss, that's not really a problem in the same way for my boss. I can't fire them, or decide what projects they can work on. They aren't the reverse of each other, because the power dynamic isn't the same.
It is part of the basic definitions of the Critical Theory worldview, and the underlying Marxist ideas behind it. (Yes, I know invoking those will cause people to presume I'm just parroting talking points, but I am being very precise.)
The gist of the idea is that the oppressed ('minority group') do not need to be bound by the laws that shackle them, created by the oppressors ('dominant group') solely to preserve their own power. Defying the oppressors and violating existing institutions and laws is a baseline understanding of those who fully adopt this worldview. It may be largely a fringe for now, but in America, it's being pushed steadily along the axes of both race and gender first, and other secondary traits following behind.
Wow are you barking up the wrong tree in describing me. This is some strange strawman version of what some left wing people believe, not a description of my philosophy.
Did you read this on Brietbart, or in The National Review, or what?
I was not attempting to describe you, and I apologize if that's what I communicated. My response was intended to be to your opening comment:
I've never seen anybody suggest that you can't be bigoted against a dominant group.
I am pointing out that that /is/ a current and growing worldview among many, even if you have not yet seen it yourself. Your views are your own, and I have relatively little insight into it from your post.
I would point out that it is the logical extension of what you stated in the first post in this subthread, carried to its extremes. If you don't believe those extremes should hold, I would ask you to consider: what is the limiting factor for you? Where is the line drawn? How far is too far?
I don't however agree with you that that's the logical extension of what I stated. Can you explain? I don't feel it particularly relevant to take an idea and carry it to an extreme to judge it's usefulness either.
Perhaps you might instead address what I said initially on it's own terms.
The argument you'd heard basically boils down to turning all power dynamics into moral categories: those who have power reinforce their own power by building systems that make sure there's no repercussions for their own actions if they harm someone under their power. The extension comes when people make it universal instead of specific: defining all human relationships in terms of power and its abuse. Those in power are inherently immoral, and thus under power are inherently moral.
There is certainly truth to this: normally, we would call such a relationship 'corruption of power', and as the adage goes, power and corruption tend to go hand-in-hand. The argument then goes that if you are not in power, the only way to return the relationship to a morally right state is to break the rules the corrupt powerful have put in place to purportedly retain their own power. If you grant the premise of the powerful making /all laws/ and /all institutions/ solely to preserve themselves and oppress others, the conclusion must follow.
The issue in my opinion is one of 'divined intent' - there is an implicit premise, that there is either direct intent built-in to those oppressive structures, or that there is indirect intent that carries the same amount of guilt for the powerful group. But that paints with far too broad a brush, and is really unfalsifiable, since we cannot fully know the mind of those creating and participating in those structures. Yet all too often, the argument boils down to an assignment of malign intent that vindicates any and all action in response. This is usually done with a motte-and-bailey: make the sweeping case that all powerful people think something, then tip-toe around individual examples when confronted, unless it's a cherry-picked target.
There is also the issue of the universal: this holds true of many systems, but not all systems, and not all people within those systems. The argument works by making the claim apply to /any/ relationship involving power.
Lastly, there is the issue of vocabulary. It's a cute trick to redefine words to apply only to a subset of what the words originally refer to, but the goal is confusion of language. You create new words to describe subsets of phenomena, but that's not what's been done in that argument: it hijacks the original meaning to generate confusion, often with the goal of saying, for example, 'if you are against racism [original definition], you will overturn all existing systems [modified definition].' There's equivocation going on in there.
0. There's no singular leftist philosophy in a world where anarchists and socialists and moderates and centrists are all ostensibly on the same side, but there are points of agreement (nazis are bad, every human being deserves equal dignity, people should have agency over their own bodies except where that agency meaningfully harms others, etc). When I refer to leftist thought I'm trying to refer to my understanding of that overlap. Also I'll number by paragraph I'm responding to.
1. To your first paragraph I'd say that's not the usual argument that I've heard from people on the left. I mean there are kooky people out there, but I think most people would say having privilege doesn't make you inherently immoral, nor is lacking power inherently moral. Morality is based on choices, with the understanding that choosing not to act is still seen as a choice.
Having systemic power gives you a greater capacity to affect change. I do think some people will see refusing to act appropriately to change things for the better when it's easier because you have power as more immoral than if you refuse to act when you lack systemic power, so in that sense you are right, but that's only true if you don't act.
Further I just don't think guilt is really the focus for most people on the left, except to understand how we got to the current status quo; What's more important is people taking responsibility and acting, and attempting to share power so that others can also act.
2. There are certainly people who intentionally work to maintain and expand their power; wealthy people who push for lower tax rates on the wealthy come to mind. Still, a large part of feminist and anti-racist theory seems to be about creating knowledge of privilege in people who take it for granted, and then pointing out the responsibility that suggests. There are conspiracy minded folks to be sure, but I don't know that that jibes with the idea of invisible privilege. I suppose you could argue it doesn't and suggest leftist philosophy isn't perfectly coherent or in agreement though. I'll have to think about this.
3. There's a whole thing in leftist philosophy about how intent is not the same thing as impact. It doesn't matter if systems that perpetuate injustice were built for the best of intentions or the worst or are just weird historical artifacts like the electoral college, what matters is the harm done, and how it falls disproportionately on members of marginalized groups. Thus the whole emphasis on anti-racism instead of not being racist, since merely not acting to further racism doesn't mitigate the harm that exists currently, and is thus also immoral. If that's confusing, look up Good Germans.
4. I'm not sure I understood why you were saying this, but to the extent that I understood I think I agree with you that not every relationship with power is affected. I see a meaningful difference in situations where a person has significant institutional or structural power vs situations where the power comes with the approval of those over whom power is wielded directly.
5.A cute trick? So does that mean you are suggesting that racism was not historically a term mainly used to describe the Nazis and other white supremacists, and sexism a term mainly used to describe the gender inequality that women faced?
I would argue that your original definition is in fact a conservative redefinition, one that treats an unequal status quo as an entitlement of those with power by pretending they are the true victims because people are attempting to redress social injustices.
I guess in the post modern sense any viewpoint can be correct because everything is subjective and based on one's viewpoint, but I'm not a post modernist and to me that seems like BS. I think terms are regularly redefined by people on the right in order to muddy the water and generate fear.
I guess I can say, at least we agree the water is muddy?
This has been fun, not sure I'll respond more or not in this thread but you've given me some food for thought.
Certainly agreed the water is muddy, and that only the kooky fringe hold to all these, but that fringe is growing. The widely-hailed current sources for this kind of thinking are Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo; the latter, specifically, is being hired by companies nationwide to run seminars for employees to train them with this kind of worldview.
It's also pushed strongly in academia, and is quite common to hear about among young progressives as compared to older ones. For concrete examples, look into the Mike Nayna documentary on the Evergreen State College's 'Equity Council'; it's an extreme example, but you can hear the same process happening to lesser degrees elsewhere.
I've read Ibram X. Kendi's How to be an Anti-Racist and Robin DiAngelo's White Fragility and while I didn't agree with everything they said, a lot of it was thoughtful, made me think, and ultimately made sense. I do have a lot of privileges that others don't, and I feel obliged to make things better if I can, using the imperfect guides that exist.
I expect in 20 years some of what Kendi and DiAngelo will have held up, and some of it won't have. That's how doing anything new usually works.
I don't expect corporations to solve racism and sexism, or politicians or even people who run seminars.
I've actually given up any hope that my lifetime will see meaningful end of racism or sexism or even childhood hunger in America. Maybe some low hanging fruit or common cases will be better addressed.
When there is a real attempt to do something that actually makes a difference in the world, I expect it to be a bit clumsy, because they are so often trying to solve for the common case or the most costly case, not for every case. That's not illogical, I do the same thing when I code.
Sometimes they will certainly screw up or go to far; nobody said changing the status quo was easy.
Perhaps that's why conservatism has as much support as it does even when it's based on unscientific BS, or even outright lies.It's very easy to treat the status quo as the best of all possible worlds and try to defend it from the imagined horrors of change.
To me that seems such an empty hopeless way to live, and I hope more people in the world strive for something better, even if it's difficult and imperfect.
Right, many countries have similar ideas. They all define them slightly differently.
The americentric part is using the american legal term of art in an international context and assuming everyone just understands it, and that its a reasonable definition in context.
The idea that minorities exist and should have some additional legal protection is not the aspect that is americentric.
My point is that I don't think it is using it as an American legal term, it's using it generically for the the broadly understood idea, a lot being common. At least that would be my assumption.
They could hardly go out of their way to find a synonym not in use by any country, and then keep checking in case some country started using it and people started interpreting the document as using it in the sense of that country's law specifically.
It's not an American legal document, so unless it explicitly defines the term as such, that's not what it means, it's just words. If it said 'murder' or 'jaywalking' we wouldn't pick a country that uses those terms to interpret them in its legal sense, we'd just understand the broad sense of what they are anywhere, even in countries where they are not used ('jaywalking' here in the UK).
> The idea that minorities exist and should have some additional legal protection
Again, that's not what it is. The legal protection is against discrimination based on your <something> such as race or ethnicity. No matter whether the particular value in your case is held by the majority or a minority of people.
Taken literally, its a referential term - "protected class" means a class protected by something (in usa typically a statute).
If they don't define the term, then surely they mean the american context - if not, who is protecting the class?
> If it said 'murder' or 'jaywalking' we wouldn't pick a country that uses those terms to interpret them in its legal sense, we'd just understand the broad sense of what they are anywhere
The difference is that these terms have widely agreed upon meanings. I know what jaywalking means regardless of country.
If i use the term protected class generically, who is included? Are we including the following groups:
- vetrens of us armed forces
- vetrens of non-usa armed forces
- political beliefs
- sexual orientation
- criminal conviction
If used generically, its impossible to know - some juridsictions say yes, some say no, in different contexts.
If the CoC was just using the term in an abstract way - to represent the abstract idea of a protected class, that would be fine. However they are not. They are using the term concretely. To understand the CoC you have to know the exact list of protected classes (or at least be able to identify if a specific trait creates membership or not).
Although i think this term is needlessly american, ultimately i'd be fine with it if they defined it. Not defining a term used almost exclusively in the usa kind of implies they mean it in its american sense.
> Again, that's not what it is. The legal protection is against discrimination based on your <something> such as race or ethnicity. No matter whether the particular value in your case is held by the majority or a minority of people.
I should of said marginalized instead of minority perhaps. Although it varries depending on context, and region, affirmative action is often not considered to be in violation of these policies. So its more complex than that.
You have what is unfortunately a common misunderstanding of the term protected class. Nobody is IN a protected class, because protected classes are not any particular group of people, like middle class or working class. In the civil rights act of 1964 protected classes are the classifications that the law refers to such as race, religion, etc. So it is illegal to discriminate against someone because of their religion, but it does not protect any religion over any other. For race, race itself is the protected class. So it is illegal to discriminate against anyone based on race, not just black people or Asians, for example.
> Not to mention the implication that harrasment is somehow ok against people who are not members of the protected class?
The GNOME CoC gleefully states they will ignore complaints of racism against whites and sexism against cis men because "we prioritize the safety of marginalized groups over the comfort of privileged groups".
That's not what that line means at all. That line means that an argument like `let's stop using gender-neutral language in our documentation, it's easier to just say "he" instead of "the user"` won't fly: this type of argument prioritizes the comfort of a privileged group (males) over the safety/well-being of a marginalized group (women and non-binary people).
I'm all for being gender-neutral for the sake of neutrality, but the idea that the use of "he" somehow hurts people's safety or well-being sounds a bit absurd to me.
The abstracting concept of "protected group" is not commonly understood. I had never heard of it before this thread.
Anti discrimination of course is, but not this specific term.
Neither in the German Wikipedia nor in the Duden (German dictionary) or on the website of the "Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung" (Federal Agency for Civic Education) can I find any reference to "geschützte Gruppe".
The German constitution, explicitly states: "No person shall be favoured or disfavoured because of sex, parentage, race, language, homeland and origin, faith or religious or political opinions. No person shall be disfavoured because of disability.".
This is often emphasized in things like job postings, but never in abbreviated/conceptualized form.
Like it or not, the ameri-centric views spill around the world causing tensions and misunderstandings. In countries with practically no colored people and no history of slavery certain things seem a bit ridiculous if imposed on the whole community.
How many people in the OOS community or elsewhere did you meet that were in favor of enslaving people. Sometimes it is necessary to ask naive questions to determine if you dig yourself into something.
You are right. It also depends if you include serfdom in slavery. In any case, just to generalize, the countries that practiced slavery were mostly those that colonized the world the most. Many of those who didn't colonize the world used serfs, like most of Eastern Europe. For these people there is no cultural association between slavery and the present. Also the proportions are different: in most countries the non-serfs were a relatively small minority. So waking up one day and reading that, say, all references to slavery are banned seems somewhat strange in other cultures.
One of my many misgivings about CoCs is their over-reliance on the unenforcable.
This is an excellent example - because the original said exactly what needed to be said, but it wasn't being interpreted correctly. Instead of improving the wording, and saying something like "participants should always assume good intentions. However, intention does not make a person's actions immune from criticism, and while assuming good intentions we will kindly encourage each other toward a higher standard of behaviour." ... they instead have chosen to weaken the specificity and balance of the CoC.
Throughout the discussion, and on the twitter thread, the overriding message is: Triggering the hurt of a protected party is always punishable.
And it's a sad viewpoint, because it becomes not "Matz is nice and so we are nice", it becomes "We are nice to avoid the ire of a protected party"
> to weaken the specificity and balance of the CoC.
This is a feature, not a bug. When the rules are clear and specific, they can be enforced fairly. When they're vague and unclear, then the only consistent principle is that the people who "enforce" the "rules" can do whatever they want and you have no recourse or due process.
I don't know why you've been downvoted, but anyone that has seen how laws have been selectively enforced since whenever should be able to easily see how this is the case as well. It's the "everyone is guilty of breaking some law" principle, but applied to what is currently considered fashionable good behavior. It's a different kind of slippery slope and we'll know it when the wrong kind of people get into positions where they can enforce these to suit their needs rather than protecting marginalized communities.
But speaking out against that will be seen as the same thing as an attack on marginalized, so most folks will either be quiet or move on, and these power-hungry folks will get to keep their fiefdoms.
I absolutely agree about both the impetus and the danger of this currently prevailing viewpoint.
I will speak to the motivation however, because I'm a reconcillatory kind of person most of the time, and unlike this CoC I do believe intent is important.
I believe that the intent behind those adopting these documents is protection and general social good, and I believe their adoption is very very bad because those adopting them are blindsided.
Because the people writing them are not lawyers, and are not expecting them to be used as laws to be enforced, but as "good feeling reinforcers". Effectively, corporate virtue signalling (and, in some cases probably also personal virtue signalling - with all the negative connotations that brings).
The fact is, when you introduce a set of rules, you have to expect those rules to be interpreted by people with some extreme biases, and ensure that the wording produces a fair outcome regardless. It doesn't matter whether you call these rules "guidelines", or a "code", or even a "statement of intent". They will be used as rules, and if they aren't, then what is the point of writing them?
Selective enforcement is exactly proof that the above comment is constructing an irrelevant problem. When the rulers don't like the rules, and there is no mechanism to force them, the rulers simply ignore the rules - they don't need to change the rules.
If you have bad rulers and no mechanism to change them, all giving them a perfect rule book to enforce will not produce better outcomes - they will selectively apply and interpret the rules as they want.
At best, a good set of rules will make it more obvious that the rulers are acting in bad faith. But the rules themselves can't compel the rulers - only other people can.
This is unfortunately one of those "zombie comments" because the comment you're responding to presently shows no evidence of being downvoted, but I guess it was when you commented. I didn't vote on it either way, but I will say there is some dissonance between an apparent belief that the principle of being maximally charitable in assuming the best of everyone is a principle of discourse worth upholding, but then not doing so yourself.
The difference is that being maximally charitable is the right way to approach normal communication from normal people, but the people who write “CoCs” are known bad actors. You don’t assume good faith from the person that’s assaulting you.
Sadly true. But I reluctantly stop short of attributing that nasty side-effect as a defining goal of the CoC movement, because - you know - I always try to assume good intentions :)
(Though, if you feel Hanlon's razor is a better motivator for you, I won't judge)
Rules can be enforced however fairly or not the rulers want. Better rules don't make for better rulers - at best, they make it more obvious when a ruler is not being fair.
Maybe, but I think there are social contracts that you are overlooking. If I write a rule, and then I violate a rule (or refuse to censure someone for violating a rule) then I can be rightly accused of hypocrisy.
People believe themselves to be within a certain margin of "good people", and having incontrovertible proof of being "The Biggest Hypocrite" makes them uncomfortable.
There are of course those who don't feel that discomfort; there are even those that commit victim-filled crimes without remorse. Often, there are external forces we can lean on to bring those people into line or out of society - and agreed, in the case of Open Source Software communities, those external forces don't always exist or are not reliable for regulating something as insignificant as moderation policies on a mailing list.
There are also those that would leverage that discomfort for their own immoral benefit, and bad rules are equally good enablers of that kind of person.
But I don't think it's fair to say that the quality of rules is meaningless - if there is any level of accountability in the sub-community of moderators (or in the community as a whole), good fair and enforceable rules have power.
This is a complicated question, and for those new to this kind of discussion, it deserves a complicated answer. This is not that answer, but here are some thoughts:
a) We are a reactionary species, unfortunately. And that served us well when the burning questions of the day were "Tiger friend? [BITE] No, tiger never friend" but less so when discussing the social weight felt by minority and historically persecuted groups, the benefits and pitfalls of hyper-vocal "allies" and the social disenfranchisement felt by potential allies bitten by persecutions that they are told do not exist.
b) We are a reductionist species, unfortunately. That helps us when understanding the complexities of mathematical infinities and physics and the workings of the human central nervous system, because - between similarly educated peers - a scientific community can abstract away the irrelevent bits and share groundbreaking research outcomes with relative ease. But when "normals" try to enter the discussion, they mistake the simplified abstract descriptions for a simple concept and end up contributing nonesense or reporting falsehoods to the rest of the world (e.g. are we moments away from fusion generators? Are we on the cusp of ignition? No, no we're not).
And so, when discussions take place about the relative protections and privileges inherent with social majority groups and justify the particular resource expenditure on helping to rebalance centuries of systemic prejudices, people will misread what they understand of the zeitgeist and say "Your social privilege, as defined by your [race / gender / sexuality / ability / age / etc] means that your feelings need no consideration"
c) We are a self-absorbed species, unfortunately. It contributes to our survival and that of our dependants to ensure that we take the resources we need so that we are in a position to then help the rest of our clan. Weirdly though, we also have faculties for patience and imagination. And so we are happy to imagine ourselves in the shoes of someone we consider as "sufficiently other" to the point where we will fight for them as if they are our own clan, which is in a way wonderful (not always - see "white saviourism") but it means that those similar enough to be relatable receive a negative consideration, being not different enough to be worth the emotional investment, but not similar enough that they are truly "in the same boat", though we feel like they are. For example, try to analyse your perceptions of the poor and homeless that live near you, compared to the poor and starving people from distant countries.
It just "feels different", right?
That "local mistrust" is just as much an undeserved prejudice as the fact that you probably imagined those "people from a distant country" with a particular skin colour.
And lastly:
d) Our emotions deceive us constantly. That small racism dig in part C - if that affected you (sorry!) might make you susceptible to further emotional manipulation, because (see A) we are a reactionary species, and so from there it's easy for someone to manipulate us to reduce (see B) the world into "overprivileged vs underprivileged" clans, take on the underprivileged as our own (see C) and thereby increase our prejudice under the guise of eliminating prejudice.
Then echo chambers, then reinforcement by media, friends, catchy superficial soundbites, our employment... and finally our own selves, because once you've declared your unwavering support for a vaguely positive cause, it's very hard to walk that back.
And convincing someone to reverse a commitment they have made that has superficially positive soundbites because they are taking a damaging approach is a lot harder than reversing a prejudice they fell into through normal upbringing.
Maybe, long-term, that isn't a problem. Over the generations, we'll react ourselves to a position where everyone is protected. Short-term though, we'll have to use our privilege to be a force for good in between protected factions.
It has been brought into conformance with the standards of corporate HR departments, whose job it is to shield the company from discrimination lawsuits, not really to foster a kinder community.
If there are any CoCs left that do not adopt these standards, they will be brought into conformance soon. Corporate sponsorship depends on it, and open source is nothing without corporate sponsorship.
What is a higher standard of behavior exactly? More formal? More informal? What goal does it have? Fundamental Christians have a pretty high standard for behavior, I doubt this is the goal.
This is an undefined spiral to infinity mainly relying on de jure expectations.
Sexism - the believe that on sex is supreme to the other is already redefined to mean anything suggestive.
These updates have a very nebulous definition of harassment. According to the new CoC, almost anything can be considered harassment. As far as the "intent and impact" of the intentions, assuming that someone acts in bad faith is a good way to turn a misunderstanding into actual hatred. Such a result should be considered worse than having to deal with a few bad apples who try to take advantage.
They're meant to further empower accusers and reduce burden of proof and remove the need for critical thinking, empathy, and nuance. Accusations equal guilt.
Or maybe it just puts more responsibility on people to think "how could my intent be read?", "what impact might it have?"
It's quite common to have someone express a personal opinion that they themselves don't interpret as harassment (e.g. because they don't belong to the group they're talking about, they see no issue with the way they talk or maybe they might be upset) only to be incredibly surprised and defensive when someone later calls them out.
With the way that the realm of what is socially acceptable to say has been shifting so constantly in recent years, the only way someone who is not terminally online could be sure to avoid offending someone would be to become a mind reader, or to not say anything at all.
There is also the fact that in this modern social climate, victimhood has become a valuable currency. There is incentive for people take offense where none could reasonably be presumed to have been given, and to blow minor transgressions out of proportion.
“When victimhood becomes currency, there are bound to be counterfeiters.“
> With the way that the realm of what is socially acceptable to say has been shifting so constantly in recent years, the only way someone who is not terminally online could be sure to avoid offending someone would be to become a mind reader, or to not say anything at all.
Really, since the norms change so quickly, the only safe thing is to say nothing at all. Over the last 10 years I’ve seen a lot of my favourite progressive authors torn to shreds on social media for being monsters. The problem is that they were trying to be open minded and progressive in the 30s or 50s or 80s instead of today and that’s unforgivable and their work should be banned for not anticipating future cultural shifts. It doesn’t matter that they were trying their best and lived in a time and place that wasn’t 2021 Twitter
Society changes and evolves. With it, we start recognising and understanding ever-smaller demographic groups.
There was a time when making jokes at the expense of women was ok, there was a time when making fun of gays was ok, there was a time when mocking trans people was ok... now it's not.
> The only way someone who is not terminally online could be sure to avoid offending someone would be to become a mind reader, or to not say anything at all
It's just society developing empathy. Think most people understand that how we see other groups of people is not a fixed thing.
> There is also the fact that in this modern social climate, victimhood has become a valuable currency. There is incentive for people take offense where none could reasonably be presumed to have been given, and to blow minor transgressions out of proportion.
People are getting "called out" and "cancelled" more than ever, for sure. But I don't think it's necessarily victimhood. Given the original topic, it's interesting that this is how you're attributing intent. Do you feel that there might be genuine reasons for acting the way they do? Could the grievances be genuine?
>Society changes and evolves. With it, we start recognising and understanding ever-smaller demographic groups
It is not a natural change. It is being forced on people. Words and understandings of concepts change of course, but in the past society would slowly start accepting the change. Now a days when a word changes if you don't start using the new definition that day you are a bigot. People don't do well with sudden change.
> There was a time when making jokes at the expense of women was ok, there was a time when making fun of gays was ok, there was a time when mocking trans people was ok... now it's not.
Jokes are jokes. If it is wrong to make a joke about women then it is wrong to make a joke about men. Anything else is sexist discriminatory double standards. Either you can joke about anything or nothing.
>It's just society developing empathy. Think most people understand that how we see other groups of people is not a fixed thing.
Society is losing empathy. We used to understand people could make mistakes and improve themselves. Now the first time you make an innocent mistake you are canceled. You are thrown out of polite society and defamed on social media. That is the opposite of empathy.
>People are getting "called out" and "cancelled" more than ever, for sure. But I don't think it's necessarily victimhood. Given the original topic, it's interesting that this is how you're attributing intent.
The person you were responding to was not saying that a person being canceled is a victim (though they possibly believe that). They were saying that people cancel other people so the person doing the canceling can play the victim regardless if they actually took offense.
>Do you feel that there might be genuine reasons for acting the way they do? Could the grievances be genuine?
I don't think anybody would deny some people are offended about things. I just don't think that matters. If I say hello to somebody and they are offended by that should I be canceled for it?
> Or maybe it just puts more responsibility on people to think "how could my intent be read?", "what impact might it have?"
How can you possibly read any possible minds. Even if you can predict the 'reasonable' person, outliers can take offence and you don't know what can offend them.
People can and do take offence at anything. This leaves two possible solutions.
1) Eventually fuck up.
2) Immediately leave the community and find greener, less insane pastures.
I've taken #2 in almost all cases, because I'm definitely going to screw up because I'm human.
> You act like fucking up is the end of the world.
People stopped forgiving and forgetting years ago. Every mistake people make follows them forever now. “Fucking up” is the end of the world for their careers since nobody wants to hire somebody who was publicly outed on Twitter for whatever they allegedly did
Apparently people who are concerned with this are “not willing to accept the effort of empathy”?
I think you're overlooking the role that rapport plays in this. If you don't have a rapport (it's a new relationship, for example), one doesn't have that to rely on (this describes a significant portion of online interactions, like this one!).
If one has a solid rapport with someone, and that person says something that one find upsetting, one's much less likely to attribute that behavior to malice, because rapport is just social context.
> Apparently people who are concerned with this are “not willing to accept the effort of empathy”?
I think a more accurate thing to say is that those who are harmed and cannot contextualize it to be reasonable are not willing to enable that harmful behavior by the person that has harmed them. Empathy is just the act of "putting yourself in someone else's shoes to gain respect for their perspective". I can empathize with an asshole and decide that their behavior needs to be called out _despite_ OR _because of_ the context I have for that person (e.g. I might be more likely to call out inappropriate behavior in those with power than in those without power, with whom I might work more closely to come to an understanding privately, as there's really no use kicking someone when they're down).
You can't have rapport with a Twitter mob. Individuals, yes, but I've seen time and again when individuals are pressured by the mob until they finally turn on the friend who 'made a mistake' and excoriate them even more fiercely than the mob itself has.
Keep in mind how this CoC change started: it wasn't by a one-on-one rapport with an individual.
And also keep in mind the freezing effect you're having on people new to the industry who need mentorship to help them mature. Sometimes you're screwing up because you're young and need to temper your own tongue.
And sometimes the screw-up isn't actually a screw-up, and a mountain gets made out of a molehill. This is more often the case than anything else, as this entire post demonstrates, and it would be wrong to conclude the premise as part of the argument.
The rule is not meant to attack people who make good-faith mistakes/unintended consequences. It instead is intended to stop defending people who make ill-intentioned comments and attempt to hide them as mistakes; or who refuse to back down from a mistake even after being told it was a mistake.
For example, if someone from Eastern Europe says something like "it's alright 'cause it's all white", someone from the USA who knows the history of this phrase may take offense. If the person from the USA feels that this may have been an attack, they should be free to raise this issue, and the person from Eastern Europe should apologize for making them uncomfortable, even if it was unintentional. As long as they do this, no further harm should happen to either person.
However, if the person who made the comment refuses to apologize/explain, or keeps repeating this comment since "to me it's not offensive, it's just a joke/reference" etc, then this should be considered a problem and someone with authority should intervene.
Similarly, if the person who took offense refuses to accept the mistake after an apology or explanation was given, then once again someone with authority should intervene and correct this error on this other side, as it unnecessarily creates a hostile working environment.
This is the intended reading of that line. Of course, that line can also be mis-applied by immediately punishing the person from Eastern Europe in my initial example.
Note: I used "person from Eastern Europe" in my example because that is where I am from, and because I have personally seen others around me using references to US culture without knowing the full context in just this way, without ill intent but in ways which would probably shock someone who assumes that the context is well known (for example, casually addressing peers using rap lyrics containing the infamous N-word).
It is impossible to evaluate what could be interpreted as harassment. Maybe 10 years ago you could have, but today everything is harassment. Words are changing meaning and becoming offensive so fast people cannot even keep up.
In Australian law, and I'd imagine generally in many other countries, intent is a big part of judging a wrong. But of course, it's possible to cause harm without intending to, so there are other things to consider. Common phrases are 'reckless disregard', 'willfully ignorant', 'negligent' or sometimes 'lack of consideration' (which is different to intent).
Obviously it isn't a binary situation with either intent or impact being the sole arbiter - so the baseline used in almost all situations is the 'ordinary' or 'objective' standards. These can vary depending on the environment and context, and are simply defined because they are hard to define across all scenarios.
I guess I find it surprising that a code of conduct like this should sway between intent and impact in quite so binary a fashion -- human behaviour isn't software.
As well as being a bedrock principle of the law, it's also basic common sense. If I accidentally step on your toe, that's obviously different to me deliberately stamping on your toe in an intentional attempt to injure you. If you set out to deliberately injure your colleagues then this is OBVIOUSLY different from doing the same thing accidentally and should be treated differently - and anyone with a working brain can see this.
The idea that "intent doesn't matter" is preposterous. Accepting it as a premise leads to insane and preposterous conclusions that no-one believes. People who say that "intent doesn't matter" don't actually believe it.
People do believe it, because thinking that intent matters makes it impossible to defend their other position: that the most important thing is how the "offense" is received.
If intent matters (as you say, anyone with half a brain knows it does), then if you receive my comment as being offensive, I am still right because I didn't mean to offend you. What they want is to make sure they can tell me I'm wrong anyway because the person was offended... hence, my intention didn't matter.
It covers the case when someone makes an inappropriate joke then defends themselves saying it was just a joke.
The person being inappropriate will always hide behind their intent because they can only argue about their own role in the exchange (e.g. they can't argue that the target person/group isn't really hurt).
When a conversation is derailed away from the damage caused to the intent, the harasser wins. What are you going to do? Establishing a default assumption takes that away. Always have good defaults :)
This is largely true, but there remains the issue that there are some people who, for whatever reason, almost seem to go out of their way to assume bad intent and interpret what was said or written in the worst possible way.
There is probably some sad history behind many of those individuals, but reasonable people can disagree about how to deal with the situation.
The current fashion implies that as soon as one such person enters the community, everybody has to start metaphorically walking on tip toes.
Maybe a better outcome overall would be for the person to get therapy.
Everybody has a line somewhere for what they consider "too easily offended". This is true even for the staunchest defenders of the current fashion, because even they understand implicitly that offense can be faked.
So yeah, you need good defaults, but that's really a discussion about where exactly that line should be drawn. I doubt either extreme is the right answer.
> It covers the case when someone makes an inappropriate joke then defends themselves saying it was just a joke.
Tell them to not make these jokes here and flag their account, repeat a handful of times and kick them out if it persists despite warnings. No need to interpret intent, no ability to hide behind ignorance after several warnings.
> Always have good defaults :)
It is impossible to harass people if you just ban every new account under the assumption of guilt.
Do you really not see that the opposite is also true? Having a position where good intentions are not assumed can be gamed far more easily by people with bad intentions
Do you really not see that either extreme is more exploitable and less resilient than a more pragmatic middle ground? Personally, my guess is that the optimum is usually towards assuming the best, but that it shifts depending on the level of antagonism present.
It also is an issue for all others. FX I don’t know if it is appropriate to say “you guys” to a mixed crowd anymore, but if I hadn’t seen that some people get upset about that I wouldn’t think twice about it and just emulated American movies. Buffy isn’t exactly sexist and she says it often and to a mixed crowd.
At least in English you have the neutral word "they". In french you only have the plural of "he" or "she". This means that when you point to a mixed crowd, you must choose which of the plurals you use.
The grammatical rule is that one male flips the plural gender to male. If you do not know the sexes, the plural is male.
As a French, the construction comes naturally because we've been taught that at school since kindergarten. This always sounded a bit weird, though.
I do not approve some "grammatical inclusivity" horrors that are being invented from time to time, but some innovative-but-not-distruptive changes would be welcome.
>As a French, the construction comes naturally because we've been taught that at school since kindergarten. This always sounded a bit weird, though.
If you follow the grammatical history of French, the neutral gender just got folded into masculine.
>but some innovative-but-not-distruptive changes would be welcome
You can't really produce grammar by decree, at best you can systematize what already exists. The only "sane" way to have explicit neutral in French would be to go back in time, reimplement declensions and possibly mangle phonology in the process. That won't happen. All forms of "inclusive writing" are from the outset destined and meant to be an elitist signal rather than an actual linguistic feature. They won't survive and they'll been seen in the future as a strange, idiosyncratic trend of the age. A bit like Renaissance orthography, where countless letters were added without meaning to simply look fancier.
Like I said, I do not approve of the horrible ideas we have, with dots everywhere - this transforms words that are fine as they are. I am for simplification, though (nothing to do with the current topic, just a thought).
What I am missing are the concepts young people are bringing in more and more, where they have words that become unisex (potes for instance). I listen to my children and (without any scientific analysis), it sounds to me that there is less of a boy/girl cut that there was in my times (this may be regional - this is for west of Paris).
And I agree with you that only naturally appearing changes will stay, not the ones forced on us. A typical example are the surrealist ideas of the 90's to have French equivalents for everything computer. Some stayed, the majority is now part of comedies.
German is also developing (unofficial) gender-neutral nouns using an asterisk ending but I think it’s also an open discussion about how best to handle it. It’s mostly often seen when referring to a person’s role, position or job in a way that includes all genders and non-binary people. I speak the language but it’s not my mother tongue so native German speakers might explain it better.
There's two types of gender-neutral nouns in German being used:
- apprehending markers like -*in, -_in, -In [1]
- forming a gerund from a verb describing the activity
e.g. the word "Bäcker" - engl. "baker" - could be written as "Bäcker*in" or "Backende" (from "backen", the verb), depending on the speaker. Note that the gerund form eliminates conveying info about gender, unlike an "universal" marker like *in.
[1] for plural forms, those are expanded to -*innen, -_innen and -Innen
Basically you take the word stem, add the asterisk and then append the female ending, you pronounce it by putting a stop where the * is and then saying the feminine ending (at least that’s how I’ve seen it done). This probably wouldn’t work in French since they hate putting stops anywhere :)
The thing is, since we don't have a separate neutral in French, masculine is also used for neutral. Which means it isn't that weird when we use masculine for groups with women, as we also use genders for everyday objects. A desk is masculine for some reason, and a table feminine.
Well, to me saying "ils sont là!" when there is a crowd of 200 girls and one boy is still weird :) I would probably say "elles sont là!" despite it not being grammatical.
As for the genders of nouns, my native English French speaking friends are usually in pain.
I feel the same, and I think it's fair to switch to feminine in these cases. My point was just that it sounds a bit less weird than saying "elles sont là" when there is 200 girls and a boy.
Changing it enables a certain kind of flame-war where people become entrenched in thinking the other side is out to get them and actually evil. Assuming the best intentions is a good way to make sure you combat what someone is doing rather than attacking them as a person.
"Did you intend to say that you dislike me because I'm gay?" is a pretty easy way to route out a troll.
Sincere apology or not, you get to know.
I've been moderating communities for 15 years, I've seen tricks from all manner of trolls and handling trolls with an even hand is still tricky; but being genuinely inquisitive is usually the easiest way to get around it. Even when tensions are high it makes people feel heard and understand their impact.
"I'm just highlight how fragile and deranged you are, funny how you instantly tied it to homosexuality though, must be suppressed hatred! I'm surprised your wife's boyfriend lets you post such stupid garbage."/s
You don't get to know anything. Good trolls have also been trolling for 15 years, they've seen tricks from all manner of jannies... See where I'm going with that?
Saying that, I do agree with you, staying inquisitive and positive with bad trolls typically tampers down their rage.
"Protected class" means stuff like race, sex or veteran status. So if you harass a random conference-goer at a Ruby-focused event, that cannot be addressed under the CoC because you haven't evidenced harassment towards a protected class as a whole (e.g. all veterans)? How does that even make sense?
> “Protected class” means stuff like race, sex or veteran status.
“Protected class” is an (American) legal term, with situation-specific definitions. (It means different things in federal employment law, federal public accommodation law, federal fair housing law, and the various states employment, public accommodation, and fair housing laws of each of the States.)
It is entirely unclear what it means in the Ruby CoC, and the explanation in the discussion thread is literally “everyone knows what ‘protected class’ means” which is obviously entirely false. Its a term used by someone who has some overly precise, overly generalized idea of what it means, doesn’t realize that they are wrong, and thinks everyone agrees with them.
It boggles the mind that people could actually think its obvious what behaviour is unfair discrimination and what isn't. Like have they never opened a history book? Or noticed the countless lawsuits on the subject? (I think usa has a sort of arbitrary enumerated list, but canada doesn't explicitly enumerate so there's fun court cases over things like do drug laws discriminate against people who enjoy the taste of marijuana, etc)
No one supported hmdne's claim everyone knows what protected classes are.
Jacob Herrington encouraged hmdne to make another PR mostly. Consider he recognized hmdne was trying to derail his PR. And he said he'd be in support of finding a better way to communicate the spirit of tolerance and mutual respect. Not removing that part.
Matz approved both PRs. But it isn't clear he read the discussion.
> @Try2Code A protected class is a group of people that has been historically discriminated or a group of people we (as humanity) want to privilege to offset the years of discrimination - but that's not all. For example the People of Color are a protected class, because of slavery. Members of board of directors of the big corporations are a protected class because they financially contribute to the cause. The non-heterosexuals are a protected class, because of discrimination. Women are a protected class obviously. I don't know how to better define it. The dictionaries should have a more understandable definition.
Side note: anyone follow what this means? “Members of board of directors of the big corporations are a protected class because they financially contribute to the cause.”?
"group of people we (as humanity) want to privilege to offset the years of discrimination" -->the humanity part is the part that have a problem with tbh (explanation below)
The "(as humanity)" should be removed. A protected class in US/UK might of been the oppresor in other countries. Example below.
Romania and Bulgaria have been invaded countless times by the ottoman empire for hundreds of years. Why would a romanian or bulgarian even consider protecting them(muslims)? Black were part of that same force(and high ranking officials) that pillaged the 2 countries. Why would eastern europeans even owe them anything?
EDIT: As an eastern European I don't ower any of them any protection. If anything those 2 classes owe us according to historical facts.
Honest question - are young or old also a protected class? I disagree that CoC clauses should be based on protected classes only, because I think there are possible types of discrimination that should be addressed in CoC.
In a legal context, yes, age is a protected class. So if past practice is anything to go with, I guess quips like "ok boomer" will now be officially verboten on the Ruby mailing lists and in Ruby events.
It’s legally OK to discriminate based on a minimum age, but not a maximum age. No voting, alcohol, tobacco, driving, guns, executing contracts, renting a car etc. until 18/21/25.
Interesting, that "Age (over 40)" are cited as "Protected class". So people over 40, which feel harassed by many of these "new rules" can actually do something about it?
I think anyone can report anything they don't like.
It's more that insults against people over 40 (or that reference people over 40) will be taken seriously, where as insults against/referencing 20 year olds apparently won't be.
So, I'm assuming "ok boomer" would not be OK, but "ok junior" would be.
From reading the comments, it sounds like it's actually self-described "non-protected" folks that are proposing these rules. And the incident started with some male developers getting upset about a joke/insult about females.
The line about protected classes is not in addition to a general rule against harassment, or emphasizing that kind of harassment in particular, it replaced that rule.
There is a separate rule against personal attacks, but is that rule supposed to take over harassment in general? That sort of makes sense in a vacuum, but then it leaves the exact meaning of the 'harassment against protected classes' rule kind of confusing. What does harassing a class mean exactly, and can you harass a non-protected class?
Really developing backwards on all accounts. This is a purity spiral. If you allow it to infect your community, you can be sure it will at some point consist of toxic people that feel slighted on every opportunity they can get.
This is exactly why many people were not really open to COCs because this is an eternal battleground with creeping behavior expectations because of some unsolved personal problems.
So if a woman accused a while man of having “small hands” for having some opinion, that’s not sexual harassment because white men are not a protected class?
White men, identified by race and sex, are legally a protected class.
People with small hands are not, unless the smallness of their hands is considered a disability.
This is correct, assuming US 'protected class' works broadly the same as UK 'protected characteristic'. I don't know why this comment is being objected to?
It's about discrimination on the basis of the value of someone's <characteristic>, not that particular values ('white', or 'female', etc.) are held in some special regard.
The obvious example is hiring: you can (should) hire white people, black people, men, women, and so on. You can't (legally) hire someone because of one of those traits, or allow it influence your judgement.
(It's why I find quotas/diversity reporting a bit troubling - it sort of assumes an equal outcome, or something close to it, is a natural state, since you can't say 'hire more women' if you find that's what's lacking; you can only try to remove existing (illegal! conscious or not) bias in the other direction. But what if the lacking group didn't have equal opportunity, so on merit they really weren't the best hires? - I know, that old argument - point is, if that's the case, hiring for an equal outcome, so-called 'affirmative/positive action' is actually illegal.)
(IANAL but I have to assume there are exceptions where an otherwise protected characteristic is actually required due to the nature of the work. The police need a certain number of women, (and men, but that's the problem side) diversity aside. Primary schools presumably have the opposite problem.)
It's true. Protected classes are people of a certain race, ethnicity, religion, sex, sexual orientation, etc. For example, an airline in the US that wanted to hire only female flight attendants would likely face a lawsuit from male candidates.
What is a protected class? I don't understand why harassment would be fine against some, but not others. That sound like the very thing that a CoC is meant to prevent.
Protected class if definition even exist can mean completely different things. Saying that US definition is the only one that matters is unwelcoming to people from other countries.
edit: non just unwelcoming, it can be considered discriminating
My thoughts follow yours entirely - the author is tweaked about the failure of the moderators and twitter is not a place for commentary on a pull request.
(There's a certain irony here to the author of the PR complaining about the difference between the intent and impact of a statement and then... completely missing the point of why their PR is meaningless).
> I don't know what specifically motivated this PR
It's mentioned in passing a couple of comments in. To highlight it (because it's easy to miss):
"I watched a group of people use these specific phrases to justify making sexist remarks over a communication channel that falls under these guidelines."
It's really odd to make fundamental rule changes to respond to things like that rather than carving out exceptions for sexist remarks specifically if those are the problem.
'This section shall not be interpreted to defend any communication reasonably seen as sexist, racist, or otherwise discriminatory' is much clearer than changing from 'assume good faith' to 'assume nothing, intent doesn't matter as much as impact. '
They quoted the start of a thread the author summarized saying it's bad because it gives cover to bad behavior. And can require people who recognize a pattern of bad behavior to persuade themselves they're paranoid. You might disagree. But those points have nothing to do with race or sex. And pointing out it's easier for people who face less bad behavior is about white men only incidentally.
I tried really hard to follow the threading in that but I came away being completely unable to parse it, at least on mobile. What was the attempted "joke"?
Guy reports a behavior where date math doesn't return the result he expected and jokes that it might have to do with how women don't like to admit when they're aging.
I wouldn't have made the joke, myself, but it's also not really insulting to anyone. It's not saying that women are bad at math, or that women broke date arithmetic to seem younger, it's just referencing that phenomenon.
What about a joke where adding weights resulted in quantities too large, and it's suggested that it was written for dudes who want to say they can bench press more than they really can?
I'd rather that joke were not made. There is a difference though between a discreet 'not a great moment' and public 'absolutely inacceptable [and we should hound the poor sap out of all gainful employment opportunities for life]'. A classic management principle is 'praise in public, criticize in private'. While the joke was was indeed inappropriate, the public reaction was 10x worse.
I can agree that there should be no public flogging, provided it is first couple times. If it has been explained to the individual that certain behaviour is considered unprofessional and yet they insist on engaging in it then... well, there should be consequences.
> Behaviour which can be considered harassment against protected classes will not be tolerated.
That's... interesting?
Some of the most vitriolic flamewars I've seen on the internet were between western straight white males. I don't see the point of special casing this clause.
Regarding the "good intentions" change, the explanation in the linked twitter thread makes sense to me: in some contexts, assuming good intentions is a way of excusing bad behavior.
It's hard to agree on the exact boundary between enabling a jerk and making an issue out of nothing. But the old "assume good intentions" policy does sound to me uncomfortably similar to "if you're offended it's your own fault". Which is generally how people treat victims of harassment in communities where that sort of harassment is tolerated.
That is misunderstanding of the principle. Of course you still need to use your head. For a community to be welcoming for people that aren't too extroverted, not fitting anyone on that mailing list really, your approach is very counter productive if you really want to empower voices that normally don't speak up.
It is also required for completely dry technical discussions. I am not sure I would want that in open source communities though, but that is certainly a preference.
I don't know. Assuming good intentions is an advice for you, so you don't get offended. And assuming good intentions doesn't justify the impact. Even if you assume good intentions of a driver, if he drove badly and did some damage he is still responsible for the damage. Assuming hus good intentions doesn't change anything. Skill, following the rules and effect are what matters when it comes to judging.
Next time you get in a car accident maybe the police should throw you in jail for wilful destruction of property. It doesn't matter if you did not intend to damage the other car since intentions don't matter. You did the crime you should do the time.
I wish we responded to situations more proportionally.
In this case, someone made a joke about women not liking to reveal their true age as they get older. It's a boring cliched joke. Something I've heard too many times in my life (and, most often from women). Is it sexist? I can see the argument. Is it professional to make such a joke on a ruby mailing list? I don't know, perhaps not.
Does it warrant responses like "Knock that bullshit off." or "you made an ass of yourself"... I don't know. Seems a little ironic to use unprofessional language in this situation. Maybe even worse than the joke itself? I don't know.
Then, folks take the discussion to github and twitter (and, eventually reddit and hn). Presenting only their verdict: "A newer member made a sexist joke, and was called out on it as being inappropriate." No links to the joke. No evidence that the joke is sexist. This makes it so much easier to imagine something really bad. No, we just get a verdict and we should all rise up against this sexism (which absolutely is bad, of course). Let's get our pitchforks. This amplifies one side of the argument and shuts down any useful conversation. Worse, it's used to rush through a CoC change without allowing any thoughtful discussion.
Is this reaction proportional to the original joke? Is the reaction itself exemplar of how we would like to conduct ourselves?
> Does it warrant responses like "Knock that bullshit off." or "you made an ass of yourself"... I don't know. Seems a little ironic to use unprofessional language in this situation. Maybe even worse than the joke itself? I don't know.
In my experience this kind of stuff is extremely counter-productive. It puts people in the defensive, and remember, you haven't actually said anything: you only gave them a (somewhat rudely phrased) command, which is just not helpful. If I object to some behaviour I typically contact them in private (not in public) whenever possible, and explain how a particular joke or comment made me feel. >95% of the time, you'll get an apology without drama and all is fine.
"Assume good faith" doesn't mean "anything goes" or "give people a free pass", but rather a recognition that most of the time, people really aren't such bad folk, even when they're behaving as less-than-perfect.
It all seems a bit much for a single new user making a joke phrased in such poor English it's barely comprehensible and the very short discussion that followed on that shrug. And there is no real mention that this is somehow indicative of a wider structural problem.
So in the name of being inclusive they're bullying someone who is not a native English speaker for not knowing the nuances of political correctness in a foreign culture? Cool cool.
Yes. That's what happens when a group of hyper-politicized people that see/read about inclusiveness and things like that every day encounters people that aren't like them. It's nice that some Americans are currently noticing the issues happening in their country, I'm happy that people are committing time and energy to this. But many of these people have to grow up and realize that the whole world isn't the USA, that different countries have different problems and not everyone is aware of what's happening in the USA. Going around imposing your values is the exact opposite of what you should actually do.
> That's what happens when a group of hyper-politicized people
Well, maybe you work on undisciplined repositories or technical mailing lists, but most of us do not want to read people's jokes, funny, offensive, or not, when we are on a technical forum.
It's really patronizing to say, "Oh, those primitive foreigners, we have to excuse them for posting offensive jokes on a technical forum."
> It's really patronizing to say, "Oh, those primitive foreigners, we have to excuse them for posting offensive jokes on a technical forum."
That's patronizing because you're thinking of them as "primitive foreigners that posts offensive jokes", while you could think of them as "different people in a different culture that may not share every values with you". I don't understand why Americans are so afraid of swear words and jokes, but I don't think they are primitive or stupid or too uptight for it, they are just different.
Just look at how judging you are: "undisciplind repositories or technical mailing lists". Repositories are undisciplined because there are offensive jokes? Aren't repositories about code? "most of us do not want to read people's jokes, funny, offensive, or not, when we are on a technical forum": who is "us" here? People from the USA? You and an imaginary group of people? The whole world? I certainly don't mind a good joke, and I like some humor that can be considered too much in US culture.
Don't just assume that you're in the right and in the position to judge people.
Anecdotal, but all of the North Americans I've ever worked with, and am related to, swear far more than any Brit I've ever met. Perhaps it is a generational thing?
I can say that as a teen, the amount I swore ruffled feathers daily in the UK. In that same breath, I suppose foul-mouthed kids do tend to shock.
I wouldn't call it "bullying" myself, but it does seem a bit like making a mountain out of a molehill.
A big problem with these kind of discussions is that they tend to escalate quite fast. The battle lines are pre-drawn and anything that looks vaguely "sexist" or vaguely "cancel culture-y" will be shot at, no matter what the actual topic is. So this this (minor) incident becomes yet another front on the Great Culture Wars.
It's unfortunate because it's very hard to have good-faith conversations like this.
I think about this blog post from the creator of redis whenever some thing like this comes up: http://antirez.com/news/122.
> I believe that political correctness has a puritan root. As such it focuses on formalities, but actually it has a real root of prejudice against others.
I'd argue this isn't exactly a Trojan horse, it's a group of poor looking pilgrims who tell sob stories to the guard and convince them to open the gates.
It seems like there does need to be some sort of method for RESOLVING these situations.
I'd hate to make more of a process for parsing a one sentence joke but ... how else do you do it?
So you throw it to a committee who comes back with "We told the user their statement could be seen as sexist and not to make that joke anymore."
There you go. Done. Issue is no longer relevant, time to move on with life. If it comes up again with the same user, then you can worry about bigger things.
I'm sure there would be some bickering after that but at some point you can't have the argument going on forever on every rando social media site and ... version control site...
What you said is exactly right in a world of ephemeral speech, but difficult to employ in a world of permanent records. Anybody can simply link to the joke and stir outrage, over and over, out of the context of the larger learning process.
The Internet never forgets. It is genuinely unclear how to adapt pre-Internet norms. I would prefer presumption of innocence and of a learning process, that is summary dismissal of one-off out of context situations. But viral content (such a fitting expression!) begs to differ.
,if you look at the updated to the code of conduct it is clear what solution they are putting forward. the removed the sentence to honor the principle of charity(removed assume good intent), and gave permission to be public scolds ( added speak with good intent). it's a facisnating attribute of American politics that insist generally upbeat people become public scolds, as if them making a fuss is a convincing learning moment.
Even if its uncool, I agree that that response is uncalled for. I feel like the "dunking" style of social media activism has really become mainstream in wildly inappropriate situations.
You are asking all the right questions... And you will never get an acceptable answer beyond "Some times you need to break a few eggs to make an omelette."
Sadly, the CoC wars were lost several years ago. The victors had the simplest tactic: projection.
"We are just against all the bad things. We are anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-prejudice. Why aren't you on our side?"
Well, I have two things to say. First, I eagerly await your omelette. Judging by how tolerant society has become, it should be any day! And second, why be against the Democratic People's Republic of North Korea? Democracy is in the name!
Exactly, and the "nice" approach is talking to people gently about why what they said is "harmful" or bad. But you still have to come to the same agreement or you're bad. It's not actually tolerance its "we'll give you a pass if you come to our side".
There's a saying "to make an omelette you have to break a few eggs." It's a justification used by those who think they're bringing about some great positive change to justify the all the damage they caused.
For example, "In order to bring about our communist utopia, we're going to have to murder a few million people."
I don't think the CoC wars are lost, I'm hopefully we're on the cusp of the backlash.
The first project that succeeds with a CoC of "sticks and stones may break your bones but words can never harm you." is going to be a watershed moment that can recruit the growing population who are sick and tired of the leftist mob and their thought policing.
Over-sensitive, politically-correct people are going to end up in a hermetically sealed bubble of their own making, hooked up to virtual reality and drugs while the rest of us enjoy the real world. I have no problem with that. It's natural selection. Some people are too fragile. I'd rather let them lock themselves away in some virtual universe driving up virtual asset prices than have them in the real world drive up real world asset prices.
I can't believe that so many people are so suggestible. Part of me feels like they can't be serious; they're just acting out, conspiring in an attempt to incite (fool) others to adopt this strange vulnerable mindset.
It's easier for me to believe that it's a conspiracy than to believe that so many people are so gullible. Why am I not richer if the world is so full of gullible people? Where are all these suckers? Maybe I've been overestimating my neighbors and competitors.
What kind of world have these people been living in all these years?
The problem with political-correctness isn't that it's trying to be sensitive to people who have been harmed, it's that it's yet another form of centralized decision making, and thus bound to be wrong about many things.
As an employer, I would never hire someone who goes berserk and attacks others for perceived slights. Work is hard and it is much more fun when you can get along and joke with people you work with. If you feel like you are walking on eggshells all the time, no one has any fun.
It's quoted in the GitHub link, and presumably it'd be trivial to find in the list archives.
This isn't as benign as you characterize it, since it's basically "this date handling bug must have been created by a woman since women lie about their age". Lazy misogyny is still misogyny.
> Is it professional to make such a joke on a ruby mailing list?
I understand what you're doing here (https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Just_asking_questions) and so aren't looking for a real answer, but the actual answer is: Of course it's unprofessional. Make "women jokes" while working at any modern company and see what happens.
> Is this reaction proportional to the original joke?
Again, this is a mischaracterization. This comment wasn't the cause of the change, but a final straw.
"Misogyny" means "hatred or mistrust of women". I don't see how this expressed either a hatred or mistrust for women. You are calling this person a horrible thing over a very small issue. I do not find this especially empathic.
I wish people were a bit more careful before slinging these words around, not just because it's overly harsh but also because I consider these to be serious issues, but when used as a cudgel carelessly thrown around it devalues the term, and thus devalues the actual real problems it describes (or rather, once described, as this ship, unfortunately, seems to have already sailed).
There really is some nuance to be had in these things.
A joke about performative third parties is not the same as joking about the class itself. That is why Tropic Thunder is still largely seen as acceptable blackface - because it was only used for the purpose of satirizing the act of blackface, not black people. Likewise, jokes about performative over-reactive wokeness by corporations are not insulting any tangentially mentioned race/sex/gender class.
rationalwiki? FYI, citing rationalwiki in a debate is a big red flag in terms of taking the argument seriously.
And in this instance, it's also completely unnecessary to your point. So please don't cite these types of radical sources when making innocuous points. It would be like if I was having a debate about average rainfall, and said something like, "Well, according to the UnabomberFanSite, the average rainfall is 3 inches". It's just so needlessly inflammatory and provocative that your best bet is to cut that out and replace it with a more mainstream source.
As an aside, I do not trust Rational Wiki to be a reliable source of information.
Just one example: Their information about Alcoholics Anonymous’s effectiveness can charitably be described as a dumpster fire: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Alcoholics_Anonymous (For example, they cite Brandsma 1980, which is a very outdated chestnut anti-AA polemics always bring out; the study is really old and its methodology was pretty bad: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandsma_1980 )
Rational Wiki is one of the most unintentionally funny and ridiculous sites, given the name. It's probably one of the least reliable and credible sources of information on the internet due to the juxtaposition, a la DPRK's name. It's Pathos Wiki. [Something something Conservapedia, stare into abyss, etc.]
For some reason, it seems there are basically no nominally-neutral websites, forums, or news outlets that exist. (That I'm aware of.) I don't mean neutral; of course nothing is or can be perfectly neutral. I mean it seems no one is even attempting to be neutral or even attempting to portray themselves as neutral. There is no concept of an anti-agenda agenda.
Indeed. The one thing RationalWiki is good at is, when there’s some quack theory or junk science out there that’s not notable enough to grace the Wikipedia, RW often times has a page on it.
> I mean it seems no one is even attempting to be neutral or even attempting to portray themselves as neutral. There is no concept of an anti-agenda agenda.
> Seems a little ironic to use unprofessional language in this situation.
It's not ironic. Forceful language (and rather tame still) is not just as bad as a 'joke'. The offence was not at the unprofessionalism of the joke, but at the contents of the joke. That is what fuelled a discussion.
Removing the line from the CoC also was not a response to the joke. It was a response to the ensuing discussion about the joke.
Talking about proportionality as if the change was brought because of the joke is as questioning the proportionality of WW I to the death of archduke Franz Ferdinand.
The 'verdict' as you call it, does not go into detail about the contents of the joke, because it was irrelevant to the reason of why they made a change. It could have easily been a different joke.
> Removing the line from the CoC also was not a response to the joke. It was a response to the ensuing discussion about the joke.
> Talking about proportionality as if the change was brought because of the joke is as questioning the proportionality of WW I to the death of archduke Franz Ferdinand.
I first thought your response was a joke, but maybe you actually mean that, put some emojis next time to show if you are joking
Humor has a fundamental role in bounds probing in a social setting. Make a joke, observe the (nonverbal) feedback, preserve social bonds through shared laughter. In a world driven by CoCs, there is no room for laughter.
- Behaviour which can be reasonably considered harassment will not be tolerated.
+ Behaviour which can be considered harassment against protected classes will not be tolerated.
That change sure seems a lot like it's saying "we're now okay with harassment as long as the person you're harassing isn't a member of a protected class". Isn't that then adding abuse-enabling language, not removing it?
> That change sure seems a lot like it's saying "we're now okay with harassment as long as the person you're harassing isn't a member of a protected class".
With the exception of a couple special exceptions (for federal employment law, these exceptions include age over 40 and veteran status), “protected classes” in US antidiscrimination law (the source of the term) are actually axes of discrimination where everyone is a “member” of one defined by each axis (race, sex, religion—including none, etc.)
So while it is ambiguous exactly what classes are involved (because the set of protected classes varies depending on context and jurisdiction), its pretty clear that the change is not about the person not being member of a protected class, but the basis of the harassment not being an axis that defines such a class.
> its pretty clear that the change is not about the person not being member of a protected class, but the basis of the harassment not being an axis that defines such a class.
Sure, but isn't harassment something that should never be okay, not something that should be okay as long as the basis isn't an axis that defines a protected class?
Such a person should already be banned by the current CoC, and thus should not be subject to harassment. Furthermore, if he is being harassed by everyone, they already have no de facto power to begin with.
I absolutely understand this discourages people from harassing harassers. This is a good thing. There is a class of harasser who will target people who are socially weak in a given community, because they broke some sort of social norm, and even if they apologized and were punished will follow them around harassing them. The motivation to me frequently seems to be getting sadistic pleasure out of it while wanting to express their sadism in some sort of socially acceptable framework and somehow believe that they have outsmarted the system and are UNTOUCHABLE. If ever called out they will feign injury and go into paroxysms of outage over how DARE we target a concerned community member such as them when this harasser is STILL on the loose in the community and how they're the only one who actually CARES about upholding any sort of morality around here!
The end result though is they make an awful lot of trouble pretty much constantly and will eventually get tempbanned for annoying everybody around them with needless drama. This will usually fill the original harasser with glee that nobody wants to see, but this is really the fault of harasser #2 rather than the community. No code of conduct will ever change this sequence of events from happening, it happens again and again in online communities over and over.
I've seen this in very incel-y contexts, but I can't imagine it being anywhere as pervasive in the context of GitHub. "Everybody hates me even though I'm a really nice guy, but man those class of people are ****" doesn't really have a place to show up.
> "Participants should speak and act with good intentions, but understand that intent and impact are not equivalent."
Huh. That's interesting phrasing. I don't think i like it. Literally nobody thinks impact & intent are equivalent, the sticky point in human interaction and morality is to what extent do we take results instead of intentions into account when evaluating the morality of an action. The statement as is isn't saying anything about how we should interpret intent vs result just that we should acknowledge that its different.
I personally believe that codes of conduct (both this current trend, but also in the traditional meaning of the word) should be specific about what behaviour is wanted, otherwise its a meaningless platitude. This says nothing about how we should interpret someone doing something hurtful while not intending to (or claiming not to). Is that ok? Is it only ok if a "reasonable" person would make the same mistake? Is it ok if they haven't made the same mistake before? Something else?
> Literally nobody thinks impact & intent are equivalent
You haven't been paying attention - the (preposterous) idea that "intent doesn't matter, only impact" is a key premise of modern social justice activism and is taught to undergraduates as unquestionable fact.
What amazes me is that the CoC doesn't actually say that. It just says they're different.
It relies on the reader to have already known that "intent doesn't matter, only impact" and anyone could actually interpret it as the opposite, especially if their culture already thinks that intent is the more important thing.
Yeah, the legal tradition and mostly the morals of my country is based on intent is the only thing which matters. So a reasonable assumption for me would be that is a reminder that impact does not matter.
I doubt that is what they mean but it is very far from clear, especially in an international context. Many of these CoCs are virtually impossible to understand unless you have at least a cursory understanding with contemporary American politics. Very inclusive ...
That's a highly disingenuous framing. A better framing would be "intent is not a sufficient excuse for impact".
Intent is not meaningless, but unintentional harms need to be remedied by understanding the harm and working to change the behavior. If someone commits an unintentional harm repeatedly, it ceases to become unintentional, because the refusal to learn is deliberate.
It's just laying out exactly what you seem to agree with, and that good intentions aren't a shield for bad results. Someone might say "you look really sexy today" and intend it as a compliment, but even if it is a compliment it almost certainly isn't going to be received as one.
Is it laying that out? I think you have to significantly read between the lines to get there.
> what you seem to agree with, that good intentions aren't a shield for bad results
I wasn't giving my opinion so much as sumarizing its an unsolved problem with no obvious correct answer.
If you want my personal view. I don't believe actual results should be taken into account at all.
"you look really sexy today" isn't wrong to say because the recipent was offended. It's wrong to say because a reasonably acculturized person would know that there is a high chance it would be offensive in context. If the dice were on your side, and for some reason the recipent was delighted at your "compliment", i would still say it was wrong because you had no way of knowing that that would be the outcome. The wrongness has nothing to do with what actually happened, only with what was reasonably predictable to happen.
There are pros and cons to this view, and reasonable people do disagree.
[And to be clear, even if something was not predictable and therefore not "wrong", that doesn't absolve you from having to apologize/make it right if you accidentally hurt someone]
If reasonable behaviour and common sense was obvious, there would be no need for CoC or even laws.
Ultimately it devolves into what a majority of the group understands the norms of the group to be. The implicit assumption is that all members of the group have an implicit duty to understand the shared norms of the group (sort of like in the legal sphere where ignorance of the law is not a defense, but unintentionally breaking the law is, provided that the lack of intentionality isn't soley based on ignorance of what the laws are).
E.g. in the case you mentioned earlier, sexualizing co-workers is the wrong thing. Not knowing that sexualizing coworkers is not a defense. If you say something with a double meaning, which you ernestly didn't realize had a double meaning, that might be a defense. You didn't intend to break a rule, and your unintentional rule breakage had nothing to do with not knowing what the rules are. It doesn't mean you don't have to apologize, but it should be enough [on this view] to prevent punitive action (generally, as always context matters).
You could say that feels unsatisfactory, and you're right it does - its squishy and subjective. I don't hold this view because i think its perfect, but just because i think its the least bad of the alternatives.
What about "That shirt looks really good on you"? Is it a compliment or the receiver may think you just want to rip it off them and have sex on the desk right there and then??
What's with the recurring comments about corporations and businesses?
> Some people may have views that when expressed, may be harmful to the interest of particular groups of people like big corporations. This has to be taken into account.
> universally accepted corporate values
> That's California Core Corporate Policies in work
> For instance, members of board of directors of the big corporations are a protected class.
> Members of board of directors of the big corporations are a protected class because they financially contribute to the cause
Given the success of the pull requests, I can only assume that this is not a sockpuppet mocking the rules in question. Is it some kind of multi-layered joke?
I don't think it's a sockpuppet - I read it as a criticism via satire.
The idea is that any rule you apply should be done fairly and, where that isn't clear, equally.
So as an example. If I say "Pepsi tastes like cow urine", and a corporate shill from Pepsi who has built their self-worth around the company and spent most of their life defending themselves from the usual Pepsi-bashing jokes by bullies telling them that Coke is better, and maybe they fall into some protected class and maybe they don't.
Now, their complaint is valid and their hurt is real. But the intent of the original comment was not to bash this person (or corporation) - it was the spirit of valid criticism.
If the intent is removed from the evaluation of the rules, nobody is safe from those who would manipulate the rules and pretend to be the hurt party to the benefit of a corporation.
[Note: I've re-read everything that person said, and now even I'm not sure. It feels to me like highly honed satire, and if it is, hats off to them, though they've maybe forgotten that a large portion of the Ruby team is not natively English speaking - hence their PR got accepted. If it isn't satire... well, they're not gonna read this, so it would be a wasted education]
It's not just you... I was unable to follow it either. I kept going back and forth trying to figure out which "side" the commenters were on, trying to find hidden meanings and running the various points through a sarcasm filter... nothing worked.
I'm left to conclude that they are just simply "out to lunch," to put it politely.
I find it confusing too, but my reading of this is that @hmdne is trolling, but the actual changes @hmdne wants to make are fine and defensible in their own right and in fact make it easier to kick out trolls like @hmdne (e.g., a troll can claim that their trollish proposition is an "opposing view" that one needs to be respectful of), and so people are engaging in good faith to try to deflate the troll.
Some of these comments are obviously bait to me - e.g., the one about how we should privilege members of boards of directors - and this looks like a careful attempt not to take the bait.
Note that PR 2690 is not from @hmdne and was unchanged from how it was proposed. PR 2691 is, and perhaps should not have been accepted in its present form because of the "protected class" language, but there are good-faith comments in 2690 (with no mention of corporations) about why the "opposing views" line should be removed.
In this sense, that they would help protect the community from trolls - yes they are defensible. But otherwise, I would unfortunately disagree. It's like an argument that we should lock everyone in cages, so they wouldn't hurt themselves.
Wow, I'm honored! I haven't been actively involved with that project for a long while but if it's making people mad enough to create throwaways, it means my work has real impact. Thank you <3
Please tell me that this Code of Conducts are all jokes? I've developed a fragile and basic rule which I try to follow:
Don't be an asshole.
I fail sometimes following that rule and I don't deny it. I struggle to become better but keep going. Of course you could extend this by "Help others, when appropriate", "Be nice to each other", "Use common sense", "Pardon others", "Don't be a d***", "Don't be a b*****" but that follows logical and would be itself a CoC. Anyway, Captain Picard said everything:
Mister Worf, villains who twirl their moustaches are easy to spot. Those who clothe themselves in good deeds are well camouflaged.
No jokes allowed. Those CoCs are installed by paid assets in order to stifle and reduce the participation rate in FOSS projects. They poison the mood and create division so that voluntary participants leave and those holes then can be filled with corporate agents.
As pointed out in the Github issue comments, Californian corporate agents in particular. The new CoC represents "California Core Corporate Policies" after all.
> I fail sometimes following that rule and I don't deny it.
We all have different definitions of being a jerk. So, do you take responsibility when you’ve crossed your own line, or when you’ve crossed someone else’s line?
Depending on the context you should take responsibility in both circumstances.
Crossing your own line is obvious. But you should still take responsibility when crossing someone else's if you feel they're acting in good faith / being reasonable about the offense, even if you disagree with them. And probably another caveat or two I can't think of off the top of my head.
A whole lot of the reasonable parts of "woke" boil down to a few things:
(1) Don't be an asshole.
(2) Don't meddle in the affairs of others if those affairs do not concern you.
(3) Evaluate other people from first principles and starting with a positive assumption, and check yourself for subconscious biases against groups of people that you might have picked up without really thinking about them. This is really a subset of checking oneself for irrational cognitive biases, which is a good practice in all areas.
Wokism is precisely about being an asshole, and using the language of social justice justify bullying and intimidating people. I think we're a little late to the game recognizing this because historically authoritarian and bullying behavior has been more likely to come from the right than from the left.
I generally avoid projects with a CoC because it signifies that the people in charge are more interested in picking fights than they are in developing great software.
The change indicated in the title[1] was made on foot of trolling by the user @hmdne
It's really a remarkable failure of communication. It doesn't appear anyone read what he was saying carefully. They just looked at the first two lines of his proposal and assumed they understood his intent. And then when encouraged he actually made the change. And they actually merged it.
It's amazing that people who are apparently paying such close attention to textual significance, don't appear to have the ability to read his statements with any care.
I'm a little embarrassed at how long it took for me to see the joke. The story should be "ruby maintainers accidentally get overeager and merge literal satire into their CoC".
A quote for context:
>A protected class is a group of people that has been historically discriminated or a group of people we (as humanity) want to privilege to offset the years of discrimination - but that's not all. For example the People of Color are a protected class, because of slavery. Members of board of directors of the big corporations are a protected class because they financially contribute to the cause. The non-heterosexuals are a protected class, because of discrimination. Women are a protected class obviously. I don't know how to better define it. The dictionaries should have a more understandable definition.
It's like the video where you try to count the number of times people pass the ball and you don't notice the gorilla walking through the middle of the room -- you read the first sentence where it starts listing off protected classes, skim over the part where it lists "boards of directors of big corporations" alongside people of color, women, and LGBT folks, and end up thinking that this @hmdne guy is a pretty woke fellow.
Wow I didn't catch that at first, but you are right. This comment illustrates it even more
> That's common sense. We all know who are protected classes. For instance, members of board of directors of the big corporations are a protected class. [1]
And
> Members of board of directors of the big corporations are a protected class because they financially contribute to the cause [2]
Wow, glad someone else caught that. I read that comment a few times because it seemed almost exactly the opposite in intent of the general intent of the PR (as explained by the twitter thread).
This github links to a twitter thread about rationale for the change which mentions a sexist joke that was in the ruby mailing lists but doesn't link to it. I feel like I've read entire news articles about kinds of events like these where no one will actually show what was said. We're just supposed to agree it was really bad sight unseen. Here's my guess at the joke at the core of this for anyone wondering: http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-talk/...
Edit: Appears it was copied in the git thread, as mentioned below.
The example is so anodyne and the pattern of CoC changes so regular that I can't help but expect that this was opportunistic - waiting for any such example to jump on and institute these changes.
The goal is to grant all offend/ed/ parties total, unimpeachable power against purported offend/ers/, and no amount of 'protected classes' cover removes the fact that this enables the same bad faith that harassing parties abuse, just for a different group.
Hold everyone to the same high standard. Period. Done. None of this thumb-on-the-scales nonsense.
Something doesn't have to exist as a certain quality for a subset of people to determine that it may be perceived as "too much a likeness of some THING".
In short: You can be banned for talking about pasta in a noodles forum. That doesn't mean pasta is not a noodle.
It's not sexist. Them banning it as sexist does not make it sexist.
Every day I wake up to the programming community becoming more pretend, more fake, more toxic and less open. Ironically the very thing it is trying to distance itself from.
It's a bit buried in the GH discussion, but someone else posted it here:
"Maybe this has been written for women, having calculated their age ;)"
If I were in charge of a community or mailing list, I would kick the person who wrote that off. But I simply don't see how (a) the existing rules didn't do enough to cover this, or (b) the changes will resolve those issues without causing other problems.
As I understand it, some people who want to make sexist jokes on the mailing list with impunity pointed to the language about tolerating opposing views to claim that their desire to belittle women on the mailing list must be tolerated.
edit: evidently someone thinks this comment is worthy of a downvote. I didn't say whether I approved of this action or not. I looked through the threads to find out why the decision was made. I don't think a sincere effort to provide more information should be punished because of disagreement.
But...like...just say no? Am I missing something? If the current CoC covers offensive jokes like the one in question, then simply assert that the CoC covers it and be done with it.
If someone is willing to go through the CoC with a fine tooth comb, they're likely going to find something they could potentially use to defend themselves. Just say no!
The changes open up so much interpretation that anyone could use it to kick out people for all sorts of silly reasons.
It is somewhat of a modern cultural failing that we cannot moderate without having a CoC to point to and say "see? You're bad, it says so here". A good moderator can make the value judgements necessary to keep a community relatively healthy. For some reason a lot of folks have forgotten a CoC does not change that at all.
I think that the problem is that some people read CoCs as essentially _legal documents_; and thus attempt to act as CoC lawyers. Thus the "I'm allowed make sexist jokes with impunity because Ruby's constitution says that opposing views must be tolerated" take.
Obviously, CoCs generally aren't written as foolproof legal documents, and there's no caselaw or court system, so this is kind of absurd. But one approach to rules-lawyering is always to tighten the rules to remove the loopholes that are being exploited, so... Personally I think it'd be better to add language emphasising that the CoC is merely a _guideline_, and that the moderators are judge, jury and executioner.
> In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise.
Can sexist humour be kept in check with rational argument and public opinion?
I did not downvote you, but unfortunately you trivialize Popper by invoking his paradox of intolerance in such context.
Popper lived in a world where democracy was threatened by very powerful totalitarian movements and its demise in Europe at least was a very credible scenario. His paradox of tolerance addresses those violent, brutal movements that left a trail of blood and destruction on the continent.
There is zero evidence that Popper intended to micropolice or censor uncouth / rude verbal or written interactions among people. He was mostly concerned about outright tyranny and genocide. And there is a long way from bad jokes to tyranny and genocide, even though the Anglo-Saxon world has evolved a rather thin skin in the last decades and seems to think otherwise.
Making sexist jokes on a mailing list should probably be rebuked or punished by moderators for being in bad taste, but not because of Popper's ideas. A person joking about some girls age almost certainly does not want to enslave/kill women and does not have to be forcibly prevented from doing so.
This is not a good use of the paradox of tolerance. There was no threat of the ruby mailing lists being taken over by sexists using violence.
Popper was talking about groups like the Nazis coming to power. When overwhelming violence is near, you have to make a choice or else you’ll lose the capacity to make that choice. And even then, determining when overwhelming violence is near is extremely difficult and should be the absolute last resort.
It’s astounding how often this is linked with respect to online discussion.
I down voted you because I felt your comment was off topic to the comment you replied to. I do not see any reason the old CoC or no CoC at all would have preventing banning that user. Just because you should assume good intent does not mean you cannot ban or give a talking to user who make sexist jokes. I see no paradox of tolerance here.
Really? You would permanently remove someone from a community for one joke in bad taste? You wouldn't use any social skills of your own to, say, tell the person their joke isn't well received and they need to be more polite?
I could see it going either way, but come on, no one in their right mind would think that that's an appropriate joke to make in a public thread with members of a professional community.
"No one in their right mind" - Again, maybe it's because I see a version of my younger self, but it seems oversensitive! Yes, I know we are now in a world where any joke in the workplace that bases itself on "protected class" is theoretically off-limits. But that switch has flipped rapidly, and on top of it, that joke was truly minor. If it was an aggression, it really puts the micro in microaggression. But to read the comments, you'd think he made a Holocaust joke on Passover.
It was foolish to make the joke, it was even more foolish to make it on a digital format that cannot be rescinded. It's also foolish for people to immediately call for this person's removal from the community in perpetuity, rather than have a chat and explain that those jokes aren't funny.
Yeah like I said, I could see it going either way. I think your response would be reasonable, and I would be on board with it. I've never been in charge of an open source community so it's hard to say exactly what I'd do, but you're right that typically these kinds of decisions persist in perpetuity. With that in mind I'd be more likely to have a conversation, so long as the person can demonstrate that they understand why those jokes can't be tolerated.
I raised my eyebrow at a statement in one of the comments in the PR.
"This is so that a harasser won't be able to use a meritocracy argument, which as we all know, is dehumanizing..."
I don't follow this at all. A meritocracy is what we want to achieve: it doesn't matter about the colour of your skin, sex, or orientation, if you can generate code of merit, then if there is a meritocracy, you should earn the respect of the community.
This doesn't mean that everyone doesn't deserve a basic level of respect.
But there are people who are better than me at what I do; I am better than other people. That's a fact of life. I think what other people achieve that I couldn't, is amazing, and I help others achieve what I am better at.
This same user states multiple times that "Everyone knows what a protected class means" and to use "common sense". After being pressed to define it then suggests: "The dictionaries should have a more understandable definition." but then offers no link to "The dictionaries".
This user has 4 followers on GitHub, but is lecturing the Ruby community on "obvious" things that unfortunately aren't that obvious.
I'm all for a robust discussion to make the community a better place, but assuming everyone has your world-view and a common understanding of words that you yourself struggle to define is a quick way to alienate folks who are seriously trying to understand the arguments but need more information.
Other people chime in to recommend that people "educate themselves", and links to an article (https://thoughtbot.com/blog/beyond-best-intentions) which suggests protected classes are: "Black, Indigenous, and People of Color, queer folks, and disabled people" because they "are disproportionately likely to experience bias and discrimination at work and in social circles."
The problem is high performers using their performance to justify abusive behavior, either implicitly or explicitly. A 10x engineer who is also an asshole (or a predator) can easily do enough damage to counteract all of his productivity.
Some high performers deliberately behave like assholes just to make a point that they are so skilled that people respect them despite their behaviors. It's a psychological thing. But I disagree that is does any damage. Everybody with minor social skills will figure out pretty quickly what kind of game is being played.
Increasingly, the word and concept of “meritocracy” is seen as racist, since it denies due compensation for past and present institutional racism. Meritocracy is also seen as misogynist, following the same reasoning.
Not a fan of the "you should educate yourself" retort whenever people ask for definitions. It happens in that Github thread over what a "protected class" entails.
The community CoC is about to change and the person sincerely wishes to understand what is going to change and why. I myself try my very best to keep my words respectful and productive. I could see myself asking the same question when faced with such a confusing situation, because I'd sincerely try to respect the new guidelines.
Harassment is never okay and I find it problematic that the entire GitHub thread seemed hostile with a toxic mindset where if you don't fully agree on the actions being taken, you're assumed to not understand the intentions behind them. You're treated like an ignorant fool, who needs to "go educate themselves" and get "woke". Productive discussion seems forbidden. You can become a troll by claiming anyone else to be a troll whenever they disagree.
You had no bad intentions yourself and I agree that way too many people do lack a basic sense of respect, but please avoid making such condescending statements if someone could be sincerely asking others to clarify their thoughts.
Whenever I’m arguing about a position I’m expected to thoroughly define terms and provide citations. Yet, when I ask what a nebulous term entails the onus is on me to “educate” myself … as if what they’re saying is self-evident. It’s so underhanded.
What is there to research? I said what a bad faith argument is for (banning trolls) and why it is necessary (trolls are poison). This addresses the post I responded to in it's entirety.
> That said, "please help me understand" is sometimes a bad faith tactic to claim ignorance of basic empathy.
Not all empathetic responses are justified, nor are they shared or universal even within the same culture. That's why humans have literally devoted millennia to the study of ethics.
I think any response to these scenarios that suggests we just need to apply empathy is deeply ignorant of basic facts of ethics and human psychology. I understand people try to game the system with these tactics, but that sort of response is not a solution.
>Not a fan of the "you should educate yourself" retort
Also not a fan of this. My response would be something along the lines of:
"I'm not going to 'educate' myself on your delusional beliefs for the same reason I'm not going to 'educate' myself when my schizophrenic uncle tells me to learn more about the 5G towers tracking people's vaccine chips and giving everyone cancer."
I think I'm realising this might be a bit of a male point of view (European here). Sometimes women put up because they feel they have to. But I agree with the general point. Banter is banter, jokes are jokes. Boundaries are boundaries.
Jokes around "haha women are less smart and do the dishes" are not OK. A joke about moving your birthday because you're a woman, not so funny but wow so not sexist.
"Be nice" is the long forgotten good rule of Internet behaviour, and "if you meant to be nice but weren't, apologise" a close second.
Here is a little hint. These women don't think you're funny. They are humouring you. Most likely they've heard all the jokes before and they think you're boring at best or an asshole at worst.
Imagine for a moment that your name was Seymour Butts and then imagine how bored you'd feel by the people that continued to make the same lame jokes about your name, as adults in a professional environment.
Maybe the other option is the "creepy guys" table?
All joking aside I can only comment very generally obviously, but just because people will tolerate a particular aspect of someones personality doesn't mean they actually enjoy it.
Remember that 30 years ago in the Western world lots of women got patted on the ass at work and the normal response was to nod and smile because that's just how the world was.
I once met someone in Australia whose best friends all called him some racial slur as a nickname (I forget which one now). In a short moment alone I asked him if that was actually okay for him and he answered "No, but that's just the way people are around here."
I obviously have no way of knowing how close you are to these women but you should probably at least be open to the possibility that there is a similar dynamic at play here.
Personally, I have a unique physical characteristic that causes even strangers to approach to comment or joke about. I've got a pretty good catalogue of witty retorts by now and one of them in particular is so spectacular that I quite enjoy the opportunity to use it. I still think the people who make the jokes are boring idiots though.
The jokes need to be funny of course, not just sexist remarks.
You also have to know to whom you can say what. My close friends at work can be very brutal, and I return the favor ;). But you cannot do that to casual colleagues, or people you know that don't like such things.
My best friend is 2m tall, so I also know all those jokes. But that doesn't stop us from annoying him now and then :D.
Seems more like you knowing it's a sexist joke should be enough reasons not to make it. I sincerely hope you agree that intentional bigotry has no place anywhere.
It's sexist regardless if woman are present. People are victims even if they stand their ground.
So lets start making white men jokes in those teams on the regular. And no, in real life, I did not seen all that many of those.
There is situation in which everyone mocks everyone. But the situation described here is that some people are valid target of jokes and others simply dont.
I think this may depend a lot in which European country. UK is absolutely filled with self deprecating humour no matter your race or sex.
I am currently at an hotel with an international audience and was part of the daily 'show' a couple days ago. I made the entire audience laugh when I joked about not knowing how to sexually satisfy a woman (I am a white man if it helps).
Think it depends a lot on the general tone. Are women targeted for sexist jokes as much as men and the jokes are free for all? Probably ok. If 95% of the sexist jokes are about women, probably not ok.
But for example, I found that a lot of Eastern European men make sexists jokes that are mean and at the same time, can't take the smallest joke about themselves (or worse, their own sexuality).
It's really hard to generalize a group on that level unless you're on the outside looking in.
There's plenty of jokes about man-bun and skinny jean wearing hipsters floating around. There's plenty of jokes about white trash floating around. I'm not sure what a joke about white dudes in general is going to look like barring the obvious case where you generalize a joke about white trash or hipsters to all of them. It's going to be very hard for a group of mostly white dudes to joke effectivly about white dudes because as members of that group they all see that group in higher resolution than that.
Jokes are meant to be offensive, at least on some level.
Go to a comedy show and listen to how many black guys make fun of white vs blacks. Go to another one and listen how there are lots of jokes about husband vs wife, men vs women etc.
The problem is that there is a time and a place for those and a professional environment is simply not it. This is why I always have a problem with American culture of after work meetups and socialization.
> When we tell a sexist joke with a woman present, you will get a witty reply from them, not a call to HR.
As a woman working in Europe, those sexist jokes sux. It sux to be in a team where you have to listen to it in the regular. It is tiring to have to be constantly prepared with "witty replies", just because collogues are dicks and need to pick on my gender.
Yes, I tell them off or am witty depending on what I think harms me the least of the two. But the situation itself sux. Working in teams where I dont have to be on guard and dont have to waste time strategizing this is so much better.
It also sux that quite a few people really do want the message behind the joke to be true. Whether they fully believe or sorta kinda believe.
I think the best update to that CoC will be kindly asking any person from the USofA to not participate. The rest of the document may be left in any state.
Most of problems with harrasment and reactions to it would disappear overnight. The USA does not dominate the contributions anymore, but it does absolutely dwarf anybody else when it comes to shitstorms.
> A protected class is a group of people that has been historically discriminated or a group of people we (as humanity) want to privilege to offset the years of discrimination - but that's not all. For example the People of Color are a protected class, because of slavery. Members of board of directors of the big corporations are a protected class because they financially contribute to the cause. The non-heterosexuals are a protected class, because of discrimination. Women are a protected class obviously. I don't know how to better define it. The dictionaries should have a more understandable definition.
> Members of board of directors of the big corporations are a protected class because they financially contribute to the cause.
I don't want to debate the race/gender stuff as it's pointless, but "member of board of director of big corporations" is a protected class? Has this always been a thing that I wasn't aware of? This doesn't seem to be a joke, although it sounds like one.
By the same person:
> if they are not a protected class, they will lose that right, yes. That's California Core Corporate Policies in work. And we enacted them.
What's going on here? Why is Ruby adopting the "California Core Corporate Policies"? Again by the same person:
> That's common sense. We all know who are protected classes. For instance, members of board of directors of the big corporations are a protected class.
That might be just me but I feel like something sinister is happening. Open source, adopting guidelines to protect "members of board of directors of the big corporations"? I'm not trying to say that these people are bad, but do they really need protection on the same level as gender/race minorities? Why is the discourse centered around one specific Californian policy? What incidents are they preventing by adopting these rules? Stuff like the recent criticism of Amazon for trying to "take over" Rust? Again, that might be paranoia on my part, but this sounds fishy.
Edit: okay, it seem that this guy was trolling. Funny that he's trolling in the discussion but still got changes in because they were considered good. That's a beautiful way to demonstrate what actually matters
> Members of board of directors of the big corporations are a protected class because they financially contribute to the cause.
If you still buy into this hogwash at this point, I don't know what to tell you...
There must sell some real strange dope in California. Honestly, with all this strive to professionalism, this is on the whole extremely childish behavior.
It isn't even Americans. These "universally accepted corporate values" are only universally accepted in a very small sliver of the US. Most Americans' cultures and views are also ignored in these discussions.
That person is likely just making a fun of it. "California Core Corporate Policies" - take every first letter - CCCP, which is a Russian abbreviation for the Soviet Union.
I assumed sarcasm/trolling because board members were singled out as a protected group, but with Californians (hi there friends, I'm obviously not talking about anyone of you reasonable ones who suffer under it) being Californians and not having seen CCCP referenced in a long time I overlooked that.
Push a change without asking a non-native English speaker, make that person upset and provoke a counter reaction, then start a major Twitter storm to discredit and possibly expel the non-U.S. peasant.
Some of the names in that article appear on LKML in connection with the Rust proposal (not sure if they are the same persons). Caveat emptor.
it worked with Antirez. Matz will cave eventually because the people pushing these idiotic changes will harass Matz the same way they harassed Antirez into submission.
> When another user, Isaac Schlueter, committed the change anyway,
Isaac "white men need no apply" Schlueter. This guy never resigned of any group he was part of, or NPM leadership when he said some objectively racist comments... rules don't apply to them...
The people who push these "codes of conducts" are the one harassing others and codes of conducts give them a way to harass other developers into ideological submission without being punished for their harassment tactics, because CoC are written in such away that if you're not following the intersectional ideology then you are fair game.
All that had never had anything to do with programming, it's purely partisanship. And if you don't cave, harassers are relentless because they have their own massive internet mobs on social media, a well oiled ideological war machine.
Twitter has made everyone neurotic and negative... e.g. very sensitive to perceived insults. Anyway, the same people that push these changes are some of the most hateful people on twitter towards people on the right of the political spectrum.
Facebook often gets its hate due to its political nature of spreading news. But I think Twitter is far worst in these type of social issues where interaction are more "personal".
Seems like a poorly misinterpreted joke about how people will often mention a younger age for their birthday when they’re getting into their older ages? Is that the joke?
If this joke is told by women more often than men (in my experience it is), is it sexist to point that out?
Would this have received the same reaction if the joke was made by a woman?
Some things to ponder, no doubt. However, in this day and age I personally wouldn’t make a joke about any particular group unless I was born into it. Cancel culture is becoming a bit overwhelming.
How about a joke in the context of saving money that said "Must've been done by a Jew" (my supremely limited interaction - with one person from Israel - was about him trying to get more money from the organization I was representing), would it be bigoted to point that out?
For my taste that "must've been a woman" line was cringeworthy. He could've said "Well I guess someone doesn't want to grow old".
Sadly, as someone who isn't Jewish, my view is that if a non-Jewish person says that, they almost have ill intent. It's one of the things that I think people can joke about themselves that way, but it's almost impossible for an outsider to do it without ill intent.
I thought the joke that spurred this was in poor taste, but didn't have any ill intent. It definitely didn't belong on on that message. I'm not even sure jokes belong there at all. If they do, it'd be a pretty narrow selection of them, in certain circumstances.
Sure and I can agree with that. My point being is that not everyone sees it that way, if someone said it and meant it negatively towards me I still wouldn’t care. They want you to care and be offended, don’t give them that. Does it stop them from doing it in the future? No. Will anything stop them? Who knows. There’s a fine line on these sometimes, I don’t want to ruin the life of someone who maybe made a bad joke one time, because not everyone is bad.
I find a community having a CoC is generally a good indicator of it not being a good idea to participate in it. Which is a little tragic, given that the underpinnings (naive and toxic as they are) do not come from a bad place.
Honestly, I'd prefer that trolls get banned straight away without needing to point anywhere, instead of all these stupid CoCs. You do not need any special document to kick off annoying people from a mailing list. The mere existence of CoC documents seems like an elaborate act of extreme trolling.
EDIT: Moreover, CoCs don't really work in practice. Has any CoC ever prevented abuse of somebody? Do you have a concrete example?
I think as a mod you are in a tough spot regardless. If you have loose rules and use your discretion you will be hated on. If you have strict rules, you will be hated on for stifling speech.
As an open-source contributor and professional developer, it tells me which projects to avoid entirely. Keep your state sponsored politics out of my hobby and profession.
Things that seem like they ought to be common sense sometimes need to be said explicitly, especially in large organizations that communicate mainly over the internet. I know at least one person who feared for her personal safety for awhile because she became a focal point of a large internet argument about how members of large open-source project ought to treat each other. I think most high-visibility projects have people with similar stories.
Yeah I don't really see a distinction between trolls coming in and posting offensive stuff and ideologues coming in and hijacking a project for their cause. Both are detrimental to actually building something good, and both basically need a benevolent dictator to keep them at bay.
Because some marginalized people perceive an implicit bias and veiled offensiveness in all manner of communication within those they regard as part of some sort of hegemony. If there’s a vehicle for applying restraint or discipline or humiliation, it will be exploited for reasons often vindictive or speculative.
See this guy gets it when others don't. The Radical Left has a victim mentality, always whining about systemic injustice to get what they want. When will conservatives wake up and realize that every aspect of this code of conduct is designed specifically to oppress them?
Excuse me but "st*pid" is an ableist slur whose use harms and triggers disabled people, which makes it a source of mass psychological harm for an already marginalized group.
The world is filled with people who have different ideas about what is funny, what is offensive, what is fun, what is boring, etc.
On the internet it is expected to have a clash of cultures since people from different backgrounds are collaborating. There will naturally be well intentioned misunderstandings. Rather than creating a system that allows for these to take place peacefully without incident, any example of a joke gone wrong or a word out of place will result in an inquisition.
Why do so many westerners want to live like this? Constantly thirsty for purifying others. It seems to come from some kind of emptiness that must exist in one's life to be so obsessed over minutiae.
Without being aware of the fact that they were originally meant to and still do discriminate against Black Americans who were brought to this country against their will in chains to be slaves?
I still don't see the parallel with the Ruby community. I'm American and quite familiar with American politics, and I still don't see the point. The Ruby community has certainly had its sexism problems [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7], but are you saying it was also formed with the intent of banning Black people? Please explain.
I think he's referring to the idea of petty HOA politics where motivated power hungry people drown others out and selectively apply rules to make others miserable.
> That's common sense. We all know who are protected classes. For instance, members of board of directors of the big corporations are a protected class.
Uh… is this a troll? Like other commented said, this feels like a anti-CoC thing or an extreme case of Poe's law, at least.
Man, the passionated bikeshedding over CoCs in some communities and even in here, with many extremist viewpoints from both sides, makes me glad I'm not really attached to any community. If they're stupid, why should I spend the emotional energy? Just walk away.
That's the whole point of CoCs: divide and conquer. As a result people "Just walk away". Assets paid by Microsoft, IBM, Salesforce and Google are pushing this.
On the topic of extremist viewpoint, this one's (in my first reaction) is off the scale... I'd ask you if you got proof, but as I wrote above, I'm not sure I want to spend my evening reading conspiracy websites. But hey, maybe you can "guide me to the light"?
IMO that's satire, "the use of humour, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize people's stupidity or vices, particularly in the context of contemporary politics and other topical issues." It says a lot if you can't tell the difference.
Others have pointed a seemingly silly phrase of "My rationale for these changes are documented on Twitter". But there is a deeper idea hidden there as perhaps one of the reason the changes were enacted was not protect anyone, but to increase engagement on Twitter. Whether someone is protected or not, is perhaps secondary.
> (removed) "When interpreting the words and actions of others, participants should always assume good intentions"
Exactly! So, on a meta level, if we apply the same idea to the change itself. How do we know it was made with a good intention or simply get +1s, heart emojies and retweets...
"documented" and "twitter" in the same sentence is so weird. There no worst format for keeping an history of things. It's ephemeral, hard to browse or search, and terrible to format.
Because it's good-old trick of making vague and overreaching rules, so anybody could be declared guilty and thus maximizing power of people who apply these rules.
But history repeats as comedy, so thankfully no firing squads and killing fields this time.
Going to details it look like they aren't making changes that are more equitable, tolerant or inclusive. Or that really those words don't mean anything what they meant anymore.
Merging a change to the CoC without any input at all from any well known long time members of the Ruby core team make me guess the committer is going to get a stern talking to.
I can’t believe this “CoC” meme actually propagated.
Project maintainers should assess whether these CoC pushers are actually bringing any value to the project.
These CoC’s feel like a way to remove someone you don’t like from a project without any real productive basis. A weapon used by folks who like to feel self righteous when they “cancel” people who don’t align with their ideologies.
Adults don’t need a “Code of Conduct” to know they should be civil and respectful. If there’s to be a CoC it should only state “get rid of anything that gets in the way of good code” and they should start by booting these CoC nazis who are making their childish fragility’s other peoples problems.
Don’t like something someone said? Talk to them personally before wasting people’s time and resources.
Does anyone else feel that the user hmdne is being completely sarcastic in this thread?
This reads 100% like irony, and yet this suggestion[1] by hmdne has 5 "hearts":
> I suggest we also remove this point from the conduct guidelines:
> * Participants will be tolerant of opposing views.
> Some people may have views that when expressed, may be harmful to the interest of particular groups of people like big corporations. This has to be taken into account.
Generally I'm opposed to rules changes as a solution to moderation problems unless the rules genuinely do not provide for a way to discipline people who misbehave. But to some extent, they're necessary. Would we prefer if enforcement of rules was capricious and random? Better to have a shared understanding of behavioral expectations before engaging in shared labor.
Still doesn't remove the need for good moderators though.
In general these seem like mostly bad ideas to me, but I'm not part of that community, and I'm in favor of them making their own rules and accepting the consequences.
However, I am wondering if there is some historical context that I'm missing: have their been increasingly hostile or abusive discussions in the Ruby community which these changes are meant to address?
The conversation in the PR makes me feel like its author thinks the whole world is California and every single computer user knows what Californian laws are.
A lot of the Codes of Conduct (especially the Ruby one) stem from activism by Coraline Ada Ehmke[0]
For those who don't know her, quite an interesting person. She was notoriously fired from GitHub after a year after being hired to work on their anti-harassment platform.
Oh yeah, wasn't she the instigator of "Opalgate"? Seems like she has a chip on her shoulder and this is her life's work (to go around bullying projects that don't have stringent enough CoCs into submission)
At first I thought you were trolling but you're right, Coraline links to your Twitter post in the original Opalgate PR. I wouldn't really call what you did "instigation" though. You called out a post on Twitter you thought was BS, but that's way different than actually taking action to boot someone from a project, their career, etc. The former I would call "speech" or "an opinion", the latter I would call (esp. with Twitter mob backing) "bullying", "instigation", and/or "aggression".
If Coraline feels bullied or harrassed, my guess would be because people tend to react to bullying and aggression with bullying and aggression. "You reap what you sow", "You catch more flies with honey than vinegar", etc.
How do you think Coraline saw this information? I spread it. She just took the brave step of actually trying to get that psycho off an important community project. All I did was gossip.
> If Coraline feels bullied or harrassed
She's gotten death threats. Doxed. Anything relating to codes of conduct will immediately bring her up, likely lying about the situation or her intentions. There is zero good faith discussion going on in this thread.
Her attempting to remove a toxic person from a community should not result in this hate, yet here you are, without all the facts, deciding she deserves it.
I never said she "deserves" the hate that she gets, I speculated why she gets it. And my theory is that hate begets hate. On paper Coraline and her ilk have good values, many of which I agree with, but her combative style of proselyting her values has the side effect of enraging people and making them want to punch back.
If HN should be nuked from orbit, Twitter should be nuked from orbit a hundred fold. It's a breeding ground for hate and mob justice.
For some context, it looks like this might be the original message that started all of this mess... I'm not a Ruby person, but I thought it would be interesting to actually go back and follow the trail of what happened from the original mailing list messages (as opposed to what someone wrote on Twitter).
The original message:
>Another example - perhaps somebody could fix that (many errors have that
source!)
>Date.today
>Date.today +1 # no error, but wrong result!
># Maybe this has been written for women, having calculated their age ;)
[1]
Thankfully, it looks like many of the replies just ignored the comment. One helpfully added:
>(btw: please don't make sexist comments, it's discouraging to many people.) [2]
Others took it a bit further:
>No. Knock that bullshit off. [3]
>You're in the wrong here. Take the loss, own up to it, and do better next time. [4]
And somewhat predictably, things devolved from there...
> What's next? Don't make enterprise java jokes / comments, it's discouraging to many people. [5]
There was no such change. Here is the diff:
-keep this list hospitable to the growing ranks of newbies, very
young people, and their teachers, as well as cater to fire breathing
wizards. :-)
+keep this list hospitable and safe for everyone.
- When interpreting the words and actions of others, participants should always assume good intentions.
+Participants should speak and act with good intentions, but understand that intent and impact are not equivalent.
The changes were made in response to sexist comments on the mailing list; they had nothing to do with "opposing views".
"As a reminder: Reinforcing stereotypes can discourage new and existing contributors. As the project runs on volunteer contributions, please think before you post about if your words may discourage anyone from participating. A good way to do this is to ask yourself "am I singling out any particular group in my statements?" If you are, and you didn't notice at first, you're probably over the line. Feel free to reach out to the moderators if you have any questions. (Ideally before posting!)"
> Unfortunately the author of #2690 was tragically born without a sense of humor. This disability makes them a protected class.
> I am actually a firebreather as a hobby, and a wizard by self identified religious affiliation. I am claiming protections under the existing text of the Code of Conduct in the master branch and demanding this pull request be accepted.
Dysfunctional organizations try to solve things by creating a new rule every time something happens that some incomptent with enough power to make a rule doesn't like. You just end up with a pile of suffocating policy haphazardly put together by the most neurotic.
I can see the logic in prohibiting abusive behaviour on lists and other such fora and maintaining it that way. I can also see that the line won't be clear and there will be several special cases that have to be dealt with on a one-by-one basis. Mistakes will be made on both sides but people have to be mature enough to move on.
One thing that I'd like to see more of is CoC's being scoped to a certain list, event or something that's clearly definable rather than a broad vague entity like "the community". If someone behaves in a certain way on a forum other than the one for which the CoC applies, it shouldn't be usable to enforce punitive action like expulsion.
Hopefully all these "wokeness" vs "conservative" lines are drawn in the sand. I really enjoyed when we were writing lines of code rather than writing borders, rules and obvious regressive in-fighting. I can't be the only one looking at all this political garbage and ghost drama with shame.
The comment was exactly in that ironic spirit. The internet version or a slow clap for someone who did something completely useless for the sole purpose of virtual signaling.
If someone runs around on github doing such nonsense "work" editing text no one ever reads you dont deserve more than a ironic acknowledgement. Its like writing ToS that no one reads but replace the salary of a lawyer with people laughing at you for doing this sh*t in your free time (I sure hope no one pays for it).
>I can't be the only one looking at all this political garbage and ghost drama with shame.
This is not political its cultural and everyone outside the US laughs about it.
I don't think you should ever demonize trivial contributions. I really dislike any COC or even the intent to further "professionalism" but that is another matter. You will never lose anything if someone contributes, however small the change may be.
I have a project with an extremely narrow purpose. Someone corrected a missing dot in a sentence. That was awesome and unexpected.
Fixing a missing dot has infinitely more real value than changing something that has no use at all to something different that still has no use. Nothing wrong with trivial contribution but these are contribution that just waste peoples time so a small group of people can get a dopamine reward out of it.
Politics is part of the culture in the US. And yes, they laugh about it.... but then they slowly devolve into catering towards it and existing within it.
> And while we are at it, maybe also we should correct this rule:
> * Behaviour which can be reasonably considered harassment will not be tolerated.
To become something like (what do other posters think? Can we make it even stricter?):
> * Behaviour which can be considered harassment will not be tolerated.
> The law should always protect the victim, not the perpetrator.
Yikes. So I'm a victim if I say I am, even if that's unreasonable given the circumstances?
Yeah, looks like that's the diff OP intended to link.
At face value, it seems even worse than presented.
Removed:
>"Participants will be tolerant of opposing views."
Modified:
>Before - "Behaviour which can be reasonably considered harassment will not be tolerated."
>After - "Behaviour which can be considered harassment against protected classes will not be tolerated."
The "reasonably" removal aside - for an attempt to be much more precise and inclusive with language, why would they narrow the previous "harassment" to "harassment against protected classes"? I'm sure this wasn't the intention, but rather than adding or intensifying any protections, the change, if read literally in the context of the diff, makes it seem like harassment is now tolerated if you aren't a protected classes whereas it previously wasn't tolerated at all.
I think a better route would've been to keep that line as-is and add a new line saying something like "any remarks that could be considered disparaging, mocking, or exclusive towards any protected classes will not be tolerated". This makes it clear that any kind of singling-out of protected classes is disallowed, regardless of the fact that some people may consider the definition of "harassment" to require something more severe than that.
Would you please stop breaking the HN guidelines? You did more than anyone to turn this thread into a flamewar, and that's exactly what we're trying to avoid here.
Replacing everything you posted with "." doesn't help.
Last time I participated in a discussion about adding a CoC to a project it boiled down to people just not liking that it's called a Code of Conduct. They agreed that we needed a basic set of rules etc for moderation purposes but opposed having a CoC, but they were fine as long long as it wasn't called a CoC. I neglected to point that out to them.
I think that's a reasonable perspective. As demonstrated by the incident here, the specific term "Code of Conduct" tends to attract people who don't like to be tolerant of opposing views and don't think it's appropriate to assume good faith. If you want to maintain those standards, which have traditionally been seen as necessary in online communities, it's probably best to use alternative terms which don't have that baggage.
How about not telling offensive jokes, not making offensive assumptions, or just not being offensive. Its a programming language mailing list, what exactly is it about a sexist joke that you think belongs there?
The problem is that almost anything, no matter how benign can be considered "offensive". A phrase as innocuous as "pregnant women" has become offensive under this ideology. The goal posts are constantly moving and if you're caught on the wrong side you get persecuted.
See, first people were irate that the code of conduct existed at all, they felt that having a definition of harassment was bad because "some people get offended at everything". Then they were angry when that definition was narrowed, because they felt that it didn't protect them enough.
Obviously, the code of conduct is the only thing in common here, so that must be the problem.
Remember, the code of conduct is bad because "some people" make it their business to get offended all the time - that could have a chilling effect on discussions! That's why we need freedom warriors to protect us with over-the-top vitriol and hyperbole every time a code of conduct is brought up.
But that's kind of the point, no? You could literally just have your comment as the CoC and it would be good enough to cover the joke in question.
So why is the pull request necessary? It very obviously opens up the potential to be abused by people who would love to kick others out of the community because they don't like their political opinions.
How about not laughing about an "offensive joke" them? If you dont find it funny it wasn't for you. The jokes where not made to make you cry they where made to make people laugh it just doesn't fit your humor.
Not laughing about something that one does not find funny but at the same time also dont cry or have a mental breakdown isnt really a political concept. Its what just about everyone does and we should not pay attention to thous few who dont.
It is inappropriate if you want to convince people of your viewpoint, which is what I stated. The aptness with respect to other goals could vary of course.
This is a casual conversation, not a trial. Refusing to treat inappropriate questions seriously discourages more questions like that in the future, which is also a solid goal.
In that case I'm sure you could think of better way to discourage nonproductive dialogue - rather than being snarky - if that is the stated goal. At least something less self-defeating.
Either way I think the question was warranted. Especially since the long passage from the Unabomber's manifesto they chose to quote when pressed for a response was rather illuminating regarding their beliefs.
It's not just the leftists. Fox News also has to keep things fresh (or at least reheated for their viewers). It seems like a lot of people in USA got addicted to feeling outrage and it sells.
Throughout history, men have bonded by expressing humor, angst, and emotions regarding sex. It may be an outrage by the moral fashion of today. But, you would have a hard time making the case that this behavior is unusual by incumbent standards of collaboration.
banter, irony and jokes are still accepted in all communities I'm know of, and I'm active in various popular FLOSS projects. I've never heard of a CoC prohibiting such things.
> The rest of us normal, sane people need to stop letting "good intentions" let the trojan horse of endless CoC, morality games, witch hunts and ideological warfare from continuing in the name of 'being non-offensive'.
Amen. These days my instant response to this kind of posturing is to disengage as far as possible from all involved. It's an ideological cancer that turns previously productive communities into a morass of backbiting and one-up-person-ship.
Opening a PR for something like this is extremely dramatic.
I have, thankfully, never had much involvement with codes of conduct but if I did I would want it to pass by a committee or a community vote, with ample time beforehand for discussion, platform, and voting with majority or super majority requirement.
A PR, on the other hand, needs just a handful of political allies — your reviewer — to land, and that’s it. I of course assume the best intentions on the part of the requester, but one could be forgiven for seeing it as a power play, subverting the democratic process.
I am very sympathetic to this change. It probably doesn't go far enough to be honest.
This type of change is important because without it moderation is more difficult. What can feel like a masochistic job becomes near impossible where every decision is treated as though it violates soeone's free speech. In reality people who don't want to abide by the CoC are free to say whatever they want in spaces they manage.
I thought this was a troll. I feel that the identifying of CEOs of big companies as a protected class may have been a tipping of the hat. There seems to be a common strategy by right wing accelerationists that involve masquerading as left wing and pushing things into absurdity.
> There seems to be a common strategy by right wing accelerationists that involve masquerading as left wing and pushing things into absurdity.
Or does there? The truly disturbing aspect of so many things like this is that (as per Poe's Law) it's impossible to distinguish cynical mockery from earnestly-held extremism.
4chan /pol/ does this stuff all the time. The OK as white power sign, the Free Bleeding movement as just a few off the top of my head. But then there are antifastonetoss which I'm pretty sure are actually fans of stonetoss using a loophole to avoid getting banned. These people cannot operate in the open and have found other ways to operate.
I can't tell if it fits the Ruby CoC case. I'm just keeping an open mind to the possibility.
Oh totally, I didn't mean to imply there weren't actors out there doing shady bad-faith false-flag things. There totally are. It's just that sometimes (often?) what they post is indistinguishable from the real thing.
but white supremacists including those on 4chan /pol/ have used OK as an actual racist sign. That may not be the dominant meaning of the symbol but it is one that exists.
I'm not saying we should or that random neo-nazis have that same power to take over it but we should acknowledge that some uses of the symbol are racist
I realize CoCs were introduced to make certain supposedly marginalized groups more at home at conferences. But my personal experience/feeling is the complete reverse. I am a member of a minority as a person with a disability. In all the years I was interacting with the community, I haven't had a single issue with someone I couldn't handle myself. I never felt uneasy interacting with others. But the day I saw the first CoC being used in a community I was interacting with, I started to feel uneasy. I cant really say why, but I feel I dont want to interact with groups which need rules like these. I also stopped going to conferences. Gosh, I am even glad I didnt go to the DebConf where they invited Linus only to realize later that they are very unhappy with his speaking style. I would have felt too much shame for being a part of such a group of hyprocrits.
> But the day I saw the first CoC being used in a community I was interacting with, I started to feel uneasy. I cant really say why, but I feel I dont want to interact with groups which need rules like these.
It’s like being in a school with metal detectors. They don’t make you feel safer, they make you feel like they’re necessary because the people around you mean you harm, even when that’s not at all the case. It’s an implicit threat.
How does it protect them? as far as I can tell they do absolutely nothing. If someone is misbehaving at a conference or online, you're already free to kick them out without a clause like this in your code of conduct.
Presumably it's not legal protection, but protection against the woke mob. CoC signals that to the mob that the community leadership is on their side so they'll be spared when any controversy arises.
Stage 1: Initial contributors and founders have a rough aggressive tone that is slowly adopted by new people (who are generally polite when they come).
Stage 2: Old boy club realizes that their own impoliteness is being used back against them. They write a complex CoC with intersectionalism and all goodies that are hard to follow or understand for non-Americans.
Stage 3: Old boy club now ostensibly follows the rule set, while being ice cold, authoritarian and contemptuous on the mailing lists. People not in the clique are undermined and contradicted regularly.
Stage 4: People not in the clique explode when the pressure gets too much. We have a CoC "incident"!
Stage 5: Here is when the CoC comes in handy. The Stealing Council now solicits reports of all past "microaggressions" of the target. People sift through the mailing lists and compile a dossier, ignoring any context that individual messages might have been written in.
In short, the CoC allows for a pseudo "justice" system, where trials are held NKVD troika style, without hearing the target once. You have a document to point to! CoC complaints are also private, so complaints against the old boys can be brushed off and ignored. A public CoC complaint would be a CoC violation, so the old boys are fully protected!
In most cases the Stealing Council operates like a FISA court. Punishments are handed out privately and the targets are afraid to go public.
I was the original author of the Pycon Canada Articles of Association back when we were starting it, which included a section on conduct and inclusivity.
A code of conduct is not there to protect powerful people. It's not there to browbeat people into being absolutely politically correct 100% of the time either.
A code of conduct is something you put together so that everyone involved in the initial organization look at it once, and say "yep, I'm dealing with reasonable people here" and 99.999% of the time you don't have to look at it again because you've established from the start the type of people you're dealing with and they attract others that share the values.
Then once in a blue moon someone does something awful and you pull it out and kick them out.
Pete Forde was pretty "powerful" in the Ruby community and I don't exactly see him leading conferences or introducing people to Tobi anymore.
The problem is your "once in a blue moon." This can easily read as, "arbitrary time where we don't have any other justification for kicking out someone we dislike."
For the truly terrible people, you really shouldn't need a code of conduct to kick them out. An assumption of good behavior is a decent assumption. For abrasive people that you don't want to deal with, things get harder if they are just difficult in good faith. But, the difficult in good faith people are the most difficult to work with using a code of conduct. Being in good faith, they likely literally don't see the problems they cause. And the code does nothing to educate.
> For the truly terrible people, you really shouldn't need a code of conduct to kick them out.
Good point, often overlooked. Though I hear the creak of an opening door to "we just don't like you" culture-fitting exclusion.
Written policies separate, by both time and person, rule creation from rule enforcement. That disconnect gives both the policymakers and enforcers CYA protection:
The rule I wrote wasn't intended to be used this way.
If it were up to me… but it's not, I just follow the rules.
Written policies are just another way to creak that door into a culture-fitting exclusion. Often done much more heavy handedly, as that second hypothetical line of yours is as often a lie.
I get the desire to make things more objective, but as long as people are involved, it is going to be near impossible to separate that aspect from things without trouncing on people that are otherwise invisible to the ones writing the rules.
The whole Python industrial complex (PSF, PyCon, python-dev) has always been extremely hierarchical. CoCs were introduced to protect the old boys and advance their careers at FAANG.
The most egregious abuse of power occurred in the Python NumFocus space, where a couple of highly paid directors defamed a speaker for basically nothing:
I have never seen those directors do anything useful like writing software.
The whole Python ecosystem is a swamp full of parasites who need a rule set to oppress the productive part of the population and justify their existence.
It looks like you cant execute one of the common CoC rules. Assume good intentions. I dont need to look at a CoC of a conference, because, you know, I am living these ideas: I actually assume good intentions, so I dont need a CoC to assure myself.
IMO (which I think is not a majority opinion, mind you) the biggest benefit of a code of conduct is to prevent the person being disciplined from saying "oh I'm sorry I didn't know" and getting a pass. There are (rarely) times a first offense warrants a harsh punishment.
> I haven't had a single issue with someone I couldn't handle myself. I never felt uneasy interacting with others.
that's good for you, but how can you then assume everyone else shares the identical circumstances as you? Different historically marginalized groups have different experiences, and different individuals within those groups have entirely different experiences as well. Heck, I'm from zero historically marginalized identities but i have a lot of social anxiety, I've had lots of uneasiness. You are lucky that you have had no bad experiences (I might even argue this is really a sub-category of "survivorship bias").
I run an open source project. Users come to me for help, I would never think to say, "this code is easy for me to do, therefore it should be easy for you too, go work harder". Would be pretty outrageously bad, in fact. For me to assume that just because something is easy / possible / reasonable for me, therefore it should be for everyone else, would indicate a profound lack of empathy.
CoC's are there to indicate to the userbase that the comfort of all users is of the highest importance so they can get on with the job of working on code together, largely related to the fact that society is in a place of great change where all kinds of tacit, implicit, pervasive disapproval and marginalization of all kinds of people is suddenly not being tolerated. It's not unusual that this level of change would make people uncomfortable but the best thing you can do is to try to see the bigger picture rather than burrowing into becoming a reactionary.
Right, this can misconstrue a difference in a way that becomes unnatural.
Obviously, you will notice a person who is disabled in some way. It's there, so why would you deny the truth and its contextual relevance and objective significance? But the kind of artificial attention to disability these sorts of things enforce in the name of "sensitivity" can displace it into some weird category that causes people to view disabled people first and foremost as disabled, and whatever else second, even if the particular occasion has nothing to do with that disability. This can even dehumanize the person by making them "a disabled" and not a person. This also makes social interaction awkward (I know how to talk to a person, but I don't know how to talk to "a disabled") and I'm sure, as you seem to agree, this is no kindness to the disabled. You're robbed of certain social interactions as a person because your identity is now "a disabled" and not "human being I can talk to about this conference topic".
One of the issues with how these things are handled:
* good faith is assumed of the CoC writers
* bad faith is assumed for people who oppose/criticise the CoC
such that:
* any opposition (or criticism) to the CoC is itself an offense
a pretty chilling and despotic approach, worsened still by the fact that the individuals behaving in this way mightn't even have any real authority or approval in the first place, and very little in the way of response to feedback outside some small ideological group (very much talking about the covenant here).
these actions are usually justified with the kind of arguments that fallaciously treat groups of people as homogeneous "identities", in effect a multi-generational rob[bing] Peter to pay Paul.
I had similar experience. Went to an art installation run by group of young lefties, and upon entering they say: “if you see any racism or sexism, you should come to us and report it”.
I was taken aback and immediately felt uncomfortable. Why did they need to say this? Do they have a problem with racism and sexism? Which would have been unusual because it was a lefty place.
The real question is does any of this stuff need to actually be said?
My view is it just provides cover for powerful people to take out their enemies based on rule interpretations and technicalities.
> they have a problem with racism and sexism? Which would have been unusual because it was a lefty place.
I'm sorry but the critical theories of gender are incredibly sexist, especially towards mothers, so I would personally expect a "lefty" place to be all about erasing biological womanhood, which personally I view as incredibly sexist.
I don’t know why you’re being downvoted. When I was younger, seeing a bouncer guarding the entrance to a pub was a pretty decent proxy for that pub not being the kind of place I’d like to have a drink in.
> I cant really say why, but I feel I dont want to interact with groups which need rules like these.
Asking in good faith here: is it possible your political mindset (wrt your opinions on CoC) is affecting your ability to relate to others in a context completely unrelated to CoC?
The way I see CoC is that, whatever might be in a CoC, does not affect 99% of people 100% of the time and does not affect the remaining 1% still 99% of the time.
Yes, it causes conflicts sometimes. You can agree or disagree on a particular CoC and that's fine by me. What I have difficulty understanding is some mentality that what's written in a CoC could directly lead to wanting to not interact with groups or go to conferences; the people in the conference are more real than the CoC itself is, and the people presumably are the same before and after the CoC is written!
My experience as a person with a disability is that whenever things were written down in rigid rules, humanity was lacking during execution of said rules. Whenever I was able to make things up on the spot with the people around me, I felt safe and OK.
Besides, I am wondering, does your choiceof screenname here imply something? Mockery perhaps? Or do you show up in this discussion with such a screenname totally by accident?
Some years ago a woman used peer pressure to get me drunk, she lied about how strong the alcohol was, she used her superior strength and health to force herself on me while being covered in the fluids of another person.
I didn't have the guts of contacting authorities because I live in a country that has laws tilted in favor of women. (Which I will not discuss but in general woke people have succeeded into bluffing everyone that this can't be real)
When I tell this story, woke people have said to me absolutely horrible things that align with the whole "men can't be abused". From "it was a good opportunity for you to learn" to "well, actually the reason you didn't come out is male fragility" completely erasing my voice.
If we are trying to be inclusive, it will never include me if woke people are allowed to use their language to shape rules. NEVER. I will not feel safe around them because the risk of being abused as a man and these people not doing anything, or enjoying it, or even supporting my aggressor in a misguided attempt to correct years of perceived injustices in the past is non negligible.
I don't see any scenario where a female contributor harasses me and the woke moderators eject the woman. In fact, I see all the roads pointing to the female contributor claiming I was the harasser after harassing me and moderators blindly believing her part claiming they looked at the evidence behind curtains to protect the victims.
This isn't conjecture on my part, you can see several CoC kerfuffles where the rules didn't apply to the woke tribe.
It's definitely a difficult balance to strike, to provide guardrails for diverse groups of individuals, that ensure everyone can behave and be treated civilly.
I applaud you for your ability to stand up for yourself in moments of discomfort or where you feel others are being mistreated. Unfortunately, not everyone is as confident or as self-advocating as you, and a CoC can help protect those who are more likely to weather abuse in silence. Codes of Conduct serve several critical roles in large community gatherings but specifically they are a method for an event organizer to set expectations for acceptable behavior, this serves to:
1. Signal to attendees the atmosphere of inclusivity and tolerance which they can expect to experience (as a marginalized group or not)
2. Provide clear examples of inappropriate behavior so that individuals who are less proactive and self-confident do not dismiss their feelings for fear of being 'over-sensitive'
3. Ensure that transgressors cannot plead ignorance when they are admonished or removed for abusive behavior.
And all the virtue signalling apparently leads to people like me, who are adults and can very well stand for themselves, not attending such conferences anymore. I truely think that people who are not willing or able to defend themselves in a social setting have bigger problems then FLOSS conferences. They have skipped a part of growing up. I feel sorry for them. But I dont agree that we should plaster everything with pseudo-laws to give them a false sense of security.
So it is apparently ok if the mentally weak feel welcome, and those which have learnt to defend themselves no longer showing up because they dont feel at home? Great, reminds me of one of the last interactions I had in a conference setting. Small children in the conference room. As a blind individual, I really rely on hearing what the speaker says. I cant just look at the slides. I already knew it wouldnt go well, but I tried to discuss the issue. At first, I heard some sympathy for my point of view. And 2 hours later, the same person didnt want to stand up for the issue anymore. So I guess womens right to bring their 1 year olds everywhere they want was trumping the needs of a disabled person attending the same conference. Thanks, I am done with this hypocrity.
It sounds like you attended a poorly run conference that was not able to accommodate your disability and still refused to accommodate you after you were forced to self-advocate
All conferences I've been to are good about offering suggestions for near-by childcare or even on-site child care for all parents. If that wasn't offered, that's more evidence the conference wasn't run well. It's not appropriate to have a 1 year old babbling over a speaker giving a presentation and the organizers should have quietly spoke to the person caring for the child and removed them from the situation.
Its like fighting a windmill. The CoC was just established. And attendees were encouraged to bring their children. I guess the organizers didnt realize what can of worms they just opened, or they were not willing to reflect. I agree with your point of view, but I cant say that it would fit the reality I see and saw. In fact, what happened was exactly the reason why I am against CoCs: I was effectively silenced because I was afraid of the backlash I would get if I opened spoke out about children in the conference room. This is psychological terrorism, and I am not having it.
I am really sorry to hear you had such a negative experience at your recent conference. Small children can definitely be a disruption under any circumstances and I cannot imagine how difficult it would be to adequately hear a presenter with boisterous children nearby.
As to your first comment, I would urge you to extend some compassion to individuals who do not or cannot stand up for themselves. An individual who has been the victim of trauma or abuse is not inherently 'mentally weak' and did not necessarily 'skip a part of growing up'.
Consider for example:
In the late 90s and early 2000s it was a common part of the gamer vernacular to use the term 'rape' in a way that was synonymous with 'pwning', '0wning', or otherwise overwhelmingly beating someone in a game. This terminology was incredibly insensitive (and psychologically damaging) to gamers who were victims of sexual assault, and many venues and gaming communities had to introduce rules to forbid its usage (alongside other epithets and hurtful language).
These rules were not intended to give victims of abuse a 'false sense of security' they were intended to raise awareness within these communities for what was considered acceptable behavior, and to educate individuals who (despite acting without malice) did not consider the potential harm they might be causing others.
Likewise, someone who is part of a marginalized group, or someone who a Code of Conduct is intending to protect, should not need to independently apply social pressure to every individual who cannot conduct themselves with civility. That is an unfair burden of expectation to place on the shoulders of few, when the responsibility belongs to us all.
While I would love to live in a world where people can behave with empathy and compassion for others, the undeniable reality is that bad faith actors will always need some explicit rules. Otherwise, they will merely hide behind the façade of "No one said I couldn't do x, it's not against the rules!'.
And yes, I believe it is 'ok if the mentally weak feel welcome', I do not believe you should need to be an emotionally impervious hero to wish to attend a social or professional gathering.
> And yes, I believe it is 'ok if the mentally weak feel welcome', I do not believe you should need to be an emotionally impervious hero to wish to attend a social or professional gathering.
That was not the question the op was asking, and you're misrepresenting his point by removing the second part.
Edit:
The question was: assuming that there exist a risk that all this struggle for inclusivity will repel those people [from categories you are specifically trying to include] that already manage to fight and stand up for their rights, is the risk worth it? At least, that's how I read it.
And the answer can still be "yes", obviously, as long as we're clear about the question.
I wanna tell a story that happened a few years ago (edit: turned out to be loosely related stories as I remembered them)... Suddenly #ruby had a new rule: the word "guys" was banned to refer to people. Why? Because it's suddenly become the most exclusionist, sexist, oppressive, whatever-bad-you-want-it-to-be word.
Bots were automated to hand out imputations and strikes, followed by kicking people who continued to use the word "guys" (regardless of the context). This automation was later reluctantly refined to be less trigger happy.
Trying to prompt discussions "about the G word" was bannable (without a proper warning): New person joins, sends "thanks guys" after a question, gets slandered by the bot as the scum of humanity and then given a four-message long wall of text about why the word "guys" was intentionally given its modern-day meaning because of something-something subconscious and it's designed to manipulate you. Naturally, person complains about this cultist-looking spam. If a mod is online: fuck that new gu—person; BAN. Immediately. A ban. I think maybe the bot mentioned it it one of the messages that discussion is forbidden, but I don't think people read the whole message. It was worded in a very patronising "you're a worthless idiot without a single fucking shread of human decency, so let me lecture you on how to behave in my version of a beautiful society like you've just turned six" way that I don't think most people got defensive and didn't give a flying fuck about the consequences.
The next in line for the woke firing squad were pronouns. ALL pronouns. This luckily never happened; I don't know why not, but I remember it being called regressive instead of progressive behaviour[2].
The G word rule ended up causing a lot of drama in-channel; and I remember at least one GitHub issue that got heated over this (they wanted it removed from the rules IIRC). At one point #ruby became a fusion of linguistic nuances, colloquialisms, culture, and social issue topics (pretty much what's happening here) that conversation about Ruby looked like it was off topic. I'm talking about hours of discussions about these subjects[1], and people with Ruby related questions get outright ghosted by everyone. This was why the earlier mentioned banning rule was introduced; mods noticed a slow exodus and a small decrease in activity in the channel when people weren't engaging in flame wars.
I'm a white guy, but I'm queer (gay). I won't delve into my background too much, but short story short is that for most of my life I was living in confusion, fear, and alienation because of sexuality, so I know how it feels to be Queer, and that I always try to be compassionate and understanding in these issues, and I always try really hard to make everyone feel welcome and included[3] and look for compromises. A lot of active people in the Ruby community started feeling alienated and unwelcome because of this rule (no joke: they were called snowflakes by the woke folk in the ops channel).
But these "woke" people on #ruby? Let me tell you: they're not woke at all. They're just hungry for control. They have all the textbook behaviours of a toxic parent (I'd know I grew up with one)/person. They wrapped their motives in good intentions, and manipulated most of the ruby community. I don't know if the "results" of their actions will be good or bad, but I'm not talking about results: I'm talking about motives and morals (which is what the focus is).
Small digression: It was really disappointing to see some of the BLM things unfold where white-assed Americans (this is by no means exhaustive or exclusive to Americans or whites) tried to steal the spotlight with their "performative workeness" where they made being woke a pissing contest about how to outwoke the rest and be the most woke. It's the same thing as people who post those "fake" instagram pictures: the only difference is fake thoughts and woke tokens instead of "likes." It's absolutely disgusting that people abuse real social issues to "promote" themselves (companies who used this for PR are just as scummy). They're the fucking Cruella De'Vils[4] of this world and they don't even see it.
This same person ("evil") that led this anti-guys movement on #ruby tried to get someone ("misguided" due to religious indoctrination) fired from _their own_ project (open source project) over a retweet. That's right, it wasn't even an original thought. She almost got her way, because some people were really supporting the.
Like, people created accounts just to be able to harass the "misguided" person via github Issues. The evil person didn't get their way in ruining someone else's life. So What happened next? They made it all about them; they were the victim in this whole story. They resigned from the Ruby community with something like "not wanting to be in such a toxic community". They came back again, because they probably couldn't find a more effective way to assert their psychological dominance/control over another naive community.
I've never experienced ANY toxicity, exclusivity, animosity or anything even remotely resembling discriminatory behaviour in my five years in the channel (at the time) until one asshole decided to ban a well-established English colloquialism. I find it incredibly ironic that they created the very thing they wanted to avoid: a fucking toxic community.
The cherry on top of this was that in those five years of being part of the community, did I ever see anyone single member complain about the channel's community being not exclusive or not welcoming. Nobody raised this before or after. The only people raising this was a handful of who invented victims to protect so they could give themselves purpose and importance in the community, when they were a nobody before.
This person who started the movement, their GitHub is littered with them doing "God's Good Work™" by opening CoC pull requests to random projects that were trending on HN or Github that week. I've never seen them talk in the Ruby channel other than the ops channel; there they would occasionally bring up someone's way of communicating wasn't sterile enough (my interpretation). They'd _almost never_ help with any Ruby related issues; the only reason why I can't straight up say "never" is because I remember they'd give wrong advice sometimes/
Anyway. I've been typing this our for a while now trying to organise a bunch of jumbled events/thoughts/ideas that happened over a long period of time, and it's getting hard. I've written so much already that I'm sure most people will just think it's TLDR and skip it, and the worst part is I don't feel like I've said enough. Feels like I'm only 20% of the way there. Recalling these events stirred some old emotions (mix of anger, disappointment and sadness).
I want to finish by saying that even with all this said—and it did have big (IMO negative) impacts on parts of the Ruby community—the Ruby community as a whole is _so_ much more than this toxic squad of performative woke bullies. The Ruby community already _is_ accepting, inclusive and non-discriminatory. I love the Ruby community even if I'm not as active as I used to be. Stay beautiful, and don't let trolls guilt-fish you toxicity. <3
---
One last thing, I used "woke" with a bad undertone throughout the text. I want to make clear that being woke is great, but being woke for the sake of your twitter followers or so you can feel "less guilty," or as a power move, or—anything that's not pure, basically, is just performative wokeness. There's very few people who do it for "knightly" reasons (as in goodness-of-their-heart reasons, I don't mean to be sexist).
I already said this has grown way longer than I planned. I know I threw out a lot of things and they might seem a bit like a gishgallop, but that wasn't my intention. I love talking about social issues (as you can tell, I have strong opinions about this) and doing what little I can to make my circle of people feel good and inspired. Anyway I refuse to make this post longer, so if someone wishes to talk with me about any of these points further, feel free to reply or reach out.
---
[1]: Nobody wants to hear they're a villain or that their moral compass is wrong. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias Also people always selectively quote parts of your message, then they construct fake a context/narrative that makes them feel morally superior in their screenshot.
[2]: I tend to agree.
[3]: One of the reason this situation/anegdote is really sensitive for me is because I was accused of being oppressive, anti-LGBTQ, etc etc etc. This brought up a lot of doubts, insecurities and other dark thoughts all back: Like, hello, I'm gay and I'm making other marginalised people feel even more marginalised?! What kind of trash human am I?
[4]: From the originals, not the recent live-action film with Emma Stone; that Cruella is awesome
This CoC just makes me feel that the Ruby community is no longer a safe space to contribute to. As a minority whose membership in one of these "protected classes" is unclear, and who can no longer be granted the benefit of the doubt / assumption of good intentions, I now find that it is safer simply to shut up and not contribute, rather than draw the ire of the community or accusations of abuse.
It's time for people to start badging projects with a new style of CoC, one line:
"No woke ideology allowed."
That's it. No explanation needed. Those who pretend they don't know what the rule means, or protest, are in violation. The radical left has been co-opting every organization they can get their hands on and kicking out the "non-believers" for years. It's time the handful of sane people that are left band together and start doing the same. The left loves the phrase "toxic," but their ideology genuinely is toxic, and no project, company, or group can thrive once it takes root.
I'm just going to dismiss the second paragraph about angrily finger-pointing at an ambiguous political alignment, "them".
You could replace "left" with "right|antifa|fascists|deep state|elite", or "toxic" with "unconstitutional|dangerous|radical", and that text wouldn't make any more sense.
I have been thinking of when I start a project to add a CODE_OF_CONDUCT.txt file which only contains "No code of conducts are allowed" making proposing a code of conduct a CoC violation. :D
Equality once meant tolerance and acceptance of differences. Now it means if you disagree with me, you're a leftist or a trumper or a thisthatortheotherphobe.
Opposing view: GitHub's changing of `master` to `main` as the name of the default remote branch was not necessary and a huge waste of time for all parties involved.
I still can't get over this. The word master has like 10 definitions and because one of them is part of a distasteful part of history that has nothing to do with the way it was used in this context, they inconvenience everyone.
I don't like taking things literally, but in this case that would be necessary, as it's the whole point. "Master" is an English word. If it isn't, "main" is primarily translated to "haupt" in German, and we all know what a Haupttruppführer was, so that should go too, as should every other word that possibly has a negative connotation somewhere in the world.
What does this have to do with the discussion, unless as an illustration of what an "opposing view" could be, which surely no-one had trouble imagining?
The consensus seems to have gelled (few years ago, give or take a few years?) around every single open source project needing to have a specific "community guidelines" document - it was the new vogue established over the past few years by the body politic, and this lead to various promoters of new social paradigms to rename things that were taken at face value, i.e. "master-slave" in the context of database client-server architectures, or "master" branch as primary branch, etc.
These changes are trivial in retrospect, but contextually, the reversion of "participants will be tolerant of opposing views" seems to validate the notion that maybe excessive discourse around social mores aren't appropriate within the substructure of "writing new code that works, backporting features that are useful for others, etc"
The conflating of social justice goal-setting and software development is a swing and a miss, and if that's not completely clear by the context then I just want to apologize for stating what seems obvious to an external observer.
I understood what you meant and agree. I believe many social justice obsessed individuals have become their own worst enemy as they view every unrelated topic an attack on their personal perspective.
What people should be slightly more concerned about is how now abusive behavior is allowed against people who are not considered to be "protected" under Californian state law.
So harassment of non-protected classes is ok? What pre-adolescent nonsense is this? How about "Behave in a professional manner or get kicked off the mailing list."
Even more than US-centric, the commenters in the GH discussion explicitly refer to California laws. The internet is not California, regardless of what the technologists who live there would like to believe.
(to be clear, I'm completely in favor of protecting people from harassment and abuse, though I strongly disagree with reserving that only to legally protected classes).
Everyone is part of a legally protected class. For example, you oughtn't discriminate on the basis of marital status. Regardless of who you are you have a marital status, either single, married, divorced, widowed, etc. Or you ought not discriminate on the basis of race. Whether it be white, mixed race, ginger, etc. So while it might be the case that being a member of a minority is a particular instance of a protected class, we all fit into various classes, and the idea is that none of us should face harassment or discrimination based upon our membership therein, regardless of what it may be.
They're part of a class but no, not everyone is "legally" protected. Short people are not a legally protected class, hence why it's possible to have height restrictions in certain employment roles (in the US at least).
But that kind of underscores why "legally protected class" really doesn't make sense for a CoC. Like yeah short people aren't legally protected...but any good CoC should prohibit harassment and abuse against people for their height. Obviously.
As someone else mentioned in another thread - it depends. There are definitely legal protections for being a CERTAIN KIND of short, for instance (such as Achondroplasia).
The law focuses on reasonableness of accommodations and the actual job needs, so for instance you can't discriminate based on height if it is a legitimate medical condition and there is the option of reasonable accommodations - say it's a cashier job, and stool would be perfectly fine and adequately allow them to do the job.
If there is no reasonable accomodations, say because the job is not being a cashier, but being a basketball player, and stools or other devices don't help adequately enough to be competitive, then you could discriminate all you wanted on that condition.
The issue of course is a lot of people can't untangle their own prejudices and ideas of what it takes to do a job or who should be doing it enough to even legitimately articulate the ACTUAL requirements to do a job, and tend to spew a bunch of half though out stereotypes, so they run afoul of it pretty regularly. And the gov't (and labor market) MOSTLY lets them unless they're pretty big.
Putting 'legally protected classes' in the CoC is pretty ridiculous, since there are a ton of different definitions depending on context.
Hardly - 26% [https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/disabilityandhealth/infographic-d...] of Americans have a recognized medical disability. Nearly that many are women of child bearing age, and can be discriminated against due to pregnancy status. 34% of Americans are over 50 years old (and officially protected as such).
You would be surprised how few people do not have a clear type of legal protection as part of some class - pretty much just fit, healthy, 18-40 something males really.
The exact phrase "protected class" is particular to the US but the concept isn't particularly so. The UK has "protected characteristics," Canada has "protected grounds," as does the European Union in Article 14 of the Convention on Human Rights. Australia has "protected attributes."
Frankly it's pretty US-centric to imagine that a general human rights concept such as protected classes of people is US-centric.
To be fair I think « protected class » specifically refers to the US definition here. Hence the choice of words. The CoC doesn’t use « protected characteristics » or « protected grounds ».
But including this filter in itself is weird. Why would they specifically talk about harassment on protected classes instead of just harassment? Does it mean someone who’s not a protected class can be harassed and no one will lift a finger? That seems overly toxic and exclusive to me.
It seems the intention is more about setting a higher bar for harassment against protected classes, rather than setting a lower bar for harassment otherwise
You're assuming good intentions on the part of the authors, but the impact is people will take away that harassment of those outside a protected class is OK. The intentions don't really matter here :-)
If it's setting the bars at different levels then this seems to be a distinction without a difference (other than I guess indicating which direction the average bar height is moving?)
Logically, a double edged sword. What an "opposing view" is is relative. The people who put this in place are logically opening the door to people being intolerant to their views, which is likely not the intended effect.
But, of course, this isn't a matter of logic and the CoC is obviously not written to account for everyone's views. It is written to protect the views of the writers of the CoC.
This isn't necessarily a bad thing. No one hires declared Nazis at universities (Maoists and other communist ilk, yes), and neutrality is not a thing. It's a question of whether those writing the CoC are correct and coherent. Are they feigning universal tolerance while imposing a regime of intolerance?
It might be slanted in the sense that they're picking out a single thing that was removed, but I don't see how it's misleading. They are indeed removing that line.
> When interpreting the words and actions of others, participants should always assume good intentions.
In favor of this:
> Participants should speak and act with good intentions, but understand that intent and impact are not equivalent.
Also changed yesterday:
> Behaviour which can be reasonably considered harassment will not be tolerated.
became:
> Behaviour which can be considered harassment against protected classes will not be tolerated.
The updated CoC is here: https://github.com/ruby/www.ruby-lang.org/blob/master/en/con...
This is very weird because fundamentally it stems from a failure of the moderators. If someone makes a sexist joke you don't just let them because you're "assuming good intentions", that clause means that you tell them it's not appropriate here, and if they apologize you assume they are sincere, and if they don't you swiftly boot them. But there is no substitute for good moderation, shifting words around won't help much.
Aside: Open source discussion opening with "My rationale for these changes are documented on Twitter: [link]" also seems somewhat crazy. And I love Twitter, it just seems very odd to link to a thread of tweets instead of restating your case in the proper medium.