I understand the title used on HN tries to follow what the article title is, but it is thoroughly useless in giving me any information on the link. Why should I even open this link?
> I don't see whats wrong with the title? The article is exactly what the title suggests - An open letter to the linux foundation
The problem is the title gives you no information about what the letter is actually about. An open letter could do anything from raising an important for the community...to something that's tedious and irrelevant (e.g. "An open letter to the linux foundation about the lack of vegan food in the cafeteria").
That seems to be general policy. I track title edits and they are frequently (though certainly not always) made less informational: https://hackernewstitles.netlify.com/ .. there are pros and cons so it's not a clear cut good or bad thing.
This letter doesn't really inform the reader of anything. The very fact that it talks around the issue so much that you cannot even discern at all what the issue was, hints at "I don't need, nor do I want to know".
It appears that someone who wore a pro-Trump MAGA hat to a software conference is being punished for violating an event Code of Conduct. Unless there is a general ban on hats and clothing with political statements at software events, this is clearly discriminatory.
"The Linux Foundation received a public tweet sent to the @KubeCon twitter address. That tweet recommended that Kube Con discontinue their association with Charles Max Wood. The reasons given in this complaint were his request for an open and civil phone call, and a picture of Mr. Wood wearing a MAGA hat.
The Linux Foundation publicly replied from the @linuxfoundation twitter account as follows:
Hi all, We have reviewed social and videos and determined that the Event Code of Conduct was violated and his registration to the event has been revoked. Our events should and will be a safe space."
> It appears that someone were a pro-Trump MAGA hat to a software conference is being punished for violating an event Code of Conduct. Unless there is a general ban on hats and clothing with political statements at software events, this is clearly discriminatory.
You don't know (and this letter's author doesn't know) that wearing a MAGA hat was what they considered a violation of the code of conduct.
The whole exchange was public. LF might not have banned Mr. Wood for wearing a MAGA hat (the true reason they banned him was probably to avoid a confrontation with Code of Conduct zealots), but it sure looks like it based on the public tweet exchange.
Literally the only evidence presented was a polite call for discussion, and a picture of the guy wearing a MAGA hat. Then the org directly responded, saying they reviewed the evidence and found he violated the code of conduct. Regardless of what they may claim or of how much anyone may try to dissemble, the MAGA hat picture was clearly the impetus for the decision.
That's what Uncle Bob is insinuating, but is that what really happened? I can't even see the tweet he's talking about.
He mentions an @KubeCon twitter account. That account is not associated w/ the event.
> general ban on hats and clothing with political statements
In some schools of thought, a MAGA hat is a hate symbol like a swastika armband. They view it differently than they would a Republican National Convention hat. Whether they're right or wrong, these are the people writing and enforcing codes of conduct these days
> In some schools of thought, a MAGA hat is a hate symbol like a swastika armband.
Excuse me, but what could ever be hateful about making America great again? Doesn't this rather suggest that these schools of thought themselves are being quite hateful towards America? It's sure convenient that "these are the people writing and enforcing codes of conduct these days", because if they weren't, the case for banning them as CoC violators would be pretty clearcut.
>Excuse me, but what could ever be hateful about making America great again?
The belief that what has weakened America is multiculturalism, immigration, feminism and racial diversity, and that what is needed to make America great again is reversing the aforementioned trends, and restoring to heterosexual, Christian white males their former status of cultural and political hegemony.
The Trump campaign has never made such a claim, though. They pushed "draining the swamp" in Washington D.C., nothing much about reversing "multiculturalism, immigration, feminism and racial diversity".
I don't necessarily approve of the pitchforks coming out at the sight of a MAGA hat, but it's either delusional or just intellectually dishonest to deny the racial component to Trump's rhetoric.
Just like everything in California causes cancer, everything Trump says has racial components.
Sheesh - for a racist spouting rhetoric full of racial components Trump is pretty awful at actually being a racist. Just look at his immediate family! He's not only an incompetent politician he's an incompetent racist!
I'm not asserting that Trump is personally racist, nor that all of his platform is racist. I think the term 'racist' as a concept has such divergent meaning across society that it's rarely useful. I'm saying he is leveraging the dimensions of the current political landscape to his advantage (something he has bragged about having no scruples in doing), which includes exacerbating racial tension. Is it more a projection of his followers than himself? Probably.
It's either delusional or just intellectually dishonest to impute "racial components" to Trump's rhetoric. He, and MAGA types in general, is not racist nor has anything he's done explainable by "racism". The persistence of imputing "racist!" belies projection, lacking an objective basis. We really, truly, don't care what race anyone is; what matters is hard work, abiding by laws (including immigration laws shared by most nations), and earning your way. Alas, those seeking racism everywhere see racism everywhere, especially in designated opponents.
But enough of his supporters have that the culture of support for Trump has been conflated with support for those other, far more toxic ideals.
Trump supporters can pretend that American white supremacists and neo-reactionaries didn't flock to him like moths to a flame and turn his campaign into a referendum against the loss of white male political and cultural relevance and the advance of progressivism and feminism, or that they aren't tainted by association, but that is what happened.
Trump supporters were perfectly aware of the racial narrative forming around him, and they chose to embrace it, rather than fight against it, because they found common ground with the racists in their hatred of the left and Hillary Clinton. They don't now have cause to complain about being tarred with the same brush.
If it's OK to exclude people thanks to 2nd degree taint like that, does this mean it would be fine for a conference to exclude everyone who supported Bernie because of his association with AntiFa?
People already associate progressivism, socialism and liberalism with Marxist and Stalinist ideals and a desire for authoritarian violence, and do occasionally throw in Antifa to demonstrate how the leftists are the "real Nazis." So it's apparently already "fine."
I tried to find out what Bernie Sanders' "association with Antifa" was, and I couldn't find anything that would indicate that he supports the group, or that his supporters do by a particularly wide margin. But yes, if the same shoe was on the other foot, obviously that would happen.
"white supremacists and neo-reactionaries" are practically non-existent. Try actually understanding your designated opponents, instead of slapping nasty labels on them. We did NOT "choose to embrace a racial narrative", it was imputed on us and we don't know how to fight it effectively (a la "I don't believe X!" "well, that's surefire proof that you believe X!").
>Try actually understanding your designated opponents, instead of slapping nasty labels on them.
I do understand my opponents - they won't shut up about themselves. The labels I ascribe to them are reasonable extrapolations of the rhetoric they use when they express their contempt for liberals, progressives, feminists, "city dwellers," immigrants, and anyone to the left of themselves, or with whom they disagree.
If such people are a minority, then they are a very vocal and, apparently, very influential minority. And if their views don't represent yours, then I would humbly suggest that you may be the one who doesn't understand your allies.
>We did NOT "choose to embrace a racial narrative", it was imputed on us and we don't know how to fight it effectively (a la "I don't believe X!" "well, that's surefire proof that you believe X!").
You seem to be implying that narrative was imputed from the outside, but it wasn't. It's a narrative that the extremists who took the party over from within embraced and a banner they proudly waved in everyone's faces.
It wasn't fought against because a house divided against itself cannot stand, and it was embraced because the narrative of the "alienated, disenfranchised white male" at the center of the victim mentality driving right-wing populism was so effective as a galvanizing force that its true white supremacist roots didn't even register, or didn't even matter, to a lot of people.
That "belief" is what you want "them" to believe, so you can degrade & oppose them as inherently evil. Pardon the mind reading; it's the conclusion I come to when subjected to such bad-faith & ignorant labeling. It's baffling to accuse Trump of such bigotries, when he specifically hires immigrants from around the world, married an immigrant, has such a high percentage of women on staff, and has long been lauded & awarded for promoting racial diversity - and his followers share & support his mindset thereof. Seems opponents want MAGA types to be racist, sexist, xenophobic, etc and go to great lengths to impute such labels thereon - when such labels absolutely do not apply.
I, and many others, are seriously outraged at this chronic & intentional libel of our sociopolitical positions - especially by those touting the banner of "tolerance & diversity".
I've observed that there is often more to the story in these sorts of cases. Not always, but >50% of the time. The little thing everyone is reacting to is usually the last straw.
The same often holds true with outbreaks of political protest, like the ones in Chile right now. The mainstream story is that the protests are over a subway fare hike, but the reality is that this was just the lightning rod event.
Are you saying there is evidence to suggest this was the reason they revoked his conference pass? I believe that this was just a part of his character that has come out since then.
> In summary, it appears to this humble observer that The Code of Conduct process at The Linux Foundation went very badly off the rails with regard to Charles Max Wood. That LF owes Mr. Wood, and the Software Community at large, a profound apology. That LF should keep all future Code of Conduct complaints and decisions personal and confidential. That LF should publish and follow a well defined process for accepting, reviewing, and adjudicating future Code of Conduct complaints. And that some form of reparation be provided to Mr. Wood for the public harm that was done to him by the careless and unprofessional behavior of The Linux Foundation.
> That LF should keep all future Code of Conduct complaints and decisions personal and confidential. That LF should publish and follow a well defined process for accepting, reviewing, and adjudicating future Code of Conduct complaints.
How any organization of any significant size can adopt a CoC without having these types of policies in place is madness. Especially handling it in private first!
> A MAGA hat can serve as a useful heuristic for "likely to cause trouble".
Wow. And here I am, thinking that we no longer discriminate people based on their political leanings and everyone has the right to freedom of political opinion.
Move over racial profiling. Here comes political profiling.
People rationalize that political profiling is acceptable using the paradox of tolerance[1]. Basically, if you can convince yourself that every member of a political party is intolerant due to their worldview, you no longer have to be tolerant of anyone in that party and you are allowed and even encouraged to politically profile them, name and shame them, or any other tactic you think will make them less intolerant (such as getting them kicked off of github projects, kicked out of conventions and events, etc.).
You misunderstand the paradox. It's not merely 'rationalizing' to recognize that the paradox demands that we do not tolerate intolerance. The system simply does not work if we tolerate the intolerant.
I find the only way for the system to work is to tolerate the intolerant. That is to say, it's vastly easier and more consistent to allow everyone their right to speak their mind than it is to justify why one person's speech isn't another person's threat. We're at the point where people are claiming MAGA hats are actionably threatening. So should that not also apply to anyone who says "eat the rich"? How about actual real communists that want to dismantle the government? Anarchists? How about anyone who promotes anti-establishment music (e.g. f the police) Which political positions, which political speech is dangerous and which is allowed? How do we know?
Or put more succinctly, when all the other intolerant are gone, who will speak up when they come for you?
There are plenty of LGBTetc. Republicans who would happily wear such a hat though, if perhaps not at a "LGBTQIA+ community" event. Peter Teal is a particularly high-profile example.
> Unlike race and sexual orientation, your political beliefs are mutable and the result of your choices.
We protect religion because it is a fundamental expression of deeply-held values and it is everyone's right to do so. Political persuasion is also a result of those values, and not mutable. You can't "just change" what you believe.
> Even moreso, the decision to wear a MAGA hat is a choice. There are many LGBTQIA+ republicans in America, including many of my friends. They don't wear MAGA hats at such events because they're not looking for conflict.
"There are many clean-cut black kids in America, including many of my friends. They don't wear hoodies and saggy pants in public because they're not looking for conflict."
If you replace a your chosen group with "blacks" and it sounds like something David Duke would write, you may wish to re-consider your phraseology.
Edit: the above poster deleted his comment, but I feel the need to replicate the text so mine makes sense. Here is what it said:
"I often help my friends organize and operate LGBTQIA+ events at hacker cons.
Someone showing up with a MAGA hat is rare, and when it does happen, they're either there to make a statement about free speech (which is fine) or to harass one or more of our attendees (which is unacceptable). So when it does happen, we have to be aware of it, but we don't take any specific actions unless they misbehave.
In the wake of white supremacist violence (see second link from my previous comment), not taking note whenever someone with a MAGA hat shows up would be negligent and put targeted people at risk. If you put "allow white supremacist violence against minority groups" on one end of the scale and "avoid any perception of 'political profiling' behavior" on the other, protecting the LGBTQIA+ community that these events serve is going to win every time.
Unlike race and sexual orientation, your political beliefs are mutable and the result of your choices.
Even moreso, the decision to wear a MAGA hat is a choice. There are many LGBTQIA+ republicans in America, including many of my friends. They don't wear MAGA hats at such events because they're not looking for conflict."
> Someone showing up with a MAGA hat ... to harass one or more of our attendees (which is unacceptable)
How does one "harass" someone by wearing a hat? If that is at all possible then no one can wear a hat because someone might claim harassment (cowboy hats - racists, MAGA hats - extreme right wing, Australian hats - cultural appropriation, etc).
If someone annoys the organizer of a private (non-government) event they simply have the right to throw them out if they don't like something about them. That is why it is in fact okay to throw out a guy with a MAGA hat (or a LG group organizer), but statists can't say it because it'd mean it's okay to discriminate. But they like to be able to practice discrimination.
I think it's perfectly legitimate to consider the MAGA hat a hate symbol. Specifically because of what it represents to American minorities; an implicit threat.
At one time the hat represented something legitimate but Trump's first term is coming to its end. The campaign has been over for a long time now. The MAGA hat is yet another symbol that the alt right appropriated for itself. It doesn't just represent Trump supporters and Republicans at large anymore.
> Trump's first term is coming to its end. The campaign has been over for a long time now.
Long enough for it to start all over again in short order, though. And Trump may well choose to keep the "MAGA" slogan for his re-election campaign - last we heard, it was a choice between that or "Keep America Great".
> Specifically because of what it represents to American minorities; an implicit threat.
Why does it represent a threat? Did Trump made any laws that negatively discriminiates minorities? Are there death camps for them? Are they not allowed to hold certain positions?
Near as I can tell, this "MAGA hat is a hate symbol" notion comes from people who want a group to embody evils X, Y, & Z so that group can be opposed. Lacking such a group, progressives have designated Trump supporters as such via wanton misinterpretation of legitimate, normal, and earnest positions. The term "alt right" didn't exist to any meaningful degree until Trump was elected, to the dismay of Leftists convinced Hillary would win; her supporters suddenly started using this term to slander the opposition. There are, for most practical purposes, no "white supremacists", "alt right", "Nazis", etc. (have you actually met any?). The Trump Right have been wrongfully slandered as "racist", "xenophobic", "sexist", etc; they just haven't figured out how to counter such libelous & intolerant abuse.
Um the "alt right" existed well before Trump, and no the notion comes from Trump being absolutely toxic and evil, if you actually followed his policies and positions on a whole multitude of issues you would see why people are criticizing what he is doing on a daily basis, so much to the point that yes, Trump supporters are considered "Nazis" and "White supremacists" or lets just call them "assholes".
Point blank that's what they are since the only benefit they seem to claim from his policies is the "economy" which we all know will begin faltering given enough time as things are slowing down and have been on a global scale, given that I don't see how his bullish policies will do anything other than create more seeded hatred among his own supporters, lie enough times about illegals or immigrants doing something and surprisingly people take the bait.
Being a Muslim can serve as a useful heuristic for “likely to be a suicide bomber.”
The current zeitgeist of Islamic violence and stochastic terrorism that revels in extreme verses in the Koran makes it simply irresponsible to not beware anyone who reads one.
I concur fellow citizen. Wearing a MAGA hat is clearly indicative of a double negative minus thought crime, when will people think crimestop better? It will allow us to beat Eastasia in the war.
Now come let us join in our minute of hate against Eurasia for war is peace, ignorance is knowledge and slavery is freedom.
This guy's original comment, because otherwise others' comments will be taken out-of-context:
"A MAGA hat can serve as a useful heuristic for "likely to cause trouble".
The current zeitgeist of white supremacist violence and stochastic terrorism that revels in dog-whistle messages from the Trump administration [1] makes it simply irresponsible to not beware anyone who touts one. [2]
That said, a photo of someone wearing a MAGA hat is insufficient evidence of misconduct.
Unless there's more to this story (which there very well could be), it sounds like the Linux Foundation was reacting rather than following a carefully constructed process to handle abuse complaints and detoxify the community.
I'll be disappointed if this turns out to be the case.
Sarah Mei has been involved in this type of attack before, so this raises alarm bells to me that she's at the center of another. I fear she's becoming a massive influence towards this kind of Stalinistic attack.
oh my god, they are complaining about an acronym DDD, because it somehow sexual (not being a native english speaker, I fail to spot the innuendo). If there's anything to complain about ddd is the name clash with Data Display Debugger, a really cool debugger for linux.
I wonder about the callous ignorance of Sarah Mei, who purports to be a feminist but ignores such an important program written by another woman.
> because it somehow sexual (not being a native english speaker, I fail to spot the innuendo).
In the US, DD is a cup size for a brassiere, and thus indirectly refers to breast size on women. DD for sometime has been considered to be an uncommonly large breast size for a woman, especially a woman of otherwise more common proportions. DDD, being the next cup size up for reasons I don't understand (instead of cup sizes going E, F, etc), would therefore imply a woman even bustier than the supposedly uncommonly-busty DD-breasted woman.
Yes, I think it's silly, too. Human mammary tissue has exactly fuck all to do with programming.
Can the letters "JS" be conflated with some other concept that offends someone who is inclined to make a stink on twitter and has a lot of followers? It could happen...
Unfortunately we'd probably just rename it something less offensive like ECMAScript.
“Later, in an effort to cash in on the popularity of Java the language is renamed JavaScript. Later still, in an effort to cash in on the popularity of skin diseases …”
But in most of the world, DD Cup size is followed by E Cup, not DDD. Like most SJWs they taken an American-centric view of the world, which is apparently bad when others do it, but acceptable when they do it.
I'm so sick of this cancel culture bullshit. Didn't they learn about sticks and stones as a kid? Honestly, so many people these days need to eat some concrete to harden the fuck up.
"SJWs" "need to eat some concrete"? You sound like a wannabe skinhead teen. Your veiled calls to violence should have nothing to do with / have no place in coding culture.
Your amerocentric view of the world assumes that because we speak the same language we have the same culture. We do not. In my culture, telling someone to eat concrete is not taken literally. Its not a call to violence. Its a way of telling someone they need to increase their mental fortitude, that being upset because someone said something you didn't like is not a productive way to go through life.
I am not American. And the meaning of the English language does not change with your culture, which, I might add, does not get transmitted in writing. I am responding to your words only. Eat concrete is crass and violent. You can hand wave all you want. Try conversing without ad hominem labels and insinuations.
This reminds me of some post by an SJW-type who complained about a makeup company printing the word “black / negro” on their mascara because it was somehow racist.
It’s easy to laugh at the sheer stupidity of that tweet. But imagine you wanted to use Domain Driven Design (or the Data Display Debugger, or the dd utility, or the D language) at an organisation that employs this person... and you get fired for it.
But all of this is on all their permanent records and when the pendulum swings the other way, they will have ample time to reflect.
Someday this type of thing is going to have a very clear connection to loss of a job or contract and someone is going to learn the term tortious interference. Then find themselves writing a bigger check than they thought they would be when they woke up that day. Paired with a groveling public apology.
No; unfortunately, this isn't cherry-picked. Unlike with the accused this topic is referring to, Sarah Mei has lots of history you can scroll through. Another incident involved her attacking an author regarding a book on 'software craftsmanship' because - she claimed - the word 'craftsman' was definitionally sexist.
In that thread, there's a comment, "it's why we call them firefighters, not firemen"...
As someone in fire and EMS, around here, among us, including the females (this area has quite probably the highest proportion of females in fire and EMS in the country), there is an inherent pride in the title 'fireman', regardless of gender.
To us it implies "I don't 'fight' fire. I am a [man] of fire, who intrinsically understands it, lives and breathes it, and knows how to master (uh-oh) it".
Good for them! I'm personally agnostic about this, but you sound as if you know them all and you know what they think. It can be tricky to separate ones perception from reality.
If we are going to change the name for "fireman" - the profession, we need to change "human" to something more appropriate like "homo idioticus" (i realize it sounds both homophobic and ableist), so does anyone have better ideas?
This kind of holier than thou, "fuck you I'm right", "you have no say because I say so", "I'm marginalized because I say so therefore my opinion trumps yours" attitude should be shunned and laughed at, not embraced and empowered. She's acting like she speaks for all women and they're all made out of glass. Somehow these people get away with equating sexual or lewd jokes as anti women, as if women couldn't possible make the same kind of jokes. Not saying that's whats going on in the DDD case though, but that's her angle of it.
Unfortunately, this kind of extreme SJW mindset seems to be winning ground in the name of inclusion by scared useful idiots. Tech used to be a relatively sane area where logic and accomplishments was what mattered, now you need to kiss these lunatics asses unless you want to be painted as a horrible person that hates everyone but white straight males.
It reminds me about how several of the subreddits for lesbians have been taken over by transsexual women that ban lesbian women if they argue about not being attracted to penis[0]. Saying you're against MtF transexuals competing against regular women in sports labels you as a TERF[1] and persona non grata in some circles, and those circles are gaining power.
I'd like to point out that this isn't all trans women and some of us realize this takeover is absolutely insane. A lot of us want to blend into society and not cause any hardship to others, or any destruction of projects like this. Social Justice is going way too far.
Because of these grifters I don't even want to identify as transgender any longer.
Was Stalin known for unfair, politically biased code of conduct enforcement? Sorry, I don't see the need for hyperbole here. Even in context, yanking a ticket from KubeCon is hardly the same thing as being purged from the government, tried for imagined crimes and sent to a Gulag.
It is in line with the categories of the accusations made in that time. This is effectively a loyalty accusation: by seeking to mediate, he has shown himself to be insufficiently committed to the cause of racial and gender justice, which consequently means his motive must have been to defend the racist.
Yeah, but "making loyalty accusations" isn't exactly what Stalin is known for. He's known for a brutal purge that sent his political enemies to death camps.
To Godwinize for clarity: this is like using "Hitlerian" to celebrate a public policy achievement in passenger rail scheduling.
In this case I suppose "Stalinist" is a metonym for the apparatchiks who enforced ideological purity in institutions and made sure that deviants got punished.
Note that "tone policing" is only an offense when non-SJWs do it. When SJWs do it, it's known as "calling out" and should be encouraged. Example: https://lkml.org/lkml/2013/7/15/329
Punishing him for "tone policing" is like nailing Al Capone for tax evasion. Charles Max Wood's actual crime was being associated with John Sonmez, some brogrammer with a propensity to mouth off. In Scientology terms, he had an SP in his vicinity making him a PTS, and refusing to disconnect from the SP despite a direct order from his E/O meant he had an SP declare issued against him.
(Understanding Scientology will give you major clues into how social justice operates.)
Note that associating with John Sonmez is an unforgivable crime, but saying "white men in tech ain't shit" or "all whiteness is racist by design", as Kim Crayton has done, is not. This is because an often unstated assumption of codes of conduct is "we prefer the safety of marginalized groups over the comfort of privileged groups". (The GNOME Code of Conduct explicitly states this, almost verbatim.) That is to say, racism, sexism, and harassment are CoC violations if they are seen to "punch down", but not if they are seen to "punch up" by the CoC commissars who deliberate in secret.
This is why Uncle Bob's letter will go unheeded. If action is taken by the Linux Foundation because of his letter, it will be against Uncle Bob himself for posting it. He suggested that legitimate actions taken against one who punches down are harassment, which is itself punching down, therefore harassment and a CoC violation.
> Charles Max Wood's actual crime was being associated with John Sonmez, some brogrammer with a propensity to mouth off.
Not saying you are wrong, but if that is indeed the case, then someone should come out and say that out loud.
Right now, having a person banned for no clear reason what so ever, only creates uncertainty and division in the community.
Edit: Having looked into it, "John Sonmez, some brogrammer with a propensity to mouth off", actually seemed to be trying to take the heat away from a woman being verbally abused and attacked on twitter.
One can obviously argue about the way he did that, but how on earth does trying to defend a woman make him a "brogrammer"? Your position seems somewhat biased.
The second offense is that there is a picture of him with a MAGA hat somewhere on the Internet.
That was enough for someone to say they're uncomfortable attending the same conference as him.
Because he is a Mormon, he tried to solve the issue the Mormon way, offering them to discuss the issue. This was considered "tone policing" by the anonymous "Linux Foundation" account.
The raging assholes enforcing this fake social justice nonsense must be unambiguously called out by anyone with half a brain.
I like the open and public way of handling such matters. You won't have much transparency in private and that is dangerous. However, i am against their decision. All these "community guidelines" and "code of conduct" bullshit just get abused to attack and censor people.
This has some very interesting parallels to the current drama at Stack Overflow w/Monica Cellio. Someone is accused of breaking the CoC. The governing body expels this person in a public an explicit way. Looking into the details shows that really that person was just not following $GROUP_THINK.
In Stack Overflow's case this seems to be headed towards a Slander/Libel. I hope we don't end up in a world where this is the only way to follow $GROUP_THINK.
> Someone is accused of breaking the CoC. The governing body expels this person in a public an explicit way. Looking into the details shows that really that person was just not following $GROUP_THINK.
Note that this is pretty much what you would predict if CoC's were inherently politicized statements, as much as a MAGA hat. Which is exactly what opponents of CoC's have been contending for a long time.
Aren't they, though, if it happens that what CoC's say align much, much more with one political group than another? This obviously implies that the latter group believes in conducting themselves quite differently than the code mandates, and they need to suppress those beliefs (or at the very least, not act on those beliefs) while engaging with the group whose code it is.
The problem is, Does the majority of the developers contributing to Linux believe in this code? Or is it forced upon them by political activist that doesn’t do much coding because they spend much of their time on ‘social justice‘?
Even with a majority, you've got some percentage having to deal with what the majority wants, which is a heavy dose of irony if the point of the CoC is blanket inclusion in the first place. The conclusion is that inclusion itself excludes those who don't like inclusion, and excluding that group is warranted, isn't it?
They don't have to be, though. It's just this particular one, the Contributor Covenant - which was written and propagated by online social justice activists - happens to be the CoC organizations are increasingly being asked/encouraged/pressured (depending on the organization) to implement.
I personally don't think the idea behind a code of conduct is bad at all, or that formally banning gender/orientation/race/etc.-based harassment and discrimination in open source projects is bad. It's just that the Contributor Covenant creators and advocates seem to have a much wider and stricter stance on what falls under that category than what I personally agree with, and some of them have a history of launching what I consider unjustified McCarthy-style witch hunts towards people who otherwise share a lot of their views.
And I think a lot of other people who don't fully agree with all of their positions are kind of forced to keep quiet about it and just enforce what's increasingly becoming the status quo. The people not afraid of the backlash and who openly oppose it are often pretty right-wing and tend to spend all day lambasting SJWs on Twitter, or whatever, which is often much further than what an average CoC-detractor may be trying to do. The more right-leaning you are, the more likely you are to be honest about your opposition to it, which over time makes left-leaning people less honest about their opposition to it. They don't have a good middle option. Like what all the other polarization in the culture is causing, a left-leaning person who isn't fully on-board usually has no good option but to capitulate.
> They don't have to be, though. It's just this particular one, the Contributor Covenant - which was written and propagated by online social justice activists - happens to be the CoC organizations are increasingly being asked/encouraged/pressured (depending on the organization) to implement.
I've heard/seen multiple accounts of anonymous drive-by commenters saying something to the effect of "I've noticed you have no code of conduct, and there are several pull requests by PoC that you have refused. You might want to consider adopting the Contributor Covenant." A sort of stealthy protection racket: "Nice project you have here. Wouldn't want a discrimination lawsuit to ruin it all."
I suspect the anonymous commenters are either Coraline Ada Ehmke herself, or one of her lieutenants.
> And I think a lot of other people who don't fully agree with all of their positions are kind of forced to keep quiet about it and just enforce what's increasingly becoming the status quo. The people not afraid of the backlash and who openly oppose it are often pretty right-wing and tend to spend all day lambasting SJWs on Twitter, or whatever, which is often much further than what an average CoC-detractor may be trying to do. The more right-leaning you are, the more likely you are to be honest about your opposition to it, which over time makes left-leaning people less honest about their opposition to it.
I'm left-leaning, and I'm sick of this shit. I've gotten downmodded here on Hackernews and elsewhere for it, and I'm kind of glad to see that others on various communities not related to Kiwi Farms or the alt-right are starting to come around. Back in the day, open source was the closest thing around to the promised cybertopia of AT&T commercials. It wasn't all holding hands and getting along, but you learned to grow a thick skin, focus on technical concerns, and -- with a bit of learning and practice -- be a bit nicer. I've seen Christians, Muslims, and atheists, people on the left and right politically, collaborate in this way. And it's being ruined by this sort of entryism. Open source (the Linux development process in particular) was built to be resilient to sabotage by government agencies and corporations. If I were just such an agency or corporation and I wanted to undermine or destroy open source, I would be paying very close attention to, if not actively exploiting, social-justice entryism because it seems to have found a weak point.
CoC always are about promoting a specific moral framework, one where traditionally marginalized people are protected. So yes, going against that framework is going against the CoC.
>Hi all, We have reviewed social and videos and determined that the Event Code of Conduct was violated and his registration to the event has been revoked. Our events should and will be a safe space
Could we try to be less orwellian? Are we really banning people who say things we don't like on YouTube?
Yes, but I don't see the relevance. The use of the term "social credit system" is intended to imply an system of political oppression and censorship similar to that used by the Chinese Communist party, and further to create fear of the implied radical leftist/progressive agenda assumed to be behind codes of conduct by associating them with violent authoritarianism.
Being banned from a private venue is an expression of the right of free association. It is not a violation of anyone's rights, because one does not have a right to attend a private venue. It is not a form of political oppression or censorship, because one does not require attendance at a private venue to express one's political beliefs.
Therefore, because the rights of banned attendees have not been violated, nor their speech suppressed, nor has any violence been imposed against the banned attendees, or critics of the code of conduct, said code of conduct is not equivalent to the policies of the Chinese government or a social credit system.
"Right of free association", sure. So by that token, businesses should be free to refuse to "associate" with anyone for any reason. Guess what, that legitimizes racism and discrimination.
I used agree with (and sort of still do) the sentiment of private discrimination. The logic goes like this...
1. People should be able to control their own business
2. If they reject a group of people for a given reason, they can
3. Businesses that done reject this group will gain more business. (Both from the newly released group, and from patrons who are not rejected but are against the discrimination)
4. The rejected people could start their own business as a competitor
5. Discriminatory people/businesses are immediately identified.
It seems like it could just work itself out, but in Patrice I'm not sure.
Maybe I'm using the wrong verbiage, but I don't see the difference. If the "rules of conduct" extend into your personal life outside the venue, how is that not the same?
Demonstrating a lack of ethical values in personal life seems like a good measuring stick to whether one might demonstrate ethical values in a professional setting. But more importantly, how can participants interact with any event or process of an organization if they cannot trust those involved?
If someone says they're going to bomb an event on Twitter should they be banned? Yes, everyone agrees.
If someone says they're a race realist and that they're going to make fun of all the black people in tech should they be banned? Not everyone agrees.
If someone analyzes IQ studies about race realism to highlight the flaws in methodology but doesn't outright condemn race realism should they be banned? No, everyone agrees.
To claim that its 1984 because we're trying to work out the fuzziness in the middle is absurd.
Even beginning to discuss race realism almost anywhere will get you banned, including from this forum. Especially if you think there are substantial IQ differences.
If in one context someone expresses beliefs I find odious but they do not say odious things or behave improperly in another say tech conferences I think they ought to be able to come to a conference and talk about tech.
I don't say this because I want to help odious people but because I don't want other people judging me.
People have many different beliefs and it ought to be sufficient to respect one another rather than agree on all points.
What if merely not denouncing trumptards with sufficient vigor is sufficient to paint me as undesirable.
That's a fair fear to have and these are difficult questions.
But take what you advocate to its logical extreme: what if I say it'd be ideal if all minorities would die of terrible diseases to "cleanse" tech/the country/etc., but without calling for direct violence. It's an opinion. Would you be OK with me speaking at a conference and being given the associated prestige?
I would be totally OK with listening to your technical presentation. I'm not concerned with your other opinions. Or rather, I refuse to be forced by others to be concerned with your other opinions.
I'd listen to quality presentation on a technical subject that interests me even if the presenter was Hitler or Pol Pot.
I don't think I like the opinions of this Sarah Mei on Twitter, but I'd happily listen to her talk on another subject that does interest me.
Seriously? You could just put aside that insane, clearly evil opinion and listen to them speak for an hour? Give them an applause and move on without the slightest burden on your conscious?
If your conscience is burdened by hearing the words someone says, may I propose you need to work on filtering words? That implies you are digesting and importing everything you hear directly into your worldview, instead of examining what people say critically in case they are lying or being disingenuous.
“Hearing the words” is an oversimplification. By attending that talk you are giving this person legitimacy. You are implicitly saying that this person belongs in our society. You are contributing, in a small way, to our society being open to wildly dangerous people. I personally don’t want to live in a society where people who wish death on minorities are accepted. This is not hard!
I continue to not buy the 'lending legitimacy' argument at all. Listening to someone's words helps me understand more accurately what they are attempting to convey. It is up to me to use that conveyed perspective correctly. I'd rather hear the words of someone I fiercely disagree with than craft a strawman in my own head to counter, because then I can correctly craft the antidote when speaking to others who /are/ being persuaded by such a view.
Maybe this person fell for a conman and in fact still DOES belong in our society. More than 49% of the country is stupid but 49% isn't literally hitler.
Well, to turn things around... You think people haven't just kept their head down, ignored the speaker's politics, and paid attention to the technical aspects of a talk when it's coming from someone on the left?
Its not about right vs left. Im talking about the specific example given. A person like that does not belong in our society much less should be given my time.
Just to be very clear, what is you Solution to these irredeemable people who you believe don't "belong in our society"? What can it be other than death, or exile resulting in premature death?
Have you thought through the implications of trying to do this to at minimum 1/3 of the population of the US? And what that 1/3 or more are concluding from this opinion being widely expressed in the US right now?
No the solution is not death. Thats is such a lazy conclusion. If you know someone has a really terrible and dangerous opinion, you dont have to attend their tech talk. Just dont support them in any way personally. Its that simple.
"A person like that does not belong in our society much less should be given my time."
What you're saying now only covers the last part of your statement, what about the "does not belong in our society" part?
And why are you evading the questions about what effects these type of statements have on the 1/3 or more of the US that's targeted by them? You really think that's a free action?
This is a message to ianwalter: your arguments are sound, both in form and substance, and are made in good faith. It pains me to see you waste your energy on educating a group a people who are so willfully ignorant that they would rather attack you with bad faith arguments and downvotes than listen.
It pains me even more to see bend over backwards to justify yourself to people such as Throwawayaerlei. To them, this is just perverse entertainment. They are not actually interested in what you have to say. You don't owe these people, or any of the other bad-faith participants in this thread, a response. If I were you, I would leave them in their morally backwards bubble, and move on.
Seriously? You'd ignore someone's (we're assuming, for the sake of argument) otherwise insightful and well-reasoned technical presentation because you dislike them personally for unrelated (if justified) reasons? Because that is literally ad hominem[0].
Yes, without a doubt. Its not about “disliking them personally”. In that example it’s about not giving legitimacy to someone who doesn’t deserve it. In the grand scheme of things, some technical insight is insignificant compared to the perpetuation of evil and suffering.
Would you still be as comfortable listening to a technical presentation by an advocate of violent ethnic cleansing of minorities if you yourself belonged to a targeted ethnic group?
Would you still be ok listening to “a quality presentation by Hitler” if you were Jewish and your grandparents died in the Holocaust?
Not the parent poster, but probably in a similar boat because I would be ok listening to "a quality presentation by Sarah Mei" even though I am considered a member of a group I have a creeping suspicion they would be quite happy to send to the "showers" if only the political climate allowed them to - and I'm very glad it doesn't! - and already had a number of relations get hounded out of society by their associates.
Hitler would have to be presenting something really outstanding to make it worth my while. Hitler and Pol Pot are extreme examples of mass murderers, of course. I'm resorting to such hyperbole to make a point: I'm not going to deny myself access to helpful information just because I can't stand the person offering it, nor do I believe it is reasonable to ask others to do so.
Operation Paperclip is a good example of this principle in practice involving actual Nazis.
Do you think your jewish, black or lgbt peers, for example, would answer the same? Would they also be comfortable with your "resorting to hyperboles to make a point"?
Allow me to answer this question for you: As a Black man in tech (my skin crawls every time I have to make this clear i n these types of discussions because I absolutely DESPISE identity politics) I would answer the same. There, you have an answer from someone who's opinion carries more weight in this context because of the color of my skin. Also, Canada's great grandparent comment was less hyperbolic than yours.
I'd wait for Hitler to finish presenting and then get a rope and hang him until dead. How we deal with extremes can be revelatory but often just muddies the water. For example here it introduces multiple novel elements that aren't present in the original example. The need for justice, personal threat, emotional involvement that nearly always destroys any hope of rational argument.
More importantly in America it can't be a moral crime to vote for the wrong side else we can't continue as a republic. Our country requires the ability to have regularly scheduled revolutions without being torn asunder.
More importantly in America it can't be a moral crime to vote for the wrong side else we can't continue as a republic. Our country requires the ability to have regularly scheduled revolutions without being torn asunder.
The Republic is dead, there is no credible path forward that's going to continue it, in part because one side has stopped accepting the results of our "regularly scheduled revolutions" if they don't win. Which perhaps not counting G. H. W. Bush has been steadily more clear with each Republican Presidential election victory starting with Nixon before Watergate.
Sarah Jeong was actually _hired_ by the New York Times after tweeting the kind of vile language you are mentioning.
So clearly it's not a problem for everyone. But I understand it's a whataboutism argument.
So my position is that organizations and individuals should, generally, be free to speak, and free to organize as they see fit (including hiring, or not, someone). Because it's the best way to minimize conflict.
I would agree with you, /except/ that we should also then hold organizations to their own standards, because if they violate them, it indicates that their proclaimed standards are disingenuous, and are covering for some other reason.
> If someone says they're going to bomb an event on Twitter should they be banned? Yes, everyone agrees.
What? No, not everyone agrees! That someone should be arrested, but keep his Twitter account. We have laws and law enforcement for a reason, and we don't need companies to play speech police, which, incidentally, in this particular case, would make law enforcement more difficult.
> If someone analyzes IQ studies... everyone agrees.
Unfortunately, you're wrong again. Some radicals would want you banned for merely using the word "race", regardless of context.
> What? No, not everyone agrees! That someone should be arrested, but keep his Twitter account. We have laws and law enforcement for a reason, and we don't need companies to play speech police, which, incidentally, in this particular case, would make law enforcement more difficult.
Exactly what I was thinking. And frankly, I'd rather have someone post "Imma shoot up ur confrence" and get arrested because of that post than have them avoid Twitter and instead, yaknow, actually shoot up the conference.
Banning 1/3 of the nation who voted for a horrible person from every participating every again in social society in any venue right thinking individuals run doesn't seem like a grey area. Twisting "safe space" to mean a space free of people who hold bad opinions instead of a space in which you can expect to share your thoughts without being treated poorly again doesn't seem very grey.
I feel like we’re on track to having to sign a sworn affidavit that you’re not a Republican, and don’t support any Republicans, to get a job, renew your driver’s license, rent an apartment, get a checking account… it sounds ridiculous, but did where we are now just a few years ago.
I am surprised you feel that way in a time where much of our government is controlled by Republicans, including the presidency. I think I understand why you feel that way given how localized politics can be, but I would counter that it does seem unlikely the 50+ million registered Republican voters will be made homeless and jobless by the government they presently control.
It's important to recognize that the ethical concerns with the current administration go far beyond the scope of simple politics. That's the fundamental issue at stake here. Are we willing to hold the line on ethics, while our political system is in turmoil. The political sphere may be willing to look the other way, but that does not mean our private intellectual organizations have to follow suit.
I think that means insisting on civility in our gatherings. Speaking out both in public and to the people we interact with against what is wrong.
I don't think it is served by trolling peoples internet history to discover if they ever committed any thought crime. Our country will be better off the more MAGAers either age into the grave or get off the stupid train. Keep in mind that many of them are already decent citizens in the way they comport themselves in their lives, in the way they treat the people they interact with. They have just bought into a moronic ideology and will vote to enable further stupidity that will hurt their fellows in a way they would never due if given that straight choice between good and evil directly.
Isolating that person instead of communicating with them is a missed opportunity that serves only to signal our virtue to our fellows. It is a choice to enhance our social status instead of our society. It's positively trumpian and it plays right into his hands by making that person more isolated and thus more vulnerable.
This is where the logical insanity really begins to play.
Your ideology is constructed in order to grant 'incivility' (the moral permission to commit violence) to people based on whatever parameters are useful at the moment.
It's a horrendously incoherent worldview, and will shake itself to pieces.
How the on earth did the kernel community allow these parasites to become arbiters of morality? And where is Linus Torvalds? He surely despises this nonsense as much as anyone.
Since Linus owns the Linux trademark, it seems it would be simple for him to step in by saying "Stop doing stupid shit or you are no longer the Linux Foundation". But maybe he can't do this because of this stupidity:
"The “Linux®” Trademark
For information regarding the Linux trademark, owned by Linus Torvalds, please see the Linux Mark Institute (administered by The Linux Foundation). Your use of the Linux trademark must be in accordance with the Linux Mark Institute’s policy."
It's clear the Linux Foundation has been given too much power. Whenever a group of people get too much power or money, someone in the group, almost by definition an asshole, will abuse it.
I don't understand. Are people mad because he posted a picture of himself in a maga hat? That seems awfully milquetoast. You know you live in a bubble when you want to black-list half the nation for a common political view.
Edit: it seems that people are annoyed because he's tied to a guy named John Sonmez. Any context on why this guy is bad? It looks like he caters to the same crowd Jordan Peterson does, but hasn't said anything offensive? The most I can find are references to "SJW"s, which doesn't sound particularly bad (especially when you consider what people on the "other side" say/do).
I agree that guy sounds like a jerk, but he's not the guy who got kicked out of a conference. It was someone associated with him. And I believe the rationale for that guy getting kicked out was wearing a maga hat.
He participates a flame war on the internet! No one has done this since Hitler!
Seriously whats so bad about that tweet? He is a bit rude "shut your mouth", but so are 90% of the other participants. The parent tweet could be interpreted as much more rude -- She is assuming her collegaues are racist just because they are saying that "she should be happy to work there" I'd say that to almost everyone in IT, just compare the job to anything in retail or a school teacher.
So outside this individual case, how open or public should these types of decisions be made? For transparency, shouldn't people that are part of the community know when these actions/accusations take place and what/how decisions were made?
>
Individuals who participate (or plan to participate) in Linux Foundation events should conduct themselves at all times in a manner that comports with both the letter and spirit of this policy prohibiting harassment and abusive behavior, whether before, during or after the event. This includes statements made in social media postings, online publications, text messages, and all other forms of electronic communication.
It sort of is but it basically just means they can ban anyone from their events at any time for any reason--and they pretty much have that right anyway CoC or no CoC.
I'm sure that policy is enforced in a fair and totally non-arbitrary fashion— have they banned Linus Torvalds from their events? He's "tone policed" way harder than this guy.
Alright, I've spent a couple hours trying to figure this out. Correct me if I'm wrong here. Asking the "woke" individuals on twitter what Charles did wrong will invoke a response of "F you do your own research it's obvious what Charles did wrong."
Man A said something racist to Woman B, Charles then stepped in and said "let's have a reasonable phone call and sort this out civilly." What gets more interesting is Woman B has at least one tweet saying "White men in tech ain't shit." So she's definitely racist. edit: (could be wrong about who is who here, but someone involved in getting him banned definitely said the white men in tech comment.)
Charles is getting this hate because by saying to the "Obviously racist" man A, "lets have a civil phone call about this," He's obviously siding with racists instead of siding with the marginalized minorities. (sarcasm)
Charles is getting tons of comments that he should shut the F up and listen to these marginalized groups instead of trying to butt in and make himself look good. Charles is Mormon, 9 Mormons were just burned alive in Mexico, so obviously Charles has no idea what it's like the be a part of a hated, marginalized group.
edit: Sorry it's hard to tell, I'm definitely being sarcastic in parts of this post.
Opinion here, I think people on twitter are working very hard to turn "differing politics" into "unacceptable bigotry." And it's definitely working. It seems the original racist guy mainly has a problem with affirmative action. And he definitely doesn't use current politically correct speech around gender either. But is that grounds for banning a dude just for associating with the "racist guy". I'll leave that up to the reader to decide.
What is happening to the USA? I am honestly more scared for our country because of the current pervasive political divisiveness than I am because of climate change. At least with climate change you have a few decades to prepare. The USA wasn't anything like it is now 20 years ago in terms of divisiveness, and it seems like the divisiveness is getting worse every year. A "cold civil war" I've heard it called.
You bet - the political elites got thoroughly rejected and the resulting temper tantrum hasn't stopped yet!
The next five years should be even more exciting.
EDIT: we really need to stop referring to them as political elites; that's giving them too much credit. The wannabe political elites then - because obviously they weren't as elite as they thought - ha!
Somewhat less divisively: what ought to have been a routine democratic election took place which a lot of people invested a lot of emotion into. It’s hardly the first time a world government has had a political upset, but it does seem to be the first time a significant segment of the population lost sight of the fact that democracy only works when everybody accepts the results, even if it wasn’t the result they voted for.
I don't believe your assertion that it was the losers who didn't accept the results. The person most prominently questioning the integrity of the election was the winner. He spent months putting out strange lies about about "3 million invalid votes" and opened an advisory committee to investigate election integrity. He's only escalated it since. A couple of months ago, he claimed that the 2016 election had 16 million fake votes.
One of those two investigations produced 34 indictments, convictions, or guilty pleas (one of the indictments is on trial today!). The other accomplished nothing but disbanded itself after a judge ordered that the Democrats appointed to the committee should be allowed to see what the committee was doing.
One of them was headline news for years on end before fizzling out after it became evident that it didn't even come close to the supposedly imminent impeachment of the president. The other was a minor thing that nobody really took seriously and ended years ago.
> ...He's obviously siding with racists instead of siding with the marginalized minorities.
Hopefully you aren't being too serious. I could easily imagine someone saying that who was taking B's side in the dispute. No one should be banned from a conference and slandered as a hateful, violence-inclined etc. person for trying his best to de-escalate a conflict, no matter how misguided and perhaps even outrageous.
I doubt 10 people know the real story behind this. Everyone here should practice the MYOB principle.
edit: DuskStar - I obviously edited this substantially, because I added nothing of value and only served to continue discussion of this submission. Both of the conclusions you jumped to are incorrect, it's a shame we were unable to have a mutually respectful exchange about it.
EDIT: My apologies for the lack of conversation here, then.
Original comment:
I'm confused by the significance of that link. Are you trying to suggest that since he was against firing James Damore, or since he's complained about character assassination in the past, his future opinions should be ignored?
What is the MYOB principle? I did a Google search, but Google seems to think I'm looking for a company out of Australia that makes accounting and resource planning software for businesses. Given your commment and the context of this thread, I suspect that's not what you're referring to.
It's also clear as mud how things got from a tussle on Twitter the whole content/participation of which is also pretty fuzzy to a ban from a conference that had no apparent connection. (The conference is in about a week so nothing happened at the conference itself.)
The Linux Foundation did do a code of conduct post thread on Twitter which, among other things, mentions you can violate an event CoC before an event although it's also unclear what that means. I'm sure more than a few of the 10,000 people attending Kubecon have, at some point in their lives, done something to upset someone else on Twitter.
What grinds my gears about situations like this is that the people inventing and enforcing these so-called CoCs are never actual engineers, just individuals who have somehow infiltrated the engineering community and are dictating to its authentic members.
That's an interesting point. Can you share more about who is an actual engineer and who isn't? Is this a certification? Do you consider yourself part of the engineering community, and if so, how does someone get admitted, either by your standards or the standards of the community?
I remember sitting in a session at a linux foundation conference where someone on staff at TLF was the speaker and took a shot at President Trump and his supporters. It was subtle but unmistakable. I think the shot likely violated the CoC but nothing ever came of it. I can't find a session video or I'd link it.
I remember hearing it and thinking, statistically speaking there are supporters of Trump in the audience. Later, when I brought this up with others, I found someone who was a Trump supporter who is uncomfortable about that attacks on Trump and Trump supporters are allowed. The CoC notes unacceptable behavior includes, "offensive or degrading language".
I share this because the linux foundation is over a global community of people from various countries. People have different opinions on politics and other beliefs. Open source is a place where people of many differences can come together.
Having personally seen a bias against Trump supporters makes me want see this be handled above reproach.
You have misunderstood this movement. It's not about fairness or stopping discriminatory behavior. It's about banning all opinions except the sanctioned one.
"Do not speak unless you are one of us, do not think unless you have been told how to, do not hold us to the same standards as we hold others."
I regularly see posts that are...intense...on this forum, and many others. They make anything that Wood did seem pretty tame.
I guess any organization has a right to do whatever they want with their hosted services, but you might ask a certain Ms. Streisand about how certain small issues can blow up.
There's a good chance that Mr. Wood will suddenly see a great deal of rather...strident...support, as a result of this. Robert Martin is pretty cool, but not everyone is Uncle Bob.
Now I know a thing about this Wood guy that I would never have known without UB's complaint. It does not, in fact, inspire me to lend him support, or even the clean socks I am led to guess he lacks.
Another result of UB's announcement is that I have noticed Uncle Bob, appropriately or ironically, shares initials with the infamous Undefined Behavior.
Is anyone surprised by this? I certainly am not. It really is inevitable.
When the whole CoC was shoehorned in the Linux Kernel, many people warned that this was going to happen. We were just hand waved with "No such thing would happen" because the people behind the CoC were not racist, etc, despite when the previous events like the whole opal mess indicated otherwise.
The really ironic thing here is that America(and Silicon Valley) was built on historical events like this. A whole lot of geniuses and skilled people were driven to America by similar groupthink lynchings happening in Europe and Asia up until and including WW2. They built America into a powerhouse. If this continues to happen then Silicon Valley is going to get a painful history lesson they could have easily avoided.
Has there ever been an instance of a CoC being used in a reasonable way against an actually unreasonable person? From the history, it appears that CoC’s were designed to stop Linus Torvalds, specifically, but he’s still around (but he does seem to be afraid of CoC enforcers now).
Part of a typical process is that these things are handled privately. Only the rare exceptions go public. That means those that know or can reference cases cannot share this detail. I would provide a citation if I could but I respect the privacy of the process so I can't.
The problem with this is it's the same argument that gets used to justify things like the Patriot Act. "The only times you see us use this power is in horrible ways, but we assure you, most of the time we use it for good reasons! We just can't tell you about it, because CLASSIFIED". In short, it's an argument that only works if you already trust the person making the argument.
IMO that shouldn't fly with the Patriot Act, and it shouldn't fly here either.
I remember watching randyben get banned from Kiwicon one year. It was very public. They said his talk violated the CoC without specifically mentioned which part and how. It was very public, announced in front of the whole conference.
> Yes. Though, most CoC violations are handled privately
That really sounds like abuse of power with extra steps. Either ALL of these violations should be private or NONE of them should be. Selectively enforcing something like this is just bias and vendetta politics
I think that a reasonable code would allow the punished party to publicly disclose their punishment, otherwise the punishers (for lack of a better term) would do whatever they wanted. But it should be private by default.
I believe that many CoC violations would include private events which the victim would like to keep private. After all, there's a good reason why we don't make all the police reports about harassment public.
Sure but in those situations most like the CoC's like we are talking about (things like the contributor covenant) would not be need to remove the person that was abusive
I have been a part of many projects with out these types of CoC's where people have been removed from the project because they were an asshole, or the project is forked and the assholes are left behind
Historically that was the way of open source.
Today however it is much different... Politics and Social Status seem to matter more than Code, merit, and reality
I'd turn it around. Has there ever been an instance of a CoC being used in an unreasonable way against an actually reasonable person? There's been a few cases that blew up because the behavior fell into an arguably ambiguous zone, but I can't think of anyone who suffered real consequences and didn't have it coming. Just a little more tact and thoughtfulness on the offender's part would have saved a world of trouble.
Now I'm of two minds on this. I do sometimes miss the more freewheeling culture of the '00s, and feel like the need for constant compliance has drained the tech scene of some life... but honestly it's a small price to pay if the only alternative is tolerating fascists in your midst.
I would disagree. I'm not a Republican myself, but it doesn't seem any different than wearing a Bernie hat or T shirt. He is expressing his political beliefs. You may find them offensive, and he may likewise find your views offensive, but I doubt either of you are doing so with the intent to offend.
On what planet? Would you say the same of a Yang (MATH) hat? I loath Trump as much as anyone but this is utterly insane. We are not talking about Nazi imagery here, we are talking about a hat that supports the president elect - who by the way might very well win a second term on the back of this sort of un-american censorship.
How is a wearing a MAGA hat a CoC violation? This is so blatantly political that it's ridiculous.
So 50% of the US (republicans) are in violation of the CoC. Echo chamber much ?
Agree with this. The MAGA hat is a symbol of endorsing every vile thing Trump has ever said. It is a threatening symbol and I believe many wear it not to stand with America but to stand with Trump, who is only concerned with Trump. And some wear it to trigger others.
It is a threatening, offensive, inconsiderate gesture.
I served on the exec board of a non profit org that used our CoC to adjudicate behavior (sexual predator, harassment, etc) that was not covered by our bylaws.
One big difference, why our CoC proved useful, was we had a trial. Plaintiff, defendant, evidence, testimony, jury, deliberation. All of it.
It was a lot of work. And EXTREMELY painful. But it worked. A popular leader had a day in court. And our org emerged stronger for it.
>Read their tweets, many of them are openly and proudly racist, sexist and ageist.
Are they really? Or do they just dare to hold views that have nothin to do with sexism, agism or racism but instead just violate the "proper" political orthodoxy?
Oh, I absolutely agree - my original comment was perhaps ambiguous. This was the hypocrisy of someone who actively advocated for CoCs to be introduced even as she was actively harassing people who didn't fit her world-view.
It is the lifecycle of great societies. It starts with a small group of independent thinkers who are less susceptible to mimicry, leaving the larger status quo. Then it becomes successful. Then it becomes the mainstream status quo. People who engage in mimicry (scapegoating) become the majority.
My natural inclination is to agree and stand against this stuff which superficially really does look like hysterical moralism.
The thing that stops me and almost makes me side with the CoC crowd is that I've spent the last 8-10 years watching a wave of fascist and hyper-reactionary ideology sweep across hacker culture.
The existence of so much actual fascism, race nationalism, Naziism, ideological misogyny ("red pill" and "incel" stuff), etc. in so many corners of hacker/geek culture make the hard core SJW crowd look like they have a point. The stuff that revolves around places like Gab and /pol/ makes the craziest examples of "call out culture" and "cancel culture" look sane and maybe necessary.
It's like this.
Say you're in Salem. Say you're horrified at all the witch hysteria. Now imagine you go for a walk in the woods and come upon a circle of people chanting and sacrificing babies over a bonfire...
Hmm... now maybe those witch hunters have a point!
I feel a little like that.
What I really think is that everyone on the right, left, and just about everywhere else lost their damn minds for some reason starting about 2010-2012. The MAGA hat crowd and the "cancel culture" crowd are all insane and this is all crazies fighting with crazies.
This install is totally borked. Format and reinstall the OS.
@ mods I 100% understand why this is flagged and it is already being a mess but it has 100+ upvotes in <1 hour. If possible I think this issue is important enough to some such as myself in the community that this post should be allowed on the front page.
Aside from employing Torvalds, LF has a lot of really muddy business. The whole OpenAPI gang is a shame on FOSS, and this is just something I touched professionally.
Er.. in short, tech-blind industry representatives are using the LF brand to advance their careers, and LF insiders are helping them out of sheer kindness.
Article flagged, because despite the relevance to a tech community, and the high profile of R Martin, some people in HN can't help abuse "flagging" for things they disagree with.
For anyone who sees this: the link is being flag- and vote-brigaded, rather than being discussed, about an hour after it was listed. The same conduct that spawned the letter is being applied here to attempt to mute dissent.
I used to think The Great Filter as one of the explanations to the Fermi Paradox was just nuts - but sadly the last several years in particular have shown how it's absolutely possible. Apparently civilizations can be too successful.
Then again I suppose one shouldn't be too surprised; it would be easy to argue that Rome fell mainly because it became too successful and turned inward onto itself - much like many parts of our society are - the need for a letter like this to be written is proof there.
680 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 322 ms ] threadThe problem is the title gives you no information about what the letter is actually about. An open letter could do anything from raising an important for the community...to something that's tedious and irrelevant (e.g. "An open letter to the linux foundation about the lack of vegan food in the cafeteria").
This letter doesn't really inform the reader of anything. The very fact that it talks around the issue so much that you cannot even discern at all what the issue was, hints at "I don't need, nor do I want to know".
"The Linux Foundation received a public tweet sent to the @KubeCon twitter address. That tweet recommended that Kube Con discontinue their association with Charles Max Wood. The reasons given in this complaint were his request for an open and civil phone call, and a picture of Mr. Wood wearing a MAGA hat.
The Linux Foundation publicly replied from the @linuxfoundation twitter account as follows:
Hi all, We have reviewed social and videos and determined that the Event Code of Conduct was violated and his registration to the event has been revoked. Our events should and will be a safe space."
You don't know (and this letter's author doesn't know) that wearing a MAGA hat was what they considered a violation of the code of conduct.
It is the only possible conclusion given this information. Is there more?
> We have reviewed social and videos and determined that the Event Code of Conduct was violated
It could have been "he wore the wrong hat" but it also could have been "we looked and he was harassing people on Twitter".
https://twitter.com/nebrius/status/1191821800302206976
> general ban on hats and clothing with political statements
In some schools of thought, a MAGA hat is a hate symbol like a swastika armband. They view it differently than they would a Republican National Convention hat. Whether they're right or wrong, these are the people writing and enforcing codes of conduct these days
Excuse me, but what could ever be hateful about making America great again? Doesn't this rather suggest that these schools of thought themselves are being quite hateful towards America? It's sure convenient that "these are the people writing and enforcing codes of conduct these days", because if they weren't, the case for banning them as CoC violators would be pretty clearcut.
The belief that what has weakened America is multiculturalism, immigration, feminism and racial diversity, and that what is needed to make America great again is reversing the aforementioned trends, and restoring to heterosexual, Christian white males their former status of cultural and political hegemony.
Sheesh - for a racist spouting rhetoric full of racial components Trump is pretty awful at actually being a racist. Just look at his immediate family! He's not only an incompetent politician he's an incompetent racist!
Trump supporters can pretend that American white supremacists and neo-reactionaries didn't flock to him like moths to a flame and turn his campaign into a referendum against the loss of white male political and cultural relevance and the advance of progressivism and feminism, or that they aren't tainted by association, but that is what happened.
Trump supporters were perfectly aware of the racial narrative forming around him, and they chose to embrace it, rather than fight against it, because they found common ground with the racists in their hatred of the left and Hillary Clinton. They don't now have cause to complain about being tarred with the same brush.
I tried to find out what Bernie Sanders' "association with Antifa" was, and I couldn't find anything that would indicate that he supports the group, or that his supporters do by a particularly wide margin. But yes, if the same shoe was on the other foot, obviously that would happen.
I do understand my opponents - they won't shut up about themselves. The labels I ascribe to them are reasonable extrapolations of the rhetoric they use when they express their contempt for liberals, progressives, feminists, "city dwellers," immigrants, and anyone to the left of themselves, or with whom they disagree.
If such people are a minority, then they are a very vocal and, apparently, very influential minority. And if their views don't represent yours, then I would humbly suggest that you may be the one who doesn't understand your allies.
>We did NOT "choose to embrace a racial narrative", it was imputed on us and we don't know how to fight it effectively (a la "I don't believe X!" "well, that's surefire proof that you believe X!").
You seem to be implying that narrative was imputed from the outside, but it wasn't. It's a narrative that the extremists who took the party over from within embraced and a banner they proudly waved in everyone's faces.
It wasn't fought against because a house divided against itself cannot stand, and it was embraced because the narrative of the "alienated, disenfranchised white male" at the center of the victim mentality driving right-wing populism was so effective as a galvanizing force that its true white supremacist roots didn't even register, or didn't even matter, to a lot of people.
I, and many others, are seriously outraged at this chronic & intentional libel of our sociopolitical positions - especially by those touting the banner of "tolerance & diversity".
The same often holds true with outbreaks of political protest, like the ones in Chile right now. The mainstream story is that the protests are over a subway fare hike, but the reality is that this was just the lightning rod event.
Check the date on the picture...
It appears that someone who wore a pro-Trump MAGA hat in 2016. And is thus banned from a conference in 2019.
> In summary, it appears to this humble observer that The Code of Conduct process at The Linux Foundation went very badly off the rails with regard to Charles Max Wood. That LF owes Mr. Wood, and the Software Community at large, a profound apology. That LF should keep all future Code of Conduct complaints and decisions personal and confidential. That LF should publish and follow a well defined process for accepting, reviewing, and adjudicating future Code of Conduct complaints. And that some form of reparation be provided to Mr. Wood for the public harm that was done to him by the careless and unprofessional behavior of The Linux Foundation.
> Yours
> Robert C. Martin.
How any organization of any significant size can adopt a CoC without having these types of policies in place is madness. Especially handling it in private first!
https://twitter.com/CHERdotdev/status/1190404796924268544
https://twitter.com/mimismash/status/1185942308769976320
-content that has a lot of missing context-
Is what is described what actually happened?
It seems like the writer might not know either.
This isn't a conversation worth having. I cannot delete my comments. Please flagkill them.
Wow. And here I am, thinking that we no longer discriminate people based on their political leanings and everyone has the right to freedom of political opinion.
Move over racial profiling. Here comes political profiling.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
Or put more succinctly, when all the other intolerant are gone, who will speak up when they come for you?
We protect religion because it is a fundamental expression of deeply-held values and it is everyone's right to do so. Political persuasion is also a result of those values, and not mutable. You can't "just change" what you believe.
> Even moreso, the decision to wear a MAGA hat is a choice. There are many LGBTQIA+ republicans in America, including many of my friends. They don't wear MAGA hats at such events because they're not looking for conflict.
"There are many clean-cut black kids in America, including many of my friends. They don't wear hoodies and saggy pants in public because they're not looking for conflict."
If you replace a your chosen group with "blacks" and it sounds like something David Duke would write, you may wish to re-consider your phraseology.
Edit: the above poster deleted his comment, but I feel the need to replicate the text so mine makes sense. Here is what it said:
"I often help my friends organize and operate LGBTQIA+ events at hacker cons.
Someone showing up with a MAGA hat is rare, and when it does happen, they're either there to make a statement about free speech (which is fine) or to harass one or more of our attendees (which is unacceptable). So when it does happen, we have to be aware of it, but we don't take any specific actions unless they misbehave.
In the wake of white supremacist violence (see second link from my previous comment), not taking note whenever someone with a MAGA hat shows up would be negligent and put targeted people at risk. If you put "allow white supremacist violence against minority groups" on one end of the scale and "avoid any perception of 'political profiling' behavior" on the other, protecting the LGBTQIA+ community that these events serve is going to win every time.
Unlike race and sexual orientation, your political beliefs are mutable and the result of your choices.
Even moreso, the decision to wear a MAGA hat is a choice. There are many LGBTQIA+ republicans in America, including many of my friends. They don't wear MAGA hats at such events because they're not looking for conflict."
How does one "harass" someone by wearing a hat? If that is at all possible then no one can wear a hat because someone might claim harassment (cowboy hats - racists, MAGA hats - extreme right wing, Australian hats - cultural appropriation, etc).
If someone annoys the organizer of a private (non-government) event they simply have the right to throw them out if they don't like something about them. That is why it is in fact okay to throw out a guy with a MAGA hat (or a LG group organizer), but statists can't say it because it'd mean it's okay to discriminate. But they like to be able to practice discrimination.
At one time the hat represented something legitimate but Trump's first term is coming to its end. The campaign has been over for a long time now. The MAGA hat is yet another symbol that the alt right appropriated for itself. It doesn't just represent Trump supporters and Republicans at large anymore.
Long enough for it to start all over again in short order, though. And Trump may well choose to keep the "MAGA" slogan for his re-election campaign - last we heard, it was a choice between that or "Keep America Great".
I'm a minority. Not only do I not think it's threatening, I'm even considering buying a few.
Not for political reasons, but just because its become so iconic I think they'll be worth a lot more as vintage items in 10-20 years.
Why does it represent a threat? Did Trump made any laws that negatively discriminiates minorities? Are there death camps for them? Are they not allowed to hold certain positions?
Point blank that's what they are since the only benefit they seem to claim from his policies is the "economy" which we all know will begin faltering given enough time as things are slowing down and have been on a global scale, given that I don't see how his bullish policies will do anything other than create more seeded hatred among his own supporters, lie enough times about illegals or immigrants doing something and surprisingly people take the bait.
The current zeitgeist of Islamic violence and stochastic terrorism that revels in extreme verses in the Koran makes it simply irresponsible to not beware anyone who reads one.
etc. etc.
See how easy this crap is?
"A MAGA hat can serve as a useful heuristic for "likely to cause trouble".
The current zeitgeist of white supremacist violence and stochastic terrorism that revels in dog-whistle messages from the Trump administration [1] makes it simply irresponsible to not beware anyone who touts one. [2]
That said, a photo of someone wearing a MAGA hat is insufficient evidence of misconduct.
Unless there's more to this story (which there very well could be), it sounds like the Linux Foundation was reacting rather than following a carefully constructed process to handle abuse complaints and detoxify the community.
I'll be disappointed if this turns out to be the case.
[1] https://twitter.com/seldo/status/1012411506305036288
[2] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/department-homeland-sec....
(EDIT: To be clear, I'm reacting to the article. I have no context outside of this submission.)"
I spent maybe 40 minutes last night trying to find out what Charles did that violated the CoC. The best I could do was find this: https://twitter.com/sarahmei/status/1187181890920312833
It seems like he was kicked from the conference for having the nerve to make a youtube video with his opinion.
If someone can show me something more significant... PLEASE... because i've been searching, I just haven't found it.
This is exactly parallel to her current tweet which LF responded to.
Live by Twitter, die by Twitter.
I wonder about the callous ignorance of Sarah Mei, who purports to be a feminist but ignores such an important program written by another woman.
In the US, DD is a cup size for a brassiere, and thus indirectly refers to breast size on women. DD for sometime has been considered to be an uncommonly large breast size for a woman, especially a woman of otherwise more common proportions. DDD, being the next cup size up for reasons I don't understand (instead of cup sizes going E, F, etc), would therefore imply a woman even bustier than the supposedly uncommonly-busty DD-breasted woman.
Yes, I think it's silly, too. Human mammary tissue has exactly fuck all to do with programming.
Unfortunately we'd probably just rename it something less offensive like ECMAScript.
[0] https://mobile.twitter.com/sarahmei/status/10732511533604823...
http://events19.linuxfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/...
I'm so sick of this cancel culture bullshit. Didn't they learn about sticks and stones as a kid? Honestly, so many people these days need to eat some concrete to harden the fuck up.
Your amerocentric view of the world assumes that because we speak the same language we have the same culture. We do not. In my culture, telling someone to eat concrete is not taken literally. Its not a call to violence. Its a way of telling someone they need to increase their mental fortitude, that being upset because someone said something you didn't like is not a productive way to go through life.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dd_(Unix)
what a shitshow that would be
But all of this is on all their permanent records and when the pendulum swings the other way, they will have ample time to reflect.
https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/dpcfns/i...
https://twitter.com/sarahmei/status/990265064866308096
The Linux Foundation seems to be a broken organization.
As someone in fire and EMS, around here, among us, including the females (this area has quite probably the highest proportion of females in fire and EMS in the country), there is an inherent pride in the title 'fireman', regardless of gender.
To us it implies "I don't 'fight' fire. I am a [man] of fire, who intrinsically understands it, lives and breathes it, and knows how to master (uh-oh) it".
Good for them! I'm personally agnostic about this, but you sound as if you know them all and you know what they think. It can be tricky to separate ones perception from reality.
Unfortunately, this kind of extreme SJW mindset seems to be winning ground in the name of inclusion by scared useful idiots. Tech used to be a relatively sane area where logic and accomplishments was what mattered, now you need to kiss these lunatics asses unless you want to be painted as a horrible person that hates everyone but white straight males.
It reminds me about how several of the subreddits for lesbians have been taken over by transsexual women that ban lesbian women if they argue about not being attracted to penis[0]. Saying you're against MtF transexuals competing against regular women in sports labels you as a TERF[1] and persona non grata in some circles, and those circles are gaining power.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueOffMyChest/comments/ddv8ep/lesb...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TERF
Because of these grifters I don't even want to identify as transgender any longer.
Was Stalin known for unfair, politically biased code of conduct enforcement? Sorry, I don't see the need for hyperbole here. Even in context, yanking a ticket from KubeCon is hardly the same thing as being purged from the government, tried for imagined crimes and sent to a Gulag.
To Godwinize for clarity: this is like using "Hitlerian" to celebrate a public policy achievement in passenger rail scheduling.
https://twitter.com/cmaxw/status/1192261086810116096?s=20 reply
(Understanding Scientology will give you major clues into how social justice operates.)
Note that associating with John Sonmez is an unforgivable crime, but saying "white men in tech ain't shit" or "all whiteness is racist by design", as Kim Crayton has done, is not. This is because an often unstated assumption of codes of conduct is "we prefer the safety of marginalized groups over the comfort of privileged groups". (The GNOME Code of Conduct explicitly states this, almost verbatim.) That is to say, racism, sexism, and harassment are CoC violations if they are seen to "punch down", but not if they are seen to "punch up" by the CoC commissars who deliberate in secret. This is why Uncle Bob's letter will go unheeded. If action is taken by the Linux Foundation because of his letter, it will be against Uncle Bob himself for posting it. He suggested that legitimate actions taken against one who punches down are harassment, which is itself punching down, therefore harassment and a CoC violation.
Not saying you are wrong, but if that is indeed the case, then someone should come out and say that out loud.
Right now, having a person banned for no clear reason what so ever, only creates uncertainty and division in the community.
Edit: Having looked into it, "John Sonmez, some brogrammer with a propensity to mouth off", actually seemed to be trying to take the heat away from a woman being verbally abused and attacked on twitter.
One can obviously argue about the way he did that, but how on earth does trying to defend a woman make him a "brogrammer"? Your position seems somewhat biased.
The first offense is from his twitter account:
>Latter Day Saint (Christian), Conservative
The second offense is that there is a picture of him with a MAGA hat somewhere on the Internet.
That was enough for someone to say they're uncomfortable attending the same conference as him. Because he is a Mormon, he tried to solve the issue the Mormon way, offering them to discuss the issue. This was considered "tone policing" by the anonymous "Linux Foundation" account.
The raging assholes enforcing this fake social justice nonsense must be unambiguously called out by anyone with half a brain.
Hear, Hear.
What a time to be alive!
In Stack Overflow's case this seems to be headed towards a Slander/Libel. I hope we don't end up in a world where this is the only way to follow $GROUP_THINK.
Note that this is pretty much what you would predict if CoC's were inherently politicized statements, as much as a MAGA hat. Which is exactly what opponents of CoC's have been contending for a long time.
Sure, they can contend that all they want - funny how their actual actions are far more revealing than their words.
Aren't they, though, if it happens that what CoC's say align much, much more with one political group than another? This obviously implies that the latter group believes in conducting themselves quite differently than the code mandates, and they need to suppress those beliefs (or at the very least, not act on those beliefs) while engaging with the group whose code it is.
The goal should be to increase the overall effectiveness of the group, and avoid marginalisation or exclusion of any potential contributors.
I personally don't think the idea behind a code of conduct is bad at all, or that formally banning gender/orientation/race/etc.-based harassment and discrimination in open source projects is bad. It's just that the Contributor Covenant creators and advocates seem to have a much wider and stricter stance on what falls under that category than what I personally agree with, and some of them have a history of launching what I consider unjustified McCarthy-style witch hunts towards people who otherwise share a lot of their views.
And I think a lot of other people who don't fully agree with all of their positions are kind of forced to keep quiet about it and just enforce what's increasingly becoming the status quo. The people not afraid of the backlash and who openly oppose it are often pretty right-wing and tend to spend all day lambasting SJWs on Twitter, or whatever, which is often much further than what an average CoC-detractor may be trying to do. The more right-leaning you are, the more likely you are to be honest about your opposition to it, which over time makes left-leaning people less honest about their opposition to it. They don't have a good middle option. Like what all the other polarization in the culture is causing, a left-leaning person who isn't fully on-board usually has no good option but to capitulate.
I've heard/seen multiple accounts of anonymous drive-by commenters saying something to the effect of "I've noticed you have no code of conduct, and there are several pull requests by PoC that you have refused. You might want to consider adopting the Contributor Covenant." A sort of stealthy protection racket: "Nice project you have here. Wouldn't want a discrimination lawsuit to ruin it all."
I suspect the anonymous commenters are either Coraline Ada Ehmke herself, or one of her lieutenants.
> And I think a lot of other people who don't fully agree with all of their positions are kind of forced to keep quiet about it and just enforce what's increasingly becoming the status quo. The people not afraid of the backlash and who openly oppose it are often pretty right-wing and tend to spend all day lambasting SJWs on Twitter, or whatever, which is often much further than what an average CoC-detractor may be trying to do. The more right-leaning you are, the more likely you are to be honest about your opposition to it, which over time makes left-leaning people less honest about their opposition to it.
I'm left-leaning, and I'm sick of this shit. I've gotten downmodded here on Hackernews and elsewhere for it, and I'm kind of glad to see that others on various communities not related to Kiwi Farms or the alt-right are starting to come around. Back in the day, open source was the closest thing around to the promised cybertopia of AT&T commercials. It wasn't all holding hands and getting along, but you learned to grow a thick skin, focus on technical concerns, and -- with a bit of learning and practice -- be a bit nicer. I've seen Christians, Muslims, and atheists, people on the left and right politically, collaborate in this way. And it's being ruined by this sort of entryism. Open source (the Linux development process in particular) was built to be resilient to sabotage by government agencies and corporations. If I were just such an agency or corporation and I wanted to undermine or destroy open source, I would be paying very close attention to, if not actively exploiting, social-justice entryism because it seems to have found a weak point.
What people have been "traditionally marginalized" in the world of FOSS, which now needs protection which will not be afforded to others?
As I see it, most CoCs are heavily biased political tools, weaponized by default to exclude anyone who disagrees with them.
As such they promote group-think and discourage diversity. Any forward thinking individual should naturally be opposed to such regression.
Could we try to be less orwellian? Are we really banning people who say things we don't like on YouTube?
Being banned from a private venue is an expression of the right of free association. It is not a violation of anyone's rights, because one does not have a right to attend a private venue. It is not a form of political oppression or censorship, because one does not require attendance at a private venue to express one's political beliefs.
Therefore, because the rights of banned attendees have not been violated, nor their speech suppressed, nor has any violence been imposed against the banned attendees, or critics of the code of conduct, said code of conduct is not equivalent to the policies of the Chinese government or a social credit system.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/04/business/secret-consumer-...
1. People should be able to control their own business 2. If they reject a group of people for a given reason, they can 3. Businesses that done reject this group will gain more business. (Both from the newly released group, and from patrons who are not rejected but are against the discrimination) 4. The rejected people could start their own business as a competitor 5. Discriminatory people/businesses are immediately identified.
It seems like it could just work itself out, but in Patrice I'm not sure.
> how can ... If they cannot trust
Bravery?
If someone says they're a race realist and that they're going to make fun of all the black people in tech should they be banned? Not everyone agrees.
If someone analyzes IQ studies about race realism to highlight the flaws in methodology but doesn't outright condemn race realism should they be banned? No, everyone agrees.
To claim that its 1984 because we're trying to work out the fuzziness in the middle is absurd.
* Yes, everyone agrees
* Almost everyone agrees on this one
* Not everyone agrees, but the public consensus seems like they'd probably be banned.
I guess we just live in different filter bubbles.
I don't say this because I want to help odious people but because I don't want other people judging me.
People have many different beliefs and it ought to be sufficient to respect one another rather than agree on all points.
What if merely not denouncing trumptards with sufficient vigor is sufficient to paint me as undesirable.
But take what you advocate to its logical extreme: what if I say it'd be ideal if all minorities would die of terrible diseases to "cleanse" tech/the country/etc., but without calling for direct violence. It's an opinion. Would you be OK with me speaking at a conference and being given the associated prestige?
I'd listen to quality presentation on a technical subject that interests me even if the presenter was Hitler or Pol Pot.
I don't think I like the opinions of this Sarah Mei on Twitter, but I'd happily listen to her talk on another subject that does interest me.
Have you thought through the implications of trying to do this to at minimum 1/3 of the population of the US? And what that 1/3 or more are concluding from this opinion being widely expressed in the US right now?
"A person like that does not belong in our society much less should be given my time."
What you're saying now only covers the last part of your statement, what about the "does not belong in our society" part?
And why are you evading the questions about what effects these type of statements have on the 1/3 or more of the US that's targeted by them? You really think that's a free action?
It pains me even more to see bend over backwards to justify yourself to people such as Throwawayaerlei. To them, this is just perverse entertainment. They are not actually interested in what you have to say. You don't owe these people, or any of the other bad-faith participants in this thread, a response. If I were you, I would leave them in their morally backwards bubble, and move on.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem
In your view, how does this transfer of legitimacy take place?
Would you still be ok listening to “a quality presentation by Hitler” if you were Jewish and your grandparents died in the Holocaust?
(Yes to the Hitler question too.)
Hitler would have to be presenting something really outstanding to make it worth my while. Hitler and Pol Pot are extreme examples of mass murderers, of course. I'm resorting to such hyperbole to make a point: I'm not going to deny myself access to helpful information just because I can't stand the person offering it, nor do I believe it is reasonable to ask others to do so.
Operation Paperclip is a good example of this principle in practice involving actual Nazis.
More importantly in America it can't be a moral crime to vote for the wrong side else we can't continue as a republic. Our country requires the ability to have regularly scheduled revolutions without being torn asunder.
The Republic is dead, there is no credible path forward that's going to continue it, in part because one side has stopped accepting the results of our "regularly scheduled revolutions" if they don't win. Which perhaps not counting G. H. W. Bush has been steadily more clear with each Republican Presidential election victory starting with Nixon before Watergate.
So my position is that organizations and individuals should, generally, be free to speak, and free to organize as they see fit (including hiring, or not, someone). Because it's the best way to minimize conflict.
What? No, not everyone agrees! That someone should be arrested, but keep his Twitter account. We have laws and law enforcement for a reason, and we don't need companies to play speech police, which, incidentally, in this particular case, would make law enforcement more difficult.
> If someone analyzes IQ studies... everyone agrees.
Unfortunately, you're wrong again. Some radicals would want you banned for merely using the word "race", regardless of context.
Exactly what I was thinking. And frankly, I'd rather have someone post "Imma shoot up ur confrence" and get arrested because of that post than have them avoid Twitter and instead, yaknow, actually shoot up the conference.
I feel like we’re on track to having to sign a sworn affidavit that you’re not a Republican, and don’t support any Republicans, to get a job, renew your driver’s license, rent an apartment, get a checking account… it sounds ridiculous, but did where we are now just a few years ago.
I don't think it is served by trolling peoples internet history to discover if they ever committed any thought crime. Our country will be better off the more MAGAers either age into the grave or get off the stupid train. Keep in mind that many of them are already decent citizens in the way they comport themselves in their lives, in the way they treat the people they interact with. They have just bought into a moronic ideology and will vote to enable further stupidity that will hurt their fellows in a way they would never due if given that straight choice between good and evil directly.
Isolating that person instead of communicating with them is a missed opportunity that serves only to signal our virtue to our fellows. It is a choice to enhance our social status instead of our society. It's positively trumpian and it plays right into his hands by making that person more isolated and thus more vulnerable.
Doing the right thing is hard. Do it anyway.
That's tone policing and a CoC violation. Marginalized groups have the right to be incivil.
Your ideology is constructed in order to grant 'incivility' (the moral permission to commit violence) to people based on whatever parameters are useful at the moment.
It's a horrendously incoherent worldview, and will shake itself to pieces.
"The “Linux®” Trademark
For information regarding the Linux trademark, owned by Linus Torvalds, please see the Linux Mark Institute (administered by The Linux Foundation). Your use of the Linux trademark must be in accordance with the Linux Mark Institute’s policy."
It's clear the Linux Foundation has been given too much power. Whenever a group of people get too much power or money, someone in the group, almost by definition an asshole, will abuse it.
I'm not sure why this is a hard distinction to grasp.
Edit: it seems that people are annoyed because he's tied to a guy named John Sonmez. Any context on why this guy is bad? It looks like he caters to the same crowd Jordan Peterson does, but hasn't said anything offensive? The most I can find are references to "SJW"s, which doesn't sound particularly bad (especially when you consider what people on the "other side" say/do).
https://twitter.com/simpleprogrammr/status/11860996963909632...
Seriously whats so bad about that tweet? He is a bit rude "shut your mouth", but so are 90% of the other participants. The parent tweet could be interpreted as much more rude -- She is assuming her collegaues are racist just because they are saying that "she should be happy to work there" I'd say that to almost everyone in IT, just compare the job to anything in retail or a school teacher.
What does that have to do with the event and its code of conduct?
> Individuals who participate (or plan to participate) in Linux Foundation events should conduct themselves at all times in a manner that comports with both the letter and spirit of this policy prohibiting harassment and abusive behavior, whether before, during or after the event. This includes statements made in social media postings, online publications, text messages, and all other forms of electronic communication.
That sounds incredibly far-reaching.
Man A said something racist to Woman B, Charles then stepped in and said "let's have a reasonable phone call and sort this out civilly." What gets more interesting is Woman B has at least one tweet saying "White men in tech ain't shit." So she's definitely racist. edit: (could be wrong about who is who here, but someone involved in getting him banned definitely said the white men in tech comment.)
Charles is getting this hate because by saying to the "Obviously racist" man A, "lets have a civil phone call about this," He's obviously siding with racists instead of siding with the marginalized minorities. (sarcasm)
Charles is getting tons of comments that he should shut the F up and listen to these marginalized groups instead of trying to butt in and make himself look good. Charles is Mormon, 9 Mormons were just burned alive in Mexico, so obviously Charles has no idea what it's like the be a part of a hated, marginalized group.
edit: Sorry it's hard to tell, I'm definitely being sarcastic in parts of this post.
Opinion here, I think people on twitter are working very hard to turn "differing politics" into "unacceptable bigotry." And it's definitely working. It seems the original racist guy mainly has a problem with affirmative action. And he definitely doesn't use current politically correct speech around gender either. But is that grounds for banning a dude just for associating with the "racist guy". I'll leave that up to the reader to decide.
It wasn't even like this 4 years ago.
The next five years should be even more exciting.
EDIT: we really need to stop referring to them as political elites; that's giving them too much credit. The wannabe political elites then - because obviously they weren't as elite as they thought - ha!
"Well, other than the interruption, Mrs Lincoln, how was the play?"
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/03/how-dongle-jokes...
These folks don't want to resolve anything, they just want to point at a "bad guy" and have them be harmed.
Hopefully you aren't being too serious. I could easily imagine someone saying that who was taking B's side in the dispute. No one should be banned from a conference and slandered as a hateful, violence-inclined etc. person for trying his best to de-escalate a conflict, no matter how misguided and perhaps even outrageous.
I've been looking for at this HN thread and there still hasn't been any evidence of the original tweets.
Why would people be mad at Charles for "let's have a reasonable phone call and sort this out civilly."?
There seems to be some missing information including a video that no one has posted.
edit: DuskStar - I obviously edited this substantially, because I added nothing of value and only served to continue discussion of this submission. Both of the conclusions you jumped to are incorrect, it's a shame we were unable to have a mutually respectful exchange about it.
Original comment:
I'm confused by the significance of that link. Are you trying to suggest that since he was against firing James Damore, or since he's complained about character assassination in the past, his future opinions should be ignored?
The Linux Foundation did do a code of conduct post thread on Twitter which, among other things, mentions you can violate an event CoC before an event although it's also unclear what that means. I'm sure more than a few of the 10,000 people attending Kubecon have, at some point in their lives, done something to upset someone else on Twitter.
https://twitter.com/cmaxw/status/1192261086810116096?s=20
Wonderful. Another big score for Mei's list of successful reputation attacks.
That just means they're being good social engineers.
I remember hearing it and thinking, statistically speaking there are supporters of Trump in the audience. Later, when I brought this up with others, I found someone who was a Trump supporter who is uncomfortable about that attacks on Trump and Trump supporters are allowed. The CoC notes unacceptable behavior includes, "offensive or degrading language".
I share this because the linux foundation is over a global community of people from various countries. People have different opinions on politics and other beliefs. Open source is a place where people of many differences can come together.
Having personally seen a bias against Trump supporters makes me want see this be handled above reproach.
"Do not speak unless you are one of us, do not think unless you have been told how to, do not hold us to the same standards as we hold others."
Those should be the mottos of these idiots.
I guess any organization has a right to do whatever they want with their hosted services, but you might ask a certain Ms. Streisand about how certain small issues can blow up.
There's a good chance that Mr. Wood will suddenly see a great deal of rather...strident...support, as a result of this. Robert Martin is pretty cool, but not everyone is Uncle Bob.
Another result of UB's announcement is that I have noticed Uncle Bob, appropriately or ironically, shares initials with the infamous Undefined Behavior.
When the whole CoC was shoehorned in the Linux Kernel, many people warned that this was going to happen. We were just hand waved with "No such thing would happen" because the people behind the CoC were not racist, etc, despite when the previous events like the whole opal mess indicated otherwise.
The really ironic thing here is that America(and Silicon Valley) was built on historical events like this. A whole lot of geniuses and skilled people were driven to America by similar groupthink lynchings happening in Europe and Asia up until and including WW2. They built America into a powerhouse. If this continues to happen then Silicon Valley is going to get a painful history lesson they could have easily avoided.
Has there ever been an instance of a CoC being used in a reasonable way against an actually unreasonable person? From the history, it appears that CoC’s were designed to stop Linus Torvalds, specifically, but he’s still around (but he does seem to be afraid of CoC enforcers now).
Yes. Though, most CoC violations are handled privately for those involved so we don't hear much about them.
[citation needed]
IMO that shouldn't fly with the Patriot Act, and it shouldn't fly here either.
That really sounds like abuse of power with extra steps. Either ALL of these violations should be private or NONE of them should be. Selectively enforcing something like this is just bias and vendetta politics
I have been a part of many projects with out these types of CoC's where people have been removed from the project because they were an asshole, or the project is forked and the assholes are left behind
Historically that was the way of open source.
Today however it is much different... Politics and Social Status seem to matter more than Code, merit, and reality
Now I'm of two minds on this. I do sometimes miss the more freewheeling culture of the '00s, and feel like the need for constant compliance has drained the tech scene of some life... but honestly it's a small price to pay if the only alternative is tolerating fascists in your midst.
Said instance is the only reason this thread exists, no?
It is a threatening, offensive, inconsiderate gesture.
I served on the exec board of a non profit org that used our CoC to adjudicate behavior (sexual predator, harassment, etc) that was not covered by our bylaws.
One big difference, why our CoC proved useful, was we had a trial. Plaintiff, defendant, evidence, testimony, jury, deliberation. All of it.
It was a lot of work. And EXTREMELY painful. But it worked. A popular leader had a day in court. And our org emerged stronger for it.
Read their tweets, many of them are openly and proudly racist, sexist and ageist.
Are they really? Or do they just dare to hold views that have nothin to do with sexism, agism or racism but instead just violate the "proper" political orthodoxy?
Well let’s see, what do you think about using “old”, “white” and “male” as pejoratives? No one ever seems to have violated a CoC for it.
> you fucking suck
Changed her Twitter name to "Kill All Men".
Drank coffee from mugs with things like "Male Tears" on the side.
https://slate.com/human-interest/2014/08/ironic-misandry-why...
https://www.reddit.com/r/freebsd/comments/3z2sbe/randi_harpe...
etc.
Especially when they don’t permit the “joking” excuses to anyone else.
If you replace one gender with the other or one race with any other race (etc, etc) and the new sentence is offensive, then so is the previous one.
Is kill all women offensive? Then you obviously shouldn't say kill all men.
Hard men make good times
Good times make soft men
Soft men make bad times
And so the cycle goes
The thing that stops me and almost makes me side with the CoC crowd is that I've spent the last 8-10 years watching a wave of fascist and hyper-reactionary ideology sweep across hacker culture.
The existence of so much actual fascism, race nationalism, Naziism, ideological misogyny ("red pill" and "incel" stuff), etc. in so many corners of hacker/geek culture make the hard core SJW crowd look like they have a point. The stuff that revolves around places like Gab and /pol/ makes the craziest examples of "call out culture" and "cancel culture" look sane and maybe necessary.
It's like this.
Say you're in Salem. Say you're horrified at all the witch hysteria. Now imagine you go for a walk in the woods and come upon a circle of people chanting and sacrificing babies over a bonfire...
Hmm... now maybe those witch hunters have a point!
I feel a little like that.
What I really think is that everyone on the right, left, and just about everywhere else lost their damn minds for some reason starting about 2010-2012. The MAGA hat crowd and the "cancel culture" crowd are all insane and this is all crazies fighting with crazies.
This install is totally borked. Format and reinstall the OS.
Everyone has the right to appeal, sue for injury, etc.
Any entity acting as judge, jury, and executioner is the problem. Secret laws, secret courts, secret rulings are the problem.
Suboptimal CoC's are not (even remotely) the problem. Broken laws, policies, rules, procedures can be fixed. If we have proper governance.
We know this.
CoC's like the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence exist to capture values, principles, culture, intent.
Which side are you on?
Pick a side.
Then again I suppose one shouldn't be too surprised; it would be easy to argue that Rome fell mainly because it became too successful and turned inward onto itself - much like many parts of our society are - the need for a letter like this to be written is proof there.
You live in a bubble.