As an open-source contributor and professional developer, it tells me which projects to avoid entirely. Keep your state sponsored politics out of my hobby and profession.
Honestly, I'd prefer that trolls get banned straight away without needing to point anywhere, instead of all these stupid CoCs. You do not need any special document to kick off annoying people from a mailing list. The mere existence of CoC documents seems like an elaborate act of extreme trolling.
EDIT: Moreover, CoCs don't really work in practice. Has any CoC ever prevented abuse of somebody? Do you have a concrete example?
I think as a mod you are in a tough spot regardless. If you have loose rules and use your discretion you will be hated on. If you have strict rules, you will be hated on for stifling speech.
Things that seem like they ought to be common sense sometimes need to be said explicitly, especially in large organizations that communicate mainly over the internet. I know at least one person who feared for her personal safety for awhile because she became a focal point of a large internet argument about how members of large open-source project ought to treat each other. I think most high-visibility projects have people with similar stories.
Yeah I don't really see a distinction between trolls coming in and posting offensive stuff and ideologues coming in and hijacking a project for their cause. Both are detrimental to actually building something good, and both basically need a benevolent dictator to keep them at bay.
Because some marginalized people perceive an implicit bias and veiled offensiveness in all manner of communication within those they regard as part of some sort of hegemony. If there’s a vehicle for applying restraint or discipline or humiliation, it will be exploited for reasons often vindictive or speculative.
See this guy gets it when others don't. The Radical Left has a victim mentality, always whining about systemic injustice to get what they want. When will conservatives wake up and realize that every aspect of this code of conduct is designed specifically to oppress them?
I find a community having a CoC is generally a good indicator of it not being a good idea to participate in it. Which is a little tragic, given that the underpinnings (naive and toxic as they are) do not come from a bad place.
Excuse me but "st*pid" is an ableist slur whose use harms and triggers disabled people, which makes it a source of mass psychological harm for an already marginalized group.
Yeah, looks like that's the diff OP intended to link.
At face value, it seems even worse than presented.
Removed:
>"Participants will be tolerant of opposing views."
Modified:
>Before - "Behaviour which can be reasonably considered harassment will not be tolerated."
>After - "Behaviour which can be considered harassment against protected classes will not be tolerated."
The "reasonably" removal aside - for an attempt to be much more precise and inclusive with language, why would they narrow the previous "harassment" to "harassment against protected classes"? I'm sure this wasn't the intention, but rather than adding or intensifying any protections, the change, if read literally in the context of the diff, makes it seem like harassment is now tolerated if you aren't a protected classes whereas it previously wasn't tolerated at all.
I think a better route would've been to keep that line as-is and add a new line saying something like "any remarks that could be considered disparaging, mocking, or exclusive towards any protected classes will not be tolerated". This makes it clear that any kind of singling-out of protected classes is disallowed, regardless of the fact that some people may consider the definition of "harassment" to require something more severe than that.
This is very weird because fundamentally it stems from a failure of the moderators. If someone makes a sexist joke you don't just let them because you're "assuming good intentions", that clause means that you tell them it's not appropriate here, and if they apologize you assume they are sincere, and if they don't you swiftly boot them. But there is no substitute for good moderation, shifting words around won't help much.
Aside: Open source discussion opening with "My rationale for these changes are documented on Twitter: [link]" also seems somewhat crazy. And I love Twitter, it just seems very odd to link to a thread of tweets instead of restating your case in the proper medium.
Changing it enables a certain kind of flame-war where people become entrenched in thinking the other side is out to get them and actually evil. Assuming the best intentions is a good way to make sure you combat what someone is doing rather than attacking them as a person.
"Did you intend to say that you dislike me because I'm gay?" is a pretty easy way to route out a troll.
Sincere apology or not, you get to know.
I've been moderating communities for 15 years, I've seen tricks from all manner of trolls and handling trolls with an even hand is still tricky; but being genuinely inquisitive is usually the easiest way to get around it. Even when tensions are high it makes people feel heard and understand their impact.
"I'm just highlight how fragile and deranged you are, funny how you instantly tied it to homosexuality though, must be suppressed hatred! I'm surprised your wife's boyfriend lets you post such stupid garbage."/s
You don't get to know anything. Good trolls have also been trolling for 15 years, they've seen tricks from all manner of jannies... See where I'm going with that?
Saying that, I do agree with you, staying inquisitive and positive with bad trolls typically tampers down their rage.
It also is an issue for all others. FX I don’t know if it is appropriate to say “you guys” to a mixed crowd anymore, but if I hadn’t seen that some people get upset about that I wouldn’t think twice about it and just emulated American movies. Buffy isn’t exactly sexist and she says it often and to a mixed crowd.
At least in English you have the neutral word "they". In french you only have the plural of "he" or "she". This means that when you point to a mixed crowd, you must choose which of the plurals you use.
The grammatical rule is that one male flips the plural gender to male. If you do not know the sexes, the plural is male.
As a French, the construction comes naturally because we've been taught that at school since kindergarten. This always sounded a bit weird, though.
I do not approve some "grammatical inclusivity" horrors that are being invented from time to time, but some innovative-but-not-distruptive changes would be welcome.
>As a French, the construction comes naturally because we've been taught that at school since kindergarten. This always sounded a bit weird, though.
If you follow the grammatical history of French, the neutral gender just got folded into masculine.
>but some innovative-but-not-distruptive changes would be welcome
You can't really produce grammar by decree, at best you can systematize what already exists. The only "sane" way to have explicit neutral in French would be to go back in time, reimplement declensions and possibly mangle phonology in the process. That won't happen. All forms of "inclusive writing" are from the outset destined and meant to be an elitist signal rather than an actual linguistic feature. They won't survive and they'll been seen in the future as a strange, idiosyncratic trend of the age. A bit like Renaissance orthography, where countless letters were added without meaning to simply look fancier.
Like I said, I do not approve of the horrible ideas we have, with dots everywhere - this transforms words that are fine as they are. I am for simplification, though (nothing to do with the current topic, just a thought).
What I am missing are the concepts young people are bringing in more and more, where they have words that become unisex (potes for instance). I listen to my children and (without any scientific analysis), it sounds to me that there is less of a boy/girl cut that there was in my times (this may be regional - this is for west of Paris).
And I agree with you that only naturally appearing changes will stay, not the ones forced on us. A typical example are the surrealist ideas of the 90's to have French equivalents for everything computer. Some stayed, the majority is now part of comedies.
German is also developing (unofficial) gender-neutral nouns using an asterisk ending but I think it’s also an open discussion about how best to handle it. It’s mostly often seen when referring to a person’s role, position or job in a way that includes all genders and non-binary people. I speak the language but it’s not my mother tongue so native German speakers might explain it better.
Basically you take the word stem, add the asterisk and then append the female ending, you pronounce it by putting a stop where the * is and then saying the feminine ending (at least that’s how I’ve seen it done). This probably wouldn’t work in French since they hate putting stops anywhere :)
There's two types of gender-neutral nouns in German being used:
- apprehending markers like -*in, -_in, -In [1]
- forming a gerund from a verb describing the activity
e.g. the word "Bäcker" - engl. "baker" - could be written as "Bäcker*in" or "Backende" (from "backen", the verb), depending on the speaker. Note that the gerund form eliminates conveying info about gender, unlike an "universal" marker like *in.
[1] for plural forms, those are expanded to -*innen, -_innen and -Innen
The thing is, since we don't have a separate neutral in French, masculine is also used for neutral. Which means it isn't that weird when we use masculine for groups with women, as we also use genders for everyday objects. A desk is masculine for some reason, and a table feminine.
Well, to me saying "ils sont là!" when there is a crowd of 200 girls and one boy is still weird :) I would probably say "elles sont là!" despite it not being grammatical.
As for the genders of nouns, my native English French speaking friends are usually in pain.
I feel the same, and I think it's fair to switch to feminine in these cases. My point was just that it sounds a bit less weird than saying "elles sont là" when there is 200 girls and a boy.
Do you really not see that the opposite is also true? Having a position where good intentions are not assumed can be gamed far more easily by people with bad intentions
Do you really not see that either extreme is more exploitable and less resilient than a more pragmatic middle ground? Personally, my guess is that the optimum is usually towards assuming the best, but that it shifts depending on the level of antagonism present.
It covers the case when someone makes an inappropriate joke then defends themselves saying it was just a joke.
The person being inappropriate will always hide behind their intent because they can only argue about their own role in the exchange (e.g. they can't argue that the target person/group isn't really hurt).
When a conversation is derailed away from the damage caused to the intent, the harasser wins. What are you going to do? Establishing a default assumption takes that away. Always have good defaults :)
This is largely true, but there remains the issue that there are some people who, for whatever reason, almost seem to go out of their way to assume bad intent and interpret what was said or written in the worst possible way.
There is probably some sad history behind many of those individuals, but reasonable people can disagree about how to deal with the situation.
The current fashion implies that as soon as one such person enters the community, everybody has to start metaphorically walking on tip toes.
Maybe a better outcome overall would be for the person to get therapy.
Everybody has a line somewhere for what they consider "too easily offended". This is true even for the staunchest defenders of the current fashion, because even they understand implicitly that offense can be faked.
So yeah, you need good defaults, but that's really a discussion about where exactly that line should be drawn. I doubt either extreme is the right answer.
> It covers the case when someone makes an inappropriate joke then defends themselves saying it was just a joke.
Tell them to not make these jokes here and flag their account, repeat a handful of times and kick them out if it persists despite warnings. No need to interpret intent, no ability to hide behind ignorance after several warnings.
> Always have good defaults :)
It is impossible to harass people if you just ban every new account under the assumption of guilt.
"Protected class" means stuff like race, sex or veteran status. So if you harass a random conference-goer at a Ruby-focused event, that cannot be addressed under the CoC because you haven't evidenced harassment towards a protected class as a whole (e.g. all veterans)? How does that even make sense?
The line about protected classes is not in addition to a general rule against harassment, or emphasizing that kind of harassment in particular, it replaced that rule.
There is a separate rule against personal attacks, but is that rule supposed to take over harassment in general? That sort of makes sense in a vacuum, but then it leaves the exact meaning of the 'harassment against protected classes' rule kind of confusing. What does harassing a class mean exactly, and can you harass a non-protected class?
> “Protected class” means stuff like race, sex or veteran status.
“Protected class” is an (American) legal term, with situation-specific definitions. (It means different things in federal employment law, federal public accommodation law, federal fair housing law, and the various states employment, public accommodation, and fair housing laws of each of the States.)
It is entirely unclear what it means in the Ruby CoC, and the explanation in the discussion thread is literally “everyone knows what ‘protected class’ means” which is obviously entirely false. Its a term used by someone who has some overly precise, overly generalized idea of what it means, doesn’t realize that they are wrong, and thinks everyone agrees with them.
No one supported hmdne's claim everyone knows what protected classes are.
Jacob Herrington encouraged hmdne to make another PR mostly. Consider he recognized hmdne was trying to derail his PR. And he said he'd be in support of finding a better way to communicate the spirit of tolerance and mutual respect. Not removing that part.
Matz approved both PRs. But it isn't clear he read the discussion.
It boggles the mind that people could actually think its obvious what behaviour is unfair discrimination and what isn't. Like have they never opened a history book? Or noticed the countless lawsuits on the subject? (I think usa has a sort of arbitrary enumerated list, but canada doesn't explicitly enumerate so there's fun court cases over things like do drug laws discriminate against people who enjoy the taste of marijuana, etc)
Honest question - are young or old also a protected class? I disagree that CoC clauses should be based on protected classes only, because I think there are possible types of discrimination that should be addressed in CoC.
In a legal context, yes, age is a protected class. So if past practice is anything to go with, I guess quips like "ok boomer" will now be officially verboten on the Ruby mailing lists and in Ruby events.
It’s legally OK to discriminate based on a minimum age, but not a maximum age. No voting, alcohol, tobacco, driving, guns, executing contracts, renting a car etc. until 18/21/25.
> @Try2Code A protected class is a group of people that has been historically discriminated or a group of people we (as humanity) want to privilege to offset the years of discrimination - but that's not all. For example the People of Color are a protected class, because of slavery. Members of board of directors of the big corporations are a protected class because they financially contribute to the cause. The non-heterosexuals are a protected class, because of discrimination. Women are a protected class obviously. I don't know how to better define it. The dictionaries should have a more understandable definition.
Side note: anyone follow what this means? “Members of board of directors of the big corporations are a protected class because they financially contribute to the cause.”?
"group of people we (as humanity) want to privilege to offset the years of discrimination" -->the humanity part is the part that have a problem with tbh (explanation below)
The "(as humanity)" should be removed. A protected class in US/UK might of been the oppresor in other countries. Example below.
Romania and Bulgaria have been invaded countless times by the ottoman empire for hundreds of years. Why would a romanian or bulgarian even consider protecting them(muslims)? Black were part of that same force(and high ranking officials) that pillaged the 2 countries. Why would eastern europeans even owe them anything?
EDIT: As an eastern European I don't ower any of them any protection. If anything those 2 classes owe us according to historical facts.
Interesting, that "Age (over 40)" are cited as "Protected class". So people over 40, which feel harassed by many of these "new rules" can actually do something about it?
I think anyone can report anything they don't like.
It's more that insults against people over 40 (or that reference people over 40) will be taken seriously, where as insults against/referencing 20 year olds apparently won't be.
So, I'm assuming "ok boomer" would not be OK, but "ok junior" would be.
From reading the comments, it sounds like it's actually self-described "non-protected" folks that are proposing these rules. And the incident started with some male developers getting upset about a joke/insult about females.
These updates have a very nebulous definition of harassment. According to the new CoC, almost anything can be considered harassment. As far as the "intent and impact" of the intentions, assuming that someone acts in bad faith is a good way to turn a misunderstanding into actual hatred. Such a result should be considered worse than having to deal with a few bad apples who try to take advantage.
They're meant to further empower accusers and reduce burden of proof and remove the need for critical thinking, empathy, and nuance. Accusations equal guilt.
Or maybe it just puts more responsibility on people to think "how could my intent be read?", "what impact might it have?"
It's quite common to have someone express a personal opinion that they themselves don't interpret as harassment (e.g. because they don't belong to the group they're talking about, they see no issue with the way they talk or maybe they might be upset) only to be incredibly surprised and defensive when someone later calls them out.
With the way that the realm of what is socially acceptable to say has been shifting so constantly in recent years, the only way someone who is not terminally online could be sure to avoid offending someone would be to become a mind reader, or to not say anything at all.
There is also the fact that in this modern social climate, victimhood has become a valuable currency. There is incentive for people take offense where none could reasonably be presumed to have been given, and to blow minor transgressions out of proportion.
“When victimhood becomes currency, there are bound to be counterfeiters.“
Society changes and evolves. With it, we start recognising and understanding ever-smaller demographic groups.
There was a time when making jokes at the expense of women was ok, there was a time when making fun of gays was ok, there was a time when mocking trans people was ok... now it's not.
> The only way someone who is not terminally online could be sure to avoid offending someone would be to become a mind reader, or to not say anything at all
It's just society developing empathy. Think most people understand that how we see other groups of people is not a fixed thing.
> There is also the fact that in this modern social climate, victimhood has become a valuable currency. There is incentive for people take offense where none could reasonably be presumed to have been given, and to blow minor transgressions out of proportion.
People are getting "called out" and "cancelled" more than ever, for sure. But I don't think it's necessarily victimhood. Given the original topic, it's interesting that this is how you're attributing intent. Do you feel that there might be genuine reasons for acting the way they do? Could the grievances be genuine?
>Society changes and evolves. With it, we start recognising and understanding ever-smaller demographic groups
It is not a natural change. It is being forced on people. Words and understandings of concepts change of course, but in the past society would slowly start accepting the change. Now a days when a word changes if you don't start using the new definition that day you are a bigot. People don't do well with sudden change.
> There was a time when making jokes at the expense of women was ok, there was a time when making fun of gays was ok, there was a time when mocking trans people was ok... now it's not.
Jokes are jokes. If it is wrong to make a joke about women then it is wrong to make a joke about men. Anything else is sexist discriminatory double standards. Either you can joke about anything or nothing.
>It's just society developing empathy. Think most people understand that how we see other groups of people is not a fixed thing.
Society is losing empathy. We used to understand people could make mistakes and improve themselves. Now the first time you make an innocent mistake you are canceled. You are thrown out of polite society and defamed on social media. That is the opposite of empathy.
>People are getting "called out" and "cancelled" more than ever, for sure. But I don't think it's necessarily victimhood. Given the original topic, it's interesting that this is how you're attributing intent.
The person you were responding to was not saying that a person being canceled is a victim (though they possibly believe that). They were saying that people cancel other people so the person doing the canceling can play the victim regardless if they actually took offense.
>Do you feel that there might be genuine reasons for acting the way they do? Could the grievances be genuine?
I don't think anybody would deny some people are offended about things. I just don't think that matters. If I say hello to somebody and they are offended by that should I be canceled for it?
> With the way that the realm of what is socially acceptable to say has been shifting so constantly in recent years, the only way someone who is not terminally online could be sure to avoid offending someone would be to become a mind reader, or to not say anything at all.
Really, since the norms change so quickly, the only safe thing is to say nothing at all. Over the last 10 years I’ve seen a lot of my favourite progressive authors torn to shreds on social media for being monsters. The problem is that they were trying to be open minded and progressive in the 30s or 50s or 80s instead of today and that’s unforgivable and their work should be banned for not anticipating future cultural shifts. It doesn’t matter that they were trying their best and lived in a time and place that wasn’t 2021 Twitter
> Or maybe it just puts more responsibility on people to think "how could my intent be read?", "what impact might it have?"
How can you possibly read any possible minds. Even if you can predict the 'reasonable' person, outliers can take offence and you don't know what can offend them.
People can and do take offence at anything. This leaves two possible solutions.
1) Eventually fuck up.
2) Immediately leave the community and find greener, less insane pastures.
I've taken #2 in almost all cases, because I'm definitely going to screw up because I'm human.
The rule is not meant to attack people who make good-faith mistakes/unintended consequences. It instead is intended to stop defending people who make ill-intentioned comments and attempt to hide them as mistakes; or who refuse to back down from a mistake even after being told it was a mistake.
For example, if someone from Eastern Europe says something like "it's alright 'cause it's all white", someone from the USA who knows the history of this phrase may take offense. If the person from the USA feels that this may have been an attack, they should be free to raise this issue, and the person from Eastern Europe should apologize for making them uncomfortable, even if it was unintentional. As long as they do this, no further harm should happen to either person.
However, if the person who made the comment refuses to apologize/explain, or keeps repeating this comment since "to me it's not offensive, it's just a joke/reference" etc, then this should be considered a problem and someone with authority should intervene.
Similarly, if the person who took offense refuses to accept the mistake after an apology or explanation was given, then once again someone with authority should intervene and correct this error on this other side, as it unnecessarily creates a hostile working environment.
This is the intended reading of that line. Of course, that line can also be mis-applied by immediately punishing the person from Eastern Europe in my initial example.
Note: I used "person from Eastern Europe" in my example because that is where I am from, and because I have personally seen others around me using references to US culture without knowing the full context in just this way, without ill intent but in ways which would probably shock someone who assumes that the context is well known (for example, casually addressing peers using rap lyrics containing the infamous N-word).
In my experience, when someone "fucks up", I can reflect on my rapport with that person to determine whether or not it was intentional. Either way, I can say something to them about it.
It is a sign of maturity to say "oh, I'm sorry. I didn't think that my words could be perceived in that way. My intent was.."
If your intent is harmful, that's great, because I can help you with #2 by not interacting with you in the future. However, if your intent was reasonable, then no harm done. I walk away having set a healthy boundary for our relationship and you got to keep me around and strengthen our rapport.
> I've taken #2 in almost all cases, because I'm definitely going to screw up because I'm human.
This makes it sound like you're not willing to accept the effort of empathy.
> You act like fucking up is the end of the world.
People stopped forgiving and forgetting years ago. Every mistake people make follows them forever now. “Fucking up” is the end of the world for their careers since nobody wants to hire somebody who was publicly outed on Twitter for whatever they allegedly did
Apparently people who are concerned with this are “not willing to accept the effort of empathy”?
I think you're overlooking the role that rapport plays in this. If you don't have a rapport (it's a new relationship, for example), one doesn't have that to rely on (this describes a significant portion of online interactions, like this one!).
If one has a solid rapport with someone, and that person says something that one find upsetting, one's much less likely to attribute that behavior to malice, because rapport is just social context.
> Apparently people who are concerned with this are “not willing to accept the effort of empathy”?
I think a more accurate thing to say is that those who are harmed and cannot contextualize it to be reasonable are not willing to enable that harmful behavior by the person that has harmed them. Empathy is just the act of "putting yourself in someone else's shoes to gain respect for their perspective". I can empathize with an asshole and decide that their behavior needs to be called out _despite_ OR _because of_ the context I have for that person (e.g. I might be more likely to call out inappropriate behavior in those with power than in those without power, with whom I might work more closely to come to an understanding privately, as there's really no use kicking someone when they're down).
You can't have rapport with a Twitter mob. Individuals, yes, but I've seen time and again when individuals are pressured by the mob until they finally turn on the friend who 'made a mistake' and excoriate them even more fiercely than the mob itself has.
Keep in mind how this CoC change started: it wasn't by a one-on-one rapport with an individual.
And also keep in mind the freezing effect you're having on people new to the industry who need mentorship to help them mature. Sometimes you're screwing up because you're young and need to temper your own tongue.
And sometimes the screw-up isn't actually a screw-up, and a mountain gets made out of a molehill. This is more often the case than anything else, as this entire post demonstrates, and it would be wrong to conclude the premise as part of the argument.
It is impossible to evaluate what could be interpreted as harassment. Maybe 10 years ago you could have, but today everything is harassment. Words are changing meaning and becoming offensive so fast people cannot even keep up.
> I don't know what specifically motivated this PR
It's mentioned in passing a couple of comments in. To highlight it (because it's easy to miss):
"I watched a group of people use these specific phrases to justify making sexist remarks over a communication channel that falls under these guidelines."
I tried really hard to follow the threading in that but I came away being completely unable to parse it, at least on mobile. What was the attempted "joke"?
Guy reports a behavior where date math doesn't return the result he expected and jokes that it might have to do with how women don't like to admit when they're aging.
I wouldn't have made the joke, myself, but it's also not really insulting to anyone. It's not saying that women are bad at math, or that women broke date arithmetic to seem younger, it's just referencing that phenomenon.
What about a joke where adding weights resulted in quantities too large, and it's suggested that it was written for dudes who want to say they can bench press more than they really can?
I'd rather that joke were not made. There is a difference though between a discreet 'not a great moment' and public 'absolutely inacceptable [and we should hound the poor sap out of all gainful employment opportunities for life]'. A classic management principle is 'praise in public, criticize in private'. While the joke was was indeed inappropriate, the public reaction was 10x worse.
I can agree that there should be no public flogging, provided it is first couple times. If it has been explained to the individual that certain behaviour is considered unprofessional and yet they insist on engaging in it then... well, there should be consequences.
It's really odd to make fundamental rule changes to respond to things like that rather than carving out exceptions for sexist remarks specifically if those are the problem.
'This section shall not be interpreted to defend any communication reasonably seen as sexist, racist, or otherwise discriminatory' is much clearer than changing from 'assume good faith' to 'assume nothing, intent doesn't matter as much as impact. '
They quoted the start of a thread the author summarized saying it's bad because it gives cover to bad behavior. And can require people who recognize a pattern of bad behavior to persuade themselves they're paranoid. You might disagree. But those points have nothing to do with race or sex. And pointing out it's easier for people who face less bad behavior is about white men only incidentally.
The objection is literally that the proposition benefits "mostly-white, mostly-male" people, so don't stand there and say it has "nothing to do with race or sex." For shame.
Isn't protected class an american legal term? Seems weirdly ameri-centric for a document of this nature. Not to mention that gay people weren't even a protected class in the usa until last year afaik. Not exactly a very inclusive definition.
Not to mention the implication that harrasment is somehow ok against people who are not members of the protected class? I appreciate minorities get a lot of shit that others don't, but its not like bigioted assholes are the only people who harrass other people.
Like it or not, the ameri-centric views spill around the world causing tensions and misunderstandings. In countries with practically no colored people and no history of slavery certain things seem a bit ridiculous if imposed on the whole community.
You are right. It also depends if you include serfdom in slavery. In any case, just to generalize, the countries that practiced slavery were mostly those that colonized the world the most. Many of those who didn't colonize the world used serfs, like most of Eastern Europe. For these people there is no cultural association between slavery and the present. Also the proportions are different: in most countries the non-serfs were a relatively small minority. So waking up one day and reading that, say, all references to slavery are banned seems somewhat strange in other cultures.
How many people in the OOS community or elsewhere did you meet that were in favor of enslaving people. Sometimes it is necessary to ask naive questions to determine if you dig yourself into something.
CoCs themselves, and the wider identity politics culture war, are also extremely Ameri-centric.
> the implication that harrasment is somehow ok against people who are not members of the protected class?
There is a subset (I like to think that they're the fringe, but have no numbers to back that up) of those who engage in identity politics who do believe that bigotry does not apply when the target is the dominant demographic.
> CoCs themselves, and the wider identity politics culture war, are also extremely Ameri-centric.
An idea can be both a good one and political. And indeed a good idea while Ameri-centric.
The risk is that this might be a status play by authoritarians, who very rarely have good ideas and typically do a lot of damage once they get in to power. I suspect actual minorities & protected classes are more worried about authoritarians than racist jokes. If they aren't they should be.
I've never seen anybody suggest that you can't be bigoted against a dominant group.
I have seen it suggested that specific terms like racism and sexism are not generic terms that apply to any sort of discrimination along racial, ethnic or in the case of sexism along gender lines, but apply specifically to actions that maintain or reinforce the power of dominant groups and existing privileges and positions that advantage them, and that trying to expand those terms to describe all discrimination serves to obfuscate and minimize the existing structural and institutional power disparities.
Or to analogize, if my boss hates me, that's probably a big problem for me and my work. If alternatively hate my boss, that's not really a problem in the same way for my boss. I can't fire them, or decide what projects they can work on. They aren't the reverse of each other, because the power dynamic isn't the same.
It is part of the basic definitions of the Critical Theory worldview, and the underlying Marxist ideas behind it. (Yes, I know invoking those will cause people to presume I'm just parroting talking points, but I am being very precise.)
The gist of the idea is that the oppressed ('minority group') do not need to be bound by the laws that shackle them, created by the oppressors ('dominant group') solely to preserve their own power. Defying the oppressors and violating existing institutions and laws is a baseline understanding of those who fully adopt this worldview. It may be largely a fringe for now, but in America, it's being pushed steadily along the axes of both race and gender first, and other secondary traits following behind.
Wow are you barking up the wrong tree in describing me. This is some strange strawman version of what some left wing people believe, not a description of my philosophy.
Did you read this on Brietbart, or in The National Review, or what?
I was not attempting to describe you, and I apologize if that's what I communicated. My response was intended to be to your opening comment:
I've never seen anybody suggest that you can't be bigoted against a dominant group.
I am pointing out that that /is/ a current and growing worldview among many, even if you have not yet seen it yourself. Your views are your own, and I have relatively little insight into it from your post.
I would point out that it is the logical extension of what you stated in the first post in this subthread, carried to its extremes. If you don't believe those extremes should hold, I would ask you to consider: what is the limiting factor for you? Where is the line drawn? How far is too far?
I don't however agree with you that that's the logical extension of what I stated. Can you explain? I don't feel it particularly relevant to take an idea and carry it to an extreme to judge it's usefulness either.
Perhaps you might instead address what I said initially on it's own terms.
The argument you'd heard basically boils down to turning all power dynamics into moral categories: those who have power reinforce their own power by building systems that make sure there's no repercussions for their own actions if they harm someone under their power. The extension comes when people make it universal instead of specific: defining all human relationships in terms of power and its abuse. Those in power are inherently immoral, and thus under power are inherently moral.
There is certainly truth to this: normally, we would call such a relationship 'corruption of power', and as the adage goes, power and corruption tend to go hand-in-hand. The argument then goes that if you are not in power, the only way to return the relationship to a morally right state is to break the rules the corrupt powerful have put in place to purportedly retain their own power. If you grant the premise of the powerful making /all laws/ and /all institutions/ solely to preserve themselves and oppress others, the conclusion must follow.
The issue in my opinion is one of 'divined intent' - there is an implicit premise, that there is either direct intent built-in to those oppressive structures, or that there is indirect intent that carries the same amount of guilt for the powerful group. But that paints with far too broad a brush, and is really unfalsifiable, since we cannot fully know the mind of those creating and participating in those structures. Yet all too often, the argument boils down to an assignment of malign intent that vindicates any and all action in response. This is usually done with a motte-and-bailey: make the sweeping case that all powerful people think something, then tip-toe around individual examples when confronted, unless it's a cherry-picked target.
There is also the issue of the universal: this holds true of many systems, but not all systems, and not all people within those systems. The argument works by making the claim apply to /any/ relationship involving power.
Lastly, there is the issue of vocabulary. It's a cute trick to redefine words to apply only to a subset of what the words originally refer to, but the goal is confusion of language. You create new words to describe subsets of phenomena, but that's not what's been done in that argument: it hijacks the original meaning to generate confusion, often with the goal of saying, for example, 'if you are against racism [original definition], you will overturn all existing systems [modified definition].' There's equivocation going on in there.
0. There's no singular leftist philosophy in a world where anarchists and socialists and moderates and centrists are all ostensibly on the same side, but there are points of agreement (nazis are bad, every human being deserves equal dignity, people should have agency over their own bodies except where that agency meaningfully harms others, etc). When I refer to leftist thought I'm trying to refer to my understanding of that overlap. Also I'll number by paragraph I'm responding to.
1. To your first paragraph I'd say that's not the usual argument that I've heard from people on the left. I mean there are kooky people out there, but I think most people would say having privilege doesn't make you inherently immoral, nor is lacking power inherently moral. Morality is based on choices, with the understanding that choosing not to act is still seen as a choice.
Having systemic power gives you a greater capacity to affect change. I do think some people will see refusing to act appropriately to change things for the better when it's easier because you have power as more immoral than if you refuse to act when you lack systemic power, so in that sense you are right, but that's only true if you don't act.
Further I just don't think guilt is really the focus for most people on the left, except to understand how we got to the current status quo; What's more important is people taking responsibility and acting, and attempting to share power so that others can also act.
2. There are certainly people who intentionally work to maintain and expand their power; wealthy people who push for lower tax rates on the wealthy come to mind. Still, a large part of feminist and anti-racist theory seems to be about creating knowledge of privilege in people who take it for granted, and then pointing out the responsibility that suggests. There are conspiracy minded folks to be sure, but I don't know that that jibes with the idea of invisible privilege. I suppose you could argue it doesn't and suggest leftist philosophy isn't perfectly coherent or in agreement though. I'll have to think about this.
3. There's a whole thing in leftist philosophy about how intent is not the same thing as impact. It doesn't matter if systems that perpetuate injustice were built for the best of intentions or the worst or are just weird historical artifacts like the electoral college, what matters is the harm done, and how it falls disproportionately on members of marginalized groups. Thus the whole emphasis on anti-racism instead of not being racist, since merely not acting to further racism doesn't mitigate the harm that exists currently, and is thus also immoral. If that's confusing, look up Good Germans.
4. I'm not sure I understood why you were saying this, but to the extent that I understood I think I agree with you that not every relationship with power is affected. I see a meaningful difference in situations where a person has significant institutional or structural power vs situations where the power comes with the approval of those over whom power is wielded directly.
5.A cute trick? So does that mean you are suggesting that racism was not historically a term mainly used to describe the Nazis and other white supremacists, and sexism a term mainly used to describe the gender inequality that women faced?
I would argue that your original definition is in fact a conservative redefinition, one that treats an unequal status quo as an entitlement of those with power by pretending they are the true victims because people are attempting to redress social injustices.
I guess in the post modern sense any viewpoint can be correct because everything is subjective and based on one's viewpoint, but I'm not a post modernist and to me that seems like BS. I think terms are regularly redefined by people on the right in order to muddy the water and generate fear.
I guess I can say, at least we agree the water is muddy?
Certainly agreed the water is muddy, and that only the kooky fringe hold to all these, but that fringe is growing. The widely-hailed current sources for this kind of thinking are Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo; the latter, specifically, is being hired by companies nationwide to run seminars for employees to train them with this kind of worldview.
It's also pushed strongly in academia, and is quite common to hear about among young progressives as compared to older ones. For concrete examples, look into the Mike Nayna documentary on the Evergreen State College's 'Equity Council'; it's an extreme example, but you can hear the same process happening to lesser degrees elsewhere.
I've read Ibram X. Kendi's How to be an Anti-Racist and Robin DiAngelo's White Fragility and while I didn't agree with everything they said, a lot of it was thoughtful, made me think, and ultimately made sense. I do have a lot of privileges that others don't, and I feel obliged to make things better if I can, using the imperfect guides that exist.
I expect in 20 years some of what Kendi and DiAngelo will have held up, and some of it won't have. That's how doing anything new usually works.
I don't expect corporations to solve racism and sexism, or politicians or even people who run seminars.
I've actually given up any hope that my lifetime will see meaningful end of racism or sexism or even childhood hunger in America. Maybe some low hanging fruit or common cases will be better addressed.
When there is a real attempt to do something that actually makes a difference in the world, I expect it to be a bit clumsy, because they are so often trying to solve for the common case or the most costly case, not for every case. That's not illogical, I do the same thing when I code.
Sometimes they will certainly screw up or go to far; nobody said changing the status quo was easy.
Perhaps that's why conservatism has as much support as it does even when it's based on unscientific BS, or even outright lies.It's very easy to treat the status quo as the best of all possible worlds and try to defend it from the imagined horrors of change.
To me that seems such an empty hopeless way to live, and I hope more people in the world strive for something better, even if it's difficult and imperfect.
The abstracting concept of "protected group" is not commonly understood. I had never heard of it before this thread.
Anti discrimination of course is, but not this specific term.
Neither in the German Wikipedia nor in the Duden (German dictionary) or on the website of the "Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung" (Federal Agency for Civic Education) can I find any reference to "geschützte Gruppe".
The German constitution, explicitly states: "No person shall be favoured or disfavoured because of sex, parentage, race, language, homeland and origin, faith or religious or political opinions. No person shall be disfavoured because of disability.".
This is often emphasized in things like job postings, but never in abbreviated/conceptualized form.
> Not to mention the implication that harrasment is somehow ok against people who are not members of the protected class?
The GNOME CoC gleefully states they will ignore complaints of racism against whites and sexism against cis men because "we prioritize the safety of marginalized groups over the comfort of privileged groups".
That's not what that line means at all. That line means that an argument like `let's stop using gender-neutral language in our documentation, it's easier to just say "he" instead of "the user"` won't fly: this type of argument prioritizes the comfort of a privileged group (males) over the safety/well-being of a marginalized group (women and non-binary people).
I'm all for being gender-neutral for the sake of neutrality, but the idea that the use of "he" somehow hurts people's safety or well-being sounds a bit absurd to me.
Right, many countries have similar ideas. They all define them slightly differently.
The americentric part is using the american legal term of art in an international context and assuming everyone just understands it, and that its a reasonable definition in context.
The idea that minorities exist and should have some additional legal protection is not the aspect that is americentric.
My point is that I don't think it is using it as an American legal term, it's using it generically for the the broadly understood idea, a lot being common. At least that would be my assumption.
They could hardly go out of their way to find a synonym not in use by any country, and then keep checking in case some country started using it and people started interpreting the document as using it in the sense of that country's law specifically.
It's not an American legal document, so unless it explicitly defines the term as such, that's not what it means, it's just words. If it said 'murder' or 'jaywalking' we wouldn't pick a country that uses those terms to interpret them in its legal sense, we'd just understand the broad sense of what they are anywhere, even in countries where they are not used ('jaywalking' here in the UK).
> The idea that minorities exist and should have some additional legal protection
Again, that's not what it is. The legal protection is against discrimination based on your <something> such as race or ethnicity. No matter whether the particular value in your case is held by the majority or a minority of people.
Taken literally, its a referential term - "protected class" means a class protected by something (in usa typically a statute).
If they don't define the term, then surely they mean the american context - if not, who is protecting the class?
> If it said 'murder' or 'jaywalking' we wouldn't pick a country that uses those terms to interpret them in its legal sense, we'd just understand the broad sense of what they are anywhere
The difference is that these terms have widely agreed upon meanings. I know what jaywalking means regardless of country.
If i use the term protected class generically, who is included? Are we including the following groups:
- vetrens of us armed forces
- vetrens of non-usa armed forces
- political beliefs
- sexual orientation
- criminal conviction
If used generically, its impossible to know - some juridsictions say yes, some say no, in different contexts.
If the CoC was just using the term in an abstract way - to represent the abstract idea of a protected class, that would be fine. However they are not. They are using the term concretely. To understand the CoC you have to know the exact list of protected classes (or at least be able to identify if a specific trait creates membership or not).
Although i think this term is needlessly american, ultimately i'd be fine with it if they defined it. Not defining a term used almost exclusively in the usa kind of implies they mean it in its american sense.
> Again, that's not what it is. The legal protection is against discrimination based on your <something> such as race or ethnicity. No matter whether the particular value in your case is held by the majority or a minority of people.
I should of said marginalized instead of minority perhaps. Although it varries depending on context, and region, affirmative action is often not considered to be in violation of these policies. So its more complex than that.
You have what is unfortunately a common misunderstanding of the term protected class. Nobody is IN a protected class, because protected classes are not any particular group of people, like middle class or working class. In the civil rights act of 1964 protected classes are the classifications that the law refers to such as race, religion, etc. So it is illegal to discriminate against someone because of their religion, but it does not protect any religion over any other. For race, race itself is the protected class. So it is illegal to discriminate against anyone based on race, not just black people or Asians, for example.
Wtf is "protected classes"? Harassement against non protected class will be tolerated? If not, why is it explicitely singled out so?
What a load of commie bull...
> Behaviour which can be considered harassment against protected classes will not be tolerated.
That's... interesting?
Some of the most vitriolic flamewars I've seen on the internet were between western straight white males. I don't see the point of special casing this clause.
Regarding the "good intentions" change, the explanation in the linked twitter thread makes sense to me: in some contexts, assuming good intentions is a way of excusing bad behavior.
It's hard to agree on the exact boundary between enabling a jerk and making an issue out of nothing. But the old "assume good intentions" policy does sound to me uncomfortably similar to "if you're offended it's your own fault". Which is generally how people treat victims of harassment in communities where that sort of harassment is tolerated.
I don't know. Assuming good intentions is an advice for you, so you don't get offended. And assuming good intentions doesn't justify the impact. Even if you assume good intentions of a driver, if he drove badly and did some damage he is still responsible for the damage. Assuming hus good intentions doesn't change anything. Skill, following the rules and effect are what matters when it comes to judging.
That is misunderstanding of the principle. Of course you still need to use your head. For a community to be welcoming for people that aren't too extroverted, not fitting anyone on that mailing list really, your approach is very counter productive if you really want to empower voices that normally don't speak up.
It is also required for completely dry technical discussions. I am not sure I would want that in open source communities though, but that is certainly a preference.
Next time you get in a car accident maybe the police should throw you in jail for wilful destruction of property. It doesn't matter if you did not intend to damage the other car since intentions don't matter. You did the crime you should do the time.
Protected class if definition even exist can mean completely different things. Saying that US definition is the only one that matters is unwelcoming to people from other countries.
edit: non just unwelcoming, it can be considered discriminating
In Australian law, and I'd imagine generally in many other countries, intent is a big part of judging a wrong. But of course, it's possible to cause harm without intending to, so there are other things to consider. Common phrases are 'reckless disregard', 'willfully ignorant', 'negligent' or sometimes 'lack of consideration' (which is different to intent).
Obviously it isn't a binary situation with either intent or impact being the sole arbiter - so the baseline used in almost all situations is the 'ordinary' or 'objective' standards. These can vary depending on the environment and context, and are simply defined because they are hard to define across all scenarios.
I guess I find it surprising that a code of conduct like this should sway between intent and impact in quite so binary a fashion -- human behaviour isn't software.
As well as being a bedrock principle of the law, it's also basic common sense. If I accidentally step on your toe, that's obviously different to me deliberately stamping on your toe in an intentional attempt to injure you. If you set out to deliberately injure your colleagues then this is OBVIOUSLY different from doing the same thing accidentally and should be treated differently - and anyone with a working brain can see this.
The idea that "intent doesn't matter" is preposterous. Accepting it as a premise leads to insane and preposterous conclusions that no-one believes. People who say that "intent doesn't matter" don't actually believe it.
People do believe it, because thinking that intent matters makes it impossible to defend their other position: that the most important thing is how the "offense" is received.
If intent matters (as you say, anyone with half a brain knows it does), then if you receive my comment as being offensive, I am still right because I didn't mean to offend you. What they want is to make sure they can tell me I'm wrong anyway because the person was offended... hence, my intention didn't matter.
So if a woman accused a while man of having “small hands” for having some opinion, that’s not sexual harassment because white men are not a protected class?
White men, identified by race and sex, are legally a protected class.
People with small hands are not, unless the smallness of their hands is considered a disability.
This is correct, assuming US 'protected class' works broadly the same as UK 'protected characteristic'. I don't know why this comment is being objected to?
It's about discrimination on the basis of the value of someone's <characteristic>, not that particular values ('white', or 'female', etc.) are held in some special regard.
The obvious example is hiring: you can (should) hire white people, black people, men, women, and so on. You can't (legally) hire someone because of one of those traits, or allow it influence your judgement.
(It's why I find quotas/diversity reporting a bit troubling - it sort of assumes an equal outcome, or something close to it, is a natural state, since you can't say 'hire more women' if you find that's what's lacking; you can only try to remove existing (illegal! conscious or not) bias in the other direction. But what if the lacking group didn't have equal opportunity, so on merit they really weren't the best hires? - I know, that old argument - point is, if that's the case, hiring for an equal outcome, so-called 'affirmative/positive action' is actually illegal.)
(IANAL but I have to assume there are exceptions where an otherwise protected characteristic is actually required due to the nature of the work. The police need a certain number of women, (and men, but that's the problem side) diversity aside. Primary schools presumably have the opposite problem.)
It's true. Protected classes are people of a certain race, ethnicity, religion, sex, sexual orientation, etc. For example, an airline in the US that wanted to hire only female flight attendants would likely face a lawsuit from male candidates.
Understandable reaction, but too broad. Like a lot of other areas of the culture war, there's a big faction you'd agree with. I'll never have a CoC on any project I work on. I consider protecting my projects from wokeism the same as protecting them from cancer, and I'm not the only one who thinks like that.
One of my many misgivings about CoCs is their over-reliance on the unenforcable.
This is an excellent example - because the original said exactly what needed to be said, but it wasn't being interpreted correctly. Instead of improving the wording, and saying something like "participants should always assume good intentions. However, intention does not make a person's actions immune from criticism, and while assuming good intentions we will kindly encourage each other toward a higher standard of behaviour." ... they instead have chosen to weaken the specificity and balance of the CoC.
Throughout the discussion, and on the twitter thread, the overriding message is: Triggering the hurt of a protected party is always punishable.
And it's a sad viewpoint, because it becomes not "Matz is nice and so we are nice", it becomes "We are nice to avoid the ire of a protected party"
> to weaken the specificity and balance of the CoC.
This is a feature, not a bug. When the rules are clear and specific, they can be enforced fairly. When they're vague and unclear, then the only consistent principle is that the people who "enforce" the "rules" can do whatever they want and you have no recourse or due process.
I don't know why you've been downvoted, but anyone that has seen how laws have been selectively enforced since whenever should be able to easily see how this is the case as well. It's the "everyone is guilty of breaking some law" principle, but applied to what is currently considered fashionable good behavior. It's a different kind of slippery slope and we'll know it when the wrong kind of people get into positions where they can enforce these to suit their needs rather than protecting marginalized communities.
But speaking out against that will be seen as the same thing as an attack on marginalized, so most folks will either be quiet or move on, and these power-hungry folks will get to keep their fiefdoms.
I absolutely agree about both the impetus and the danger of this currently prevailing viewpoint.
I will speak to the motivation however, because I'm a reconcillatory kind of person most of the time, and unlike this CoC I do believe intent is important.
I believe that the intent behind those adopting these documents is protection and general social good, and I believe their adoption is very very bad because those adopting them are blindsided.
Because the people writing them are not lawyers, and are not expecting them to be used as laws to be enforced, but as "good feeling reinforcers". Effectively, corporate virtue signalling (and, in some cases probably also personal virtue signalling - with all the negative connotations that brings).
The fact is, when you introduce a set of rules, you have to expect those rules to be interpreted by people with some extreme biases, and ensure that the wording produces a fair outcome regardless. It doesn't matter whether you call these rules "guidelines", or a "code", or even a "statement of intent". They will be used as rules, and if they aren't, then what is the point of writing them?
This is unfortunately one of those "zombie comments" because the comment you're responding to presently shows no evidence of being downvoted, but I guess it was when you commented. I didn't vote on it either way, but I will say there is some dissonance between an apparent belief that the principle of being maximally charitable in assuming the best of everyone is a principle of discourse worth upholding, but then not doing so yourself.
The difference is that being maximally charitable is the right way to approach normal communication from normal people, but the people who write “CoCs” are known bad actors. You don’t assume good faith from the person that’s assaulting you.
Selective enforcement is exactly proof that the above comment is constructing an irrelevant problem. When the rulers don't like the rules, and there is no mechanism to force them, the rulers simply ignore the rules - they don't need to change the rules.
If you have bad rulers and no mechanism to change them, all giving them a perfect rule book to enforce will not produce better outcomes - they will selectively apply and interpret the rules as they want.
At best, a good set of rules will make it more obvious that the rulers are acting in bad faith. But the rules themselves can't compel the rulers - only other people can.
Sadly true. But I reluctantly stop short of attributing that nasty side-effect as a defining goal of the CoC movement, because - you know - I always try to assume good intentions :)
(Though, if you feel Hanlon's razor is a better motivator for you, I won't judge)
Rules can be enforced however fairly or not the rulers want. Better rules don't make for better rulers - at best, they make it more obvious when a ruler is not being fair.
Maybe, but I think there are social contracts that you are overlooking. If I write a rule, and then I violate a rule (or refuse to censure someone for violating a rule) then I can be rightly accused of hypocrisy.
People believe themselves to be within a certain margin of "good people", and having incontrovertible proof of being "The Biggest Hypocrite" makes them uncomfortable.
There are of course those who don't feel that discomfort; there are even those that commit victim-filled crimes without remorse. Often, there are external forces we can lean on to bring those people into line or out of society - and agreed, in the case of Open Source Software communities, those external forces don't always exist or are not reliable for regulating something as insignificant as moderation policies on a mailing list.
There are also those that would leverage that discomfort for their own immoral benefit, and bad rules are equally good enablers of that kind of person.
But I don't think it's fair to say that the quality of rules is meaningless - if there is any level of accountability in the sub-community of moderators (or in the community as a whole), good fair and enforceable rules have power.
It has been brought into conformance with the standards of corporate HR departments, whose job it is to shield the company from discrimination lawsuits, not really to foster a kinder community.
If there are any CoCs left that do not adopt these standards, they will be brought into conformance soon. Corporate sponsorship depends on it, and open source is nothing without corporate sponsorship.
What is a higher standard of behavior exactly? More formal? More informal? What goal does it have? Fundamental Christians have a pretty high standard for behavior, I doubt this is the goal.
This is an undefined spiral to infinity mainly relying on de jure expectations.
Sexism - the believe that on sex is supreme to the other is already redefined to mean anything suggestive.
This is a complicated question, and for those new to this kind of discussion, it deserves a complicated answer. This is not that answer, but here are some thoughts:
a) We are a reactionary species, unfortunately. And that served us well when the burning questions of the day were "Tiger friend? [BITE] No, tiger never friend" but less so when discussing the social weight felt by minority and historically persecuted groups, the benefits and pitfalls of hyper-vocal "allies" and the social disenfranchisement felt by potential allies bitten by persecutions that they are told do not exist.
b) We are a reductionist species, unfortunately. That helps us when understanding the complexities of mathematical infinities and physics and the workings of the human central nervous system, because - between similarly educated peers - a scientific community can abstract away the irrelevent bits and share groundbreaking research outcomes with relative ease. But when "normals" try to enter the discussion, they mistake the simplified abstract descriptions for a simple concept and end up contributing nonesense or reporting falsehoods to the rest of the world (e.g. are we moments away from fusion generators? Are we on the cusp of ignition? No, no we're not).
And so, when discussions take place about the relative protections and privileges inherent with social majority groups and justify the particular resource expenditure on helping to rebalance centuries of systemic prejudices, people will misread what they understand of the zeitgeist and say "Your social privilege, as defined by your [race / gender / sexuality / ability / age / etc] means that your feelings need no consideration"
c) We are a self-absorbed species, unfortunately. It contributes to our survival and that of our dependants to ensure that we take the resources we need so that we are in a position to then help the rest of our clan. Weirdly though, we also have faculties for patience and imagination. And so we are happy to imagine ourselves in the shoes of someone we consider as "sufficiently other" to the point where we will fight for them as if they are our own clan, which is in a way wonderful (not always - see "white saviourism") but it means that those similar enough to be relatable receive a negative consideration, being not different enough to be worth the emotional investment, but not similar enough that they are truly "in the same boat", though we feel like they are. For example, try to analyse your perceptions of the poor and homeless that live near you, compared to the poor and starving people from distant countries.
It just "feels different", right?
That "local mistrust" is just as much an undeserved prejudice as the fact that you probably imagined those "people from a distant country" with a particular skin colour.
And lastly:
d) Our emotions deceive us constantly. That small racism dig in part C - if that affected you (sorry!) might make you susceptible to further emotional manipulation, because (see A) we are a reactionary species, and so from there it's easy for someone to manipulate us to reduce (see B) the world into "overprivileged vs underprivileged" clans, take on the underprivileged as our own (see C) and thereby increase our prejudice under the guise of eliminating prejudice.
Then echo chambers, then reinforcement by media, friends, catchy superficial soundbites, our employment... and finally our own selves, because once you've declared your unwavering support for a vaguely positive cause, it's very hard to walk that back.
And convincing someone to reverse a commitment they have made that has superficially positive soundbites because they are taking a damaging approach is a lot harder than reversing a prejudice they fell into through normal upbringing.
Maybe, long-term, that isn't a problem. Over the generations, we'll react ourselves to a position where everyone is protecte...
The very core of the problem is that impact of anything on human minds is, in fact, not objectively measurable. Even formalized attempts to do this - e.g. psychology - suffer from a major replication crisis.
In that scenario, the situation degenerates into "he said - she said". Traditional response was "in dubio pro reo" = "in doubt, let the accused go free".
But modern woke movements generally hollow out this principle and replace it by "believe the marginalized / weaker / oppressed side" and "be strict and hostile against the privileged side", as defined by the contemporary academic ladder of oppression.
This leads to a very paranoid society and I think it will take at most 10-20 years to reverse again, as bad cases start to heap. One of the universal qualities of humanity is that we can all be manipulative dicks, regardless of gender, color and creed, and once you shift the balance of power to the accuser, you will empower manipulative people across the board. And they are perfectly able to poison the common well for everyone.
Edit: 2 downvotes within 20 seconds and zero attempt at rebuttal.
Really developing backwards on all accounts. This is a purity spiral. If you allow it to infect your community, you can be sure it will at some point consist of toxic people that feel slighted on every opportunity they can get.
This is exactly why many people were not really open to COCs because this is an eternal battleground with creeping behavior expectations because of some unsolved personal problems.
My thoughts follow yours entirely - the author is tweaked about the failure of the moderators and twitter is not a place for commentary on a pull request.
(There's a certain irony here to the author of the PR complaining about the difference between the intent and impact of a statement and then... completely missing the point of why their PR is meaningless).
What is a protected class? I don't understand why harassment would be fine against some, but not others. That sound like the very thing that a CoC is meant to prevent.
Not a fan of the "you should educate yourself" retort whenever people ask for definitions. It happens in that Github thread over what a "protected class" entails.
Whenever I’m arguing about a position I’m expected to thoroughly define terms and provide citations. Yet, when I ask what a nebulous term entails the onus is on me to “educate” myself … as if what they’re saying is self-evident. It’s so underhanded.
What is there to research? I said what a bad faith argument is for (banning trolls) and why it is necessary (trolls are poison). This addresses the post I responded to in it's entirety.
The community CoC is about to change and the person sincerely wishes to understand what is going to change and why. I myself try my very best to keep my words respectful and productive. I could see myself asking the same question when faced with such a confusing situation, because I'd sincerely try to respect the new guidelines.
Harassment is never okay and I find it problematic that the entire GitHub thread seemed hostile with a toxic mindset where if you don't fully agree on the actions being taken, you're assumed to not understand the intentions behind them. You're treated like an ignorant fool, who needs to "go educate themselves" and get "woke". Productive discussion seems forbidden. You can become a troll by claiming anyone else to be a troll whenever they disagree.
You had no bad intentions yourself and I agree that way too many people do lack a basic sense of respect, but please avoid making such condescending statements if someone could be sincerely asking others to clarify their thoughts.
> That said, "please help me understand" is sometimes a bad faith tactic to claim ignorance of basic empathy.
Not all empathetic responses are justified, nor are they shared or universal even within the same culture. That's why humans have literally devoted millennia to the study of ethics.
I think any response to these scenarios that suggests we just need to apply empathy is deeply ignorant of basic facts of ethics and human psychology. I understand people try to game the system with these tactics, but that sort of response is not a solution.
>Not a fan of the "you should educate yourself" retort
Also not a fan of this. My response would be something along the lines of:
"I'm not going to 'educate' myself on your delusional beliefs for the same reason I'm not going to 'educate' myself when my schizophrenic uncle tells me to learn more about the 5G towers tracking people's vaccine chips and giving everyone cancer."
This github links to a twitter thread about rationale for the change which mentions a sexist joke that was in the ruby mailing lists but doesn't link to it. I feel like I've read entire news articles about kinds of events like these where no one will actually show what was said. We're just supposed to agree it was really bad sight unseen. Here's my guess at the joke at the core of this for anyone wondering: http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-talk/...
Edit: Appears it was copied in the git thread, as mentioned below.
It's a bit buried in the GH discussion, but someone else posted it here:
"Maybe this has been written for women, having calculated their age ;)"
If I were in charge of a community or mailing list, I would kick the person who wrote that off. But I simply don't see how (a) the existing rules didn't do enough to cover this, or (b) the changes will resolve those issues without causing other problems.
As I understand it, some people who want to make sexist jokes on the mailing list with impunity pointed to the language about tolerating opposing views to claim that their desire to belittle women on the mailing list must be tolerated.
edit: evidently someone thinks this comment is worthy of a downvote. I didn't say whether I approved of this action or not. I looked through the threads to find out why the decision was made. I don't think a sincere effort to provide more information should be punished because of disagreement.
But...like...just say no? Am I missing something? If the current CoC covers offensive jokes like the one in question, then simply assert that the CoC covers it and be done with it.
If someone is willing to go through the CoC with a fine tooth comb, they're likely going to find something they could potentially use to defend themselves. Just say no!
The changes open up so much interpretation that anyone could use it to kick out people for all sorts of silly reasons.
It is somewhat of a modern cultural failing that we cannot moderate without having a CoC to point to and say "see? You're bad, it says so here". A good moderator can make the value judgements necessary to keep a community relatively healthy. For some reason a lot of folks have forgotten a CoC does not change that at all.
I think that the problem is that some people read CoCs as essentially _legal documents_; and thus attempt to act as CoC lawyers. Thus the "I'm allowed make sexist jokes with impunity because Ruby's constitution says that opposing views must be tolerated" take.
Obviously, CoCs generally aren't written as foolproof legal documents, and there's no caselaw or court system, so this is kind of absurd. But one approach to rules-lawyering is always to tighten the rules to remove the loopholes that are being exploited, so... Personally I think it'd be better to add language emphasising that the CoC is merely a _guideline_, and that the moderators are judge, jury and executioner.
I did not downvote you, but unfortunately you trivialize Popper by invoking his paradox of intolerance in such context.
Popper lived in a world where democracy was threatened by very powerful totalitarian movements and its demise in Europe at least was a very credible scenario. His paradox of tolerance addresses those violent, brutal movements that left a trail of blood and destruction on the continent.
There is zero evidence that Popper intended to micropolice or censor uncouth / rude verbal or written interactions among people. He was mostly concerned about outright tyranny and genocide. And there is a long way from bad jokes to tyranny and genocide, even though the Anglo-Saxon world has evolved a rather thin skin in the last decades and seems to think otherwise.
Making sexist jokes on a mailing list should probably be rebuked or punished by moderators for being in bad taste, but not because of Popper's ideas. A person joking about some girls age almost certainly does not want to enslave/kill women and does not have to be forcibly prevented from doing so.
I down voted you because I felt your comment was off topic to the comment you replied to. I do not see any reason the old CoC or no CoC at all would have preventing banning that user. Just because you should assume good intent does not mean you cannot ban or give a talking to user who make sexist jokes. I see no paradox of tolerance here.
This is not a good use of the paradox of tolerance. There was no threat of the ruby mailing lists being taken over by sexists using violence.
Popper was talking about groups like the Nazis coming to power. When overwhelming violence is near, you have to make a choice or else you’ll lose the capacity to make that choice. And even then, determining when overwhelming violence is near is extremely difficult and should be the absolute last resort.
It’s astounding how often this is linked with respect to online discussion.
> In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise.
Can sexist humour be kept in check with rational argument and public opinion?
Really? You would permanently remove someone from a community for one joke in bad taste? You wouldn't use any social skills of your own to, say, tell the person their joke isn't well received and they need to be more polite?
I could see it going either way, but come on, no one in their right mind would think that that's an appropriate joke to make in a public thread with members of a professional community.
"No one in their right mind" - Again, maybe it's because I see a version of my younger self, but it seems oversensitive! Yes, I know we are now in a world where any joke in the workplace that bases itself on "protected class" is theoretically off-limits. But that switch has flipped rapidly, and on top of it, that joke was truly minor. If it was an aggression, it really puts the micro in microaggression. But to read the comments, you'd think he made a Holocaust joke on Passover.
It was foolish to make the joke, it was even more foolish to make it on a digital format that cannot be rescinded. It's also foolish for people to immediately call for this person's removal from the community in perpetuity, rather than have a chat and explain that those jokes aren't funny.
Yeah like I said, I could see it going either way. I think your response would be reasonable, and I would be on board with it. I've never been in charge of an open source community so it's hard to say exactly what I'd do, but you're right that typically these kinds of decisions persist in perpetuity. With that in mind I'd be more likely to have a conversation, so long as the person can demonstrate that they understand why those jokes can't be tolerated.
Something doesn't have to exist as a certain quality for a subset of people to determine that it may be perceived as "too much a likeness of some THING".
In short: You can be banned for talking about pasta in a noodles forum. That doesn't mean pasta is not a noodle.
It's not sexist. Them banning it as sexist does not make it sexist.
Every day I wake up to the programming community becoming more pretend, more fake, more toxic and less open. Ironically the very thing it is trying to distance itself from.
The example is so anodyne and the pattern of CoC changes so regular that I can't help but expect that this was opportunistic - waiting for any such example to jump on and institute these changes.
The goal is to grant all offend/ed/ parties total, unimpeachable power against purported offend/ers/, and no amount of 'protected classes' cover removes the fact that this enables the same bad faith that harassing parties abuse, just for a different group.
Hold everyone to the same high standard. Period. Done. None of this thumb-on-the-scales nonsense.
Even more than US-centric, the commenters in the GH discussion explicitly refer to California laws. The internet is not California, regardless of what the technologists who live there would like to believe.
(to be clear, I'm completely in favor of protecting people from harassment and abuse, though I strongly disagree with reserving that only to legally protected classes).
Everyone is part of a legally protected class. For example, you oughtn't discriminate on the basis of marital status. Regardless of who you are you have a marital status, either single, married, divorced, widowed, etc. Or you ought not discriminate on the basis of race. Whether it be white, mixed race, ginger, etc. So while it might be the case that being a member of a minority is a particular instance of a protected class, we all fit into various classes, and the idea is that none of us should face harassment or discrimination based upon our membership therein, regardless of what it may be.
They're part of a class but no, not everyone is "legally" protected. Short people are not a legally protected class, hence why it's possible to have height restrictions in certain employment roles (in the US at least).
But that kind of underscores why "legally protected class" really doesn't make sense for a CoC. Like yeah short people aren't legally protected...but any good CoC should prohibit harassment and abuse against people for their height. Obviously.
As someone else mentioned in another thread - it depends. There are definitely legal protections for being a CERTAIN KIND of short, for instance (such as Achondroplasia).
The law focuses on reasonableness of accommodations and the actual job needs, so for instance you can't discriminate based on height if it is a legitimate medical condition and there is the option of reasonable accommodations - say it's a cashier job, and stool would be perfectly fine and adequately allow them to do the job.
If there is no reasonable accomodations, say because the job is not being a cashier, but being a basketball player, and stools or other devices don't help adequately enough to be competitive, then you could discriminate all you wanted on that condition.
The issue of course is a lot of people can't untangle their own prejudices and ideas of what it takes to do a job or who should be doing it enough to even legitimately articulate the ACTUAL requirements to do a job, and tend to spew a bunch of half though out stereotypes, so they run afoul of it pretty regularly. And the gov't (and labor market) MOSTLY lets them unless they're pretty big.
Putting 'legally protected classes' in the CoC is pretty ridiculous, since there are a ton of different definitions depending on context.
Hardly - 26% [https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/disabilityandhealth/infographic-d...] of Americans have a recognized medical disability. Nearly that many are women of child bearing age, and can be discriminated against due to pregnancy status. 34% of Americans are over 50 years old (and officially protected as such).
You would be surprised how few people do not have a clear type of legal protection as part of some class - pretty much just fit, healthy, 18-40 something males really.
The exact phrase "protected class" is particular to the US but the concept isn't particularly so. The UK has "protected characteristics," Canada has "protected grounds," as does the European Union in Article 14 of the Convention on Human Rights. Australia has "protected attributes."
Frankly it's pretty US-centric to imagine that a general human rights concept such as protected classes of people is US-centric.
To be fair I think « protected class » specifically refers to the US definition here. Hence the choice of words. The CoC doesn’t use « protected characteristics » or « protected grounds ».
But including this filter in itself is weird. Why would they specifically talk about harassment on protected classes instead of just harassment? Does it mean someone who’s not a protected class can be harassed and no one will lift a finger? That seems overly toxic and exclusive to me.
It seems the intention is more about setting a higher bar for harassment against protected classes, rather than setting a lower bar for harassment otherwise
You're assuming good intentions on the part of the authors, but the impact is people will take away that harassment of those outside a protected class is OK. The intentions don't really matter here :-)
If it's setting the bars at different levels then this seems to be a distinction without a difference (other than I guess indicating which direction the average bar height is moving?)
It might be slanted in the sense that they're picking out a single thing that was removed, but I don't see how it's misleading. They are indeed removing that line.
How about not telling offensive jokes, not making offensive assumptions, or just not being offensive. Its a programming language mailing list, what exactly is it about a sexist joke that you think belongs there?
Throughout history, men have bonded by expressing humor, angst, and emotions regarding sex. It may be an outrage by the moral fashion of today. But, you would have a hard time making the case that this behavior is unusual by incumbent standards of collaboration.
It's not just the leftists. Fox News also has to keep things fresh (or at least reheated for their viewers). It seems like a lot of people in USA got addicted to feeling outrage and it sells.
It is inappropriate if you want to convince people of your viewpoint, which is what I stated. The aptness with respect to other goals could vary of course.
This is a casual conversation, not a trial. Refusing to treat inappropriate questions seriously discourages more questions like that in the future, which is also a solid goal.
In that case I'm sure you could think of better way to discourage nonproductive dialogue - rather than being snarky - if that is the stated goal. At least something less self-defeating.
Either way I think the question was warranted. Especially since the long passage from the Unabomber's manifesto they chose to quote when pressed for a response was rather illuminating regarding their beliefs.
The problem is that almost anything, no matter how benign can be considered "offensive". A phrase as innocuous as "pregnant women" has become offensive under this ideology. The goal posts are constantly moving and if you're caught on the wrong side you get persecuted.
But that's kind of the point, no? You could literally just have your comment as the CoC and it would be good enough to cover the joke in question.
So why is the pull request necessary? It very obviously opens up the potential to be abused by people who would love to kick others out of the community because they don't like their political opinions.
See, first people were irate that the code of conduct existed at all, they felt that having a definition of harassment was bad because "some people get offended at everything". Then they were angry when that definition was narrowed, because they felt that it didn't protect them enough.
Obviously, the code of conduct is the only thing in common here, so that must be the problem.
Remember, the code of conduct is bad because "some people" make it their business to get offended all the time - that could have a chilling effect on discussions! That's why we need freedom warriors to protect us with over-the-top vitriol and hyperbole every time a code of conduct is brought up.
How about not laughing about an "offensive joke" them? If you dont find it funny it wasn't for you. The jokes where not made to make you cry they where made to make people laugh it just doesn't fit your humor.
Not laughing about something that one does not find funny but at the same time also dont cry or have a mental breakdown isnt really a political concept. Its what just about everyone does and we should not pay attention to thous few who dont.
banter, irony and jokes are still accepted in all communities I'm know of, and I'm active in various popular FLOSS projects. I've never heard of a CoC prohibiting such things.
Last time I participated in a discussion about adding a CoC to a project it boiled down to people just not liking that it's called a Code of Conduct. They agreed that we needed a basic set of rules etc for moderation purposes but opposed having a CoC, but they were fine as long long as it wasn't called a CoC. I neglected to point that out to them.
I think that's a reasonable perspective. As demonstrated by the incident here, the specific term "Code of Conduct" tends to attract people who don't like to be tolerant of opposing views and don't think it's appropriate to assume good faith. If you want to maintain those standards, which have traditionally been seen as necessary in online communities, it's probably best to use alternative terms which don't have that baggage.
> The rest of us normal, sane people need to stop letting "good intentions" let the trojan horse of endless CoC, morality games, witch hunts and ideological warfare from continuing in the name of 'being non-offensive'.
Amen. These days my instant response to this kind of posturing is to disengage as far as possible from all involved. It's an ideological cancer that turns previously productive communities into a morass of backbiting and one-up-person-ship.
Would you please stop breaking the HN guidelines? You did more than anyone to turn this thread into a flamewar, and that's exactly what we're trying to avoid here.
Replacing everything you posted with "." doesn't help.
What's with the recurring comments about corporations and businesses?
> Some people may have views that when expressed, may be harmful to the interest of particular groups of people like big corporations. This has to be taken into account.
> universally accepted corporate values
> That's California Core Corporate Policies in work
> For instance, members of board of directors of the big corporations are a protected class.
> Members of board of directors of the big corporations are a protected class because they financially contribute to the cause
Given the success of the pull requests, I can only assume that this is not a sockpuppet mocking the rules in question. Is it some kind of multi-layered joke?
I find it confusing too, but my reading of this is that @hmdne is trolling, but the actual changes @hmdne wants to make are fine and defensible in their own right and in fact make it easier to kick out trolls like @hmdne (e.g., a troll can claim that their trollish proposition is an "opposing view" that one needs to be respectful of), and so people are engaging in good faith to try to deflate the troll.
Some of these comments are obviously bait to me - e.g., the one about how we should privilege members of boards of directors - and this looks like a careful attempt not to take the bait.
Note that PR 2690 is not from @hmdne and was unchanged from how it was proposed. PR 2691 is, and perhaps should not have been accepted in its present form because of the "protected class" language, but there are good-faith comments in 2690 (with no mention of corporations) about why the "opposing views" line should be removed.
In this sense, that they would help protect the community from trolls - yes they are defensible. But otherwise, I would unfortunately disagree. It's like an argument that we should lock everyone in cages, so they wouldn't hurt themselves.
Wow, I'm honored! I haven't been actively involved with that project for a long while but if it's making people mad enough to create throwaways, it means my work has real impact. Thank you <3
It's not just you... I was unable to follow it either. I kept going back and forth trying to figure out which "side" the commenters were on, trying to find hidden meanings and running the various points through a sarcasm filter... nothing worked.
I'm left to conclude that they are just simply "out to lunch," to put it politely.
I don't think it's a sockpuppet - I read it as a criticism via satire.
The idea is that any rule you apply should be done fairly and, where that isn't clear, equally.
So as an example. If I say "Pepsi tastes like cow urine", and a corporate shill from Pepsi who has built their self-worth around the company and spent most of their life defending themselves from the usual Pepsi-bashing jokes by bullies telling them that Coke is better, and maybe they fall into some protected class and maybe they don't.
Now, their complaint is valid and their hurt is real. But the intent of the original comment was not to bash this person (or corporation) - it was the spirit of valid criticism.
If the intent is removed from the evaluation of the rules, nobody is safe from those who would manipulate the rules and pretend to be the hurt party to the benefit of a corporation.
[Note: I've re-read everything that person said, and now even I'm not sure. It feels to me like highly honed satire, and if it is, hats off to them, though they've maybe forgotten that a large portion of the Ruby team is not natively English speaking - hence their PR got accepted. If it isn't satire... well, they're not gonna read this, so it would be a wasted education]
Generally I'm opposed to rules changes as a solution to moderation problems unless the rules genuinely do not provide for a way to discipline people who misbehave. But to some extent, they're necessary. Would we prefer if enforcement of rules was capricious and random? Better to have a shared understanding of behavioral expectations before engaging in shared labor.
Still doesn't remove the need for good moderators though.
I think he's referring to the idea of petty HOA politics where motivated power hungry people drown others out and selectively apply rules to make others miserable.
Without being aware of the fact that they were originally meant to and still do discriminate against Black Americans who were brought to this country against their will in chains to be slaves?
I still don't see the parallel with the Ruby community. I'm American and quite familiar with American politics, and I still don't see the point. The Ruby community has certainly had its sexism problems [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7], but are you saying it was also formed with the intent of banning Black people? Please explain.
> "Participants should speak and act with good intentions, but understand that intent and impact are not equivalent."
Huh. That's interesting phrasing. I don't think i like it. Literally nobody thinks impact & intent are equivalent, the sticky point in human interaction and morality is to what extent do we take results instead of intentions into account when evaluating the morality of an action. The statement as is isn't saying anything about how we should interpret intent vs result just that we should acknowledge that its different.
I personally believe that codes of conduct (both this current trend, but also in the traditional meaning of the word) should be specific about what behaviour is wanted, otherwise its a meaningless platitude. This says nothing about how we should interpret someone doing something hurtful while not intending to (or claiming not to). Is that ok? Is it only ok if a "reasonable" person would make the same mistake? Is it ok if they haven't made the same mistake before? Something else?
It's just laying out exactly what you seem to agree with, and that good intentions aren't a shield for bad results. Someone might say "you look really sexy today" and intend it as a compliment, but even if it is a compliment it almost certainly isn't going to be received as one.
Is it laying that out? I think you have to significantly read between the lines to get there.
> what you seem to agree with, that good intentions aren't a shield for bad results
I wasn't giving my opinion so much as sumarizing its an unsolved problem with no obvious correct answer.
If you want my personal view. I don't believe actual results should be taken into account at all.
"you look really sexy today" isn't wrong to say because the recipent was offended. It's wrong to say because a reasonably acculturized person would know that there is a high chance it would be offensive in context. If the dice were on your side, and for some reason the recipent was delighted at your "compliment", i would still say it was wrong because you had no way of knowing that that would be the outcome. The wrongness has nothing to do with what actually happened, only with what was reasonably predictable to happen.
There are pros and cons to this view, and reasonable people do disagree.
[And to be clear, even if something was not predictable and therefore not "wrong", that doesn't absolve you from having to apologize/make it right if you accidentally hurt someone]
"Now now Sally, everyone knows before we can talk to another human, unless you are a protected class, you have to sign an interaction receival request. Don't be scared honey, only about half of all interaction receival requests are deemed offensive by the receiver, and punishable by removal of the tongue. Besides, how do you expect daddy to get another loaf of bread if I don't request one from our local CoC Kommando?
I need you to be brave in this world, as right now you are a protected class, you can bargain on my behalf. Please go to the entity presiding over that area and beg them/their/it/they to be sparing with the interaction receival request litigation fees."
If reasonable behaviour and common sense was obvious, there would be no need for CoC or even laws.
Ultimately it devolves into what a majority of the group understands the norms of the group to be. The implicit assumption is that all members of the group have an implicit duty to understand the shared norms of the group (sort of like in the legal sphere where ignorance of the law is not a defense, but unintentionally breaking the law is, provided that the lack of intentionality isn't soley based on ignorance of what the laws are).
E.g. in the case you mentioned earlier, sexualizing co-workers is the wrong thing. Not knowing that sexualizing coworkers is not a defense. If you say something with a double meaning, which you ernestly didn't realize had a double meaning, that might be a defense. You didn't intend to break a rule, and your unintentional rule breakage had nothing to do with not knowing what the rules are. It doesn't mean you don't have to apologize, but it should be enough [on this view] to prevent punitive action (generally, as always context matters).
You could say that feels unsatisfactory, and you're right it does - its squishy and subjective. I don't hold this view because i think its perfect, but just because i think its the least bad of the alternatives.
What about "That shirt looks really good on you"? Is it a compliment or the receiver may think you just want to rip it off them and have sex on the desk right there and then??
> Literally nobody thinks impact & intent are equivalent
You haven't been paying attention - the (preposterous) idea that "intent doesn't matter, only impact" is a key premise of modern social justice activism and is taught to undergraduates as unquestionable fact.
What amazes me is that the CoC doesn't actually say that. It just says they're different.
It relies on the reader to have already known that "intent doesn't matter, only impact" and anyone could actually interpret it as the opposite, especially if their culture already thinks that intent is the more important thing.
Yeah, the legal tradition and mostly the morals of my country is based on intent is the only thing which matters. So a reasonable assumption for me would be that is a reminder that impact does not matter.
I doubt that is what they mean but it is very far from clear, especially in an international context. Many of these CoCs are virtually impossible to understand unless you have at least a cursory understanding with contemporary American politics. Very inclusive ...
That's a highly disingenuous framing. A better framing would be "intent is not a sufficient excuse for impact".
Intent is not meaningless, but unintentional harms need to be remedied by understanding the harm and working to change the behavior. If someone commits an unintentional harm repeatedly, it ceases to become unintentional, because the refusal to learn is deliberate.
I thought this was a troll. I feel that the identifying of CEOs of big companies as a protected class may have been a tipping of the hat. There seems to be a common strategy by right wing accelerationists that involve masquerading as left wing and pushing things into absurdity.
> There seems to be a common strategy by right wing accelerationists that involve masquerading as left wing and pushing things into absurdity.
Or does there? The truly disturbing aspect of so many things like this is that (as per Poe's Law) it's impossible to distinguish cynical mockery from earnestly-held extremism.
4chan /pol/ does this stuff all the time. The OK as white power sign, the Free Bleeding movement as just a few off the top of my head. But then there are antifastonetoss which I'm pretty sure are actually fans of stonetoss using a loophole to avoid getting banned. These people cannot operate in the open and have found other ways to operate.
I can't tell if it fits the Ruby CoC case. I'm just keeping an open mind to the possibility.
Oh totally, I didn't mean to imply there weren't actors out there doing shady bad-faith false-flag things. There totally are. It's just that sometimes (often?) what they post is indistinguishable from the real thing.
but white supremacists including those on 4chan /pol/ have used OK as an actual racist sign. That may not be the dominant meaning of the symbol but it is one that exists.
I'm not saying we should or that random neo-nazis have that same power to take over it but we should acknowledge that some uses of the symbol are racist
The world is filled with people who have different ideas about what is funny, what is offensive, what is fun, what is boring, etc.
On the internet it is expected to have a clash of cultures since people from different backgrounds are collaborating. There will naturally be well intentioned misunderstandings. Rather than creating a system that allows for these to take place peacefully without incident, any example of a joke gone wrong or a word out of place will result in an inquisition.
Why do so many westerners want to live like this? Constantly thirsty for purifying others. It seems to come from some kind of emptiness that must exist in one's life to be so obsessed over minutiae.
Equality once meant tolerance and acceptance of differences. Now it means if you disagree with me, you're a leftist or a trumper or a thisthatortheotherphobe.
Opening a PR for something like this is extremely dramatic.
I have, thankfully, never had much involvement with codes of conduct but if I did I would want it to pass by a committee or a community vote, with ample time beforehand for discussion, platform, and voting with majority or super majority requirement.
A PR, on the other hand, needs just a handful of political allies — your reviewer — to land, and that’s it. I of course assume the best intentions on the part of the requester, but one could be forgiven for seeing it as a power play, subverting the democratic process.
In general these seem like mostly bad ideas to me, but I'm not part of that community, and I'm in favor of them making their own rules and accepting the consequences.
However, I am wondering if there is some historical context that I'm missing: have their been increasingly hostile or abusive discussions in the Ruby community which these changes are meant to address?
Hopefully all these "wokeness" vs "conservative" lines are drawn in the sand. I really enjoyed when we were writing lines of code rather than writing borders, rules and obvious regressive in-fighting. I can't be the only one looking at all this political garbage and ghost drama with shame.
The comment was exactly in that ironic spirit. The internet version or a slow clap for someone who did something completely useless for the sole purpose of virtual signaling.
If someone runs around on github doing such nonsense "work" editing text no one ever reads you dont deserve more than a ironic acknowledgement. Its like writing ToS that no one reads but replace the salary of a lawyer with people laughing at you for doing this sh*t in your free time (I sure hope no one pays for it).
>I can't be the only one looking at all this political garbage and ghost drama with shame.
This is not political its cultural and everyone outside the US laughs about it.
Politics is part of the culture in the US. And yes, they laugh about it.... but then they slowly devolve into catering towards it and existing within it.
I don't think you should ever demonize trivial contributions. I really dislike any COC or even the intent to further "professionalism" but that is another matter. You will never lose anything if someone contributes, however small the change may be.
I have a project with an extremely narrow purpose. Someone corrected a missing dot in a sentence. That was awesome and unexpected.
Fixing a missing dot has infinitely more real value than changing something that has no use at all to something different that still has no use. Nothing wrong with trivial contribution but these are contribution that just waste peoples time so a small group of people can get a dopamine reward out of it.
Opposing view: GitHub's changing of `master` to `main` as the name of the default remote branch was not necessary and a huge waste of time for all parties involved.
I still can't get over this. The word master has like 10 definitions and because one of them is part of a distasteful part of history that has nothing to do with the way it was used in this context, they inconvenience everyone.
I don't like taking things literally, but in this case that would be necessary, as it's the whole point. "Master" is an English word. If it isn't, "main" is primarily translated to "haupt" in German, and we all know what a Haupttruppführer was, so that should go too, as should every other word that possibly has a negative connotation somewhere in the world.
What does this have to do with the discussion, unless as an illustration of what an "opposing view" could be, which surely no-one had trouble imagining?
The consensus seems to have gelled (few years ago, give or take a few years?) around every single open source project needing to have a specific "community guidelines" document - it was the new vogue established over the past few years by the body politic, and this lead to various promoters of new social paradigms to rename things that were taken at face value, i.e. "master-slave" in the context of database client-server architectures, or "master" branch as primary branch, etc.
These changes are trivial in retrospect, but contextually, the reversion of "participants will be tolerant of opposing views" seems to validate the notion that maybe excessive discourse around social mores aren't appropriate within the substructure of "writing new code that works, backporting features that are useful for others, etc"
The conflating of social justice goal-setting and software development is a swing and a miss, and if that's not completely clear by the context then I just want to apologize for stating what seems obvious to an external observer.
I understood what you meant and agree. I believe many social justice obsessed individuals have become their own worst enemy as they view every unrelated topic an attack on their personal perspective.
> That's common sense. We all know who are protected classes. For instance, members of board of directors of the big corporations are a protected class.
Uh… is this a troll? Like other commented said, this feels like a anti-CoC thing or an extreme case of Poe's law, at least.
Man, the passionated bikeshedding over CoCs in some communities and even in here, with many extremist viewpoints from both sides, makes me glad I'm not really attached to any community. If they're stupid, why should I spend the emotional energy? Just walk away.
That's the whole point of CoCs: divide and conquer. As a result people "Just walk away". Assets paid by Microsoft, IBM, Salesforce and Google are pushing this.
On the topic of extremist viewpoint, this one's (in my first reaction) is off the scale... I'd ask you if you got proof, but as I wrote above, I'm not sure I want to spend my evening reading conspiracy websites. But hey, maybe you can "guide me to the light"?
IMO that's satire, "the use of humour, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize people's stupidity or vices, particularly in the context of contemporary politics and other topical issues." It says a lot if you can't tell the difference.
Seems like a poorly misinterpreted joke about how people will often mention a younger age for their birthday when they’re getting into their older ages? Is that the joke?
If this joke is told by women more often than men (in my experience it is), is it sexist to point that out?
Would this have received the same reaction if the joke was made by a woman?
Some things to ponder, no doubt. However, in this day and age I personally wouldn’t make a joke about any particular group unless I was born into it. Cancel culture is becoming a bit overwhelming.
How about a joke in the context of saving money that said "Must've been done by a Jew" (my supremely limited interaction - with one person from Israel - was about him trying to get more money from the organization I was representing), would it be bigoted to point that out?
For my taste that "must've been a woman" line was cringeworthy. He could've said "Well I guess someone doesn't want to grow old".
Sadly, as someone who isn't Jewish, my view is that if a non-Jewish person says that, they almost have ill intent. It's one of the things that I think people can joke about themselves that way, but it's almost impossible for an outsider to do it without ill intent.
I thought the joke that spurred this was in poor taste, but didn't have any ill intent. It definitely didn't belong on on that message. I'm not even sure jokes belong there at all. If they do, it'd be a pretty narrow selection of them, in certain circumstances.
Sure and I can agree with that. My point being is that not everyone sees it that way, if someone said it and meant it negatively towards me I still wouldn’t care. They want you to care and be offended, don’t give them that. Does it stop them from doing it in the future? No. Will anything stop them? Who knows. There’s a fine line on these sometimes, I don’t want to ruin the life of someone who maybe made a bad joke one time, because not everyone is bad.
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 330 ms ] threadEDIT: Moreover, CoCs don't really work in practice. Has any CoC ever prevented abuse of somebody? Do you have a concrete example?
Please don't spread us-vs-them politics. It's bad enough to know you have it, it will not become more healthy if you infect other people with it too.
At face value, it seems even worse than presented.
Removed:
>"Participants will be tolerant of opposing views."
Modified:
>Before - "Behaviour which can be reasonably considered harassment will not be tolerated."
>After - "Behaviour which can be considered harassment against protected classes will not be tolerated."
The "reasonably" removal aside - for an attempt to be much more precise and inclusive with language, why would they narrow the previous "harassment" to "harassment against protected classes"? I'm sure this wasn't the intention, but rather than adding or intensifying any protections, the change, if read literally in the context of the diff, makes it seem like harassment is now tolerated if you aren't a protected classes whereas it previously wasn't tolerated at all.
I think a better route would've been to keep that line as-is and add a new line saying something like "any remarks that could be considered disparaging, mocking, or exclusive towards any protected classes will not be tolerated". This makes it clear that any kind of singling-out of protected classes is disallowed, regardless of the fact that some people may consider the definition of "harassment" to require something more severe than that.
> When interpreting the words and actions of others, participants should always assume good intentions.
In favor of this:
> Participants should speak and act with good intentions, but understand that intent and impact are not equivalent.
Also changed yesterday:
> Behaviour which can be reasonably considered harassment will not be tolerated.
became:
> Behaviour which can be considered harassment against protected classes will not be tolerated.
The updated CoC is here: https://github.com/ruby/www.ruby-lang.org/blob/master/en/con...
This is very weird because fundamentally it stems from a failure of the moderators. If someone makes a sexist joke you don't just let them because you're "assuming good intentions", that clause means that you tell them it's not appropriate here, and if they apologize you assume they are sincere, and if they don't you swiftly boot them. But there is no substitute for good moderation, shifting words around won't help much.
Aside: Open source discussion opening with "My rationale for these changes are documented on Twitter: [link]" also seems somewhat crazy. And I love Twitter, it just seems very odd to link to a thread of tweets instead of restating your case in the proper medium.
Sincere apology or not, you get to know.
I've been moderating communities for 15 years, I've seen tricks from all manner of trolls and handling trolls with an even hand is still tricky; but being genuinely inquisitive is usually the easiest way to get around it. Even when tensions are high it makes people feel heard and understand their impact.
Do you have any other examples?
You don't get to know anything. Good trolls have also been trolling for 15 years, they've seen tricks from all manner of jannies... See where I'm going with that?
Saying that, I do agree with you, staying inquisitive and positive with bad trolls typically tampers down their rage.
The grammatical rule is that one male flips the plural gender to male. If you do not know the sexes, the plural is male.
As a French, the construction comes naturally because we've been taught that at school since kindergarten. This always sounded a bit weird, though.
I do not approve some "grammatical inclusivity" horrors that are being invented from time to time, but some innovative-but-not-distruptive changes would be welcome.
If you follow the grammatical history of French, the neutral gender just got folded into masculine.
>but some innovative-but-not-distruptive changes would be welcome
You can't really produce grammar by decree, at best you can systematize what already exists. The only "sane" way to have explicit neutral in French would be to go back in time, reimplement declensions and possibly mangle phonology in the process. That won't happen. All forms of "inclusive writing" are from the outset destined and meant to be an elitist signal rather than an actual linguistic feature. They won't survive and they'll been seen in the future as a strange, idiosyncratic trend of the age. A bit like Renaissance orthography, where countless letters were added without meaning to simply look fancier.
This is not just grammatical history, this is the current grammar rules.
However some people are trying to force a change of the rule by making up new words and rules, such as "iels" instead of "ils/elles".
What I am missing are the concepts young people are bringing in more and more, where they have words that become unisex (potes for instance). I listen to my children and (without any scientific analysis), it sounds to me that there is less of a boy/girl cut that there was in my times (this may be regional - this is for west of Paris).
And I agree with you that only naturally appearing changes will stay, not the ones forced on us. A typical example are the surrealist ideas of the 90's to have French equivalents for everything computer. Some stayed, the majority is now part of comedies.
Some info and alternatives here https://www.goethe.de/ins/th/en/m/spr/mag/21967217.html
- apprehending markers like -*in, -_in, -In [1]
- forming a gerund from a verb describing the activity
e.g. the word "Bäcker" - engl. "baker" - could be written as "Bäcker*in" or "Backende" (from "backen", the verb), depending on the speaker. Note that the gerund form eliminates conveying info about gender, unlike an "universal" marker like *in.
[1] for plural forms, those are expanded to -*innen, -_innen and -Innen
As for the genders of nouns, my native English French speaking friends are usually in pain.
Assuming good intentions enable troll to engage in endless sealioning.
The person being inappropriate will always hide behind their intent because they can only argue about their own role in the exchange (e.g. they can't argue that the target person/group isn't really hurt).
When a conversation is derailed away from the damage caused to the intent, the harasser wins. What are you going to do? Establishing a default assumption takes that away. Always have good defaults :)
There is probably some sad history behind many of those individuals, but reasonable people can disagree about how to deal with the situation.
The current fashion implies that as soon as one such person enters the community, everybody has to start metaphorically walking on tip toes.
Maybe a better outcome overall would be for the person to get therapy.
Everybody has a line somewhere for what they consider "too easily offended". This is true even for the staunchest defenders of the current fashion, because even they understand implicitly that offense can be faked.
So yeah, you need good defaults, but that's really a discussion about where exactly that line should be drawn. I doubt either extreme is the right answer.
Tell them to not make these jokes here and flag their account, repeat a handful of times and kick them out if it persists despite warnings. No need to interpret intent, no ability to hide behind ignorance after several warnings.
> Always have good defaults :)
It is impossible to harass people if you just ban every new account under the assumption of guilt.
[1] https://github.com/ruby/www.ruby-lang.org/commit/7e96640e1ca...
The line about protected classes is not in addition to a general rule against harassment, or emphasizing that kind of harassment in particular, it replaced that rule.
There is a separate rule against personal attacks, but is that rule supposed to take over harassment in general? That sort of makes sense in a vacuum, but then it leaves the exact meaning of the 'harassment against protected classes' rule kind of confusing. What does harassing a class mean exactly, and can you harass a non-protected class?
> Encouraged by the quick success of this PR, I made #2691 with another small change. One step at a time at fixing the world :)
https://github.com/ruby/www.ruby-lang.org/pull/2691
“Protected class” is an (American) legal term, with situation-specific definitions. (It means different things in federal employment law, federal public accommodation law, federal fair housing law, and the various states employment, public accommodation, and fair housing laws of each of the States.)
It is entirely unclear what it means in the Ruby CoC, and the explanation in the discussion thread is literally “everyone knows what ‘protected class’ means” which is obviously entirely false. Its a term used by someone who has some overly precise, overly generalized idea of what it means, doesn’t realize that they are wrong, and thinks everyone agrees with them.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28712977
No one supported hmdne's claim everyone knows what protected classes are.
Jacob Herrington encouraged hmdne to make another PR mostly. Consider he recognized hmdne was trying to derail his PR. And he said he'd be in support of finding a better way to communicate the spirit of tolerance and mutual respect. Not removing that part.
Matz approved both PRs. But it isn't clear he read the discussion.
Only american vetrens. Screwing with canadian vetrens is still fair game according to this CoC i guess.
It’s legally OK to discriminate based on a minimum age, but not a maximum age. No voting, alcohol, tobacco, driving, guns, executing contracts, renting a car etc. until 18/21/25.
> @hmdne commented yesterday
> @Try2Code A protected class is a group of people that has been historically discriminated or a group of people we (as humanity) want to privilege to offset the years of discrimination - but that's not all. For example the People of Color are a protected class, because of slavery. Members of board of directors of the big corporations are a protected class because they financially contribute to the cause. The non-heterosexuals are a protected class, because of discrimination. Women are a protected class obviously. I don't know how to better define it. The dictionaries should have a more understandable definition.
Side note: anyone follow what this means? “Members of board of directors of the big corporations are a protected class because they financially contribute to the cause.”?
> @peterc commented yesterday
> Since California has been mentioned, I'm guessing these: https://www.senate.ca.gov/content/protected-classes
The "(as humanity)" should be removed. A protected class in US/UK might of been the oppresor in other countries. Example below.
Romania and Bulgaria have been invaded countless times by the ottoman empire for hundreds of years. Why would a romanian or bulgarian even consider protecting them(muslims)? Black were part of that same force(and high ranking officials) that pillaged the 2 countries. Why would eastern europeans even owe them anything?
EDIT: As an eastern European I don't ower any of them any protection. If anything those 2 classes owe us according to historical facts.
Uhhhh this person has to be trolling, right?
It's more that insults against people over 40 (or that reference people over 40) will be taken seriously, where as insults against/referencing 20 year olds apparently won't be.
So, I'm assuming "ok boomer" would not be OK, but "ok junior" would be.
From reading the comments, it sounds like it's actually self-described "non-protected" folks that are proposing these rules. And the incident started with some male developers getting upset about a joke/insult about females.
It's quite common to have someone express a personal opinion that they themselves don't interpret as harassment (e.g. because they don't belong to the group they're talking about, they see no issue with the way they talk or maybe they might be upset) only to be incredibly surprised and defensive when someone later calls them out.
There is also the fact that in this modern social climate, victimhood has become a valuable currency. There is incentive for people take offense where none could reasonably be presumed to have been given, and to blow minor transgressions out of proportion.
“When victimhood becomes currency, there are bound to be counterfeiters.“
There was a time when making jokes at the expense of women was ok, there was a time when making fun of gays was ok, there was a time when mocking trans people was ok... now it's not.
> The only way someone who is not terminally online could be sure to avoid offending someone would be to become a mind reader, or to not say anything at all
It's just society developing empathy. Think most people understand that how we see other groups of people is not a fixed thing.
> There is also the fact that in this modern social climate, victimhood has become a valuable currency. There is incentive for people take offense where none could reasonably be presumed to have been given, and to blow minor transgressions out of proportion.
People are getting "called out" and "cancelled" more than ever, for sure. But I don't think it's necessarily victimhood. Given the original topic, it's interesting that this is how you're attributing intent. Do you feel that there might be genuine reasons for acting the way they do? Could the grievances be genuine?
It is not a natural change. It is being forced on people. Words and understandings of concepts change of course, but in the past society would slowly start accepting the change. Now a days when a word changes if you don't start using the new definition that day you are a bigot. People don't do well with sudden change.
> There was a time when making jokes at the expense of women was ok, there was a time when making fun of gays was ok, there was a time when mocking trans people was ok... now it's not.
Jokes are jokes. If it is wrong to make a joke about women then it is wrong to make a joke about men. Anything else is sexist discriminatory double standards. Either you can joke about anything or nothing.
>It's just society developing empathy. Think most people understand that how we see other groups of people is not a fixed thing.
Society is losing empathy. We used to understand people could make mistakes and improve themselves. Now the first time you make an innocent mistake you are canceled. You are thrown out of polite society and defamed on social media. That is the opposite of empathy.
>People are getting "called out" and "cancelled" more than ever, for sure. But I don't think it's necessarily victimhood. Given the original topic, it's interesting that this is how you're attributing intent.
The person you were responding to was not saying that a person being canceled is a victim (though they possibly believe that). They were saying that people cancel other people so the person doing the canceling can play the victim regardless if they actually took offense.
>Do you feel that there might be genuine reasons for acting the way they do? Could the grievances be genuine?
I don't think anybody would deny some people are offended about things. I just don't think that matters. If I say hello to somebody and they are offended by that should I be canceled for it?
Really, since the norms change so quickly, the only safe thing is to say nothing at all. Over the last 10 years I’ve seen a lot of my favourite progressive authors torn to shreds on social media for being monsters. The problem is that they were trying to be open minded and progressive in the 30s or 50s or 80s instead of today and that’s unforgivable and their work should be banned for not anticipating future cultural shifts. It doesn’t matter that they were trying their best and lived in a time and place that wasn’t 2021 Twitter
How can you possibly read any possible minds. Even if you can predict the 'reasonable' person, outliers can take offence and you don't know what can offend them.
People can and do take offence at anything. This leaves two possible solutions.
1) Eventually fuck up.
2) Immediately leave the community and find greener, less insane pastures.
I've taken #2 in almost all cases, because I'm definitely going to screw up because I'm human.
For example, if someone from Eastern Europe says something like "it's alright 'cause it's all white", someone from the USA who knows the history of this phrase may take offense. If the person from the USA feels that this may have been an attack, they should be free to raise this issue, and the person from Eastern Europe should apologize for making them uncomfortable, even if it was unintentional. As long as they do this, no further harm should happen to either person.
However, if the person who made the comment refuses to apologize/explain, or keeps repeating this comment since "to me it's not offensive, it's just a joke/reference" etc, then this should be considered a problem and someone with authority should intervene.
Similarly, if the person who took offense refuses to accept the mistake after an apology or explanation was given, then once again someone with authority should intervene and correct this error on this other side, as it unnecessarily creates a hostile working environment.
This is the intended reading of that line. Of course, that line can also be mis-applied by immediately punishing the person from Eastern Europe in my initial example.
Note: I used "person from Eastern Europe" in my example because that is where I am from, and because I have personally seen others around me using references to US culture without knowing the full context in just this way, without ill intent but in ways which would probably shock someone who assumes that the context is well known (for example, casually addressing peers using rap lyrics containing the infamous N-word).
In my experience, when someone "fucks up", I can reflect on my rapport with that person to determine whether or not it was intentional. Either way, I can say something to them about it.
It is a sign of maturity to say "oh, I'm sorry. I didn't think that my words could be perceived in that way. My intent was.."
If your intent is harmful, that's great, because I can help you with #2 by not interacting with you in the future. However, if your intent was reasonable, then no harm done. I walk away having set a healthy boundary for our relationship and you got to keep me around and strengthen our rapport.
> I've taken #2 in almost all cases, because I'm definitely going to screw up because I'm human.
This makes it sound like you're not willing to accept the effort of empathy.
People stopped forgiving and forgetting years ago. Every mistake people make follows them forever now. “Fucking up” is the end of the world for their careers since nobody wants to hire somebody who was publicly outed on Twitter for whatever they allegedly did
Apparently people who are concerned with this are “not willing to accept the effort of empathy”?
If one has a solid rapport with someone, and that person says something that one find upsetting, one's much less likely to attribute that behavior to malice, because rapport is just social context.
> Apparently people who are concerned with this are “not willing to accept the effort of empathy”?
I think a more accurate thing to say is that those who are harmed and cannot contextualize it to be reasonable are not willing to enable that harmful behavior by the person that has harmed them. Empathy is just the act of "putting yourself in someone else's shoes to gain respect for their perspective". I can empathize with an asshole and decide that their behavior needs to be called out _despite_ OR _because of_ the context I have for that person (e.g. I might be more likely to call out inappropriate behavior in those with power than in those without power, with whom I might work more closely to come to an understanding privately, as there's really no use kicking someone when they're down).
Keep in mind how this CoC change started: it wasn't by a one-on-one rapport with an individual.
And also keep in mind the freezing effect you're having on people new to the industry who need mentorship to help them mature. Sometimes you're screwing up because you're young and need to temper your own tongue.
And sometimes the screw-up isn't actually a screw-up, and a mountain gets made out of a molehill. This is more often the case than anything else, as this entire post demonstrates, and it would be wrong to conclude the premise as part of the argument.
I don't know what specifically motivated this PR, but I assume something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning .
It's mentioned in passing a couple of comments in. To highlight it (because it's easy to miss):
"I watched a group of people use these specific phrases to justify making sexist remarks over a communication channel that falls under these guidelines."
http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-talk/...
What about a joke where adding weights resulted in quantities too large, and it's suggested that it was written for dudes who want to say they can bench press more than they really can?
'This section shall not be interpreted to defend any communication reasonably seen as sexist, racist, or otherwise discriminatory' is much clearer than changing from 'assume good faith' to 'assume nothing, intent doesn't matter as much as impact. '
Not to mention the implication that harrasment is somehow ok against people who are not members of the protected class? I appreciate minorities get a lot of shit that others don't, but its not like bigioted assholes are the only people who harrass other people.
(and those who actively deny its existence /s)
> the implication that harrasment is somehow ok against people who are not members of the protected class?
There is a subset (I like to think that they're the fringe, but have no numbers to back that up) of those who engage in identity politics who do believe that bigotry does not apply when the target is the dominant demographic.
Modern tribalism at it's finest
An idea can be both a good one and political. And indeed a good idea while Ameri-centric.
The risk is that this might be a status play by authoritarians, who very rarely have good ideas and typically do a lot of damage once they get in to power. I suspect actual minorities & protected classes are more worried about authoritarians than racist jokes. If they aren't they should be.
I have seen it suggested that specific terms like racism and sexism are not generic terms that apply to any sort of discrimination along racial, ethnic or in the case of sexism along gender lines, but apply specifically to actions that maintain or reinforce the power of dominant groups and existing privileges and positions that advantage them, and that trying to expand those terms to describe all discrimination serves to obfuscate and minimize the existing structural and institutional power disparities.
Or to analogize, if my boss hates me, that's probably a big problem for me and my work. If alternatively hate my boss, that's not really a problem in the same way for my boss. I can't fire them, or decide what projects they can work on. They aren't the reverse of each other, because the power dynamic isn't the same.
The gist of the idea is that the oppressed ('minority group') do not need to be bound by the laws that shackle them, created by the oppressors ('dominant group') solely to preserve their own power. Defying the oppressors and violating existing institutions and laws is a baseline understanding of those who fully adopt this worldview. It may be largely a fringe for now, but in America, it's being pushed steadily along the axes of both race and gender first, and other secondary traits following behind.
Did you read this on Brietbart, or in The National Review, or what?
I would point out that it is the logical extension of what you stated in the first post in this subthread, carried to its extremes. If you don't believe those extremes should hold, I would ask you to consider: what is the limiting factor for you? Where is the line drawn? How far is too far?
I don't however agree with you that that's the logical extension of what I stated. Can you explain? I don't feel it particularly relevant to take an idea and carry it to an extreme to judge it's usefulness either.
Perhaps you might instead address what I said initially on it's own terms.
There is certainly truth to this: normally, we would call such a relationship 'corruption of power', and as the adage goes, power and corruption tend to go hand-in-hand. The argument then goes that if you are not in power, the only way to return the relationship to a morally right state is to break the rules the corrupt powerful have put in place to purportedly retain their own power. If you grant the premise of the powerful making /all laws/ and /all institutions/ solely to preserve themselves and oppress others, the conclusion must follow.
The issue in my opinion is one of 'divined intent' - there is an implicit premise, that there is either direct intent built-in to those oppressive structures, or that there is indirect intent that carries the same amount of guilt for the powerful group. But that paints with far too broad a brush, and is really unfalsifiable, since we cannot fully know the mind of those creating and participating in those structures. Yet all too often, the argument boils down to an assignment of malign intent that vindicates any and all action in response. This is usually done with a motte-and-bailey: make the sweeping case that all powerful people think something, then tip-toe around individual examples when confronted, unless it's a cherry-picked target.
There is also the issue of the universal: this holds true of many systems, but not all systems, and not all people within those systems. The argument works by making the claim apply to /any/ relationship involving power.
Lastly, there is the issue of vocabulary. It's a cute trick to redefine words to apply only to a subset of what the words originally refer to, but the goal is confusion of language. You create new words to describe subsets of phenomena, but that's not what's been done in that argument: it hijacks the original meaning to generate confusion, often with the goal of saying, for example, 'if you are against racism [original definition], you will overturn all existing systems [modified definition].' There's equivocation going on in there.
1. To your first paragraph I'd say that's not the usual argument that I've heard from people on the left. I mean there are kooky people out there, but I think most people would say having privilege doesn't make you inherently immoral, nor is lacking power inherently moral. Morality is based on choices, with the understanding that choosing not to act is still seen as a choice.
Having systemic power gives you a greater capacity to affect change. I do think some people will see refusing to act appropriately to change things for the better when it's easier because you have power as more immoral than if you refuse to act when you lack systemic power, so in that sense you are right, but that's only true if you don't act.
Further I just don't think guilt is really the focus for most people on the left, except to understand how we got to the current status quo; What's more important is people taking responsibility and acting, and attempting to share power so that others can also act.
2. There are certainly people who intentionally work to maintain and expand their power; wealthy people who push for lower tax rates on the wealthy come to mind. Still, a large part of feminist and anti-racist theory seems to be about creating knowledge of privilege in people who take it for granted, and then pointing out the responsibility that suggests. There are conspiracy minded folks to be sure, but I don't know that that jibes with the idea of invisible privilege. I suppose you could argue it doesn't and suggest leftist philosophy isn't perfectly coherent or in agreement though. I'll have to think about this.
3. There's a whole thing in leftist philosophy about how intent is not the same thing as impact. It doesn't matter if systems that perpetuate injustice were built for the best of intentions or the worst or are just weird historical artifacts like the electoral college, what matters is the harm done, and how it falls disproportionately on members of marginalized groups. Thus the whole emphasis on anti-racism instead of not being racist, since merely not acting to further racism doesn't mitigate the harm that exists currently, and is thus also immoral. If that's confusing, look up Good Germans.
4. I'm not sure I understood why you were saying this, but to the extent that I understood I think I agree with you that not every relationship with power is affected. I see a meaningful difference in situations where a person has significant institutional or structural power vs situations where the power comes with the approval of those over whom power is wielded directly.
5.A cute trick? So does that mean you are suggesting that racism was not historically a term mainly used to describe the Nazis and other white supremacists, and sexism a term mainly used to describe the gender inequality that women faced?
I would argue that your original definition is in fact a conservative redefinition, one that treats an unequal status quo as an entitlement of those with power by pretending they are the true victims because people are attempting to redress social injustices.
I guess in the post modern sense any viewpoint can be correct because everything is subjective and based on one's viewpoint, but I'm not a post modernist and to me that seems like BS. I think terms are regularly redefined by people on the right in order to muddy the water and generate fear.
I guess I can say, at least we agree the water is muddy?
This has been fun, not ...
It's also pushed strongly in academia, and is quite common to hear about among young progressives as compared to older ones. For concrete examples, look into the Mike Nayna documentary on the Evergreen State College's 'Equity Council'; it's an extreme example, but you can hear the same process happening to lesser degrees elsewhere.
I expect in 20 years some of what Kendi and DiAngelo will have held up, and some of it won't have. That's how doing anything new usually works.
I don't expect corporations to solve racism and sexism, or politicians or even people who run seminars.
I've actually given up any hope that my lifetime will see meaningful end of racism or sexism or even childhood hunger in America. Maybe some low hanging fruit or common cases will be better addressed.
When there is a real attempt to do something that actually makes a difference in the world, I expect it to be a bit clumsy, because they are so often trying to solve for the common case or the most costly case, not for every case. That's not illogical, I do the same thing when I code.
Sometimes they will certainly screw up or go to far; nobody said changing the status quo was easy.
Perhaps that's why conservatism has as much support as it does even when it's based on unscientific BS, or even outright lies.It's very easy to treat the status quo as the best of all possible worlds and try to defend it from the imagined horrors of change.
To me that seems such an empty hopeless way to live, and I hope more people in the world strive for something better, even if it's difficult and imperfect.
I assume the Evergreen State College doc is about Bret Weinstein, which I'm familiar with, but I'll watch the documentary. Have you heard or read about Harvard and Lorgia García Peña? https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-education/why-lorgi...
I said something similar about this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28664520
Then I literally had a troll stalk me for it, claiming I was racist.
When I asked why: "There’s no arguing with racist pieces of shit such as yourself"
so, while what you say is true, careful pointing that out.
Protected class ("geschützte Gruppe") is a commonly understood concept in Germany, too.
Neither in the German Wikipedia nor in the Duden (German dictionary) or on the website of the "Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung" (Federal Agency for Civic Education) can I find any reference to "geschützte Gruppe".
The German constitution, explicitly states: "No person shall be favoured or disfavoured because of sex, parentage, race, language, homeland and origin, faith or religious or political opinions. No person shall be disfavoured because of disability.".
This is often emphasized in things like job postings, but never in abbreviated/conceptualized form.
The GNOME CoC gleefully states they will ignore complaints of racism against whites and sexism against cis men because "we prioritize the safety of marginalized groups over the comfort of privileged groups".
EU has the concept but doesn't name them in that way, countries implementing them may do in their respective language (someone else has already commented as such for German): https://ec.europa.eu/info/aid-development-cooperation-fundam...
The americentric part is using the american legal term of art in an international context and assuming everyone just understands it, and that its a reasonable definition in context.
The idea that minorities exist and should have some additional legal protection is not the aspect that is americentric.
They could hardly go out of their way to find a synonym not in use by any country, and then keep checking in case some country started using it and people started interpreting the document as using it in the sense of that country's law specifically.
It's not an American legal document, so unless it explicitly defines the term as such, that's not what it means, it's just words. If it said 'murder' or 'jaywalking' we wouldn't pick a country that uses those terms to interpret them in its legal sense, we'd just understand the broad sense of what they are anywhere, even in countries where they are not used ('jaywalking' here in the UK).
> The idea that minorities exist and should have some additional legal protection
Again, that's not what it is. The legal protection is against discrimination based on your <something> such as race or ethnicity. No matter whether the particular value in your case is held by the majority or a minority of people.
If they don't define the term, then surely they mean the american context - if not, who is protecting the class?
> If it said 'murder' or 'jaywalking' we wouldn't pick a country that uses those terms to interpret them in its legal sense, we'd just understand the broad sense of what they are anywhere
The difference is that these terms have widely agreed upon meanings. I know what jaywalking means regardless of country.
If i use the term protected class generically, who is included? Are we including the following groups:
- vetrens of us armed forces
- vetrens of non-usa armed forces
- political beliefs
- sexual orientation
- criminal conviction
If used generically, its impossible to know - some juridsictions say yes, some say no, in different contexts.
If the CoC was just using the term in an abstract way - to represent the abstract idea of a protected class, that would be fine. However they are not. They are using the term concretely. To understand the CoC you have to know the exact list of protected classes (or at least be able to identify if a specific trait creates membership or not).
Although i think this term is needlessly american, ultimately i'd be fine with it if they defined it. Not defining a term used almost exclusively in the usa kind of implies they mean it in its american sense.
> Again, that's not what it is. The legal protection is against discrimination based on your <something> such as race or ethnicity. No matter whether the particular value in your case is held by the majority or a minority of people.
I should of said marginalized instead of minority perhaps. Although it varries depending on context, and region, affirmative action is often not considered to be in violation of these policies. So its more complex than that.
After all, anyone reading the document would need to know that info, why not make it obvious?
That's... interesting?
Some of the most vitriolic flamewars I've seen on the internet were between western straight white males. I don't see the point of special casing this clause.
It's hard to agree on the exact boundary between enabling a jerk and making an issue out of nothing. But the old "assume good intentions" policy does sound to me uncomfortably similar to "if you're offended it's your own fault". Which is generally how people treat victims of harassment in communities where that sort of harassment is tolerated.
It is also required for completely dry technical discussions. I am not sure I would want that in open source communities though, but that is certainly a preference.
edit: non just unwelcoming, it can be considered discriminating
Obviously it isn't a binary situation with either intent or impact being the sole arbiter - so the baseline used in almost all situations is the 'ordinary' or 'objective' standards. These can vary depending on the environment and context, and are simply defined because they are hard to define across all scenarios.
I guess I find it surprising that a code of conduct like this should sway between intent and impact in quite so binary a fashion -- human behaviour isn't software.
As well as being a bedrock principle of the law, it's also basic common sense. If I accidentally step on your toe, that's obviously different to me deliberately stamping on your toe in an intentional attempt to injure you. If you set out to deliberately injure your colleagues then this is OBVIOUSLY different from doing the same thing accidentally and should be treated differently - and anyone with a working brain can see this.
The idea that "intent doesn't matter" is preposterous. Accepting it as a premise leads to insane and preposterous conclusions that no-one believes. People who say that "intent doesn't matter" don't actually believe it.
If intent matters (as you say, anyone with half a brain knows it does), then if you receive my comment as being offensive, I am still right because I didn't mean to offend you. What they want is to make sure they can tell me I'm wrong anyway because the person was offended... hence, my intention didn't matter.
It's about discrimination on the basis of the value of someone's <characteristic>, not that particular values ('white', or 'female', etc.) are held in some special regard.
The obvious example is hiring: you can (should) hire white people, black people, men, women, and so on. You can't (legally) hire someone because of one of those traits, or allow it influence your judgement.
(It's why I find quotas/diversity reporting a bit troubling - it sort of assumes an equal outcome, or something close to it, is a natural state, since you can't say 'hire more women' if you find that's what's lacking; you can only try to remove existing (illegal! conscious or not) bias in the other direction. But what if the lacking group didn't have equal opportunity, so on merit they really weren't the best hires? - I know, that old argument - point is, if that's the case, hiring for an equal outcome, so-called 'affirmative/positive action' is actually illegal.)
(IANAL but I have to assume there are exceptions where an otherwise protected characteristic is actually required due to the nature of the work. The police need a certain number of women, (and men, but that's the problem side) diversity aside. Primary schools presumably have the opposite problem.)
This is an excellent example - because the original said exactly what needed to be said, but it wasn't being interpreted correctly. Instead of improving the wording, and saying something like "participants should always assume good intentions. However, intention does not make a person's actions immune from criticism, and while assuming good intentions we will kindly encourage each other toward a higher standard of behaviour." ... they instead have chosen to weaken the specificity and balance of the CoC.
Throughout the discussion, and on the twitter thread, the overriding message is: Triggering the hurt of a protected party is always punishable.
And it's a sad viewpoint, because it becomes not "Matz is nice and so we are nice", it becomes "We are nice to avoid the ire of a protected party"
This is a feature, not a bug. When the rules are clear and specific, they can be enforced fairly. When they're vague and unclear, then the only consistent principle is that the people who "enforce" the "rules" can do whatever they want and you have no recourse or due process.
But speaking out against that will be seen as the same thing as an attack on marginalized, so most folks will either be quiet or move on, and these power-hungry folks will get to keep their fiefdoms.
I will speak to the motivation however, because I'm a reconcillatory kind of person most of the time, and unlike this CoC I do believe intent is important.
I believe that the intent behind those adopting these documents is protection and general social good, and I believe their adoption is very very bad because those adopting them are blindsided.
Because the people writing them are not lawyers, and are not expecting them to be used as laws to be enforced, but as "good feeling reinforcers". Effectively, corporate virtue signalling (and, in some cases probably also personal virtue signalling - with all the negative connotations that brings).
The fact is, when you introduce a set of rules, you have to expect those rules to be interpreted by people with some extreme biases, and ensure that the wording produces a fair outcome regardless. It doesn't matter whether you call these rules "guidelines", or a "code", or even a "statement of intent". They will be used as rules, and if they aren't, then what is the point of writing them?
Although that same COC says intend doesn't matter in many cases.
If you have bad rulers and no mechanism to change them, all giving them a perfect rule book to enforce will not produce better outcomes - they will selectively apply and interpret the rules as they want.
At best, a good set of rules will make it more obvious that the rulers are acting in bad faith. But the rules themselves can't compel the rulers - only other people can.
(Though, if you feel Hanlon's razor is a better motivator for you, I won't judge)
People believe themselves to be within a certain margin of "good people", and having incontrovertible proof of being "The Biggest Hypocrite" makes them uncomfortable.
There are of course those who don't feel that discomfort; there are even those that commit victim-filled crimes without remorse. Often, there are external forces we can lean on to bring those people into line or out of society - and agreed, in the case of Open Source Software communities, those external forces don't always exist or are not reliable for regulating something as insignificant as moderation policies on a mailing list.
There are also those that would leverage that discomfort for their own immoral benefit, and bad rules are equally good enablers of that kind of person.
But I don't think it's fair to say that the quality of rules is meaningless - if there is any level of accountability in the sub-community of moderators (or in the community as a whole), good fair and enforceable rules have power.
If there are any CoCs left that do not adopt these standards, they will be brought into conformance soon. Corporate sponsorship depends on it, and open source is nothing without corporate sponsorship.
This is an undefined spiral to infinity mainly relying on de jure expectations.
Sexism - the believe that on sex is supreme to the other is already redefined to mean anything suggestive.
a) We are a reactionary species, unfortunately. And that served us well when the burning questions of the day were "Tiger friend? [BITE] No, tiger never friend" but less so when discussing the social weight felt by minority and historically persecuted groups, the benefits and pitfalls of hyper-vocal "allies" and the social disenfranchisement felt by potential allies bitten by persecutions that they are told do not exist.
b) We are a reductionist species, unfortunately. That helps us when understanding the complexities of mathematical infinities and physics and the workings of the human central nervous system, because - between similarly educated peers - a scientific community can abstract away the irrelevent bits and share groundbreaking research outcomes with relative ease. But when "normals" try to enter the discussion, they mistake the simplified abstract descriptions for a simple concept and end up contributing nonesense or reporting falsehoods to the rest of the world (e.g. are we moments away from fusion generators? Are we on the cusp of ignition? No, no we're not).
And so, when discussions take place about the relative protections and privileges inherent with social majority groups and justify the particular resource expenditure on helping to rebalance centuries of systemic prejudices, people will misread what they understand of the zeitgeist and say "Your social privilege, as defined by your [race / gender / sexuality / ability / age / etc] means that your feelings need no consideration"
c) We are a self-absorbed species, unfortunately. It contributes to our survival and that of our dependants to ensure that we take the resources we need so that we are in a position to then help the rest of our clan. Weirdly though, we also have faculties for patience and imagination. And so we are happy to imagine ourselves in the shoes of someone we consider as "sufficiently other" to the point where we will fight for them as if they are our own clan, which is in a way wonderful (not always - see "white saviourism") but it means that those similar enough to be relatable receive a negative consideration, being not different enough to be worth the emotional investment, but not similar enough that they are truly "in the same boat", though we feel like they are. For example, try to analyse your perceptions of the poor and homeless that live near you, compared to the poor and starving people from distant countries.
It just "feels different", right?
That "local mistrust" is just as much an undeserved prejudice as the fact that you probably imagined those "people from a distant country" with a particular skin colour.
And lastly:
d) Our emotions deceive us constantly. That small racism dig in part C - if that affected you (sorry!) might make you susceptible to further emotional manipulation, because (see A) we are a reactionary species, and so from there it's easy for someone to manipulate us to reduce (see B) the world into "overprivileged vs underprivileged" clans, take on the underprivileged as our own (see C) and thereby increase our prejudice under the guise of eliminating prejudice.
Then echo chambers, then reinforcement by media, friends, catchy superficial soundbites, our employment... and finally our own selves, because once you've declared your unwavering support for a vaguely positive cause, it's very hard to walk that back.
And convincing someone to reverse a commitment they have made that has superficially positive soundbites because they are taking a damaging approach is a lot harder than reversing a prejudice they fell into through normal upbringing.
Maybe, long-term, that isn't a problem. Over the generations, we'll react ourselves to a position where everyone is protecte...
In that scenario, the situation degenerates into "he said - she said". Traditional response was "in dubio pro reo" = "in doubt, let the accused go free".
But modern woke movements generally hollow out this principle and replace it by "believe the marginalized / weaker / oppressed side" and "be strict and hostile against the privileged side", as defined by the contemporary academic ladder of oppression.
This leads to a very paranoid society and I think it will take at most 10-20 years to reverse again, as bad cases start to heap. One of the universal qualities of humanity is that we can all be manipulative dicks, regardless of gender, color and creed, and once you shift the balance of power to the accuser, you will empower manipulative people across the board. And they are perfectly able to poison the common well for everyone.
Edit: 2 downvotes within 20 seconds and zero attempt at rebuttal.
This is exactly why many people were not really open to COCs because this is an eternal battleground with creeping behavior expectations because of some unsolved personal problems.
A reasonable moderator should flag a joke as this as not appropriate in professional conversation without any CoC changes:
When they say “there will be no jokes”: a joke told by professionals in professional setting might have different meaning than originally intended.My thoughts follow yours entirely - the author is tweaked about the failure of the moderators and twitter is not a place for commentary on a pull request.
(There's a certain irony here to the author of the PR complaining about the difference between the intent and impact of a statement and then... completely missing the point of why their PR is meaningless).
...against a protected class. All others are allowed, apparently?
That said, "please help me understand" is sometimes a bad faith tactic to claim ignorance of basic empathy.
Yes, it is. It is meant to dismiss trolls.
> to justify overreaction
Trolls should be banned, because they are poison to a community. As such, it is not an overreaction to use a mechanism like this.
Harassment is never okay and I find it problematic that the entire GitHub thread seemed hostile with a toxic mindset where if you don't fully agree on the actions being taken, you're assumed to not understand the intentions behind them. You're treated like an ignorant fool, who needs to "go educate themselves" and get "woke". Productive discussion seems forbidden. You can become a troll by claiming anyone else to be a troll whenever they disagree.
You had no bad intentions yourself and I agree that way too many people do lack a basic sense of respect, but please avoid making such condescending statements if someone could be sincerely asking others to clarify their thoughts.
Not all empathetic responses are justified, nor are they shared or universal even within the same culture. That's why humans have literally devoted millennia to the study of ethics.
I think any response to these scenarios that suggests we just need to apply empathy is deeply ignorant of basic facts of ethics and human psychology. I understand people try to game the system with these tactics, but that sort of response is not a solution.
Also not a fan of this. My response would be something along the lines of:
"I'm not going to 'educate' myself on your delusional beliefs for the same reason I'm not going to 'educate' myself when my schizophrenic uncle tells me to learn more about the 5G towers tracking people's vaccine chips and giving everyone cancer."
Edit: Appears it was copied in the git thread, as mentioned below.
"Maybe this has been written for women, having calculated their age ;)"
If I were in charge of a community or mailing list, I would kick the person who wrote that off. But I simply don't see how (a) the existing rules didn't do enough to cover this, or (b) the changes will resolve those issues without causing other problems.
Maybe they should point to Karl Popper's paradox of tolerance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
edit: evidently someone thinks this comment is worthy of a downvote. I didn't say whether I approved of this action or not. I looked through the threads to find out why the decision was made. I don't think a sincere effort to provide more information should be punished because of disagreement.
If someone is willing to go through the CoC with a fine tooth comb, they're likely going to find something they could potentially use to defend themselves. Just say no!
The changes open up so much interpretation that anyone could use it to kick out people for all sorts of silly reasons.
It is somewhat of a modern cultural failing that we cannot moderate without having a CoC to point to and say "see? You're bad, it says so here". A good moderator can make the value judgements necessary to keep a community relatively healthy. For some reason a lot of folks have forgotten a CoC does not change that at all.
Obviously, CoCs generally aren't written as foolproof legal documents, and there's no caselaw or court system, so this is kind of absurd. But one approach to rules-lawyering is always to tighten the rules to remove the loopholes that are being exploited, so... Personally I think it'd be better to add language emphasising that the CoC is merely a _guideline_, and that the moderators are judge, jury and executioner.
Popper lived in a world where democracy was threatened by very powerful totalitarian movements and its demise in Europe at least was a very credible scenario. His paradox of tolerance addresses those violent, brutal movements that left a trail of blood and destruction on the continent.
There is zero evidence that Popper intended to micropolice or censor uncouth / rude verbal or written interactions among people. He was mostly concerned about outright tyranny and genocide. And there is a long way from bad jokes to tyranny and genocide, even though the Anglo-Saxon world has evolved a rather thin skin in the last decades and seems to think otherwise.
Making sexist jokes on a mailing list should probably be rebuked or punished by moderators for being in bad taste, but not because of Popper's ideas. A person joking about some girls age almost certainly does not want to enslave/kill women and does not have to be forcibly prevented from doing so.
Popper was talking about groups like the Nazis coming to power. When overwhelming violence is near, you have to make a choice or else you’ll lose the capacity to make that choice. And even then, determining when overwhelming violence is near is extremely difficult and should be the absolute last resort.
It’s astounding how often this is linked with respect to online discussion.
From Popper's own words at the link:
> In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise.
Can sexist humour be kept in check with rational argument and public opinion?
It was foolish to make the joke, it was even more foolish to make it on a digital format that cannot be rescinded. It's also foolish for people to immediately call for this person's removal from the community in perpetuity, rather than have a chat and explain that those jokes aren't funny.
In short: You can be banned for talking about pasta in a noodles forum. That doesn't mean pasta is not a noodle.
It's not sexist. Them banning it as sexist does not make it sexist.
Every day I wake up to the programming community becoming more pretend, more fake, more toxic and less open. Ironically the very thing it is trying to distance itself from.
The goal is to grant all offend/ed/ parties total, unimpeachable power against purported offend/ers/, and no amount of 'protected classes' cover removes the fact that this enables the same bad faith that harassing parties abuse, just for a different group.
Hold everyone to the same high standard. Period. Done. None of this thumb-on-the-scales nonsense.
(to be clear, I'm completely in favor of protecting people from harassment and abuse, though I strongly disagree with reserving that only to legally protected classes).
But that kind of underscores why "legally protected class" really doesn't make sense for a CoC. Like yeah short people aren't legally protected...but any good CoC should prohibit harassment and abuse against people for their height. Obviously.
The law focuses on reasonableness of accommodations and the actual job needs, so for instance you can't discriminate based on height if it is a legitimate medical condition and there is the option of reasonable accommodations - say it's a cashier job, and stool would be perfectly fine and adequately allow them to do the job.
If there is no reasonable accomodations, say because the job is not being a cashier, but being a basketball player, and stools or other devices don't help adequately enough to be competitive, then you could discriminate all you wanted on that condition.
The issue of course is a lot of people can't untangle their own prejudices and ideas of what it takes to do a job or who should be doing it enough to even legitimately articulate the ACTUAL requirements to do a job, and tend to spew a bunch of half though out stereotypes, so they run afoul of it pretty regularly. And the gov't (and labor market) MOSTLY lets them unless they're pretty big.
Putting 'legally protected classes' in the CoC is pretty ridiculous, since there are a ton of different definitions depending on context.
Completely besides the point and distracting.
You would be surprised how few people do not have a clear type of legal protection as part of some class - pretty much just fit, healthy, 18-40 something males really.
Frankly it's pretty US-centric to imagine that a general human rights concept such as protected classes of people is US-centric.
But including this filter in itself is weird. Why would they specifically talk about harassment on protected classes instead of just harassment? Does it mean someone who’s not a protected class can be harassed and no one will lift a finger? That seems overly toxic and exclusive to me.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
* https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/unab...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unabomber_Manifesto
Either way I think the question was warranted. Especially since the long passage from the Unabomber's manifesto they chose to quote when pressed for a response was rather illuminating regarding their beliefs.
So why is the pull request necessary? It very obviously opens up the potential to be abused by people who would love to kick others out of the community because they don't like their political opinions.
See, first people were irate that the code of conduct existed at all, they felt that having a definition of harassment was bad because "some people get offended at everything". Then they were angry when that definition was narrowed, because they felt that it didn't protect them enough.
Obviously, the code of conduct is the only thing in common here, so that must be the problem.
Remember, the code of conduct is bad because "some people" make it their business to get offended all the time - that could have a chilling effect on discussions! That's why we need freedom warriors to protect us with over-the-top vitriol and hyperbole every time a code of conduct is brought up.
Not laughing about something that one does not find funny but at the same time also dont cry or have a mental breakdown isnt really a political concept. Its what just about everyone does and we should not pay attention to thous few who dont.
Amen. These days my instant response to this kind of posturing is to disengage as far as possible from all involved. It's an ideological cancer that turns previously productive communities into a morass of backbiting and one-up-person-ship.
Replacing everything you posted with "." doesn't help.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> Some people may have views that when expressed, may be harmful to the interest of particular groups of people like big corporations. This has to be taken into account.
> universally accepted corporate values
> That's California Core Corporate Policies in work
> For instance, members of board of directors of the big corporations are a protected class.
> Members of board of directors of the big corporations are a protected class because they financially contribute to the cause
Given the success of the pull requests, I can only assume that this is not a sockpuppet mocking the rules in question. Is it some kind of multi-layered joke?
Some of these comments are obviously bait to me - e.g., the one about how we should privilege members of boards of directors - and this looks like a careful attempt not to take the bait.
Note that PR 2690 is not from @hmdne and was unchanged from how it was proposed. PR 2691 is, and perhaps should not have been accepted in its present form because of the "protected class" language, but there are good-faith comments in 2690 (with no mention of corporations) about why the "opposing views" line should be removed.
Someone with the same name invoked the old good intentions clause on the mailing list.[1] Apparently sincerely.
[1] http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-talk/...
I'm left to conclude that they are just simply "out to lunch," to put it politely.
The idea is that any rule you apply should be done fairly and, where that isn't clear, equally.
So as an example. If I say "Pepsi tastes like cow urine", and a corporate shill from Pepsi who has built their self-worth around the company and spent most of their life defending themselves from the usual Pepsi-bashing jokes by bullies telling them that Coke is better, and maybe they fall into some protected class and maybe they don't.
Now, their complaint is valid and their hurt is real. But the intent of the original comment was not to bash this person (or corporation) - it was the spirit of valid criticism.
If the intent is removed from the evaluation of the rules, nobody is safe from those who would manipulate the rules and pretend to be the hurt party to the benefit of a corporation.
[Note: I've re-read everything that person said, and now even I'm not sure. It feels to me like highly honed satire, and if it is, hats off to them, though they've maybe forgotten that a large portion of the Ruby team is not natively English speaking - hence their PR got accepted. If it isn't satire... well, they're not gonna read this, so it would be a wasted education]
Still doesn't remove the need for good moderators though.
[1] Home Owners Association, for those outside the U.S. and unfamiliar with the term.
https://www.businessinsider.com/personal-finance/homeowners-...
>When homeowners associations were first created, they helped keep Black people out of the neighborhood. They're still doing it today.
>Homeowners associations exploded in popularity in the 1960s as suburb development was booming.
>Some HOAs used racist deeds and covenants to bar Black buyers from purchasing homes.
>Today, HOAs are majority white and Asian, and Black homeowners say they experience targeted discrimination and harassment by their HOAs.
I still don't see the parallel with the Ruby community. I'm American and quite familiar with American politics, and I still don't see the point. The Ruby community has certainly had its sexism problems [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7], but are you saying it was also formed with the intent of banning Black people? Please explain.
[1] https://martinfowler.com/bliki/SmutOnRails.html
[2] https://codahale.com/ruby-and-male-privilege/
[3] http://devandpencil.herokuapp.com/blog/2013/10/09/being-an-a...
[4] https://python-list.python.narkive.com/ja3ig3ln/sexism-in-th...
[5] http://blog.ian.gent/2013/10/the-petrie-multiplier-why-attac...
[6] https://www.cloudcity.io/blog/2013/11/06/an-open-letter-to-t...
[7] https://geekfeminism.wikia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_incidents
> "Participants should speak and act with good intentions, but understand that intent and impact are not equivalent."
Huh. That's interesting phrasing. I don't think i like it. Literally nobody thinks impact & intent are equivalent, the sticky point in human interaction and morality is to what extent do we take results instead of intentions into account when evaluating the morality of an action. The statement as is isn't saying anything about how we should interpret intent vs result just that we should acknowledge that its different.
I personally believe that codes of conduct (both this current trend, but also in the traditional meaning of the word) should be specific about what behaviour is wanted, otherwise its a meaningless platitude. This says nothing about how we should interpret someone doing something hurtful while not intending to (or claiming not to). Is that ok? Is it only ok if a "reasonable" person would make the same mistake? Is it ok if they haven't made the same mistake before? Something else?
> what you seem to agree with, that good intentions aren't a shield for bad results
I wasn't giving my opinion so much as sumarizing its an unsolved problem with no obvious correct answer.
If you want my personal view. I don't believe actual results should be taken into account at all.
"you look really sexy today" isn't wrong to say because the recipent was offended. It's wrong to say because a reasonably acculturized person would know that there is a high chance it would be offensive in context. If the dice were on your side, and for some reason the recipent was delighted at your "compliment", i would still say it was wrong because you had no way of knowing that that would be the outcome. The wrongness has nothing to do with what actually happened, only with what was reasonably predictable to happen.
There are pros and cons to this view, and reasonable people do disagree.
[And to be clear, even if something was not predictable and therefore not "wrong", that doesn't absolve you from having to apologize/make it right if you accidentally hurt someone]
I need you to be brave in this world, as right now you are a protected class, you can bargain on my behalf. Please go to the entity presiding over that area and beg them/their/it/they to be sparing with the interaction receival request litigation fees."
And what if you're not a "reasonably acculturized" person?
If reasonable behaviour and common sense was obvious, there would be no need for CoC or even laws.
Ultimately it devolves into what a majority of the group understands the norms of the group to be. The implicit assumption is that all members of the group have an implicit duty to understand the shared norms of the group (sort of like in the legal sphere where ignorance of the law is not a defense, but unintentionally breaking the law is, provided that the lack of intentionality isn't soley based on ignorance of what the laws are).
E.g. in the case you mentioned earlier, sexualizing co-workers is the wrong thing. Not knowing that sexualizing coworkers is not a defense. If you say something with a double meaning, which you ernestly didn't realize had a double meaning, that might be a defense. You didn't intend to break a rule, and your unintentional rule breakage had nothing to do with not knowing what the rules are. It doesn't mean you don't have to apologize, but it should be enough [on this view] to prevent punitive action (generally, as always context matters).
You could say that feels unsatisfactory, and you're right it does - its squishy and subjective. I don't hold this view because i think its perfect, but just because i think its the least bad of the alternatives.
You haven't been paying attention - the (preposterous) idea that "intent doesn't matter, only impact" is a key premise of modern social justice activism and is taught to undergraduates as unquestionable fact.
It relies on the reader to have already known that "intent doesn't matter, only impact" and anyone could actually interpret it as the opposite, especially if their culture already thinks that intent is the more important thing.
I doubt that is what they mean but it is very far from clear, especially in an international context. Many of these CoCs are virtually impossible to understand unless you have at least a cursory understanding with contemporary American politics. Very inclusive ...
I ask because the law, legal system and even democratic values as we know them are built on very different principles.
We definitely punish theft, burglary and fraud even if outcome giving to poor is seen as preferrable.
We dont punish legal tax shenanigans and some shady philanthropy, even if outcome is poor.
And when democratic majority is in favor of some stupid and harmful policy, we campaign against it, but still obey democratic majority.
Intent is not meaningless, but unintentional harms need to be remedied by understanding the harm and working to change the behavior. If someone commits an unintentional harm repeatedly, it ceases to become unintentional, because the refusal to learn is deliberate.
Or does there? The truly disturbing aspect of so many things like this is that (as per Poe's Law) it's impossible to distinguish cynical mockery from earnestly-held extremism.
I can't tell if it fits the Ruby CoC case. I'm just keeping an open mind to the possibility.
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29644591
I'm not saying we should or that random neo-nazis have that same power to take over it but we should acknowledge that some uses of the symbol are racist
The world is filled with people who have different ideas about what is funny, what is offensive, what is fun, what is boring, etc.
On the internet it is expected to have a clash of cultures since people from different backgrounds are collaborating. There will naturally be well intentioned misunderstandings. Rather than creating a system that allows for these to take place peacefully without incident, any example of a joke gone wrong or a word out of place will result in an inquisition.
Why do so many westerners want to live like this? Constantly thirsty for purifying others. It seems to come from some kind of emptiness that must exist in one's life to be so obsessed over minutiae.
I have, thankfully, never had much involvement with codes of conduct but if I did I would want it to pass by a committee or a community vote, with ample time beforehand for discussion, platform, and voting with majority or super majority requirement.
A PR, on the other hand, needs just a handful of political allies — your reviewer — to land, and that’s it. I of course assume the best intentions on the part of the requester, but one could be forgiven for seeing it as a power play, subverting the democratic process.
Not everything is code.
However, I am wondering if there is some historical context that I'm missing: have their been increasingly hostile or abusive discussions in the Ruby community which these changes are meant to address?
How it ended: I am from a different culture, I have no idea what any of this means.
Classic.
>I can't be the only one looking at all this political garbage and ghost drama with shame.
This is not political its cultural and everyone outside the US laughs about it.
I have a project with an extremely narrow purpose. Someone corrected a missing dot in a sentence. That was awesome and unexpected.
...of one of the english speaking countries
The consensus seems to have gelled (few years ago, give or take a few years?) around every single open source project needing to have a specific "community guidelines" document - it was the new vogue established over the past few years by the body politic, and this lead to various promoters of new social paradigms to rename things that were taken at face value, i.e. "master-slave" in the context of database client-server architectures, or "master" branch as primary branch, etc.
These changes are trivial in retrospect, but contextually, the reversion of "participants will be tolerant of opposing views" seems to validate the notion that maybe excessive discourse around social mores aren't appropriate within the substructure of "writing new code that works, backporting features that are useful for others, etc"
The conflating of social justice goal-setting and software development is a swing and a miss, and if that's not completely clear by the context then I just want to apologize for stating what seems obvious to an external observer.
Uh… is this a troll? Like other commented said, this feels like a anti-CoC thing or an extreme case of Poe's law, at least.
Man, the passionated bikeshedding over CoCs in some communities and even in here, with many extremist viewpoints from both sides, makes me glad I'm not really attached to any community. If they're stupid, why should I spend the emotional energy? Just walk away.
If this joke is told by women more often than men (in my experience it is), is it sexist to point that out?
Would this have received the same reaction if the joke was made by a woman?
Some things to ponder, no doubt. However, in this day and age I personally wouldn’t make a joke about any particular group unless I was born into it. Cancel culture is becoming a bit overwhelming.
For my taste that "must've been a woman" line was cringeworthy. He could've said "Well I guess someone doesn't want to grow old".
I thought the joke that spurred this was in poor taste, but didn't have any ill intent. It definitely didn't belong on on that message. I'm not even sure jokes belong there at all. If they do, it'd be a pretty narrow selection of them, in certain circumstances.
That's not really the same at all. The difference being one is a self-deprecating joke while the other is not.
To your second point, that's why I think it was a poor translation but I'm just guessing at this point. I agree on the cringe.