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Drupal Confessions – An Open Letter

drupalconfessions.org

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Re: Drupal Confessions – An Open Letter

#181

Post by Bartweiss »

manarth wrote: post #134
Pxtl wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is where professionalism is important. Firmly separating your personal life and your professional life. That said, there's a huge gap between a religion a person is imparted with as a child, and philosophy they chose as an adult and have jumped into with both feet. Many people come from backgrounds with bigoted ideas like that, but they don't colour their daily lives with it because they're not actively married…

Marvel Comics recently fired an illustrator for hiding Islamist, anti-Semitic and anti-Christian references in his art. It wasn't exactly his art in which the references were hidden - it was Marvel's art . He hid the references in comic panels, commissioned by Marvel and designed specifically for publication in a Marvel comic.

The bait-and-switch here is pretty bad, yeah.

This was content hidden in his professional work that he was dismissed over. It's not comparable. If someone were putting inflammatory political content in the Drupal source, it'd be an unambiguous CoC violation and I think they'd have basically no defenders.

Re: Drupal Confessions – An Open Letter

#182

Post by gooseus »

lucideer wrote: post #110

A lot of people are taking either stance: that a person's beliefs squarely should or should not affect their involvement in the project. However - the third stance is that one needs to assess the material effect their beliefs may have on their day-to-day involvement in that project. In an industry with serious, systemic issues with gender balance, is it not reasonable to suggest a person promoting "Gorean philosophy"…

But who does the assessing? What measure do we use to determine which beliefs will create which affects? Is a Gorean belief system more or less likely than an Abrahamic belief system to execute poor judgement with regards to female collaborators?

I think the problem with many of these approaches is this notion that we can predict ahead of time. I would agree with your third approach if you just changed the tense of the sentence:

> However - the third stance is that one needs to assess the material effect their beliefs _have had_ on their day-to-day involvement in that project. In an industry with serious, systemic issues with gender balance, is it not reasonable to suggest a person promoting "Gorean philosophy" _might have executed_ poor judgement in the context of work with female collaborators?

We can't assume behavior from stated beliefs, but past behavior and beliefs may factor into a case where wrong-doing has occurred. If I'm a satanist, that doesn't mean I'm going to sacrifice babies... but if you find me connected to a bunch of baby-sacrificing, then you better believe my stated Satanic beliefs will factor into the "motive" part of my prosecution.

Not only is this the "innocent till proven guilty" ethos applied generally, it's also going to be far more efficient to judge people case-by-case on observed actions/offenses than by trying to extrapolate potential actions from the subjective interpretations of their words.

Re: Drupal Confessions – An Open Letter

#183

Post by coldpie »

Turing_Machine wrote: post #175
coldpie wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's an interesting comparison, given one is a choice between two "lesser evils" and elected by three hundred million citizens VS the other being a leader of a private company appointed by a board from a pool of presumably many (or at least several) valid candidates. Totally different scenarios. But yes, it was a big black mark against them and they, too, received lots of public pressure to change their…

Sorry, why should a public official should be held to a lower standard than the director of a private company? I'm not seeing that. Most observers believe that the passage of Proposition 8 in California had far more to do with black churches turning out for Barack Obama than it did with contributions from people like Eich. Edit: updating with citation. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11... 7…

You're right that I didn't answer your question directly. To be explicit, yes, I think wishing to impose your personal religious beliefs on your constituents should disqualify you from holding public office. However, when presented with two options that both fail that test, I will vote for the lesser of the two evils presented to me.

I don't think that Mozilla was faced with that dichotomy, and the fact that Eich was relatively quickly and easily replaced backs that up.

Re: Drupal Confessions – An Open Letter

#184

Post by humanrebar »

enord wrote: post #73
humanrebar wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...as long as that belief is not in some way construed as a community value... I honestly don't care about that even, as long as people can discuss their ideas and leave the group if they're done tolerating each other. > It's one of the simple facts of life that you pretty have to work with people who believe all kinds of things... In popular usage, "tolerance" is slowly becoming synonymous with "acceptance" or "ce…

It feels like this new "tolerance" somehow connotates "without bias" instead of "despite bias", which opens an avenue for persecuting perceived or potential bias (by some reasoning from base moral values) as a thought crime. This makes anything less than complete moral alignment a cause for bias and therefore "intolerance". Tolerance and persecution together in harmony.

On top of that, "without bias" seems to mean "with my bias".

Re: Drupal Confessions – An Open Letter

#185

Post by ekianjo »

nebabyte wrote: post #135
oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally agree. I'm fed up of the argument that goes "if you preach tolerance, you must be tolerant of intolerance", for my own understanding of tolerance. Yes, you shouldn't commit a violent act against someone because they are intolerant. No, you shouldn't have to accept their intolerance unreservedly. I also have an issue with the part of the statement that reads along the lines of "we are against discrimination ba…

So then how do you deal with people with such beliefs in your society? Do you shun them, throw slurs at them? What happens when one moves in to be your next-door neighbor? Do you try moving to places without them? Intolerance of beliefs is incompatible with society, and society has shown no signs of changing. How would your solution address that? Indoctrination? Building an ideological "wall"? Killing those who do no…

> So then how do you deal with people with such beliefs in your society? Do you shun them, throw slurs at them? What happens when one moves in to be your next-door neighbor? Do you try moving to places without them?

As long as they do not impede on my or anyone else Freedom's, it's fine for them to have their own beliefs about the world or whatever. Why should we ALL have the same beliefs anyway?

> Intolerance of beliefs is incompatible with society, and society has shown no signs of changing.

Sorry but society as a whole has NEVER collapsed no matter how many disharmonies there are or were amongst us - even civil wars do not bring down entire societies. There's a lot more harm to be done by putting limits on how people should think, and this kind of line of thought is actually what leads to conflict more often than not.

> What happens when they elect someone with such beliefs to lead you?

So what? Leaders who do not represent folks have been elected for centuries already, it's hardly something new. You know, live with it.

Re: Drupal Confessions – An Open Letter

#186

Post by marbletiles »

sitepodmatt wrote: post #31
Flow wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've started to mentally replace the words "inclusion and diversity" with "conformity" on certain places on the net.

Agreed. These people are essentially bullies acting from their ivory tower of unchallengable beliefs and morals. Their non-sense such as "he holds views that are in opposition with the values of the Drupal project." actually do more to suppress tolerance, diversity, and inclusion than encourage it. tl;dr think like me or I throw the dummy out the pram. I wish techies would get back to focusing on tech, it seems every…

Well, in part everything you complain about is because the tech industry is suffering from the "focusing on the tech".

Focusing on the tech unquestioningly meant only the privileged (in one sense or another) were able to get access to the community, and so it has unwittingly become exclusionary. While we were all "focusing on the tech", the number of women and minorities in tech somehow and mysteriously plummeted. And software was made, even by big companies, that excluded huge swathes of people (hello Apple Health). And companies were made that badly suffered from this too (Uber).

So, belatedly, the community is addressing that, by trying to actively work towards diversity, inclusion, tolerance, etc. Tech being tech, this has meant a whole assload of bike-shedding and "works for me, close as wontfix", as this thread yet again evidences. Doesn't mean we still don't have the bugs, and should still be trying to figure out how to fix them.

Re: Drupal Confessions – An Open Letter

#187

Post by humanrebar »

marbletiles wrote: post #180
dorfsmay wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me, the message was "Mozilla is about promoting trendy idea", rather than openness. If we cannot support and debate "wrong" ideas, then we're not very open in my opinion.

Saying that homosexuals are equal to heterosexuals is not a "trendy idea", it's basic equality. I'm not sure why you think "employment as CEO" is the metric for whether "we" "support and debate [inequality] as an idea"

It was literally a new trend in this case. The proposition that Eich supported actually passed with a majority of votes in California. The trend is that opinions have slowly evolved in the subsequent decade.

The shift was from "we can treat people equally while keeping marriage heterosexual" to "gay marriage is an inalienable human right". Nobody was advocating for oppressing people in their minds.

Re: Drupal Confessions – An Open Letter

#188

Post by Bartweiss »

noir_lord wrote: post #81
speeder wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Larry is Gorean Goreans are people that agree with philosophy of professor John Lange, that writes his philosophy in porn books with pen name John Norman What got Larry kicked out is that similarly to Abrahamic religions, Goreans believe there is an inherent hierarchy between men and women. Or at least it is what Dries (Drupal leader) wrote as explanation for the incident. So Larry is being punished literally for "wr…

> Goreanism is not a religion, so probably doesn't count as religious discrimination. I've often wondered what the difference between a Cult and a Religion is and my best answer seems to be "4 orders of magnitude". 1000 is a cult, 10,000,000 is a Religion. If it's a numbers game then everyone religion went through a stage where it was a cult (and indeed if you look at the history of religion lots of them where treat…

> 1000 is a cult, 10,000,000 is a Religion.

I don't think this holds.

There are about 1,000 practicing Samaritans left in the world. They practice a faith very similar to Judaism with a comparably long history, and I think hardly anyone would call them a cult.

There are >50,000 self-described Scientologists worldwide. Many different people, including some government bodies, have referred to that organization as a cult.

If we're talking about formal definition, there are detailed lists of what constitutes a cult - size isn't a factor, but segregation from non-members, active indoctrination, and public shaming are. If we're talking common usage, it appears to be respectability or 'kookiness'. Size is a factor, but age, similarity to other traditions, and behavior of members and leaders all count too.

Re: Drupal Confessions – An Open Letter

#189

Post by erpellan »

Code of Conduct. Conduct. CONDUCT!

Not: code of thought, beliefs, sexuality, politics, religion....

All the discussions of philosophy and belief systems in this thread are missing the point. It DOES NOT MATTER how you feel about someone else's beliefs. It is not relevant. How they CONDUCT themselves in the community is the only thing that matters.

Re: Drupal Confessions – An Open Letter

#190

Post by humanrebar »

coldpie wrote: post #120
humanrebar wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The donor list was not public. Some people believe private political behavior should stay private, just like voting. Saying "this is too important for privacy to apply" affects more issues than just politics advocacy. In this situation, people apparently are applying the template: "When you X, it's no longer personal anymore".

Are you sure it wasn't public? Those kinds of donation rolls often are. In either case, I do think it is reasonable to reject a CEO who is actively attempting to harm their own employees through government enforcement of personal religious beliefs. Especially for an altruistic company like Mozilla.

> Are you sure it wasn't public?

Ah, I was mistaken on that detail. Apologies. Apparently I've read some poorly researched sources on the subject.

There was a lawsuit about whether it should be made public and a judge ruled that it should be. So "leaked" is inaccurate, though there was and is disagreement about whether the information should be public.

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