211–220 of 447 posts
And that's why political activist infestations should be dealt with quickly and forcefully, before they get a chance to fester and take over the host. ESR: "The effect – the intended effect – is to diminish the prestige and autonomy of people who do the work – write the code – in favor of self-appointed tone-policers. In the process, the freedom to speak necessary truths even when the manner in which they are express…
I've read a bunch of ESR's writing, and I disagree with him on an awful lot of political and social issues. Chances are we wouldn't get along very well. Tone-policing, cancel culture, and identity politics are a real problem though, and it seems like they're getting out of hand. This is happening everywhere though - it's not unique to the open source world at all. I don't know what the right solution is. ESR and RMS…
I don't know about others, but personally, I find the overly politically correct "safe spaces" much less welcoming and counter to the spirit of the internet. It feels like you constantly need to tip-toe around with every word to avoid the risk of offending someone. I'm much more bothered by people trying to police the world than someone who is rude or that disagrees with me. In a properly functioning society, people…
What I think the moderators should have done in this circumstance is actually moderate. In cases like this where things are getting heated and you're obviously in an un-usual circumstance, schedule a real conversation to diffuse the situation. Slack, Zoom, Hangouts, phone call, whatever. Anything where tone and emotion can be effectively communicated.
Can you do this always? No. Should you do it when you're founding member is at risk of being banned from the mailing list? Obviously, yes.
This is what happens when people rely too much on email.
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What relevance does his personal opinion on homosexuality, expressed on his personal blog, have to his participation in an OSI mailing list about open source licensing?
It spills over. He is fighting against codes of conducts and diversity because he thinks its about normalizing homosexuality and he thinks that normalizing homosexuality is the first step towards normalizing pedophilia.
I’m torn on this. On one hand, esr has a point. There is a credible argument that cancel culture has gone too far, and that expressing disagreement itself is now becoming dangerous as those with whom you disagree will take the opportunity to play victim and attempt to defame you simply for disagreeing. Identity politics along these lines have lately become unproductive and distracting. I generally don’t participate i…
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I don't see any reason you can't have an open source project which enforces a strong code of conduct, creates a "safe space" for members sensitive to various things, which doesn't tolerate rudeness, jerks, bullies, etc. Or one with a "show me the code, stick and stones" ethos. I also don't think that has to be every open source project. Put another way Tumblr and 4chan can exist on the same internet and we can compla…
> "Code of conducts" inherently drive power away from the contributors to some sort of moderator enforcing the CoC. Could we have both? e.g. CoC moderators elected by contributors from the ranks of contributors?
You know, this really sucks for me personally. Not the ban, but the sorts of things Eric appears to stand for. I read The Cathedral and the Bazaar when I was 13, and it was probably my gateway into advocating for open source. Somewhere around that age, I ended up speaking on a panel, among other OSS advocates, that successfully sold one of the local school divisions on OSS (we also helped them integrate it, on-site :…
You are taking what he wrote out of context and interpreting it to mean something very different than what he intended.
Eric is not arguing that insults are preferable to dispassionate feedback. (As I noted in another comment upthread, I have worked with him on a small part of one of his coding projects, and in that context he is all dispassionate feedback and no insults whatever. So in actual work he does not exhibit the bad behavior you describe at all.) He is looking at what is being done to OSI, and what is being done to open source projects around the world, in the name of "social justice", and he sees the same game being played that has been played by the Left for centuries to gain control of institutions and then completely subvert them from their original purpose. If you don't understand that historical context, of course you're not going to understand why he is being so forceful about this. He is not trying to stop people from being constructive and non-insulting about actually writing good code. He is trying to stop people whose ultimate agenda has nothing to do with writing good code from taking over open source projects and ruining them, making us all much worse off in the process.
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insane political rant part probably. >> * The "Persona Non Grata" clause is best understood as an attempt to paralyze resistance to such political ratfucking by subverting th freedom-centered principles of OSI. It is very unlikely to be the last such attempt. > Make no mistake; we are under attack. If we do not recognize the nature of the attack and reject it, we risk watching the best features of the open-source sub…
"ratfucking"? Classy. I don't agree with him but I feel a bit sorry for him. He's passionate about this and he believes what he's saying. Perhaps nothing could make him see things differently, but banning him definitely won't.
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I'm not exactly sure where you draw the difference. Minority opinions are sometimes helpful in creating products that work for everyone (my favorite example here being a hand dryer that did not recognize black skin). It can be useful to amplify such voices. If you want to call that "SJWism", fine. But this is literally just a call for civility, recognizing that many people may not want to subject themselves to this k…
> But this is literally just a call for civility, recognizing that many people may not want to subject themselves to this kind of toxic atmosphere The problem here is that "toxic" is something that gets to be defined by those who would use it as a hammer against everyone else. What one person considers to simply be a spirited conversation may seem as a deafeningly aggressive argument to someone else; but such is life…
Oh, I'm not the only one to notice the rampant transphobia in UK media and the labour party, nice.
See how easy I proved your premise wrong?
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Uh, I suppose the name calling, strawman-ing of arguments and insinuations of subterfuge. > toxic loonytoon > The actual goal of the movement behind the ESD > banishing contributors for wrongthink > The "Persona Non Grata" clause is best understood as an attempt to paralyze resistance to such political ratfucking Like I said I don't know the OSI culture (or this context) but nothing about this message strikes me as s…
> but nothing about this message strikes me as someone who's acting in good faith So you don't know who ESR is, and you're going to act like the man who has put his entire life into this effort as though he's not "acting in good faith". Wow. If anything, I'd question whether everyone else on the list even knows what 'good faith' is, as they voluntarily proceed to censor themselves.
However, that's still a ridiculous email, and inappropriate for any context where grownups are trying to have a serious conversation about adult matters.
First off, it's unprofessional. But even beyond that, the email is either intended to persuade through facts and reasoned argument, or bully though shouting. It's clearly not written to persuade (there are no facts or reasoned arguments), ergo its intended to bully.
> Its originator is a toxic loonytoon who believes "show me the code" meritocracy is at best outmoded and in general a sinister supremacist plot by straight white cisgender males.
"Show me the code" is a good principle, and not just in programming. Hard data is much better than ad hominems or making arguments from authority. It is, therefore, sadly ironic that ESRs linked email is purely comprised of ad hominems, and the best his defenders can do is to make arguments from authority. Your code isn't automatically right because you're the CTO, and your arguments aren't automatically right because you're the co-founder, and the more heated and inflated your claims get, with no citations or links or proof, the less time I have for you.
ESR remains correct on the principles he has spent his life advocating for. His email is still garbage, and I fully support the removal of anyone who authors emails like that from a mailing list until they apologise and commit to behaving better in the future.