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Ruby removed “Participants will be tolerant of opposing views” from its CoC

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Re: Ruby removed “Participants will be tolerant of opposing views” from its CoC

#471

Post by dqpb »

bjt2n3904 wrote: post #463
Locke wrote: post #406

I wish we responded to situations more proportionally. In this case, someone made a joke about women not liking to reveal their true age as they get older. It's a boring cliched joke. Something I've heard too many times in my life (and, most often from women). Is it sexist? I can see the argument. Is it professional to make such a joke on a ruby mailing list? I don't know, perhaps not. Does it warrant responses like…

You are asking all the right questions... And you will never get an acceptable answer beyond "Some times you need to break a few eggs to make an omelette." Sadly, the CoC wars were lost several years ago. The victors had the simplest tactic: projection. "We are just against all the bad things. We are anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-prejudice. Why aren't you on our side?" Well, I have two things to say. First, I eagerl…

Except it turns out the anti-racists are racist and the anti-sexists are sexist.

Re: Ruby removed “Participants will be tolerant of opposing views” from its CoC

#472

Post by [deleted] »

teddyh wrote: post #432
okeuro49 wrote: post #386

I raised my eyebrow at a statement in one of the comments in the PR. "This is so that a harasser won't be able to use a meritocracy argument, which as we all know, is dehumanizing..." I don't follow this at all. A meritocracy is what we want to achieve: it doesn't matter about the colour of your skin, sex, or orientation, if you can generate code of merit, then if there is a meritocracy, you should earn the respect o…

Increasingly, the word and concept of “meritocracy” is seen as racist, since it denies due compensation for past and present institutional racism. Meritocracy is also seen as misogynist, following the same reasoning.

[deleted]

Re: Ruby removed “Participants will be tolerant of opposing views” from its CoC

#473

Post by sigzero »

ezconnect wrote: post #364
undecisive wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 g…

Why is there a protected party? Why can't everyone be protected only a few?

Exactly!

Re: Ruby removed “Participants will be tolerant of opposing views” from its CoC

#474

Post by dqpb »

cryptica wrote: post #464
Locke wrote: post #406

I wish we responded to situations more proportionally. In this case, someone made a joke about women not liking to reveal their true age as they get older. It's a boring cliched joke. Something I've heard too many times in my life (and, most often from women). Is it sexist? I can see the argument. Is it professional to make such a joke on a ruby mailing list? I don't know, perhaps not. Does it warrant responses like…

Over-sensitive, politically-correct people are going to end up in a hermetically sealed bubble of their own making, hooked up to virtual reality and drugs while the rest of us enjoy the real world. I have no problem with that. It's natural selection. Some people are too fragile. I'd rather let them lock themselves away in some virtual universe driving up virtual asset prices than have them in the real world drive up…

The problem with political-correctness isn't that it's trying to be sensitive to people who have been harmed, it's that it's yet another form of centralized decision making, and thus bound to be wrong about many things.

Re: Ruby removed “Participants will be tolerant of opposing views” from its CoC

#475

Post by toastercat »

Does anyone else feel that the user hmdne is being completely sarcastic in this thread?

This reads 100% like irony, and yet this suggestion[1] by hmdne has 5 "hearts":

> I suggest we also remove this point from the conduct guidelines:

> * Participants will be tolerant of opposing views.

> Some people may have views that when expressed, may be harmful to the interest of particular groups of people like big corporations. This has to be taken into account.

[1] https://github.com/ruby/www.ruby-lang.org/pull/2690#issuecom...

Re: Ruby removed “Participants will be tolerant of opposing views” from its CoC

#476

Post by zzzeek »

mlang23 wrote: post #357

I realize CoCs were introduced to make certain supposedly marginalized groups more at home at conferences. But my personal experience/feeling is the complete reverse. I am a member of a minority as a person with a disability. In all the years I was interacting with the community, I haven't had a single issue with someone I couldn't handle myself. I never felt uneasy interacting with others. But the day I saw the firs…

> I haven't had a single issue with someone I couldn't handle myself. I never felt uneasy interacting with others.

that's good for you, but how can you then assume everyone else shares the identical circumstances as you? Different historically marginalized groups have different experiences, and different individuals within those groups have entirely different experiences as well. Heck, I'm from zero historically marginalized identities but i have a lot of social anxiety, I've had lots of uneasiness. You are lucky that you have had no bad experiences (I might even argue this is really a sub-category of "survivorship bias").

I run an open source project. Users come to me for help, I would never think to say, "this code is easy for me to do, therefore it should be easy for you too, go work harder". Would be pretty outrageously bad, in fact. For me to assume that just because something is easy / possible / reasonable for me, therefore it should be for everyone else, would indicate a profound lack of empathy.

CoC's are there to indicate to the userbase that the comfort of all users is of the highest importance so they can get on with the job of working on code together, largely related to the fact that society is in a place of great change where all kinds of tacit, implicit, pervasive disapproval and marginalization of all kinds of people is suddenly not being tolerated. It's not unusual that this level of change would make people uncomfortable but the best thing you can do is to try to see the bigger picture rather than burrowing into becoming a reactionary.

Re: Ruby removed “Participants will be tolerant of opposing views” from its CoC

#477

Post by throwaway894345 »

vlunkr wrote: post #415
fennecfoxen wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The code of conduct is like HR. It’s there to protect the powerful, not to protect you.

How does it protect them? as far as I can tell they do absolutely nothing. If someone is misbehaving at a conference or online, you're already free to kick them out without a clause like this in your code of conduct.

Presumably it's not legal protection, but protection against the woke mob. CoC signals that to the mob that the community leadership is on their side so they'll be spared when any controversy arises.

Re: Ruby removed “Participants will be tolerant of opposing views” from its CoC

#478

Post by prancer_or_vix »

scandox wrote: post #425

The change indicated in the title[1] was made on foot of trolling by the user @hmdne It's really a remarkable failure of communication. It doesn't appear anyone read what he was saying carefully. They just looked at the first two lines of his proposal and assumed they understood his intent. And then when encouraged he actually made the change. And they actually merged it. It's amazing that people who are apparently p…

Wow, glad someone else caught that. I read that comment a few times because it seemed almost exactly the opposite in intent of the general intent of the PR (as explained by the twitter thread).

Re: Ruby removed “Participants will be tolerant of opposing views” from its CoC

#479

Post by bobthechef »

mlang23 wrote: post #357

I realize CoCs were introduced to make certain supposedly marginalized groups more at home at conferences. But my personal experience/feeling is the complete reverse. I am a member of a minority as a person with a disability. In all the years I was interacting with the community, I haven't had a single issue with someone I couldn't handle myself. I never felt uneasy interacting with others. But the day I saw the firs…

Right, this can misconstrue a difference in a way that becomes unnatural.

Obviously, you will notice a person who is disabled in some way. It's there, so why would you deny the truth and its contextual relevance and objective significance? But the kind of artificial attention to disability these sorts of things enforce in the name of "sensitivity" can displace it into some weird category that causes people to view disabled people first and foremost as disabled, and whatever else second, even if the particular occasion has nothing to do with that disability. This can even dehumanize the person by making them "a disabled" and not a person. This also makes social interaction awkward (I know how to talk to a person, but I don't know how to talk to "a disabled") and I'm sure, as you seem to agree, this is no kindness to the disabled. You're robbed of certain social interactions as a person because your identity is now "a disabled" and not "human being I can talk to about this conference topic".

Re: Ruby removed “Participants will be tolerant of opposing views” from its CoC

#480

Post by ytxman »

vlunkr wrote: post #415
fennecfoxen wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The code of conduct is like HR. It’s there to protect the powerful, not to protect you.

How does it protect them? as far as I can tell they do absolutely nothing. If someone is misbehaving at a conference or online, you're already free to kick them out without a clause like this in your code of conduct.

[This is not about Ruby.]

In an open source project it works like this:

Stage 1: Initial contributors and founders have a rough aggressive tone that is slowly adopted by new people (who are generally polite when they come).

Stage 2: Old boy club realizes that their own impoliteness is being used back against them. They write a complex CoC with intersectionalism and all goodies that are hard to follow or understand for non-Americans.

Stage 3: Old boy club now ostensibly follows the rule set, while being ice cold, authoritarian and contemptuous on the mailing lists. People not in the clique are undermined and contradicted regularly.

Stage 4: People not in the clique explode when the pressure gets too much. We have a CoC "incident"!

Stage 5: Here is when the CoC comes in handy. The Stealing Council now solicits reports of all past "microaggressions" of the target. People sift through the mailing lists and compile a dossier, ignoring any context that individual messages might have been written in.

In short, the CoC allows for a pseudo "justice" system, where trials are held NKVD troika style, without hearing the target once. You have a document to point to! CoC complaints are also private, so complaints against the old boys can be brushed off and ignored. A public CoC complaint would be a CoC violation, so the old boys are fully protected!

In most cases the Stealing Council operates like a FISA court. Punishments are handed out privately and the targets are afraid to go public.

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