Open Letter to the Emacs Maintainers

I support codes of conduct, for multiple reasons stated and not in this thread.

I do not support putting words into someone else's mouth, particularly on socially explosive (hence the discussion in the first place) or ideologically driven issues.

Asking if someone's ever been harassed is one thing. Stating point blank that they haven't, crosses a line. Your interlocutor knows their personal history. You don't. Don't presume. It's a cheap shot, often derailing.

Because you have to waste time reading it, and because they tend to force people to sugarcoat everything they say so that someone doesn't get "triggered" [1]. They also encourage SJWs (social justice warriors) to waste other people's time with various crap, for example the Node.js pronoun scandal [2].

[1]: http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Trigger_warning

[2]: https://www.joyent.com/blog/the-power-of-a-pronoun

I suspect this discussion has now ceased to be useful to anyone. I'm more or less certain that you are now 'white knight' and 'question trolling'. I find it equally frustrating that you are 'concerned' about 'feeling' harassed, not 'being' harassed. I'm suspect you view me through a similarly narrow filter.

But hey, https://xkcd.com/386/

I did not say anything about 'what happened', I was speaking of 'belief' which was part of your sentence.

I'm not claiming I've been harassed, nor am I denying it. I find the term a bit vague, as it runs a spectrum from minor trolling which I think we've nearly all experienced (and perhaps committed), to real world doxing and stalking and physical violence. So let's pick something much more concrete.

Rape. Since even that has a somewhat ill defined colloquial use, I'll specifically restrict to a narrow and somewhat historic subset: The act of a man forcing coitus upon a woman.

There is recent precedent for this in the Tor community. I don't know enough of the specifics of that to claim my hypotheticals reflect any of the reality of that case, but I think it's a useful way to make this seem less abstract.

I don't believe that the Tor project had a specific 'code of conduct'. Despite that, they seem to have been able to report appelbaum's behavior as inappropriate, and remove him from the project. This suggests a CoC is not a requirement -- it is not necessary. Does anyone claim a CoC would have prevented those events from happening? -- it is not sufficient.

Let's imagine that there was a CoC. I don't think any of the CoCs I've seen specifically mention rape (nor murder or pedophilia - my original examples). I find it hard to believe that there was (or even could be) a woman who was ready to contribute to Tor, but due to previous experience with rape, and the lack of it being mentioned in the CoC, decided this was not an environment where she was welcome.

trigger warnings, safe spaces, and codes of conduct have all become strangely familiar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCU_(film) , but bland ways of marking some tribal identity. But they do not seem to actually achieve any of their stated goals.

I've previously been involved in organizing one tech conference, where a single member of the admin board felt it was urgent that we nail this down, and it became a time consuming and long recurring part of our calendar, which to my mind achieved little beyond bike shedding. None of us are strongly opposed to the core idea. We do want a healthy vibrant community. But if that's all we wanted, we'd have joined some other social forum, be it a book club, a sports team, or whatever suits you. Instead we joined a code base, a conference or some other technology focused community, and advancing that specific goal is actually priority #1. To the extent a community helps us to advance that goal, wonderful. But to the extent that certain members of that community actively hurt progress, we're glad to see them excluded. Sometimes we decide that exclusion is necessary due to social practices like criminal activity ( Hans Reiser ) sometimes it's due to some (race/sex/other)-ism which is taboo. But one of the great things about the way we do online collaboration ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_... ) is that I've gotten to meet and collaborate with a lot of people who are WAY outside my usual social bubble. And it's allowed me to build a tolerance and respect for people who I would otherwise have probably dismissed too early. Satanic polytheist -- have you seen his filesystem API? Blind transexual with a diaper fetish - built that 9 dimensional rubics cube app in 4k of assembly. CoCs set a dangerous precedent of deciding in advance who's one of us, and who is not, based on things other than tech skills. I've got enough of that in my corporate and real world life. This is the internet. 99.9% of the time the absolute worst that can happen is that you get your feelings hurt. To prematurely constrain it to prevent that, is a medicine more dangerous than the disease.

You point to a case where someone was freely able to harass and abuse other members of the community for years as an example of why CoC's aren't needed?

You accept that you need to exclude people for the health of the community but you continue to reject CoCs because....you once were involved in a board with someone that took a long time to establish one?

I personally think a lot of the push back is from jerks fearing that they will be pushed out of the only communities that have dealt with them up to now.

There are stereotypes about programmers and their social skills and if over 20 years programming has taught me anything it is that they portray way too many individuals involved in it accurately. A lot of people do need to be told exactly what is or isn't appropriate. A lot of people do need something like a CoC to feel comfortable reporting abuse.

They said their discussions have been more productive since the change.