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Comment by quantummkv | Hacker News Reader

Is anyone surprised by this? I certainly am not. It really is inevitable.

When the whole CoC was shoehorned in the Linux Kernel, many people warned that this was going to happen. We were just hand waved with "No such thing would happen" because the people behind the CoC were not racist, etc, despite when the previous events like the whole opal mess indicated otherwise.

The really ironic thing here is that America(and Silicon Valley) was built on historical events like this. A whole lot of geniuses and skilled people were driven to America by similar groupthink lynchings happening in Europe and Asia up until and including WW2. They built America into a powerhouse. If this continues to happen then Silicon Valley is going to get a painful history lesson they could have easily avoided.

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It is the lifecycle of great societies. It starts with a small group of independent thinkers who are less susceptible to mimicry, leaving the larger status quo. Then it becomes successful. Then it becomes the mainstream status quo. People who engage in mimicry (scapegoating) become the majority.

Bad times make hard men

Hard men make good times

Good times make soft men

Soft men make bad times

And so the cycle goes

> It really is inevitable.

Has there ever been an instance of a CoC being used in a reasonable way against an actually unreasonable person? From the history, it appears that CoC’s were designed to stop Linus Torvalds, specifically, but he’s still around (but he does seem to be afraid of CoC enforcers now).

> Has there ever been an instance of a CoC being used in a reasonable way against an actually unreasonable person?

Yes. Though, most CoC violations are handled privately for those involved so we don't hear much about them.

> Yes. Though, most CoC violations are handled privately

That really sounds like abuse of power with extra steps. Either ALL of these violations should be private or NONE of them should be. Selectively enforcing something like this is just bias and vendetta politics

I think that a reasonable code would allow the punished party to publicly disclose their punishment, otherwise the punishers (for lack of a better term) would do whatever they wanted. But it should be private by default.

So maybe the expected outcome is merging of HR-SJW positions and NDA-CoC so that "everyone" can feel safe

I believe that many CoC violations would include private events which the victim would like to keep private. After all, there's a good reason why we don't make all the police reports about harassment public.

Sure but in those situations most like the CoC's like we are talking about (things like the contributor covenant) would not be need to remove the person that was abusive

I have been a part of many projects with out these types of CoC's where people have been removed from the project because they were an asshole, or the project is forked and the assholes are left behind

Historically that was the way of open source.

Today however it is much different... Politics and Social Status seem to matter more than Code, merit, and reality

Yes.

[citation needed]

Part of a typical process is that these things are handled privately. Only the rare exceptions go public. That means those that know or can reference cases cannot share this detail. I would provide a citation if I could but I respect the privacy of the process so I can't.

The problem with this is it's the same argument that gets used to justify things like the Patriot Act. "The only times you see us use this power is in horrible ways, but we assure you, most of the time we use it for good reasons! We just can't tell you about it, because CLASSIFIED". In short, it's an argument that only works if you already trust the person making the argument.

IMO that shouldn't fly with the Patriot Act, and it shouldn't fly here either.

I remember watching randyben get banned from Kiwicon one year. It was very public. They said his talk violated the CoC without specifically mentioned which part and how. It was very public, announced in front of the whole conference.

Shouldn't the ones handled publicly be handled with greater care given the scrutiny?

Absolutely.

I served on the exec board of a non profit org that used our CoC to adjudicate behavior (sexual predator, harassment, etc) that was not covered by our bylaws.

One big difference, why our CoC proved useful, was we had a trial. Plaintiff, defendant, evidence, testimony, jury, deliberation. All of it.

It was a lot of work. And EXTREMELY painful. But it worked. A popular leader had a day in court. And our org emerged stronger for it.

I'd turn it around. Has there ever been an instance of a CoC being used in an unreasonable way against an actually reasonable person? There's been a few cases that blew up because the behavior fell into an arguably ambiguous zone, but I can't think of anyone who suffered real consequences and didn't have it coming. Just a little more tact and thoughtfulness on the offender's part would have saved a world of trouble.

Now I'm of two minds on this. I do sometimes miss the more freewheeling culture of the '00s, and feel like the need for constant compliance has drained the tech scene of some life... but honestly it's a small price to pay if the only alternative is tolerating fascists in your midst.

>Has there ever been an instance of a CoC being used in an unreasonable way against an actually reasonable person?

Said instance is the only reason this thread exists, no?

No such thing would happen" because the people behind the CoC were not racist

Read their tweets, many of them are openly and proudly racist, sexist and ageist.

>Read their tweets, many of them are openly and proudly racist, sexist and ageist.

Are they really? Or do they just dare to hold views that have nothin to do with sexism, agism or racism but instead just violate the "proper" political orthodoxy?

FreeBSD - Randi Harper. Who ran an online anti-harassment support organization:

> you fucking suck

Changed her Twitter name to "Kill All Men".

Drank coffee from mugs with things like "Male Tears" on the side.

https://slate.com/human-interest/2014/08/ironic-misandry-why...

https://www.reddit.com/r/freebsd/comments/3z2sbe/randi_harpe...

etc.

“Joking” about killing all men to make men feel uncomfortable is still clearly harassment.

Especially when they don’t permit the “joking” excuses to anyone else.

Here's my personal litmus test:

If you replace one gender with the other or one race with any other race (etc, etc) and the new sentence is offensive, then so is the previous one.

Is kill all women offensive? Then you obviously shouldn't say kill all men.

Oh, I absolutely agree - my original comment was perhaps ambiguous. This was the hypocrisy of someone who actively advocated for CoCs to be introduced even as she was actively harassing people who didn't fit her world-view.

do they just dare to hold views that have nothin to do with sexism, agism or racism but instead just violate the "proper" political orthodoxy?

Well let’s see, what do you think about using “old”, “white” and “male” as pejoratives? No one ever seems to have violated a CoC for it.

I do feel the need to point out that the kennel CoC isn't involved in this particular episode at all...

The problem is poor governance.

Everyone has the right to appeal, sue for injury, etc.

Any entity acting as judge, jury, and executioner is the problem. Secret laws, secret courts, secret rulings are the problem.

Suboptimal CoC's are not (even remotely) the problem. Broken laws, policies, rules, procedures can be fixed. If we have proper governance.

We know this.

The two are tightly coupled. An intentionally vague CoC permits gaps throughout the governance system.

If CoC's were specific, they'd be called laws, rules, procedures.

CoC's like the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence exist to capture values, principles, culture, intent.

You're not exactly helping the case that this whole 'governance' is flimsy, a facade over arbitrary application of power.

What?

Which side are you on?

Pick a side.

My natural inclination is to agree and stand against this stuff which superficially really does look like hysterical moralism.

The thing that stops me and almost makes me side with the CoC crowd is that I've spent the last 8-10 years watching a wave of fascist and hyper-reactionary ideology sweep across hacker culture.

The existence of so much actual fascism, race nationalism, Naziism, ideological misogyny ("red pill" and "incel" stuff), etc. in so many corners of hacker/geek culture make the hard core SJW crowd look like they have a point. The stuff that revolves around places like Gab and /pol/ makes the craziest examples of "call out culture" and "cancel culture" look sane and maybe necessary.

It's like this.

Say you're in Salem. Say you're horrified at all the witch hysteria. Now imagine you go for a walk in the woods and come upon a circle of people chanting and sacrificing babies over a bonfire...

Hmm... now maybe those witch hunters have a point!

I feel a little like that.

What I really think is that everyone on the right, left, and just about everywhere else lost their damn minds for some reason starting about 2010-2012. The MAGA hat crowd and the "cancel culture" crowd are all insane and this is all crazies fighting with crazies.

This install is totally borked. Format and reinstall the OS.

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