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Comment by okareaman | Hacker News Reader

Pre-internet, we had an informal mediation process involving the affected parties. I think it worked pretty well because it refocused people on the code. It was like the US Constitution with separation of church and state. Let's focus on the law and leave our religious differences out of it.

I could be wrong, but it seems now people feel obligated to make a public stance on social media or email lists. Some of it is genuine outrage, some of it is virtue signaling, etc... but the effect is that the perpetrator is backed into a corner in embarrassment at public shaming. It's difficult to come back from that.

I would dread being a young person now and live in terror of saying something stupid about trans issues or do some cultural appropriation I was unconscious of and be "called out" in a public manner.

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>It was like the US Constitution with separation of church and state. Let's focus on the law and leave our religious differences out of it.

I think the pre-internet nostalgia of a proper “informal mediation process” is about as genuine as believing the US has an actual hardline between church and state.

That said, it’s funny you turn to “trans” issues as some powder keg when the article is about whether a committer should be allowed to push something along the lines that says “ni—-er get a job” to CPAN. I can’t think most professional communities would have caused a stink about that on their mailing list

> believing the US has an actual hardline between church and state.

Did I say "hardline"? No, that's your word. Of course there isn't a hardline. It's an ideal that we try to maintain. It's a stated goal that we can all read in black and white. We have lawyers and constitutional scholars to mediate disputes over this stated goal.

> it’s funny you turn to “trans”... “ni—-er get a job”

I don't know why this is funny. Or are you saying that you are offended I even brought it up?

If I'm following all this correctly, the role of the person standing behind the committer that used the n-word in commit messages was literally to purge "toxic" elements and enforce social justice orthodoxy within the Perl Foundation, until she resigned and accused the rest of the board of not caring about the safety of the community. I would honestly be unsurprised to find she'd outright been invoking trans rights to get her way in unrelated disputes; that seems to happen a lot these days. A lot of this has nothing to do with whatever oppressed groups it's meant to be helping and everything to do with the raw exercise of power.

FWIW, she was not standing behind this committer. This committer, by the way, has been asked to resign from the Raku Steering Council over this (which he did). This committer has also been banned for 6 months over this from any Raku community activity, specifically on the IRC channels by the Raku CAT.

And she has terminated her relationship with the committer.

The toxic element to be "purged" from the Perl community, has now returned and will make the Perl community more to his image . Which will only get more people to leave the Perl community. But that is no different from the past 15 years that I have had the pleasure of dealing with this toxic element.

Liz, as the person who forced me to reverse Patrick Spek's original ban for uploading a perl6-n_gg_r directory to cpan, I don't feel your opinion on my "toxicity" is necessarily universal.

I am, however, very glad that the Raku CAT has since corrected your mistake.

I am very well aware that I can be an asshole sometimes, but unlike you I don't defend outright anti-black racism because, to quote Patrick, "I call my black friends that" and "it's just a word".

Your repeated opposition to code of conduct enforcement is unfortunate but now you've resigned I hope we'll be able to move forwards on that matter without your personal dislike of me interfering.

A correction: Liz has been entirely supportive the Raku Steering Council's efforts to establish our Code of Conduct[0] and to enforce that Code.

(I know that part of this comment is referring to events that took place years ago; I don't have any firsthand knowledge about those events but want to correct the record about the present)

[0]: https://github.com/Raku/Raku-Steering-Council/blob/main/pape...

This is not the only instance of Liz opposing conduct enforcement, but I don't feel like tracking even more drama in onto the carpet in that regard.

I appreciate that she's revised her opinion on this specific case and apologise for not making clearer that she's done so - I only wish she'd be more supportive of code of conduct enforcement in other cases.

That's completely wrong.

Sam was absolutely doing her best, and if her initial decisions with regard to me were perhaps arguably a trifle draconian, I'd note that "a moderator getting out over their skis due to an excess of righteous anger" is absolutely somebody I've been significantly more times than Sam has.

The only person standing behind said committer's racism was lizmat, who forced me to reverse the ban I laid for the original fucked up cpan upload and has been attacking me for thinking he was a problem since.

However, lizmat has now resigned from TPF; I hope she isn't as much of a problem to raku conduct enforcement going forwards as she's been elsewhere, but I have faith in the raku team's ability to manage that issue and don't intend to interfere with their doing so.

> should be allowed to push something along the lines that says “ni—-er get a job” to CPAN

He didn't push it to CPAN, his dotfiles repo is not on CPAN. Please do not spread misinformation.

Edit: The CPAN thing is different. It contains a directory whose name is "perl6-nigger", you can find it at http://backpan.perl.org/authors/id/T/TY/TYIL/Perl6/App-Cpan6...

OTOH, he did push a funny-named package to CPAN, as seen in OP's screenshots.

From the article:

Riedel's complaint to the board points out that this isn't Spek's first racism rodeo. CPAN still offers downloads containing a 2017-era tarball from Spek with a folder named "perl6-n[word]". We downloaded the linked file and can verify that it's still available from CPAN, and it does in fact contain that folder.

I'm not going to address the "church and state" argument. I'll refer instead to Emerson's quote that "An Institution Is The Lengthened Shadow Of One Man [sic]." (We should say "one person.")

There's a simple CoC that neatly solves all these problems, and it's small enough to put on a footer for every page of every document:

   "If you're an asshole, I kick you out."

You're asking "how do we know what asshole-ness consists of?"

The answer is that you know the leader and you trust them. If you don't, you should leave.

> The answer is that you know the leader and you trust them. If you don't, you should leave.

That sounds like a recipe for a cult.

People like to know what is and isn't okay, and leaving it up to someone's feeling, even if you generally trust that person, makes the whole thing very fragile.

Ye, because then you have the Bus Factor to worry about. I think the Rust language project is a good example of how to do it right.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor

"Very fragile" and the Bus Factor: those things ignore the Lindy Effect (as modified by Taleb).

Monarchy in one form or another has lasted thousands of years. It does have the succession problem (or the Bus Factor), but requiring the monarch to designate a successor is the usual solution to that.

Interesting. I just finished "The Crown" so have been meditating on the idea of one person holding the spirit and sensibility of a nation. Then there's the idea of Benevolent Dictator for Life (BDFL) like Guido van Rossum, who quit the role and then took it back up.

Here's the essay: https://archive.vcu.edu/english/engweb/transcendentalism/aut...

Larry Wall is essentially this for the Perl Community, and many of us unironically refer to him as a saint. He certainly fulfills the role of constitutional monarch. But his attention has turned more towards Raku, and the rename (which he opposed for years before relenting) has started to split the community a little more.

I was just involved in some local political drama that was, if anything, worse than what happened here. And ignoring the Perl community as a consequence. So I was quite surprised to see a news article about all people I know, all of them friends. I really think the months of isolation are getting to all of us psychologically. That and the fact that the color of the sunlight has been subtly wrong all summer long from the smoke. We are children of a dying planet.

I don’t know how to fix it, but I do think everyone everywhere needs to take some time and calm down if they haven’t already. I love involved in this, and hope that we can all have a beer together once again.

You also should add “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.”

That's so outdated. Everyone knows that words are literal violence now, and the worst offence you can give to someone is not believing in their ideology. It's like we want to emulate the religious right for some reason...

> Pre-internet, we had an informal mediation process involving the affected parties.

That's not the way I remember it.

YMMV - I worked at Microsoft and then at various startups in California. Maybe West Coast culture was different from yours.

>live in terror of saying something stupid about trans issues or do some cultural appropriation

I think one reasonable way of "checking" statements about trans issues is to think about how similar statements about the obese would play out.

Sadly, most trans-related issues cannot be fixed by getting on a diet.

I mean from the perspective that if you think a similar statement would make an obese person feel bad then don't make that statement about a trans person

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