Ruby removed “Participants will be tolerant of opposing views” from its CoC
github.com
github.com
> When interpreting the words and actions of others, participants should always assume good intentions.
In favor of this:
> Participants should speak and act with good intentions, but understand that intent and impact are not equivalent.
Also changed yesterday:
> Behaviour which can be reasonably considered harassment will not be tolerated.
became:
> Behaviour which can be considered harassment against protected classes will not be tolerated.
The updated CoC is here: https://github.com/ruby/www.ruby-lang.org/blob/master/en/con...
This is very weird because fundamentally it stems from a failure of the moderators. If someone makes a sexist joke you don't just let them because you're "assuming good intentions", that clause means that you tell them it's not appropriate here, and if they apologize you assume they are sincere, and if they don't you swiftly boot them. But there is no substitute for good moderation, shifting words around won't help much.
Aside: Open source discussion opening with "My rationale for these changes are documented on Twitter: [link]" also seems somewhat crazy. And I love Twitter, it just seems very odd to link to a thread of tweets instead of restating your case in the proper medium.
In that scenario, the situation degenerates into "he said - she said". Traditional response was "in dubio pro reo" = "in doubt, let the accused go free".
But modern woke movements generally hollow out this principle and replace it by "believe the marginalized / weaker / oppressed side" and "be strict and hostile against the privileged side", as defined by the contemporary academic ladder of oppression.
This leads to a very paranoid society and I think it will take at most 10-20 years to reverse again, as bad cases start to heap. One of the universal qualities of humanity is that we can all be manipulative dicks, regardless of gender, color and creed, and once you shift the balance of power to the accuser, you will empower manipulative people across the board. And they are perfectly able to poison the common well for everyone.
Edit: 2 downvotes within 20 seconds and zero attempt at rebuttal.
Not to mention the implication that harrasment is somehow ok against people who are not members of the protected class? I appreciate minorities get a lot of shit that others don't, but its not like bigioted assholes are the only people who harrass other people.
> the implication that harrasment is somehow ok against people who are not members of the protected class?
There is a subset (I like to think that they're the fringe, but have no numbers to back that up) of those who engage in identity politics who do believe that bigotry does not apply when the target is the dominant demographic.
EU has the concept but doesn't name them in that way, countries implementing them may do in their respective language (someone else has already commented as such for German): https://ec.europa.eu/info/aid-development-cooperation-fundam...
The GNOME CoC gleefully states they will ignore complaints of racism against whites and sexism against cis men because "we prioritize the safety of marginalized groups over the comfort of privileged groups".
Protected class ("geschützte Gruppe") is a commonly understood concept in Germany, too.
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 good intentions we will kindly encourage each other toward a higher standard of behaviour." ... they instead have chosen to weaken the specificity and balance of the CoC.
Throughout the discussion, and on the twitter thread, the overriding message is: Triggering the hurt of a protected party is always punishable.
And it's a sad viewpoint, because it becomes not "Matz is nice and so we are nice", it becomes "We are nice to avoid the ire of a protected party"
This is a feature, not a bug. When the rules are clear and specific, they can be enforced fairly. When they're vague and unclear, then the only consistent principle is that the people who "enforce" the "rules" can do whatever they want and you have no recourse or due process.
If there are any CoCs left that do not adopt these standards, they will be brought into conformance soon. Corporate sponsorship depends on it, and open source is nothing without corporate sponsorship.
This is an undefined spiral to infinity mainly relying on de jure expectations.
Sexism - the believe that on sex is supreme to the other is already redefined to mean anything suggestive.
Obviously it isn't a binary situation with either intent or impact being the sole arbiter - so the baseline used in almost all situations is the 'ordinary' or 'objective' standards. These can vary depending on the environment and context, and are simply defined because they are hard to define across all scenarios.
I guess I find it surprising that a code of conduct like this should sway between intent and impact in quite so binary a fashion -- human behaviour isn't software.
As well as being a bedrock principle of the law, it's also basic common sense. If I accidentally step on your toe, that's obviously different to me deliberately stamping on your toe in an intentional attempt to injure you. If you set out to deliberately injure your colleagues then this is OBVIOUSLY different from doing the same thing accidentally and should be treated differently - and anyone with a working brain can see this.
The idea that "intent doesn't matter" is preposterous. Accepting it as a premise leads to insane and preposterous conclusions that no-one believes. People who say that "intent doesn't matter" don't actually believe it.
The person being inappropriate will always hide behind their intent because they can only argue about their own role in the exchange (e.g. they can't argue that the target person/group isn't really hurt).
When a conversation is derailed away from the damage caused to the intent, the harasser wins. What are you going to do? Establishing a default assumption takes that away. Always have good defaults :)
Assuming good intentions enable troll to engage in endless sealioning.
“Protected class” is an (American) legal term, with situation-specific definitions. (It means different things in federal employment law, federal public accommodation law, federal fair housing law, and the various states employment, public accommodation, and fair housing laws of each of the States.)
It is entirely unclear what it means in the Ruby CoC, and the explanation in the discussion thread is literally “everyone knows what ‘protected class’ means” which is obviously entirely false. Its a term used by someone who has some overly precise, overly generalized idea of what it means, doesn’t realize that they are wrong, and thinks everyone agrees with them.
> @hmdne commented yesterday
> @Try2Code A protected class is a group of people that has been historically discriminated or a group of people we (as humanity) want to privilege to offset the years of discrimination - but that's not all. For example the People of Color are a protected class, because of slavery. Members of board of directors of the big corporations are a protected class because they financially contribute to the cause. The non-heterosexuals are a protected class, because of discrimination. Women are a protected class obviously. I don't know how to better define it. The dictionaries should have a more understandable definition.
Side note: anyone follow what this means? “Members of board of directors of the big corporations are a protected class because they financially contribute to the cause.”?
> @peterc commented yesterday
> Since California has been mentioned, I'm guessing these: https://www.senate.ca.gov/content/protected-classes
Only american vetrens. Screwing with canadian vetrens is still fair game according to this CoC i guess.
This is exactly why many people were not really open to COCs because this is an eternal battleground with creeping behavior expectations because of some unsolved personal problems.
A reasonable moderator should flag a joke as this as not appropriate in professional conversation without any CoC changes:
# Maybe this has been written for women, having calculated their age ;)
edit: non just unwelcoming, it can be considered discriminating
My thoughts follow yours entirely - the author is tweaked about the failure of the moderators and twitter is not a place for commentary on a pull request.
(There's a certain irony here to the author of the PR complaining about the difference between the intent and impact of a statement and then... completely missing the point of why their PR is meaningless).
I don't know what specifically motivated this PR, but I assume something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning .
It's mentioned in passing a couple of comments in. To highlight it (because it's easy to miss):
"I watched a group of people use these specific phrases to justify making sexist remarks over a communication channel that falls under these guidelines."
...against a protected class. All others are allowed, apparently?
That's... interesting?
Some of the most vitriolic flamewars I've seen on the internet were between western straight white males. I don't see the point of special casing this clause.
It's hard to agree on the exact boundary between enabling a jerk and making an issue out of nothing. But the old "assume good intentions" policy does sound to me uncomfortably similar to "if you're offended it's your own fault". Which is generally how people treat victims of harassment in communities where that sort of harassment is tolerated.
It is also required for completely dry technical discussions. I am not sure I would want that in open source communities though, but that is certainly a preference.
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 "Knock that bullshit off." or "you made an ass of yourself"... I don't know. Seems a little ironic to use unprofessional language in this situation. Maybe even worse than the joke itself? I don't know.
Then, folks take the discussion to github and twitter (and, eventually reddit and hn). Presenting only their verdict: "A newer member made a sexist joke, and was called out on it as being inappropriate." No links to the joke. No evidence that the joke is sexist. This makes it so much easier to imagine something really bad. No, we just get a verdict and we should all rise up against this sexism (which absolutely is bad, of course). Let's get our pitchforks. This amplifies one side of the argument and shuts down any useful conversation. Worse, it's used to rush through a CoC change without allowing any thoughtful discussion.
Is this reaction proportional to the original joke? Is the reaction itself exemplar of how we would like to conduct ourselves?
In my experience this kind of stuff is extremely counter-productive. It puts people in the defensive, and remember, you haven't actually said anything: you only gave them a (somewhat rudely phrased) command, which is just not helpful. If I object to some behaviour I typically contact them in private (not in public) whenever possible, and explain how a particular joke or comment made me feel. >95% of the time, you'll get an apology without drama and all is fine.
"Assume good faith" doesn't mean "anything goes" or "give people a free pass", but rather a recognition that most of the time, people really aren't such bad folk, even when they're behaving as less-than-perfect.
Anyway, the actual email thread can be found here: https://rubytalk.org/t/simple-operations/75577
It all seems a bit much for a single new user making a joke phrased in such poor English it's barely comprehensible and the very short discussion that followed on that shrug. And there is no real mention that this is somehow indicative of a wider structural problem.
I'd hate to make more of a process for parsing a one sentence joke but ... how else do you do it?
So you throw it to a committee who comes back with "We told the user their statement could be seen as sexist and not to make that joke anymore."
There you go. Done. Issue is no longer relevant, time to move on with life. If it comes up again with the same user, then you can worry about bigger things.
I'm sure there would be some bickering after that but at some point you can't have the argument going on forever on every rando social media site and ... version control site...
The Internet never forgets. It is genuinely unclear how to adapt pre-Internet norms. I would prefer presumption of innocence and of a learning process, that is summary dismissal of one-off out of context situations. But viral content (such a fitting expression!) begs to differ.
[0]: https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-cruel-moraliser-uses-a-halo-t...
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 eagerly await your omelette. Judging by how tolerant society has become, it should be any day! And second, why be against the Democratic People's Republic of North Korea? Democracy is in the name!
what does this mean?
The first project that succeeds with a CoC of "sticks and stones may break your bones but words can never harm you." is going to be a watershed moment that can recruit the growing population who are sick and tired of the leftist mob and their thought policing.
How about ‘let’s keep the discussion about Ruby’? Instead of poisoning another venue with woke drama.
I can't believe that so many people are so suggestible. Part of me feels like they can't be serious; they're just acting out, conspiring in an attempt to incite (fool) others to adopt this strange vulnerable mindset.
It's easier for me to believe that it's a conspiracy than to believe that so many people are so gullible. Why am I not richer if the world is so full of gullible people? Where are all these suckers? Maybe I've been overestimating my neighbors and competitors.
What kind of world have these people been living in all these years?
It's quoted in the GitHub link, and presumably it'd be trivial to find in the list archives.
This isn't as benign as you characterize it, since it's basically "this date handling bug must have been created by a woman since women lie about their age". Lazy misogyny is still misogyny.
> Is it professional to make such a joke on a ruby mailing list?
I understand what you're doing here (https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Just_asking_questions) and so aren't looking for a real answer, but the actual answer is: Of course it's unprofessional. Make "women jokes" while working at any modern company and see what happens.
> Is this reaction proportional to the original joke?
Again, this is a mischaracterization. This comment wasn't the cause of the change, but a final straw.
The joke was that the bug could be caused because it was written FOR a woman, not BY a woman.
And in this instance, it's also completely unnecessary to your point. So please don't cite these types of radical sources when making innocuous points. It would be like if I was having a debate about average rainfall, and said something like, "Well, according to the UnabomberFanSite, the average rainfall is 3 inches". It's just so needlessly inflammatory and provocative that your best bet is to cut that out and replace it with a more mainstream source.
Just one example: Their information about Alcoholics Anonymous’s effectiveness can charitably be described as a dumpster fire: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Alcoholics_Anonymous (For example, they cite Brandsma 1980, which is a very outdated chestnut anti-AA polemics always bring out; the study is really old and its methodology was pretty bad: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandsma_1980 )
In particular, Rational Wiki’s article on AA completely ignores Cochrane 2020, which shows that Alcoholics Anonymous has a 42% success rate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effectiveness_of_Alcoholics_An...
Is it? I don't see it, just a link to a Twitter thread that also never links to the actual joke.
It's not ironic. Forceful language (and rather tame still) is not just as bad as a 'joke'. The offence was not at the unprofessionalism of the joke, but at the contents of the joke. That is what fuelled a discussion.
Removing the line from the CoC also was not a response to the joke. It was a response to the ensuing discussion about the joke.
Talking about proportionality as if the change was brought because of the joke is as questioning the proportionality of WW I to the death of archduke Franz Ferdinand.
The 'verdict' as you call it, does not go into detail about the contents of the joke, because it was irrelevant to the reason of why they made a change. It could have easily been a different joke.
> Talking about proportionality as if the change was brought because of the joke is as questioning the proportionality of WW I to the death of archduke Franz Ferdinand.
I first thought your response was a joke, but maybe you actually mean that, put some emojis next time to show if you are joking
+ Behaviour which can be considered harassment against protected classes will not be tolerated.
That change sure seems a lot like it's saying "we're now okay with harassment as long as the person you're harassing isn't a member of a protected class". Isn't that then adding abuse-enabling language, not removing it?
With the exception of a couple special exceptions (for federal employment law, these exceptions include age over 40 and veteran status), “protected classes” in US antidiscrimination law (the source of the term) are actually axes of discrimination where everyone is a “member” of one defined by each axis (race, sex, religion—including none, etc.)
So while it is ambiguous exactly what classes are involved (because the set of protected classes varies depending on context and jurisdiction), its pretty clear that the change is not about the person not being member of a protected class, but the basis of the harassment not being an axis that defines such a class.
Sure, but isn't harassment something that should never be okay, not something that should be okay as long as the basis isn't an axis that defines a protected class?
> "Participants should speak and act with good intentions, but understand that intent and impact are not equivalent."
Huh. That's interesting phrasing. I don't think i like it. Literally nobody thinks impact & intent are equivalent, the sticky point in human interaction and morality is to what extent do we take results instead of intentions into account when evaluating the morality of an action. The statement as is isn't saying anything about how we should interpret intent vs result just that we should acknowledge that its different.
I personally believe that codes of conduct (both this current trend, but also in the traditional meaning of the word) should be specific about what behaviour is wanted, otherwise its a meaningless platitude. This says nothing about how we should interpret someone doing something hurtful while not intending to (or claiming not to). Is that ok? Is it only ok if a "reasonable" person would make the same mistake? Is it ok if they haven't made the same mistake before? Something else?
You haven't been paying attention - the (preposterous) idea that "intent doesn't matter, only impact" is a key premise of modern social justice activism and is taught to undergraduates as unquestionable fact.
It relies on the reader to have already known that "intent doesn't matter, only impact" and anyone could actually interpret it as the opposite, especially if their culture already thinks that intent is the more important thing.
I ask because the law, legal system and even democratic values as we know them are built on very different principles.
We definitely punish theft, burglary and fraud even if outcome giving to poor is seen as preferrable.
We dont punish legal tax shenanigans and some shady philanthropy, even if outcome is poor.
And when democratic majority is in favor of some stupid and harmful policy, we campaign against it, but still obey democratic majority.
Intent is not meaningless, but unintentional harms need to be remedied by understanding the harm and working to change the behavior. If someone commits an unintentional harm repeatedly, it ceases to become unintentional, because the refusal to learn is deliberate.
> what you seem to agree with, that good intentions aren't a shield for bad results
I wasn't giving my opinion so much as sumarizing its an unsolved problem with no obvious correct answer.
If you want my personal view. I don't believe actual results should be taken into account at all.
"you look really sexy today" isn't wrong to say because the recipent was offended. It's wrong to say because a reasonably acculturized person would know that there is a high chance it would be offensive in context. If the dice were on your side, and for some reason the recipent was delighted at your "compliment", i would still say it was wrong because you had no way of knowing that that would be the outcome. The wrongness has nothing to do with what actually happened, only with what was reasonably predictable to happen.
There are pros and cons to this view, and reasonable people do disagree.
[And to be clear, even if something was not predictable and therefore not "wrong", that doesn't absolve you from having to apologize/make it right if you accidentally hurt someone]
> 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.
> universally accepted corporate values
> That's California Core Corporate Policies in work
> For instance, members of board of directors of the big corporations are a protected class.
> Members of board of directors of the big corporations are a protected class because they financially contribute to the cause
Given the success of the pull requests, I can only assume that this is not a sockpuppet mocking the rules in question. Is it some kind of multi-layered joke?
The idea is that any rule you apply should be done fairly and, where that isn't clear, equally.
So as an example. If I say "Pepsi tastes like cow urine", and a corporate shill from Pepsi who has built their self-worth around the company and spent most of their life defending themselves from the usual Pepsi-bashing jokes by bullies telling them that Coke is better, and maybe they fall into some protected class and maybe they don't.
Now, their complaint is valid and their hurt is real. But the intent of the original comment was not to bash this person (or corporation) - it was the spirit of valid criticism.
If the intent is removed from the evaluation of the rules, nobody is safe from those who would manipulate the rules and pretend to be the hurt party to the benefit of a corporation.
[Note: I've re-read everything that person said, and now even I'm not sure. It feels to me like highly honed satire, and if it is, hats off to them, though they've maybe forgotten that a large portion of the Ruby team is not natively English speaking - hence their PR got accepted. If it isn't satire... well, they're not gonna read this, so it would be a wasted education]
Someone with the same name invoked the old good intentions clause on the mailing list.[1] Apparently sincerely.
[1] http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-talk/...
I'm left to conclude that they are just simply "out to lunch," to put it politely.
Some of these comments are obviously bait to me - e.g., the one about how we should privilege members of boards of directors - and this looks like a careful attempt not to take the bait.
Note that PR 2690 is not from @hmdne and was unchanged from how it was proposed. PR 2691 is, and perhaps should not have been accepted in its present form because of the "protected class" language, but there are good-faith comments in 2690 (with no mention of corporations) about why the "opposing views" line should be removed.
Don't be an asshole.
I fail sometimes following that rule and I don't deny it. I struggle to become better but keep going. Of course you could extend this by "Help others, when appropriate", "Be nice to each other", "Use common sense", "Pardon others", "Don't be a d***", "Don't be a b*****" but that follows logical and would be itself a CoC. Anyway, Captain Picard said everything:
Mister Worf, villains who twirl their moustaches are easy to spot. Those who clothe themselves in good deeds are well camouflaged.
Give yourself some credit. There's a lot of precedence for this rule. One of the original versions of it goes something like:
"So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you..."
We all have different definitions of being a jerk. So, do you take responsibility when you’ve crossed your own line, or when you’ve crossed someone else’s line?
Crossing your own line is obvious. But you should still take responsibility when crossing someone else's if you feel they're acting in good faith / being reasonable about the offense, even if you disagree with them. And probably another caveat or two I can't think of off the top of my head.
A whole lot of the reasonable parts of "woke" boil down to a few things:
(1) Don't be an asshole.
(2) Don't meddle in the affairs of others if those affairs do not concern you.
(3) Evaluate other people from first principles and starting with a positive assumption, and check yourself for subconscious biases against groups of people that you might have picked up without really thinking about them. This is really a subset of checking oneself for irrational cognitive biases, which is a good practice in all areas.
I generally avoid projects with a CoC because it signifies that the people in charge are more interested in picking fights than they are in developing great software.
If this was part of being woke it wouldn't be considered a slur by anyone..?
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 paying such close attention to textual significance, don't appear to have the ability to read his statements with any care.
[1] https://github.com/ruby/www.ruby-lang.org/pull/2690#issuecom...
A quote for context:
>A protected class is a group of people that has been historically discriminated or a group of people we (as humanity) want to privilege to offset the years of discrimination - but that's not all. For example the People of Color are a protected class, because of slavery. Members of board of directors of the big corporations are a protected class because they financially contribute to the cause. The non-heterosexuals are a protected class, because of discrimination. Women are a protected class obviously. I don't know how to better define it. The dictionaries should have a more understandable definition.
It's like the video where you try to count the number of times people pass the ball and you don't notice the gorilla walking through the middle of the room -- you read the first sentence where it starts listing off protected classes, skim over the part where it lists "boards of directors of big corporations" alongside people of color, women, and LGBT folks, and end up thinking that this @hmdne guy is a pretty woke fellow.
This whole thing is pretty juvenile but I must admit I found it amusing.
> That's common sense. We all know who are protected classes. For instance, members of board of directors of the big corporations are a protected class. [1]
And
> Members of board of directors of the big corporations are a protected class because they financially contribute to the cause [2]
[1] https://github.com/ruby/www.ruby-lang.org/pull/2690#issuecom...
[2] https://github.com/ruby/www.ruby-lang.org/pull/2690#issuecom...
Edit: Appears it was copied in the git thread, as mentioned below.
Date.today
Date.today +1 # no error, but wrong result!
# Maybe this has been written for women, having calculated their age ;)The goal is to grant all offend/ed/ parties total, unimpeachable power against purported offend/ers/, and no amount of 'protected classes' cover removes the fact that this enables the same bad faith that harassing parties abuse, just for a different group.
Hold everyone to the same high standard. Period. Done. None of this thumb-on-the-scales nonsense.
"Maybe this has been written for women, having calculated their age ;)"
If I were in charge of a community or mailing list, I would kick the person who wrote that off. But I simply don't see how (a) the existing rules didn't do enough to cover this, or (b) the changes will resolve those issues without causing other problems.
"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 of the community.
This doesn't mean that everyone doesn't deserve a basic level of respect.
But there are people who are better than me at what I do; I am better than other people. That's a fact of life. I think what other people achieve that I couldn't, is amazing, and I help others achieve what I am better at.
I didn't either.
This same user states multiple times that "Everyone knows what a protected class means" and to use "common sense". After being pressed to define it then suggests: "The dictionaries should have a more understandable definition." but then offers no link to "The dictionaries".
This user has 4 followers on GitHub, but is lecturing the Ruby community on "obvious" things that unfortunately aren't that obvious.
I'm all for a robust discussion to make the community a better place, but assuming everyone has your world-view and a common understanding of words that you yourself struggle to define is a quick way to alienate folks who are seriously trying to understand the arguments but need more information.
Other people chime in to recommend that people "educate themselves", and links to an article (https://thoughtbot.com/blog/beyond-best-intentions) which suggests protected classes are: "Black, Indigenous, and People of Color, queer folks, and disabled people" because they "are disproportionately likely to experience bias and discrimination at work and in social circles."
Another user suggests the California definition which is much broader (https://www.senate.ca.gov/content/protected-classes) and includes classes like "marital status" and "genetic characteristics".
It's just better to be clear about what exactly is meant by these terms if possible.
https://github.com/ruby/www.ruby-lang.org/pull/2690
>We all know who are protected classes. For instance, members of board of directors of the big corporations are a protected class.
I think we all got played.
That said, "please help me understand" is sometimes a bad faith tactic to claim ignorance of basic empathy.
Also not a fan of this. My response would be something along the lines of:
"I'm not going to 'educate' myself on your delusional beliefs for the same reason I'm not going to 'educate' myself when my schizophrenic uncle tells me to learn more about the 5G towers tracking people's vaccine chips and giving everyone cancer."
In EU we like to joke around, tease each other, and not get fired over that.
When we tell a sexist joke with a woman present, you will get a witty reply from them, not a call to HR.
I hope this US bullshit stays in US.
Seems that EU women are not victims but can stand their own ground.
Jokes around "haha women are less smart and do the dishes" are not OK. A joke about moving your birthday because you're a woman, not so funny but wow so not sexist.
"Be nice" is the long forgotten good rule of Internet behaviour, and "if you meant to be nice but weren't, apologise" a close second.
Imagine for a moment that your name was Seymour Butts and then imagine how bored you'd feel by the people that continued to make the same lame jokes about your name, as adults in a professional environment.
It has been spreading to all corners of English Speaking Countries although mostly in Tech ( for Now ) and Open Source.
There are many signs it is growing in EU as well.
This depends heavily on where you work. It is not healthy for your career to assume this.
It's sexist regardless if woman are present. People are victims even if they stand their ground.
As a woman working in Europe, those sexist jokes sux. It sux to be in a team where you have to listen to it in the regular. It is tiring to have to be constantly prepared with "witty replies", just because collogues are dicks and need to pick on my gender.
Yes, I tell them off or am witty depending on what I think harms me the least of the two. But the situation itself sux. Working in teams where I dont have to be on guard and dont have to waste time strategizing this is so much better.
It also sux that quite a few people really do want the message behind the joke to be true. Whether they fully believe or sorta kinda believe.
Most of problems with harrasment and reactions to it would disappear overnight. The USA does not dominate the contributions anymore, but it does absolutely dwarf anybody else when it comes to shitstorms.
> A protected class is a group of people that has been historically discriminated or a group of people we (as humanity) want to privilege to offset the years of discrimination - but that's not all. For example the People of Color are a protected class, because of slavery. Members of board of directors of the big corporations are a protected class because they financially contribute to the cause. The non-heterosexuals are a protected class, because of discrimination. Women are a protected class obviously. I don't know how to better define it. The dictionaries should have a more understandable definition.
> Members of board of directors of the big corporations are a protected class because they financially contribute to the cause.
I don't want to debate the race/gender stuff as it's pointless, but "member of board of director of big corporations" is a protected class? Has this always been a thing that I wasn't aware of? This doesn't seem to be a joke, although it sounds like one.
By the same person:
> if they are not a protected class, they will lose that right, yes. That's California Core Corporate Policies in work. And we enacted them.
What's going on here? Why is Ruby adopting the "California Core Corporate Policies"? Again by the same person:
> That's common sense. We all know who are protected classes. For instance, members of board of directors of the big corporations are a protected class.
That might be just me but I feel like something sinister is happening. Open source, adopting guidelines to protect "members of board of directors of the big corporations"? I'm not trying to say that these people are bad, but do they really need protection on the same level as gender/race minorities? Why is the discourse centered around one specific Californian policy? What incidents are they preventing by adopting these rules? Stuff like the recent criticism of Amazon for trying to "take over" Rust? Again, that might be paranoia on my part, but this sounds fishy.
Edit: okay, it seem that this guy was trolling. Funny that he's trolling in the discussion but still got changes in because they were considered good. That's a beautiful way to demonstrate what actually matters
If you still buy into this hogwash at this point, I don't know what to tell you...
There must sell some real strange dope in California. Honestly, with all this strive to professionalism, this is on the whole extremely childish behavior.
The same person calls it “universally accepted corporate values” in one of the previous comments.
I guess it's Americans again ignoring the existence of other places on Earth with their cultures and views on things?
This definitely gives the Poe away.
https://www.dailydot.com/unclick/github-gendered-pronoun-deb...
Push a change without asking a non-native English speaker, make that person upset and provoke a counter reaction, then start a major Twitter storm to discredit and possibly expel the non-U.S. peasant.
Some of the names in that article appear on LKML in connection with the Rust proposal (not sure if they are the same persons). Caveat emptor.
https://www.dailydot.com/unclick/github-gendered-pronoun-deb...
> When another user, Isaac Schlueter, committed the change anyway,
Isaac "white men need no apply" Schlueter. This guy never resigned of any group he was part of, or NPM leadership when he said some objectively racist comments... rules don't apply to them...
The people who push these "codes of conducts" are the one harassing others and codes of conducts give them a way to harass other developers into ideological submission without being punished for their harassment tactics, because CoC are written in such away that if you're not following the intersectional ideology then you are fair game.
All that had never had anything to do with programming, it's purely partisanship. And if you don't cave, harassers are relentless because they have their own massive internet mobs on social media, a well oiled ideological war machine.
If this joke is told by women more often than men (in my experience it is), is it sexist to point that out?
Would this have received the same reaction if the joke was made by a woman?
Some things to ponder, no doubt. However, in this day and age I personally wouldn’t make a joke about any particular group unless I was born into it. Cancel culture is becoming a bit overwhelming.
For my taste that "must've been a woman" line was cringeworthy. He could've said "Well I guess someone doesn't want to grow old".
The world is filled with people who have different ideas about what is funny, what is offensive, what is fun, what is boring, etc.
On the internet it is expected to have a clash of cultures since people from different backgrounds are collaborating. There will naturally be well intentioned misunderstandings. Rather than creating a system that allows for these to take place peacefully without incident, any example of a joke gone wrong or a word out of place will result in an inquisition.
Why do so many westerners want to live like this? Constantly thirsty for purifying others. It seems to come from some kind of emptiness that must exist in one's life to be so obsessed over minutiae.
[1] Home Owners Association, for those outside the U.S. and unfamiliar with the term.
https://www.businessinsider.com/personal-finance/homeowners-...
>When homeowners associations were first created, they helped keep Black people out of the neighborhood. They're still doing it today.
>Homeowners associations exploded in popularity in the 1960s as suburb development was booming.
>Some HOAs used racist deeds and covenants to bar Black buyers from purchasing homes.
>Today, HOAs are majority white and Asian, and Black homeowners say they experience targeted discrimination and harassment by their HOAs.
Uh… is this a troll? Like other commented said, this feels like a anti-CoC thing or an extreme case of Poe's law, at least.
Man, the passionated bikeshedding over CoCs in some communities and even in here, with many extremist viewpoints from both sides, makes me glad I'm not really attached to any community. If they're stupid, why should I spend the emotional energy? Just walk away.
> (removed) "When interpreting the words and actions of others, participants should always assume good intentions"
Exactly! So, on a meta level, if we apply the same idea to the change itself. How do we know it was made with a good intention or simply get +1s, heart emojies and retweets...
But history repeats as comedy, so thankfully no firing squads and killing fields this time.
Furthermore they don't even have a solid definition of terms. Unsurprising.
Furthermore their arguments are based on their interpretations of law in California. Unsurprising.
Project maintainers should assess whether these CoC pushers are actually bringing any value to the project.
These CoC’s feel like a way to remove someone you don’t like from a project without any real productive basis. A weapon used by folks who like to feel self righteous when they “cancel” people who don’t align with their ideologies.
Adults don’t need a “Code of Conduct” to know they should be civil and respectful. If there’s to be a CoC it should only state “get rid of anything that gets in the way of good code” and they should start by booting these CoC nazis who are making their childish fragility’s other peoples problems.
Don’t like something someone said? Talk to them personally before wasting people’s time and resources.
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...
Still doesn't remove the need for good moderators though.
However, I am wondering if there is some historical context that I'm missing: have their been increasingly hostile or abusive discussions in the Ruby community which these changes are meant to address?
What a chauvinistic little bigot he must be.
For those who don't know her, quite an interesting person. She was notoriously fired from GitHub after a year after being hired to work on their anti-harassment platform.
The original message:
>Another example - perhaps somebody could fix that (many errors have that source!)
>Date.today
>Date.today +1 # no error, but wrong result!
># Maybe this has been written for women, having calculated their age ;) [1]
Thankfully, it looks like many of the replies just ignored the comment. One helpfully added:
>(btw: please don't make sexist comments, it's discouraging to many people.) [2]
Others took it a bit further:
>No. Knock that bullshit off. [3]
>You're in the wrong here. Take the loss, own up to it, and do better next time. [4]
And somewhat predictably, things devolved from there...
> What's next? Don't make enterprise java jokes / comments, it's discouraging to many people. [5]
[1] http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-talk/...
[2] http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-talk/...
[3] http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-talk/...
[4] http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-talk/...
[5] http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-talk/...
California Core Corporate Policies.
CCCP.
That guy is the greatest troll ever.
- When interpreting the words and actions of others, participants should always assume good intentions. +Participants should speak and act with good intentions, but understand that intent and impact are not equivalent.
The changes were made in response to sexist comments on the mailing list; they had nothing to do with "opposing views".
This has to be a joke right? We're now at a point where the rules clearly say you can be harassed if you're not a protected class?
fixed it.
https://github.com/ruby/www.ruby-lang.org/pull/2693
https://github.com/ruby/www.ruby-lang.org/pull/2695
I have the impression that Matz and co, without understanding the context, just approved the related PRs to avoid being canceled?
> I am actually a firebreather as a hobby, and a wizard by self identified religious affiliation. I am claiming protections under the existing text of the Code of Conduct in the master branch and demanding this pull request be accepted.
The trolling has come full circle
One thing that I'd like to see more of is CoC's being scoped to a certain list, event or something that's clearly definable rather than a broad vague entity like "the community". If someone behaves in a certain way on a forum other than the one for which the CoC applies, it shouldn't be usable to enforce punitive action like expulsion.
> * Behaviour which can be reasonably considered harassment will not be tolerated. To become something like (what do other posters think? Can we make it even stricter?):
> * Behaviour which can be considered harassment will not be tolerated.
> The law should always protect the victim, not the perpetrator.
Yikes. So I'm a victim if I say I am, even if that's unreasonable given the circumstances?
https://github.com/jacobherrington/www.ruby-lang.org/blob/ma...
Removing "Participants will be tolerant of opposing views" was proposed, but I don't see where the proposal was accepted or merged.
Also, the person who made the joke about women's ages should be banned for such a lame, cliche joke.
As for harassment as CoCs, it's a mailing list... How hard is it to just talk about code?
Replacing everything you posted with "." doesn't help.
Amen. These days my instant response to this kind of posturing is to disengage as far as possible from all involved. It's an ideological cancer that turns previously productive communities into a morass of backbiting and one-up-person-ship.
I have, thankfully, never had much involvement with codes of conduct but if I did I would want it to pass by a committee or a community vote, with ample time beforehand for discussion, platform, and voting with majority or super majority requirement.
A PR, on the other hand, needs just a handful of political allies — your reviewer — to land, and that’s it. I of course assume the best intentions on the part of the requester, but one could be forgiven for seeing it as a power play, subverting the democratic process.
Not everything is code.
This type of change is important because without it moderation is more difficult. What can feel like a masochistic job becomes near impossible where every decision is treated as though it violates soeone's free speech. In reality people who don't want to abide by the CoC are free to say whatever they want in spaces they manage.
Or does there? The truly disturbing aspect of so many things like this is that (as per Poe's Law) it's impossible to distinguish cynical mockery from earnestly-held extremism.
It’s like being in a school with metal detectors. They don’t make you feel safer, they make you feel like they’re necessary because the people around you mean you harm, even when that’s not at all the case. It’s an implicit threat.
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.
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".
* good faith is assumed of the CoC writers
* bad faith is assumed for people who oppose/criticise the CoC
such that:
* any opposition (or criticism) to the CoC is itself an offense
a pretty chilling and despotic approach, worsened still by the fact that the individuals behaving in this way mightn't even have any real authority or approval in the first place, and very little in the way of response to feedback outside some small ideological group (very much talking about the covenant here).
these actions are usually justified with the kind of arguments that fallaciously treat groups of people as homogeneous "identities", in effect a multi-generational rob[bing] Peter to pay Paul.
I was taken aback and immediately felt uncomfortable. Why did they need to say this? Do they have a problem with racism and sexism? Which would have been unusual because it was a lefty place.
The real question is does any of this stuff need to actually be said?
My view is it just provides cover for powerful people to take out their enemies based on rule interpretations and technicalities.
Seems like a variation of this. "If this community really needs a CoC, maybe it's actually full of bigots and assholes."
Asking in good faith here: is it possible your political mindset (wrt your opinions on CoC) is affecting your ability to relate to others in a context completely unrelated to CoC?
The way I see CoC is that, whatever might be in a CoC, does not affect 99% of people 100% of the time and does not affect the remaining 1% still 99% of the time.
Yes, it causes conflicts sometimes. You can agree or disagree on a particular CoC and that's fine by me. What I have difficulty understanding is some mentality that what's written in a CoC could directly lead to wanting to not interact with groups or go to conferences; the people in the conference are more real than the CoC itself is, and the people presumably are the same before and after the CoC is written!
I applaud you for your ability to stand up for yourself in moments of discomfort or where you feel others are being mistreated. Unfortunately, not everyone is as confident or as self-advocating as you, and a CoC can help protect those who are more likely to weather abuse in silence. Codes of Conduct serve several critical roles in large community gatherings but specifically they are a method for an event organizer to set expectations for acceptable behavior, this serves to:
1. Signal to attendees the atmosphere of inclusivity and tolerance which they can expect to experience (as a marginalized group or not)
2. Provide clear examples of inappropriate behavior so that individuals who are less proactive and self-confident do not dismiss their feelings for fear of being 'over-sensitive'
3. Ensure that transgressors cannot plead ignorance when they are admonished or removed for abusive behavior.
Bots were automated to hand out imputations and strikes, followed by kicking people who continued to use the word "guys" (regardless of the context). This automation was later reluctantly refined to be less trigger happy.
Trying to prompt discussions "about the G word" was bannable (without a proper warning): New person joins, sends "thanks guys" after a question, gets slandered by the bot as the scum of humanity and then given a four-message long wall of text about why the word "guys" was intentionally given its modern-day meaning because of something-something subconscious and it's designed to manipulate you. Naturally, person complains about this cultist-looking spam. If a mod is online: fuck that new gu—person; BAN. Immediately. A ban. I think maybe the bot mentioned it it one of the messages that discussion is forbidden, but I don't think people read the whole message. It was worded in a very patronising "you're a worthless idiot without a single fucking shread of human decency, so let me lecture you on how to behave in my version of a beautiful society like you've just turned six" way that I don't think most people got defensive and didn't give a flying fuck about the consequences.
The next in line for the woke firing squad were pronouns. ALL pronouns. This luckily never happened; I don't know why not, but I remember it being called regressive instead of progressive behaviour[2].
The G word rule ended up causing a lot of drama in-channel; and I remember at least one GitHub issue that got heated over this (they wanted it removed from the rules IIRC). At one point #ruby became a fusion of linguistic nuances, colloquialisms, culture, and social issue topics (pretty much what's happening here) that conversation about Ruby looked like it was off topic. I'm talking about hours of discussions about these subjects[1], and people with Ruby related questions get outright ghosted by everyone. This was why the earlier mentioned banning rule was introduced; mods noticed a slow exodus and a small decrease in activity in the channel when people weren't engaging in flame wars.
I'm a white guy, but I'm queer (gay). I won't delve into my background too much, but short story short is that for most of my life I was living in confusion, fear, and alienation because of sexuality, so I know how it feels to be Queer, and that I always try to be compassionate and understanding in these issues, and I always try really hard to make everyone feel welcome and included[3] and look for compromises. A lot of active people in the Ruby community started feeling alienated and unwelcome because of this rule (no joke: they were called snowflakes by the woke folk in the ops channel).
But these "woke" people on #ruby? Let me tell you: they're not woke at all. They're just hungry for control. They have all the textbook behaviours of a toxic parent (I'd know I grew up with one)/person. They wrapped their motives in good intentions, and manipulated most of the ruby community. I don't know if the "results" of their actions will be good or bad, but I'm not talking about results: I'm talking about motives and morals (which is what the focus is).
Small digression: It was really disappointing to see some of the BLM things unfold where white-assed Americans (this is by no means exhaustive or exclusive to Americans or whites) tried to steal the spotlight with their "performative workeness" where they made being woke a pissing contest about how to outwoke the rest and be the most woke. It's the same thing as people who post those "fake" instagram pictures: the only difference is fake thoughts and woke tokens instead of "likes." It's absolutely disgusting that people abuse real social issues to "promote" themselves (companies who used this for PR are just as scummy). They're the fucking Cruella De'Vils[4] of this world and they don't even see it.
This same person ("evil") that led this anti-guys movement on #ruby tried to get someone ("misguided" due to religious indoctrination) fired from _their own_ project (open source project) over a retweet. That's right, it wasn't even an original thought. She almost got her way, because some people were really supporting the.
Like, people created accounts just to be able to harass the "misguided" person via github Issues. The evil person didn't get their way in ruining someone else's life. So What happened next? They made it all about them; they were the victim in this whole story. They resigned from the Ruby community with something like "not wanting to be in such a toxic community". They came back again, because they probably couldn't find a more effective way to assert their psychological dominance/control over another naive community.
I've never experienced ANY toxicity, exclusivity, animosity or anything even remotely resembling discriminatory behaviour in my five years in the channel (at the time) until one asshole decided to ban a well-established English colloquialism. I find it incredibly ironic that they created the very thing they wanted to avoid: a fucking toxic community.
The cherry on top of this was that in those five years of being part of the community, did I ever see anyone single member complain about the channel's community being not exclusive or not welcoming. Nobody raised this before or after. The only people raising this was a handful of who invented victims to protect so they could give themselves purpose and importance in the community, when they were a nobody before.
This person who started the movement, their GitHub is littered with them doing "God's Good Work™" by opening CoC pull requests to random projects that were trending on HN or Github that week. I've never seen them talk in the Ruby channel other than the ops channel; there they would occasionally bring up someone's way of communicating wasn't sterile enough (my interpretation). They'd _almost never_ help with any Ruby related issues; the only reason why I can't straight up say "never" is because I remember they'd give wrong advice sometimes/
Anyway. I've been typing this our for a while now trying to organise a bunch of jumbled events/thoughts/ideas that happened over a long period of time, and it's getting hard. I've written so much already that I'm sure most people will just think it's TLDR and skip it, and the worst part is I don't feel like I've said enough. Feels like I'm only 20% of the way there. Recalling these events stirred some old emotions (mix of anger, disappointment and sadness).
I want to finish by saying that even with all this said—and it did have big (IMO negative) impacts on parts of the Ruby community—the Ruby community as a whole is _so_ much more than this toxic squad of performative woke bullies. The Ruby community already _is_ accepting, inclusive and non-discriminatory. I love the Ruby community even if I'm not as active as I used to be. Stay beautiful, and don't let trolls guilt-fish you toxicity. <3
---
One last thing, I used "woke" with a bad undertone throughout the text. I want to make clear that being woke is great, but being woke for the sake of your twitter followers or so you can feel "less guilty," or as a power move, or—anything that's not pure, basically, is just performative wokeness. There's very few people who do it for "knightly" reasons (as in goodness-of-their-heart reasons, I don't mean to be sexist).
I already said this has grown way longer than I planned. I know I threw out a lot of things and they might seem a bit like a gishgallop, but that wasn't my intention. I love talking about social issues (as you can tell, I have strong opinions about this) and doing what little I can to make my circle of people feel good and inspired. Anyway I refuse to make this post longer, so if someone wishes to talk with me about any of these points further, feel free to reply or reach out.
---
[1]: Nobody wants to hear they're a villain or that their moral compass is wrong. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias Also people always selectively quote parts of your message, then they construct fake a context/narrative that makes them feel morally superior in their screenshot. [2]: I tend to agree. [3]: One of the reason this situation/anegdote is really sensitive for me is because I was accused of being oppressive, anti-LGBTQ, etc etc etc. This brought up a lot of doubts, insecurities and other dark thoughts all back: Like, hello, I'm gay and I'm making other marginalised people feel even more marginalised?! What kind of trash human am I? [4]: From the originals, not the recent live-action film with Emma Stone; that Cruella is awesome
"No woke ideology allowed."
That's it. No explanation needed. Those who pretend they don't know what the rule means, or protest, are in violation. The radical left has been co-opting every organization they can get their hands on and kicking out the "non-believers" for years. It's time the handful of sane people that are left band together and start doing the same. The left loves the phrase "toxic," but their ideology genuinely is toxic, and no project, company, or group can thrive once it takes root.
"No ideology allowed."
I'm just going to dismiss the second paragraph about angrily finger-pointing at an ambiguous political alignment, "them".
You could replace "left" with "right|antifa|fascists|deep state|elite", or "toxic" with "unconstitutional|dangerous|radical", and that text wouldn't make any more sense.
We need less polarization, thank you.
But, of course, this isn't a matter of logic and the CoC is obviously not written to account for everyone's views. It is written to protect the views of the writers of the CoC.
This isn't necessarily a bad thing. No one hires declared Nazis at universities (Maoists and other communist ilk, yes), and neutrality is not a thing. It's a question of whether those writing the CoC are correct and coherent. Are they feigning universal tolerance while imposing a regime of intolerance?
How it ended: I am from a different culture, I have no idea what any of this means.
Classic.