Furthermore, people are attempting to hold on to their ability to speak freely, to not have to monitor their own speech. There is no way to stop other people from being offended. No matter what you do, it will be offensive to someone. So should that person have the right to police you and to take down something that's yours? And what if you disagree with that person?
Honestly, saying that anything you do will be offensive is a weak evasion of personal responsibility. It's like saying that you might as well eat Big Macs for every meal since all food can be unhealthy, under certain circumstances. While the premise is technically true, the conclusion is flawed. It's a spectrum, with behavior on one end being better than behavior on the other end.
To your last point, of course some rando who's offended by my statement should haven't the right to police me or take down something I wrote. But they do have the right to respond to what I wrote, point it out to others, argue with me, criticize me for it, etc. And I have the right to argue back, ignore them, or even – as crazy as it sounds – consider if their feelings might be sincere and worth me reevaluating my statement.
Anyway, this became longer than I intended. I'm just trying to say that, to paraphrase Carl Sagan, as fellow creatures inhabiting this pale blue dot, we have an obligation to deal kindly with one another. The fact that some people are jerks doesn't obviate that.
I am not advocating of getting rid of kindness, and I think that preventing racism is a noble idea. And I'm not obviating a responsibility to avoid offending people by commenters who want to be taken seriously. But in the end, it is nearly impossible to entirely rid yourself of offense. Freedom of speech is necessary for productive environments, and it's been proven that people behave differently and speak differently when they know they're being watched.
There's a difference between attempting to be taken seriously and being disingenuous about who you are and they way you think. I believe in freedom of speech above all.
The other way to use retard as an insult is to use it against people with a learning disability. I don't think that's what you're defending -- verbal aggression by mostly rich programmers of mostly poor vulnerable people.
> I believe in freedom of speech above all.
Not right to life?
My go-to example is generally something along the lines of, religious people might be offended by atheist philosophies. Does that mean atheists should refrain from speaking about their beliefs to avoid potentially offending someone? What about the reverse, should religious people refrain from speaking about religion to avoid offending people of a different (or no) religion?
Or for an example closer to the context of the discussion, is it rude or offensive to argue that a wage gap between men and women doesn't actually exist? Or that employers shouldn't hire women purely based on a need to balance out a gender disparity in their employees?
I'm sure there are plenty of people would be offended by those arguments. Does that mean people should refrain from using them?
Actually, the above is two examples. One where I stop after the first sentence, one where I include both. It is extremely offensive to some people, and the second (extended) version even includes a call to action that can be considered outright harmful (but done to reduce what is viewed by those who take the call as a greater harm).
Now in some cases, such as talking to someone who holds an anti-vaxxer view point, being offensive is counter productive. But when calling those already on your side to action, using such wording can motivate and mobilize others in ways that more sanitized language cannot.
Well said, it's hard to convey severity without using severe language.
For a comparison, say you have a party at your house that gets out of hand. Too many strangers show up. So you explicitly state that all guests are required to leave. There is a difference between telling some people they can stay (or saying I won't call the cops if you stay, but I'll call the cops on anyone else who stays) and just ignoring the few people who don't leave.
If anything betrays their political bent, it is that they view this as a negative thing. But the same could be said of those who do not view this as a negative thing.
Also, why are you assuming they are a man?
Honestly I assumed it because his comments just read like a bitter MRA. But if you want, you can click his profile and confirm it for yourself like I did.
"Why do you assume a member who spouts KKK rhetoric is a white person?!?" -okasaki
Seems strange to feign ambivalence while still responding to the post in question. If you really "didn't want to get into a shouting match", shouldn't you have just not responded at all?
Please explain how removing a rug promoting meritocracy makes things better for women.
Remember that the term "meritocracy" was coined in a satirical essay about a dystopian society. It was not meant to have positive connotations.
I was tempted to give a perhaps too glib response that it allows them to live in a world where they might possibly be able to benefit from the advances wrought by the more talented, but that doesn't seem to get at your underlying concern.
My personal belief is that those who lacked the opportunities to develop themselves still deserve to live with dignity and full moral consideration, but that doesn't mean we should give them awards or accept their pull requests necessarily. Furthermore, if one apportions them a scarce resource at someone else's expense, I would consider that to be unjust.
It doesn't, but I don't think it should. Instead we should try to correct those social disparities.
I suppose I need to give my slightly inaccurate summary: trying to judge people just based upon their contributions ends up only benefiting the elite who had unfair advantages to begin with, and intentionally silences any effort to compensate people who have inherent social disadvantages.
But the actual article, which I have my doubts you've read, explains this better.
Sorry, I had read it before. I just didn't really get an opportunity to discuss it.
> I suppose I need to give my slightly inaccurate summary: trying to judge people just based upon their contributions ends up only benefiting the elite who had unfair advantages to get those advantages, and intentionally silences any effort to compensate people who have inherent social disadvantages.
I'm not saying perfect meritocracy is something we have, but it's something we should strive for and act under at least. We shouldn't over or undervalue contributions just because someone is a certain race/gender/etc in my opinion. It's patronizing and to do so seems only to contribute to the problem further.
The goal of an open source project should not be to fix social disadvantages but to produce the best possible product. They do this best via meritocracy, accepting contributions happily from anyone and choosing the best of them, not by rewarding or punishing people for things which they cannot change. Doing so makes the resulting product worse as you're not getting the best code from the best people, but instead discriminating on other factors unrelated to your end goal.
Is it really "racist" or "sexist" to say this? Is it not the truth?
EDIT: Added some wording to clarify.
Why? Lots of open source projects have social goals; for example, there's the Debian Social Contract, the Mozilla Manifesto, and Ubuntu is itself named after an humanitarian philosophy. These goals often override technical quality: Debian will rather ship a more buggy and incomplete FOSS software than one which doesn't comply with the Social Contract.
To answer why: because people want quality software and political agendas are a niche at best. There are much better places to address such things.
I don't agree with the notion that you can neatly separate "politics" from the rest of your life. Every action that you do which affects others is inherently political, and publicly distributing software is no different. By just following along, one is simply weakly supporting the status quo - which might be fine, but should be consciously chosen nevertheless.
Regarding whether I want worse software because of my political opinions, it's not really relevant what I want; I do consider having social goals as a valid position for an open source / free software project.
I am not supporting the status quo, I am simply supporting the best possible software we can produce. And I don't believe we produce that by rewarding or punishing people based on factors they can't change. This is not a matter of "following along", this is a matter of using the best people to the best of their abilities, regardless of these factors.
Freedom 0 according to the FSF is the freedom to use the software for any purpose (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html). Genocide included. I don't see why that would make anyone switch unless the authors publicly said "yes, we support this genocide".
Software is a tool, plain and simple. A better example right now would be Tor or Bitcoin. People aren't flocking away from those for their use in crimes...
"We are not mistreating them! We are treating them equally. We are keeping the races separate because [whatever reason], but nobody is being mistreated. We are being well-intentioned and everyone can still have equality."
The people who believed and supported separate-but-equal were genuinely thinking they were well-intentioned. They thought it was a good and necessary thing.
Many still do about a small subset of life. Separate bathrooms, separate living quarters, separate locker rooms, etc.
Perhaps, just perhaps...instead of spending time dealing with the rug, she could have brushed up on her coding skills (since someone else had to fix her coding defects for her)?
Overcoming social disadvantage requires some work, you know.
She might not be socially disadvantaged with respect to inner city dwellers, but she's still socially disadvantaged with respect to men.
Please don't make me reiterate all of the things that women have to put up with and men don't, especially in tech. Just because she got a job does not mean that we've solved patriarchy.
On what planet is this a "disadvantage"?
You are a bit too antagonistic and you sound too emotional in your responses. Please be more charitable. I am not able to respond well to such an unfriendly tone.
Grandparent never said that at all. Why would you even think grandparent intended this?
>In my usual workplaces, nobody would be as systematically angry as you seem to be about a woman and a company asking other people to be nice.
Once again, grandparent isn't systematically angry as a woman and a company asking other people to be nice. Where did you get this from?
I wonder how big this cultural divide really is, or if it just seems this big online. In my usual workplaces, nobody would be as systematically angry as you seem to be about a woman and a company asking other people to be nice.