I came to quote this very article. This raised my eyebrows a lot when I originally read it. I always thought that DEVELOPING A DAMN PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE is inherently apolitical and strongly meritocratic endeavor. Boy, how naive I was...

We are naive when we think, as we all do at times, that humans in our <group> differ from the others - that we have no politics or biases and aren't affected by those things, and we form some just, meritocratic ideal.

When we find ourselvees thinking that, then we are part of the status quo - the system is designed to suit us. It's very easy to think that status quo is the entire universe; just keep doing what you're doing. Instead, to avoid perpetuating the bad aspects of the system, it's essential to curiously and closely look for its boundaries, look outside it, notice the humans out there who are not being served, who may express unhappiness.

Take them at their word; they may seem absurd, but that's your human response to someone violating norms - the norms being the status quo. Their expression may include being disruptive or unpleasant. 'Disrupt' means 'violate the status quo'; it shows you the status quo's limitations.

No, it's just entryism. It's not inevitable. Long march. I was naive once, too.

Their is a lot of sociology and other research that suggests that ironically these attempts at stricter social/etc codes mostly arise in communities that don't really need them. this happens for various reasons, but it makes intutive sense if you think about it - thoughtful, well-run communities tend to think about stuff like this. but they also, because of that, mostly don’t need it. that doesn’t mean that that it is true in every case, of course.

As someone formally trained in many forms of dispute resolution, I'll also offer many of these have a significantly misguided view of effective dispute resolution. They often think some neutral and objective group of people evaluating a situation is an effective way to resolve code of conduct disputes, in part out of a desire to be fair and objective. But these are social disputes and not contract or other legal disputes. Applying mechanisms meant for one to the other does not make a ton of sense

> They often think some neutral and objective group of people evaluating a situation is an effective way to resolve code of conduct disputes, in part out of a desire to be fair and objective.

This claim is increasingly difficult to reconcile with an awareness of who gets chosen to evaluate situations, what reasoning they present as "neutral/fair and objective", and how they go about their resolutions.

I sometimes wonder if people-who-think-of-solving-problems-not-creating-them-defensively should secede from the rest of the Internet.

They can keep the tools & remix new ones with LLMs. The rest of us can hang out in some tiny corner talking civilly.

Post-George Floyd up until Donald Trump was elected, which is when this happened, was peak of this performative bullshit. Like renaming master to main or changing the the name of blacklists and whitelists would end racism, when all this language policing did was make people quietly resentful and was one factor in the backlash that followed.

And when Donald Trump was elected, a lot of the engine of that performative BS switched sides without missing a beat, and we went from corporate pinkwashing to corporate stinkwashing.

I was not aware of this, but I had an experience at PyCon 2022 in Utah where I realized how bad the Python community had gotten and turned me off them. I came to attend PyCon from India, I land up there with vaccination certificates and everything and they would not let me attend. Apparently, two vaccinations and a booster were not sufficient because the booster was 15 days past the 6 month mark. Also, they did not have Covishield (Astrazeneca in India) on their list. While I was rtying to explain this to them beside a wall with some 35 pronoun stickers to label yourself with, the guy would shush me if my mask even slipped a mm below the nose. While at the exact same venue, within the same lobby space, some gymnastics convention for high schoolers was going on and they had no masking nothing at all. It could not be more performative than this. I did manage to get in, but lost half a day.