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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   36583 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022

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It excludes the outgroup, or at least forces them to adopt your norms.

But all the CoCs I've seen seem pretty banal. How does it exclude people? A right-wing person can just focus on the actual development and not get involved in the political disputes and they should be perfectly fine.

Are you actually kidding? The default template for all tech codes of conduct specifically states:

[COMMUNITY] prioritizes marginalized people's safety over privileged people's comfort. The administrators will not act on complaints regarding:

'Reverse’ -isms, including ‘reverse racism,’ ‘reverse sexism,’ and ‘cisphobia’.

Communicating in a ‘tone’ you don’t find congenial.

Criticizing racist, sexist, cissexist, or otherwise oppressive behavior or assumptions.

I refuse to believe you have not seen this. It's the most common one out there. Look me in the eye and tell me you're not trying to gaslight people.

OK, this is my fault. Hanlon's razor and all that.

The phrase "all the CoCs I've seen" implies I've seen a decent number of them. In fact, at the time of writing that comment, I had only really seen two: the one that was removed from PolyMC (linked in the top comment) and the Wikipedia/Wikimedia "Universal Code of Conduct". Those two just happened to be fairly reasonable (in my view). The W3C CoC you linked below is egregious, and I can see how that sort of CoC could become a culture war battleground.

That, along with the comment by @thrownaway24e89172, answers my original question. My understanding now is that CoCs do not necessarily need to be designed to enforce wokeism, but actually existing CoCs often are. And I suppose a CoC that amounts to "be nice to each other" is kind of pointless, so people who are trying to get a CoC adopted usually have an ulterior motive. The PolyMC CoC still seems innocuous, though.

I’ve been in a group that tried to do things like banning “slurs” like “crazy” (even when used innocuously, as in “how crazy is that”) because it’s “harmful to neurodivergent and folx with mental illnesses” or something of that nature, explicitly in their CoC. (I wonder if it’s still up there?)

That said, this was also a group that had a serious discussion on their slack (or discord? Idk) about whether they should ban food photos because it’s exclusionary to people with eating disorders. I have to assume not all places are this nuts.

The default template for all tech codes of conduct

It's the most common one out there

Github's two default choices are the Contributor Covenant and the Citizen Code of Conduct, and neither of those documents contains that passage. It's true that a quick Google search for "will not act" "reverse racism" turns up quite a few hits, but I think you need more evidence for your inflammatory claims.

GitHub made it their code of conduct all the way back in 2015. The fucking W3 consortium uses an even worse version of it that bans "dog whistles and microaggressions"! Is the main internet standards organization that literally controls HTML not big enough to count?

He's claiming he's never seen such codes, which I think is an incredibly unreasonable claim to make and requires some kind of evidence, because he's insinuating that everyone else is imagining it and low-key sneering at them for it.

I did provide evidence such codes are widespread among major organizations. He should have to provide some evidence they're not if he wants to make that claim.

Is that good enough for you? Is anything good enough to counter zero-evidence claims of "I haven't seen this, so you're making it up and probably crazy"? Because gaslighting people about this seems to have worked without fail since 2015.

A quick Google search for "code of conduct" reverse turns up a few:

GNOME Foundation:

Safety versus Comfort

The GNOME community prioritizes marginalized people's safety over privileged people's comfort, for example in situations involving:

  • "Reverse"-isms, including "reverse racism," "reverse sexism," and "cisphobia"
  • Reasonable communication of boundaries, such as "leave me alone," "go away," or "I'm not discussing this with you."
  • Criticizing racist, sexist, cissexist, or otherwise oppressive behavior or assumptions
  • Communicating boundaries or criticizing oppressive behavior in a "tone" you don't find congenial

GeekFeminism's Recommended Community Anti-harassment/Policy:

COMMUNITY NAME prioritizes marginalized people’s safety over privileged people’s comfort. RESPONSE TEAM reserves the right not to act on complaints regarding:

  • ‘Reverse’ -isms, including ‘reverse racism,’ ‘reverse sexism,’ and ‘cisphobia’
  • Reasonable communication of boundaries, such as “leave me alone,” “go away,” or “I’m not discussing this with you.”
  • Communicating in a ‘tone’ you don’t find congenial
  • Criticizing racist, sexist, cissexist, or otherwise oppressive behavior or assumptions

IIRC, the GeekFeminism policy recommendation in particular came out right when these started showing up in a lot of open source projects and is probably responsible for a lot of the culture war surrounding this due to being widely cited.

EDIT: The links at the end of the GNOME Foundation's code of conduct include more examples, eg this template has an example section on reversisms.

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