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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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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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