Drupal Confessions – An Open Letter | Hacker News Reader

Drupal Confessions – An Open Letter

drupalconfessions.org

240 pointsinian312 comments

Expanding on one of the comments that might clear up what we're actually talking about (which wasn't made especially clear otherwise):

>> "The Gorean philosophy promoted by Larry is based on the principle that women are evolutionarily predisposed to serve men and that the natural order is for men to dominate and lead."

Even assuming this is Larry's philosophy, it is pretty much the same philosophy shared by many women & men in various conservative religious faiths, including branches of Christianity, Judaism, & Islam—only they add in the idea that it is divinely ordered. Are we now going to expel all who hold such religious beliefs? <<

I agree this philosophy is hard to swallow, but the commenter's point about religious belief is well made. Apart from the issue that this is in fact a widely-held belief I would suggest communities allow their members to hold any belief in private, as long as that belief is not in some way construed as a community value, and as long as that person does not act based on that belief during community interactions.

It's one of the simple facts of life that you pretty have to work with people who believe all kinds of things, and they have to work with you. Furthermore, we seem to have forgotten that it's even feasible to have good relationships and friendships with people we fundamentally disagree with.

In this context, if you're running an open source project, it's expected that people hold an even more varied spectrum of beliefs than would be the case in a traditional company. As long as members can professionally conduct themselves in that environment, firing them is not a productive solution. Presumably the person in question has pledged to uphold Drupal's community values and at first glance it looks like that pledge has not been broken.

> ...as long as that belief is not in some way construed as a community value...

I honestly don't care about that even, as long as people can discuss their ideas and leave the group if they're done tolerating each other.

> It's one of the simple facts of life that you pretty have to work with people who believe all kinds of things...

In popular usage, "tolerance" is slowly becoming synonymous with "acceptance" or "celebration". But in reality, you just described real tolerance right here. It's a good balance because we can absolutely agree to disagree and be part of a healthy community anyway. Keeping "tolerance" as tolerance is the best recipe for actual diversity of identity and thought in my opinion.

EDIT: Clarified my phrasing a bit.

> I honestly don't care about that even, as long as people can discuss their ideas and leave the group if they're done tolerating each other.

Personally I'd agree with that, but analogous to being the employee of a company, it becomes a problem if off-topic distractions seep into the daily business, especially if these conflicts have a potential to escalate into the public view, and especially if the convictions in question are unethical.

I think tolerance, professionalism, and pragmatism all fit well together. Replacing tolerance with "tolerance"? The track record isn't strong.

I don't follow the caveat for unethical behavior. Do you expect the organization to align to your ethics? Everyone is unethical to someone. The best we can hope for, I think, is to find a common ethic (no lying, no stealing, no verbal abuse, etc.) and agree to part ways respectfully to the degree we can't.

> The best we can hope for, I think, is to find a common ethic (no lying, no stealing, no verbal abuse, etc.) and agree to part ways respectfully to the degree we can't.

Indeed, that's why I used the word ethics instead of morals ;)

It feels like this new "tolerance" somehow connotates "without bias" instead of "despite bias", which opens an avenue for persecuting perceived or potential bias (by some reasoning from base moral values) as a thought crime. This makes anything less than complete moral alignment a cause for bias and therefore "intolerance".

Tolerance and persecution together in harmony.

On top of that, "without bias" seems to mean "with my bias".

> In popular usage, "tolerance" is slowly becoming synonymous with "acceptance" or "celebration". But in reality, you just described real tolerance right here. It's a good balance because we can absolutely agree to disagree and be part of a healthy community anyway. Keeping "tolerance" as tolerance is the best recipe for actual diversity of identity and thought in my opinion.

http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything...

this was a good read, thanks for sharing

This is where professionalism is important. Firmly separating your personal life and your professional life.

That said, there's a huge gap between a religion a person is imparted with as a child, and philosophy they chose as an adult and have jumped into with both feet.

Many people come from backgrounds with bigoted ideas like that, but they don't colour their daily lives with it because they're not actively married to the idea - it's just part of the box of stuff they grew up believing passively.

This, on the other hand, is an active choice. An active decision that women are our lessers. That's far more serious. I have a lot more trouble with the idea of politely ignoring somebody who actively evangelizes this kind of idea rather than being simply passively being raised with it.

Where do you draw the line? How far do you go in ignoring the fact that key people in your community are, to be blunt: hateful?

Marvel Comics recently fired an illustrator for hiding Islamist, anti-Semitic and anti-Christian references in his art. His ideas were "normal" in his country - should that have been ignored? Reprimanded as long as he kept his politics out of his art?

>This, on the other hand, is an active choice. An active decision that women are our lessers. That's far more serious.

As long as holding that belief doesn't affect in any way his behaviour towards women as a contributor of that project, then his beliefs are none of the project's business.

> That said, there's a huge gap between a religion a person is imparted with as a child, and philosophy they chose as an adult and have jumped into with both feet.

Searching out which people have chosen a philosophy as an adult is how witch hunts start and are justified. I've heard complaints about McCarthyism and the Red Scare over the years, and I thought the moral was "witch hunts are bad." However, it looks clear to me that other people think the main problem was that McCarthy picked the wrong targets. If he hadn't chased leftist beliefs, then perhaps he never would have been vilified.

Leftist beliefs aren't "half the population is my lesser".

Seriously, would you make excuses like this for a pro-ISIS muslim? A white nationalist? A violent anarchist? An antisemitic holocaust denier?

Believing that one person is less human than the other by the attributes of their birth is not a philosophical discussion like capitalism vs communism.

If witches are actually doing damage, then by all means hunt them.

That's the funny thing - leftist beliefs are in fact "half the population is my lesser". The half that are not leftist are "bad hateful people", and you hate them and do not tolerate them.

I'm no republican, but I end up being more annoyed by liberals for such blatant doublethink, for being unable to recognize their own actions.

> The half that are not leftist are "bad hateful people", and you hate them and do not tolerate them.

You're arguing with a strawman.

There's an ocean of space between "leftist" and "bigoted" for normal centre and right-wing people who aren't bigots. I'll agree that the social justice community has made a bad habit of throwing around "racist" and "sexist" far too freely, especially in the wake of Trump's election.

But this isn't like that. This is a guy who celebrates sexism. Who has made sexism a cornerstone of his ideology.

It is not hypocritical to be intolerant of intolerance, anymore than it is hypocritical to use violence to stop violence (since that is the entire mechanism of law enforcement).

I've never seen any leftist claim that any group is inferior by birth; though it is, of course, easy to find leftists looking down on people for the ideas they hold and politics they practice. But having bad ideas doesn't seem to translate to "is my lesser" or is less human than me.

To put it another way, the leftists will acknowledge that anyone can grow out of stupid ideas (and indeed, there are hopeful stories of bigots changing their tune), while the things the right gets down on people for (being gay, whatever) are things built into the person.

So, I think this is an inaccurate characterization of the left. You're free to be annoyed by whatever annoys you, of course, but this one might merit rethinking.

Leftists do regularly paint those with different beliefs as evil just because they have a different point of view. They also have a streak of disdain toward minorities where they start with an assumption that they can't do certain things and only the lefties can save them with overreaching policies.

So while I agree with you - your second statement "annoyed by liberals" should probably be changed to "annoyed by leftists". Liberals and leftists couldn't be more different but are often used interchangeably. Leftists will do what we are talking about. Liberals don't.

I didn't even notice that I used a different term - thanks for pointing that out. And the terms are probably defined differently by significant numbers of people (compare to "hacker").

So I'll go ahead and agree that there are more than a few liberals out there who seem reasonable to me, and I might even consider myself among them :)

Yes, the beliefs he entertain in his mind are doing terrible damage to the moral fiber of our civilization as we speak. Burn him at the stake, I say!

>Seriously, would you make excuses like this for a pro-ISIS muslim? A white nationalist? A violent anarchist? An antisemitic holocaust denier?

I can only speak for myself but I would tolerate it vehemently. I have more respect for politeness through gritted teeth than indignation, exclusion and marginalization because the former implies real effort and a conscious fight against your innate prejudice. Of course, no prejudice is best but show me the man who doth not judgeth and i will show you a liar.

> Leftist beliefs aren't "half the population is my lesser".

Yes they are. Opposing views (and the people who hold them) are seen as morally inferior. Furthermore, people who hold leftist beliefs defend other people who hold views such as “women are inferior”, or “homosexuality should be punishable by death”, etc.

And I say this is a liberal, left-leaning, pro-multiculturalism individual.

My point is perhaps not entirely relevant to this Drupal guy though.

AFAIK, a whole bunch of people here are missing the point: the Gorean stuff is primarily a consensual sexual fantasy, not a 24/7 philosophy. It doesn't say "this is the right way to live life for everyone", it says "we like this system for our personal lives and weekends and vacations".

ISIS? Nazis? They want to destroy the world and make it over in their own image, not be left alone in quiet enjoyment of their kinks. Different things entirely.

... ouch. That really would've been nice to see in the letter. Having a pervy philosophy during kinky sex with consenting adults is a very different thing from believing women are inherently inferior.

As I understood it, the driving evidence in this case (what's been publicized, at least) was roleplay on a private forum specifically for that purpose. Which wasn't clarified in the letter, but is a significant part of why people across the political spectrum are so upset about this one - it treats statements made in a fictional context as core beliefs.

(All made more complicated by the fact that Goreanism itself seems to operate on a bizarre multiple-levels-of-fiction basis, but still.)

My God.

Did you honestly think it was the latter? Without even considering the less malicious of the two first?

"Brilliant Geek posts mysogyny on his spare time" happens enough that I took it at face value.

I mean, after Scott Adams and Dave Sim, it wouldn't be shocking to learn that a geek I respected had views that disgusted me.

I guess I can understand that perspective to some degree, but you made a lot of assertions in this thread that were ultimately unfounded.

Do you think that's fair to Larry?

I don't want to give you a hard time, I just wish people were more careful about this kind of thing.

I'm just going by the letter, and mostly on the issue of "how do we handle misogyny in our orgs" not about Larry himself. Unfortunately HN will no longer let me edit my first posts to point out "it was a sex thing".

Yeah, until I read the comments, the context of that letter was not clear to me at all, as BDSM was only referred to in passing.

I only have a vague familiarity with the Gorean subculture. The modern subculture seems largely to be an extension of BDSM oriented role-play. The main negative I've heard is that Goreans sometimes take themselves way too seriously, ala a deep Star Wars or Star Trek nerd. I don't think I've ever heard them described as "abusive to women".

Even just adding "Gorean" within the letter would've helped me understand better. In literary circles, the books (after the first couple at least) do not have a great reputation, and they definitely have been criticized as sexist / misogynist (in addition to being simply bad pornographic writing). So it's easier to see how this sort of controversy can pop up.

Wait, Gorean as in the Gor books? Ohhhhh.

Yes... for further clarification, the "Gorean subculture" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorean_subculture -- beware, this link is NSFW) is derived from the Gor series of fantasy books by John Norman (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gor).

(I don't know too much in detail about either, the only Gor related media I've seen is a tangentially related film bad enough to make it onto MST3K -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outlaw_of_Gor)

> If witches are actually doing damage, then by all means hunt them.

Thank you for confirming my point: there are people who believe McCarthy was wrong only because he picked the wrong targets. If he had picked other targets, the resulting witch hunts would have been acceptable.

> there are people who believe McCarthy was wrong only because he picked the wrong targets.

"Actually doing damage" is a fairly good discriminator, imho.

C.S. Lewis: "One man said to me, 'Three hundred years ago people in England were putting witches to death. Was that what you call the Rule of Human Nature or Right Conduct?' But surely the reason we do not execute witches is that we do not believe there are such things. If we did -- if we really thought that there were people going about who had sold themselves to the devil and received supernatural powers from him in return and were using these powers to kill their neighbours or drive them mad or bring bad weather -- surely we would all agree that if anyone deserved the death penalty, then these filthy quislings did?"

Very interesting quote. That statement underlines an important point: Witch hunts are commited by people who are convinced that their reaction is justified. Then, it was because that evil witch had cursed your cousin, now it is perhaps because someone made a joke you didn't get[1].

And obviously, no single person holding the digital pitchforks would ever think of themselves doing the same thing as a superstitious peasant a couple hundred years ago.

Is there something productive anyone could do in this regard? I would guess in the most cases, the trenches are almost instantly dug way too deep for a sensible discussion...

[1]: To resort to an example Jon Ronson talked about in various talks. Well worth a Google query.

In the US, these kinds of reactions are often called "moral panics" (according to Wikipedia, the term has a slightly different meaning in Britain). It's much easier to identify them when you aren't involved. I don't know any way to avoid them, but I believe a good first step is to acknowledge that you may not be immune to overreaction, even if you are open minded and hold all the correct political positions.

  if we really thought that there were people who had sold
  themselves to the devil and received supernatural powers

then surely it would be a terrible idea to attack them, and in fact, the only people who could be successfully attacked, were the ones innocent of the charge?

You're right! It's a great discriminator! Actual damage done as a standard makes things exceptionally clear.

Assuming, of course, one has an objective way to determine when damage has been done. It's perhaps possible that this isn't always as easy as it sounds.

>If witches are actually doing damage, then by all means hunt them.

That's the business of the criminal justice system. If someone is committing criminal acts, then they need to be caught and prosecuted. If they merely hold objectionable views, then it's not my job to try them in the court of public opinion.

If I'm free to persecute people whose beliefs I disagree with, then what right have I to complain if someone starts persecuting me for my beliefs? Witch-hunting and thought-policing is a very slippery slope.

> Leftist beliefs aren't "half the population is my lesser".

One could be very easily misled into thinking so with comments like "basket of deplorables". And it's not the only or the worst that leftists said about their opponents. One could argue about if it's exactly "half of the population" or merely 37%, but the idea of un-acceptance and plain old hate is definitely there. And occasionally spills out into violence, as we have seen lately.

> Believing that one person is less human than the other by the attributes of their birth is not a philosophical discussion like capitalism vs communism.

Communists believe bourgeoise are less human, at least if you look how they treated them whereever they got to win. Including kids, of course. In fact, in the USSR having ancestors of a wrong class (not "worker class") was a permanent stain on one's CV for a quite long time. Not sure about other communist/socialist countries but don't think they were more moderate.

> If witches are actually doing damage, then by all means hunt them.

Except beliefs don't do damage. Actions do. And in this case literally nobody was able to name any harmful action that ever happened. Unless "I got my feelings hurt knowing you think wrongthoughts" is counted as harm, which it is not.

> One could be very easily misled into thinking so with comments like "basket of deplorables".

Even if you could, that was a comment from a center-right neoliberal about the supporters of a far right authoritarian, and didn't involve leftists in any capacity.

> Communists believe bourgeoise are less human, at least if you look how they treated them whereever they got to win.

The bourgeoisie are a narrow elite, particularly so (compared to, e.g., the developed West and economies which met the criteria for moving on from capitalism to socialism in the Marxist model of Communism) in places where Leninist vanguardism established regimes, not half of the population. And, in any case, Leninist vanguardism isn't representative of leftism, in much the same way Dominionism isn't representative of Christianity. (Or, for that matter, the same way that Leninist vanguardism isn't representative of atheism.)

> didn't involve leftists in any capacity.

Ah, I know, no true Scottsman!

> not half of the population.

Well, I don't know if any regime managed to kill literally half of the affected population, but certainly Stalin and Pol Pot could be seen as a viable contenders. Not forgetting the wonders of Cultural Revolution of course. If some movement hold the championship in dehumanising the opponents, it's certainly ones that created Gulag, killing fields, Great Leap Forward, and other similar wonders. All no true Scottsmen of course. And we should not forget one National Socialist Worker Party, which despite the name also definitely has nothing to do with socialism and such.

> And, in any case, Leninist vanguardism isn't representative of leftism

But of course. How did I know?

> the same way that Leninist vanguardism isn't representative of atheism.

Atheist ideas were not central to the bolsheviks' worldview - while totalitarian ideology they followed left no place for Christianity or any other old religion, they were perfectly fine creating new one, with their own saints, holidays, prayers, rituals and churches. They were against God only because The Party leaves no space for God on the top in their ideology. But leftist socialist ideology was the backbone of their worldview. Of course, now, that disastrous results of this ideology is in full view, modern leftists show wonders of creativity to prove that nobody who ever tried to build a society based on leftist principles was actually adherent of these principles. These effort are nothing but laughable, but some people do it again and again.

I don't think you get it.

It doesn't matter what some guy posts on some message board (unless it's a threat, an incitement of violence, or something along those lines). It doesn't matter if he says he believes in "Gorean philosophy," whatever the hell that is.

What matters are his actions. If he's treating women disrespectfully then, by all means, throw him out. But he's allowed to believe whatever the hell he wants, and the idea that he should face repercussions for his beliefs is wrong, whatever age he was when he came to those beliefs.

Sure, there's going to be some correlation between holding misogynistic beliefs and inappropriate behavior toward women, but we don't punish the beliefs, we just punish the behavior. That's what makes this a free society.

I do get it. That's why I started from the important of professionalism, of separating the professional from the personal. But I'm also pointing out the other side: that maybe, just maybe, this kind of thing crosses the line. If it was just his beliefs we wouldn't know about them in the first place. But obviously, we know about them, which means it's not just his beliefs it's his statements.

If I went around on some other private forum and said "tps5 is sub-human and should be subservient to me" you'd have reason to say "I will not work with Pxtl and I'm disappointed that this project is working with him, his behavior is seriously not okay".

If I went around on some other private forum and said "all people who share attribute X with tps5 are sub-human and should be subservient to me" is that more or less okay?

> If I went around on some other private forum and said "all people who share attribute X with tps5 are sub-human and should be subservient to me" is that more or less okay?

If you didn't bring that into the workplace, yes. You can believe it and not act towards implementing it.

If you acted on that belief in a public or professional capacity, then that would not be OK. "Acted" need not be defined overly restrictively -- openly advocating for a specific policy or state of affairs, running for office on a specific platform, even openly declaring membership in an organization that seeks to enact your beliefs could all be construed as actions given the right circumstances.

If instead you were discussing your sexual preferences on a private forum, then I would owe you an apology for having invaded your privacy.

> If instead you were discussing your sexual preferences on a private forum, then I would owe you an apology for having invaded your privacy.

Yeah, the fact that the letter doesn't mention that this was a BSDM thing - that these statements are part of a sex-play thing and should be regarded in that context - is kind of frustrating. I don't think casual readers are expected to know what "Gorean Philosophy" is.

I mention this because last time I saw "comments came out from a public figure on a private paywalled forum" it was about holocaust denial and the commentator was a journalist.

This thing being a sex thing hadn't entered my mind at all.

I have given you an upvote, although I starkly disagree with what you're saying.

Your comment is greying out. HN's own petite version of silly distolerance - disagree, hence downvote. It isn't civilized at all.

Of course people will have tolerance for some ideas and expressions and intolerance for others. Of course! We tend not to like reddit-style jokes here, and downvote those. Who speaks up for the reddit-style jokers, though?

If you really want to share ideas, and they're not well-received here, you can either refine/modify your ideas/delivery, or go somewhere else.

Complaining about downvotes, though? Man, there's a reason that's specifically called out in the guidelines.

> If I went around on some other private forum and said "all people who share attribute X with tps5 are sub-human and should be subservient to me" is that more or less okay?

Yeah, it's okay.

I would say that, because we are coworkers, you are obligated to treat me respectfully, whatever your personal beliefs. If you treat me poorly, and I complain, the issue is the fact that you treated me poorly, not your whacko belief system.

If this guy behaved improperly towards women, then I have no problem with him being "removed from the community." But posting X whacko opinion on Y message board should not hurt you professionally. That applies equally to racism and holocaust-denial and whatever other fringe beliefs you can come up with.

I'm not sure it's possible to have certain views and maintain a respectful workplace environment, full stop.

To make an extreme hypothetical: You have a white supremacist coworker and a black coworker. The white supremacist always treats your black coworker with respect, kindness, and compassion. She also openly admits that, nothing personal, but she believes black folks are inferior and should be expelled/exterminated. Ask the black coworker, is he being treated poorly?

What's the resolution in this situation? If he knows how she feels, but she is nice to him, how do you propose resolving that?

Why is she openly admitting it? If she brings it to work that's the problem.

What if she were out marching with a white power rally on the weekend, and the black coworker happened to see her there?

What's that going to be like on the following Monday? If asked, in this hypothetical, is she supposed to lie?

"So, Jean, I saw you at a white power rally...you were holding an effigy of a hanged black person...what's that about?"

Or, contrive any situation in which her views on her black colleague (i.e. that, although she treats him with kindness and respect, she considers him subhuman and would like to exile/exterminate him and everyone who looks like him) were brought into the workplace.

If the white supremacist coworker doesn't bring up her white supremacist views at work, ever, and treats her black colleague with kindness and respect, at work, but outside the office does not conceal her views, and when asked directly does not lie about them ("Yes, Jim, I'd kill every black person if I could"), how do you resolve the tension that's going to arise from that?

Tell the black colleague, "Jim, don't ask Jean about her white supremacy."? How's Jim supposed to feel about working with her, knowing what he knows about Jean?

I think the line is "undue hardship". There's a legal precedent that the accusation of accommodation of religious beliefs causing undue hardship "generally requires evidence that the accommodation would actually infringe on the rights of co-workers or cause disruption of work" [1] -- I'd argue the same goes for any personal belief system. In this scenario Jean is an asshole but I don't think it causes Jim undue hardship if she never discusses it at work. Jim has no legal right to like his coworkers, nor does Jean have to be liked. However, if she hung a Nazi flag by her desk it would be a different story.

1. https://www.eeoc.gov/eeoc/foia/letters/2009/religionhandshak...

I would like to find out what people who have been traditionally been the target of white supremacy groups would say to your reply. I would like to know if they would consider it acceptable, given the history and context of white supremacy and the violence toward minorities that it's led to.

I wonder if they would be OK with, "well, Jean marches with a group calling for your extermination, and you know, throughout history, there's been a lot of violence from them to people who look like you, but since she doesn't bring it up at work, deal with it."

I think I'll ask around with my POC friends, in that ham-fisted way white folks always end up asking about these things ("So, I don't want you to speak for all people of color, but ... I'm hashing something out on the internet with some stranger who's probably also a hetero white guy, and ...").

My hunch is, knowing your coworker wishes for the extermination of your people would be considered hostile and unacceptable, especially by those people historically targeted by white supremacist violence, even if she's nice to your face. Like, I imagine you'd have the same tension with a card-carrying nazi and a Jewish colleague who lost family in the holocaust.

I like your assumption that I only have this opinion become I'm insulated from it. What if I were a homosexual who's had conservative Christian and conservative Muslim coworkers? It's not a hostile environment as long as each group treats the other with respect.

To be clear: I think card carrying Nazis are abhorrent and would rather not interact with them. I also thinking banning them from an apolitical volunteer group where they do not volunteer their views is wrong.

Well, yeah, I did make that assumption, and I will do so again the next time I talk to someone on the internet who defers to rules and tells hypothetical minorities to just deal with hypothetical white supremacists. Based on the conversations I have had in the past, both with people who endure this stuff and people who are insulated from it, it really sounds a lot more like you're insulated from that situation than someone who's had to deal with it. That whole response sounds lacking in empathy for the people who, hypothetically speaking, endure having coworkers wish for their expulsion/death.

Also, in the hypothetical, we were talking about a workplace, not a volunteer group. As for whether card-carrying nazis should be allowed to join apolitical volunteer groups, I think that each group can surely decide for themselves, and this is exactly where a code of conduct would apply, e.g. "nazis welcome" makes it clear up front that nazis aren't going to be uninvited for their views. Then everyone else can make the call whether they want to be involved with the Drupal-with-nazis fork or the Drupal-without-nazis fork.

Because a workplace is fundamentally different. In the US an employer can fire an employee for any reason, they also have no obligation do to fire any given employee for their views. It's kind of a moot point.

You know a lot of people who have worked with Nazis? If you do I feel bad for those people but it doesn't alter my views. Claiming your position is the moral high ground doesn't really lend any credence to your argument.

So often you get stories in which a certain type of person cries, "Thought Police!" as a way to deflect from the core issues, but... this really is an example of that. As you say, the thoughts you have and express on your own time, which in no way change your professionalism, are your thoughts, period. I can't even imagine the life I would have led, the friends and colleagues I would never have had if "What you think is unacceptable, regardless of how well you act," was some kind of standard.

I also wonder how the hell some people think minds are to be changed, if the way they want to deal with them is quarantine. Most of the time, you need have some mutual knowledge and respect between two parties for one to really reach the other.

Let's reductio ad absurdum: what if one of your friends was a literal nazi. Never gassed any Jews, but thought it was a good idea. Wouldbe okay with that?

No, but I don't see that as being remotely similar to someone who roleplays a bigot during sex. If I had a friend who liked to dress up like Himmler and get roundly spanked, I'm not going to judge him for it. If I have a friend who calmly remarks that maybe "Hitler really did nothing wrong," I'm going to be furious and horrified.

Lets really try not to judge people for their kinks, because they tend to be strange, inexplicable, and personal.

Again, when this letter was first posted, there was no mention of this being a sex thing. As far as well all knew, the matter was about actual misogyny, not kink.

Not the OP, but I definitely would not be ok with that. Making me wonder if such a person would be my friend in the first place because we'd clash pretty badly over that. If I found out I would probably try real hard to convince them of the error of their ways (according to me, at least) and if that was unsuccessful I'd stop being their friend.

There are big differences between:

1. Genocide and consenting adults choosing how they want to interact with one another.

2. Being friends with someone and being able to interact with them professionally.

The discussion as I understood it was centered on professionalism rather than friendship. When you do business with someone, you can and should take into account their publicly-known actions and public statements. Anything else is bad business.

However, when I do business with someone I don't know on a personal level, there is every possibility that person is secretly a Rape Nazi. My question is, is catching all of the Rape Nazis worth the cost of sacrificing all borders between the personal and the professional, between public and private life?

So far as I know, doing so is the only way one could guarantee that one never conducted any business with someone whose personal beliefs differ from one's own to an unsatisfactory degree.

What if one of your friends was a Communist?

They've murdered way more people than the Nazis, after all, and they're still a going concern.

Most of the various groups that call themselves "Nazis" or "KKK" consist of about five yokels who meet in somebody's garage. Communists still control entire countries.

So, how about it: is it okay to fire people for being Communists? If not, why not?

> Let's reductio ad absurdum: what if one of your friends was a literal nazi. Never gassed any Jews, but thought it was a good idea. Wouldbe okay with that?

Well put, I wonder would the signers be so vocal in support if he were a fundamentalist Christian that opposed abortion and gay marriage?

I'd work with the reanimated corpse of Adolf Hitler if he made good, well-documented commits.

Tolerance (noun): "the ability or willingness to tolerate the existence of opinions or behaviour that one dislikes or disagrees with". Tolerance only counts for anything if it's an effort, if you have to grit your teeth and bite your tongue to make it work. Tolerance is meaningless if you only tolerate people who you consider worthy of tolerating.

I find it odd that many of the people who are so vehement about no-platforming and safe spaces are also strident advocates for a rehabilitative model of criminal justice. That seems profoundly dissonant - if you're a literal murderer I'll fight for your right to be re-integrated into society, but if you hold views that I find unacceptable I'll fight to ensure that you're completely marginalised. I don't see how more division and more antipathy is going to create a more inclusive society.

I care less about whether he is full gentlemen and more about whether I can be promoted into leadership position if he is decision maker. If there is ambigous situation between me and college being given responsibility, will I have disadvantage?

That is I think where that theor breaks. Sex jokes making dude can still be more fair then respectful gentleman wit bias.

  Marvel Comics recently fired an illustrator for hiding Islamist,
  anti-Semitic and anti-Christian references in his art.

It wasn't exactly his art in which the references were hidden - it was Marvel's art. He hid the references in comic panels, commissioned by Marvel and designed specifically for publication in a Marvel comic.

That's a practice that is as old as Michelangelo.

No comparison can be made between Marvel Comics, and Michelangelo.

If Michelangelo were alive today chances are that he would be employed by some game studio instead of by the pope.

The bait-and-switch here is pretty bad, yeah.

This was content hidden in his professional work that he was dismissed over. It's not comparable. If someone were putting inflammatory political content in the Drupal source, it'd be an unambiguous CoC violation and I think they'd have basically no defenders.

Artists aren't typically doing peer-review before merge.

I get the feeling that Marvel and others might change that if it costs them more money.

Artists in many industries do tons of peer review, actually.

But not in the sense that programmers do it. Of course there is the 'hackers and painters' essay by PG but I don't see it that way. Artists are a lot freer in their expressions than programmers ever will be, syntax, coding styles, those pesky specifications and so on.

Sure, I agree that painting is not programming. But in the context of professional artists, many of them are CONSTANTLY being reviewed by peers and stakeholders.

How about Drupalgeddon? Not covered by the CoC.

> That said, there's a huge gap between a religion a person is imparted with as a child, and philosophy they chose as an adult and have jumped into with both feet.

That seems like a distinction without a difference. If someone converted to a religion as an adult, would you feel justified in using their religious beliefs to eject them from an open source project?

All other commentary aside, I find the "imparted as a child" distinction creepy and infantilizing. It sounds like "I know you think you believe this, but you were raised that way so your views don't count as real opinions!" My gut reaction is something like "screw you, hold me accountable for all my beliefs!"

Even more obviously, childhood beliefs affect us in lots of different ways. If someone becomes a Satanist because they were raised with oppressive Christianity, is that any less "imparted as a child" than sticking with their Christian faith?

This is a bizarre distinction that seems like a way to exempt popular beliefs from being held accountable for their content.

> Marvel Comics recently fired an illustrator for hiding Islamist, anti-Semitic and anti-Christian references in his art. His ideas were "normal" in his country - should that have been ignored? Reprimanded as long as he kept his politics out of his art?

Indonesian here, I'm not sure to what you attribute it to a normal view by Indonesians?

Sorry, not "normal" but "common" as in "not rare". 100,000 people out protesting Ahok is a pretty firm sign that the artist is part of a large movement, even if his viewpoint is in the minority.

Yes, certainly not a normal nor common view, but as you said, a lot of people seems to share it.

Nothing surprising to see here. This is why I seldom bother getting involved in open source projects and NEVER use my real name. Large, interesting projects are too much like this and groups quickly form using the same BS as in high school only now "wrong brand of shoes" gets replaced with "incorrect values". Whatever that heck that means.

I'm still not clear why anyone would care how he gets off on his own time, in the privacy of his home. If this is really a thing then other "identifiable" groups might want to prepare for when the pendulum swing back and then they themselves are holding "incorrect values".

edit: removed not

Some context:

Garfield's statement:

https://www.garfieldtech.com/blog/tmi-outing

Executive Director's statement:

https://www.drupal.org/association/blog/a-statement-from-the...

> > So if and only if Larry did not violate the Code of Conduct, then apologize to Larry and rescind your request to remove himself from the community (if there was a violation, provide the details to Larry and confirm to the public)

TL;DR : Please continue iff there was a violation we don't know about

> We want to be clear that the decision to remove Larry's DrupalCon session and track chair role was not because of his private life or personal beliefs. The Drupal Association stands by our values of inclusivity. Our decision was based on confidential information conveyed in private by many sources. Due to the confidential nature of the situation we cannot and will not disclose any information that may harm any members of our community, including Larry

> This decision followed our established process. As the Executive Director, charged with safekeeping the goodwill of the organization, I made this decision after considering input from various sources including the Community Working Group (CWG) and Drupal Project Lead, Dries Buytaert. Upon Larry’s request for an appeal, the full board reviewed the situation, all the evidence, and statements provided by Larry. After reviewing the entirety of the information available (including information not in the public view) the decision was upheld.

> In order to protect everyone involved we cannot comment more, and trust that the community will be understanding

TL;DR : We're continuing, there was a violation you don't know about

Sounds like it's done, then

https://www.garfieldtech.com/blog/tmi-part-3

TL;DR : The Drupal leadership hasn't accused Larry of a code of conduct violation publicly or privately but they're happy to imply that a secret violation exists so they can cover up the fact that they ousted him because his lifestyle is icky and bad for PR.

Still, that's a bit ambiguous. They should clarify that the initial evidence of his beliefs was not what got him in trouble, but the evidence that they're keeping confidential. Otherwise, it just seems like Garfield is being ousted for his for all we know harmless lifestyle choices.

I'm actually impressed, from the first few lines I was expecting another social justice fueled witch hunt, but instead we have the exact opposite here.

Without getting into controversial labels, it's not clear to me who did what to whom and what the people are petitioning for.

I seemed to me that (all allegedly) someone was outed as into BDSM and was somehow treated unfairly. I think that certainly falls into the domain of liberal sexual identity politics.

Larry is Gorean

Goreans are people that agree with philosophy of professor John Lange, that writes his philosophy in porn books with pen name John Norman

What got Larry kicked out is that similarly to Abrahamic religions, Goreans believe there is an inherent hierarchy between men and women. Or at least it is what Dries (Drupal leader) wrote as explanation for the incident.

So Larry is being punished literally for "wrong-think", having beliefs that are shared with billions of Abrahamic religion followers around the world. But Goreanism is not a religion, so probably doesn't count as religious discrimination.

Also according to a blog lost by Larry, the "proof" used against him was a transcription of a discourse he made in a private wedding.

> Goreanism is not a religion, so probably doesn't count as religious discrimination.

I've often wondered what the difference between a Cult and a Religion is and my best answer seems to be "4 orders of magnitude".

1000 is a cult, 10,000,000 is a Religion.

If it's a numbers game then everyone religion went through a stage where it was a cult (and indeed if you look at the history of religion lots of them where treat that way, Roman treatment of Christianity is a well documented one).

"Cult" is perjorative. It implies an unhealthy worldview and probably abusive leadership. People would infer that people in the "religions are just big cults" camp see those properties in all religions. If you care to espouse that viewpoint, you're on the right track.

> 1000 is a cult, 10,000,000 is a Religion.

I don't think this holds.

There are about 1,000 practicing Samaritans left in the world. They practice a faith very similar to Judaism with a comparably long history, and I think hardly anyone would call them a cult.

There are >50,000 self-described Scientologists worldwide. Many different people, including some government bodies, have referred to that organization as a cult.

If we're talking about formal definition, there are detailed lists of what constitutes a cult - size isn't a factor, but segregation from non-members, active indoctrination, and public shaming are. If we're talking common usage, it appears to be respectability or 'kookiness'. Size is a factor, but age, similarity to other traditions, and behavior of members and leaders all count too.

I would call Samaritanism a cult. I think calling Scientology a cult is misappropriation which grew from a perceived relationship between small religions and esoteric beliefs.

Thanks for the info!

Be careful about the Abrahamic religions thing, though. There's a lot of diversity of thought in that space, ranging from conservative Muslim ideas to ideas that are indistinguishable from any given form of feminism.

And in that space, I would guess that "billions" is an overestimate unless you are speaking in the broadest sense, like "gender roles exist".

The problem is that Larry's brand of BDSM (Gor) is not the "right" form of BDSM, as supported by "liberal sexual identity politics".

As such, he was outed, smeared, and asked to leave the Drupal community.

He was asked to leave the Drupal community by its community leader against the recommendations of its Code of Conduct board, to a large amount of backlash by pretty much everybody, including many of those evil social justice warriors.

Gor is, for the most part, a personal way of going about one's private relationships. Unlike e.g. red pill doctrine, Goreans still respect consent at its core. Men and women both enter into Gorean relationships with full knowledge of what they entail, and generally speaking, the ability to leave if they find it necessary. Goreans don't "promote" their relationship model as a way that they think everyone should view the world at all times, and put down people who don't think that way.

In short - there's really nothing there for SJW types to be upset about. This is some guy who decided to discriminate against someone for how they go about their relationships and sexuality - precisely the sort of behaviour we're almost always against.

> He was asked to leave the Drupal community by its community leader against the recommendations of its Code of Conduct board, to a large amount of backlash by pretty much everybody, including many of those evil social justice warriors.

Umm, no. The "Code of Conduct board" said he didn't violate the Code of Conduct, but they escalated the issue to Dries because _something_ came up that they felt needed his intervention.

We don't know exactly what _something_ is. Larry has decided to spin the narrative that it has to do with his Gorean belief and that this is "kink shaming", comparing himself to persecuted gay people. The counter-narrative has been "we're not going to say for confidentiality and liability reasons, but it has nothing to do with anything Larry wrote about."

They decided, rather explicitly, that there was no code of conduct violation. I don't know what else to say.

Also: your quotations around kink shaming imply that you don't believe this is a real thing. The fact that I have multiple friends who've lost their jobs because someone sent their bosses a set of pictures taken off of Fetlife suggests otherwise.

"No Code of Conduct violation" doesn't mean "nothing wrong happened." It could just as easily mean that the Code of Conduct is inadequate.

Also, I do believe kink shaming is a real thing. I don’t believe that Larry Garfield was kink shamed. I think Larry is making this about kink to distract from whatever it is really about.

I also know some feminists who find the idea of a white heterosexual male being capable of being kink shamed is definitionally impossible and thus something to find offensive, especially given the enormous privilege Larry Garfield has enjoyed up until now as one of the leading members of the Drupal community. Whether that is true or not is something I don’t actually know enough about to comment on, but it's enough to make me cautious about labelling what happened here as kink shaming.

> I also know some feminists who find the idea of a white heterosexual male being capable of being kink shamed is definitionally impossible and thus something to find offensive

Ehh, there's a lot who find kink shaming to be something fundamentally different from oppression of LGBTQIA+ people and racial minorities, but many fewer who'll state categorically that it doesn't exist or doesn't cause harm to individuals.

You're absolutely right! You'll definitely find few who categorically state that kink shaming doesn't exist or doesn't cause harm to individuals.

At the same time, it's possible you'll find some who may struggle with the idea of a cis-het white male being kink shamed as something to that should be a source of active and ongoing concern.

Was this outed through a witchhunt? Who conducted the witchhunt?

For the record, a large chunk of the social justice community are kinky (and, separately, a large chunk of the kink community agrees broadly with modern feminist views). Nobody I've spoken to within my subset of the social justice community wants somebody to be removed from the Drupal community based on how they go about their personal relationships and sexuality.

> For the record, a large chunk of the social justice community are ki

Gonna stop you right there - there exists no "record" this needs to be on.

Or rather, were there a need for it to be "on a record", such a community would already be failing their supposed 'without the community needing to know or care' ideal.

I'm just saying, that it'd be entirely illogical for the social justice community at large to be against the practice of kink, given that many of its members practice kink in a wide variety of ways. There's no reason to assume that the SJW community at large will be against the practice of any consensual sexuality, which many people in this thread are doing.

And I'm just saying, the ideal of "don't know, don't care" can't purport to be upheld when analyses like these enter into "people X and people Y do Z to what degree".

You can't have it both ways.

I never said "don't know, don't care" - though I certainly don't care, even if I do know. I was only attacking the idea that it's a bunch of nebulous "SJWs" kicking Larry out of the community, and pointing out that this is a nonsensical idea from the very start. There is no better way to do that given that many people believe SJWs are literally the devil than to say "we do literally this, why the fuck would we attack someone for it?"

+1 for this. I know plenty of feminists that hang out with Goreans. Seems like an imagined opposition more than a real one.

The social justice community has also pretty much always had completely different standards for members of the ingroup and outgroup. (To be honest, most communities probably do.) I mean, one of the really prominent (now ex-)members of the social justice gamedev community wrote a heartwrenching piece about what a terrible, abusive place it and its "compulsory BDSM sexuality" was for her, people handwrung over it a little, and a year later nothing had changed and everyone was gushing about how the latest game out the community showed that actually, non-BDSM relationships were the abusive, manipulative ones. They literally learned nothing, and no-one saw anything wrong with this. Meanwhile, every failure within the mainstream BDSM community is seen as an indictment of its evil misogynistic heterosexist buzzword bingo.

In the same line, Brendan Eich. I completely disagree with his views on marriage of homosexuals, but disagree that it led him to have to quit his position at Mozilla Foundation.

another victim of the proponents of Liberty And Freedom. Who basically dont accept opinions different than theirs.

Seems reasonable. The Catholic Church doesn't allow high-ranking members to be atheists, and look, the Old World even gave them their own state.

The Catholic church never pretended to be open-minded!

Eich was CEO, though. It's a special position in any organization. The board can ask you to leave at any time if you seem to be a liability, and the mere optics of a PR issue can be enough.

That's why CEOs often have such generous compensation packages in the event of involuntary termination.

> The board can ask you to leave at any time if you seem to be a liability...

It's worth noting that many of the objections are about private information being misused. Eich was actually outed from a donor list that was leaked. There's a lot of parallels here if the concern is about "doxxing" activities.

I also have a really hard time with the "but CEOs are different argument". So could being a Democrat in a red state be a liability? Republican in a blue state? Evangelical in a secular area? Atheist in a religious one? Scientologists? Mormons?

In other words, are we saying that only certain kinds of people can be CEOs?

That's how it works. The board decides who they want.

You can always start your own company if you want to be CEO.

In fact, that's what Eich has done - he's a startup founder nowadays.

> In other words, are we saying that only certain kinds of people can be CEOs?

In short, yes.

There are plenty of rational people out there who don't care what someone does in their private life as long as it doesn't have a readily apparent effect on business. It's a shame that all people cannot be like this, because there are others who take a hard line stance against certain private matter that someone else may hold. That is, the fact that a CEO is a Dom in a D/s relationship will resonate so negatively with some people that is can adversely impact business.

Do you remember the Cheerios commercial[0] with the interracial family? People have much bigger skeletons in their closets, and from a business standpoint, that's a liability. It's not right. It's not fair. But it's reality.

[0]: http://www.today.com/news/cheerios-ad-mixed-race-family-draw...

> It's a shame that all people cannot be like this, because there are others who take a hard line stance against certain private matter that someone else may hold.

In Eich's case, it wasn't a private matter. He used his money and influence to attempt to enforce his religious views on people who do not subscribe to his religion. When you are involving the government in public enforcement of your personal views, they are not personal any longer.

The donor list was not public. Some people believe private political behavior should stay private, just like voting.

Saying "this is too important for privacy to apply" affects more issues than just politics advocacy.

In this situation, people apparently are applying the template: "When you X, it's no longer personal anymore".

Are you sure it wasn't public? Those kinds of donation rolls often are. In either case, I do think it is reasonable to reject a CEO who is actively attempting to harm their own employees through government enforcement of personal religious beliefs. Especially for an altruistic company like Mozilla.

Given that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were also opposed to gay marriage at that time, would you agree that that they should also have been disqualified?

If not, why not?

I don't think it's an interesting comparison, given one is a choice between two "lesser evils" and elected by three hundred million citizens VS the other being a leader of a private company appointed by a board from a pool of presumably many (or at least several) valid candidates. Totally different scenarios.

But yes, it was a big black mark against them and they, too, received lots of public pressure to change their public policy on the matter. And eventually, they did. Eich refused to even say he wouldn't make such a donation again, much less apologize for the harm he caused.

Sorry, why should a public official should be held to a lower standard than the director of a private company? I'm not seeing that.

Most observers believe that the passage of Proposition 8 in California had far more to do with black churches turning out for Barack Obama than it did with contributions from people like Eich.

Edit: updating with citation.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11...

70% of black voters supported Proposition 8, which means that they were against gay marriage.

You're right that I didn't answer your question directly. To be explicit, yes, I think wishing to impose your personal religious beliefs on your constituents should disqualify you from holding public office. However, when presented with two options that both fail that test, I will vote for the lesser of the two evils presented to me.

I don't think that Mozilla was faced with that dichotomy, and the fact that Eich was relatively quickly and easily replaced backs that up.

> I think wishing to impose your personal religious beliefs on your constituents should disqualify you from holding public office.

Should officials be cajoling or forcing people to "convert" (not every religion has conversion as such)? Nope.

Can we divorce all laws from any metaphysical worldview? No. That's not possible. We presume certain things matter, like human lives, freedom of conscience, truth, the health of the planet, etc. Banning murder assumes that the Flying Spaghetti Monster does not exist and/or does not require human sacrifice to get into heaven. I can't come up with the right adjective, but that's imposing an (a)theological position on constituents. It's obviously the right position, too.

Point being, even the idea of "inalienable rights" is an (a)theological position. Some people think rights are given by God or the nature of humanity. Others think laws are given by the people and groups that can enforce them.

The goal isn't to have agnostic laws. That's literally impossible. The goal is to find a just baseline worldview we can all compromise on and have tolerant laws that follow from that.

I don't agree with your premise, and this isn't the forum to debate that. But even if I did, given that even members of the same religion have disagreements about the morality of gay marriage, I don't think your argument is relevant to this specific situation.

> Are you sure it wasn't public?

Ah, I was mistaken on that detail. Apologies. Apparently I've read some poorly researched sources on the subject.

There was a lawsuit about whether it should be made public and a judge ruled that it should be. So "leaked" is inaccurate, though there was and is disagreement about whether the information should be public.

Has he actually said he did it because of religious views?

I've come across people who believed that the state should not be involved in marriage. They viewed extending marriage to gay couples as just making a bad situation worse, by getting the state involved in even more relationships.

> Has he actually said he did it because of religious views?

Yes, he has.

No, I haven't -- but keep on misrepresenting everything about that case, including the legal situation in California.

Do you have a religious reason for putting words in my mouth on hacker news? That would explain things about as well as your false assertion about me!

To save anyone interested in what I've written some site-specific searching, start here and follow the links I left in this comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13411986

Searching for coldpie and my name will return lots of tediously similar comments from him inveighing against me based on ill will and little else. I'll spare you all those search results :-|.

Sorry. I should have said "should be CEO", not "can".

My question was about how much we cater to others' intolerance. It seems backward to me that we throw up our hands and accept that we'll, say, never have a fat president again because people just don't respect fat people. Or that a major political party should never nominate an out atheist because they are not electable (a self-fulfilling prophecy).

The silver lining to the Trump candidacy, I think, is that there is more tolerance of unconventional leadership than we have suspected. I swore up and down that Trump was unelectable.

CEOs serve at will. Their job duties include being an emissary to the industry, and leading the company's reputation. I say what happened to Garfield was wrong, but agree that the Mozilla board made the right decision on Eich, who could not effectively carry out his general duties given the PR liability he became - not of his own making even. They didn't say he couldn't be a part of the org. as a lead software architect, for example; he just couldn't be allowed to continue as CEO given the mission of defending and promoting Mozilla which the board is bound to do. It was strictly business.

To me, the message was "Mozilla is about promoting trendy idea", rather than openness.

If we cannot support and debate "wrong" ideas, then we're not very open in my opinion.

Saying that homosexuals are equal to heterosexuals is not a "trendy idea", it's basic equality. I'm not sure why you think "employment as CEO" is the metric for whether "we" "support and debate [inequality] as an idea"

It was literally a new trend in this case. The proposition that Eich supported actually passed with a majority of votes in California. The trend is that opinions have slowly evolved in the subsequent decade.

The shift was from "we can treat people equally while keeping marriage heterosexual" to "gay marriage is an inalienable human right". Nobody was advocating for oppressing people in their minds.

Sure, to be fair, few people think they're advocating for evil. But the Supreme Court found it was an unjustified removal of rights, so it turned out that the holders of that opinion were, in the opinion of the court's interpretation of the US Constitution, in fact advocating oppression.

All of which begs the question of whether removing a CEO on the losing side of such a debate is tantamount to the imposition of a liberal orthodoxy.

> Saying that homosexuals are equal to heterosexuals is not a "trendy idea", it's basic equality.

Equality of what?

Marriage is not based in physics or biology. It's a made up concept, actually concepts, plural. There are countries where it means one man + a limited number of women, there are countries where it means one man + as many women as he can afford (and can afford taking care of all the kids), there are countries where it means one man + one woman, and now there are countries where it means 2 adult homo sapiens regardless of sex. There are countries where it can only be between adults, there are countries where legal children can become a legal adults by getting married. etc...

Shouldn't equality include polyamorists? Why isn't it? What about minors who have the legal right to have sex, can they get married? Actually, what about kids who are legally entitled to own stuff, forget about sex? etc.... As far as I am concerned, marriage is just a legal contract that regulates what is owned by the different parties, and as such, none of the setup described here should be excluded. It does get a little bit more complicated when it comes to succession of active assets, for example polyamorists could daisy chain over time and earn retirements for somebody who was part of that chain and died hundred years ago, so there would be some tweaks to be done there, but that shouldn't be a blocker.

Now do you still think "gay marriage" (as opposed to other forms) wasn't just a trendy idea? Are you ok with polyamorist marriages? If not, even though that this is your personal opinion, should you be pushed out of your job because of it?

Equality of what? Equality of ability to exercise the right to marry and have a family (eg as noted in the declaration of human rights).

As for polygamy, that's not quite got the same status, no. And the UN Human Rights ctte has called for it to be outlawed, as it already is in many US states, because it violates the dignity of women in particular. So I think that is vastly more complicated and legally murky area than two-party adult marriage.

Regardless, I fail to see how the extended riff on edge cases and the revelation that marriage isn't a physical or biological construct has anything at all to do with its trendiness.

I'm saying it's besides the point: the controversy became a distraction regardless of the morality behind either side, which was perpetuating an terrible divisiveness for too long in the board's estimation. We don't know what happened in the internal meetings about it, but we do know some of the fallout, e.g. OkCupid's redirection of Firefox users to other browsers. Eich's presence was toxic to the "brand" in a large segment of the community, and that's one of the primary duties of the CEO to keep in good standing - he became ineffective in that aspect, pure and simple.

It was not not about Mozilla promoting anything. There was both open criticism and support for Eich within Mozilla, but by far the largest reaction to Brendan Eich came from the public. Public reaction to Mozilla is not the same as Mozilla, and Mozilla can't control it.

This is not complete (F in FAQ stands for Frequently), but it is official Mozilla material about me, and your comment contradicts it:

https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/04/05/faq-on-ceo-resignat...

Are you just making stuff up for fun on HN, or do you have inside information ("They didn't say...; he just couldn't be allowed...") that no one but board members and a few other principals could know for certain?

The donor list was not leaked, it's public information.

> In other words, are we saying that only certain kinds of people can be CEOs?

Yes. When you're the leader and figure head of an org your views and opinions are seen as representing that org. If you're anti-gay marriage it's seen as if you may treat gay employees negatively. That's bad for hiring and bad for public opinion.

>Eich was actually outed from a donor list that was leaked

There was no "leak" or "outing." Campaign contributions are public information. I just pulled up his donation (to Prop 8 and a Lt Gov campaign) here.

http://dbsearch.ss.ca.gov/ContributorSearch.aspx

I'd link directly but the form uses POST so there's no unique URL for his contributions.

The donor list was not "leaked" and Eich was not "outted." Donations to CA ballot propositions has been public information since the 1970s, when voters overwhelmingly approved a ballot initiative in response to the Watergate scandal. http://www.fppc.ca.gov/the-law.html Even leaving overlapping federal law aside, in CA, where Democrats have a permanent majority for the foreseeable future, it is beyond unlikely that such transparency rules will change. If anything, it seems more likely that we'll increase transparency around SuperPacs, rather than the reverse. After all, isn't more accountability better than less?

And, yes, as it turns out, historically, we've only ever permitted certain kinds of people to be CEOs. They are also not chosen--or removed--democratically. But this is way off-topic.

Eich didn't engage in advocacy as an executive, he did so as a private citizen.

Doesn't matter for a CEO. The job has no such protections.

He was being paid by Mozilla, and that money then ended up in the hands of people who weaponized that money against values that the people who financed that salary held. If people can't even vote with their wallets anymore, then we are creating a situation of moral hazard.

I guess you can't use any of your paycheck to support your union, then, because it is working against the interests of your employer who paid you that salary.

Proposition 8 passed. It was in line with the wishes of the majority of California voters.

> The board can ask you to leave at any time if you seem to be a liability

Brendan Eich quit, he wasn't fired.

Eich was the first person I thought of when I read this letter.

We've all heard of sore losers but those people were sore winners.

Code of Conduct. Conduct. CONDUCT!

Not: code of thought, beliefs, sexuality, politics, religion....

All the discussions of philosophy and belief systems in this thread are missing the point. It DOES NOT MATTER how you feel about someone else's beliefs. It is not relevant. How they CONDUCT themselves in the community is the only thing that matters.

If that were the case it would be called a "Code of Conduct In the [Drupal] Community". Many people assume they should consider any conduct that they don't like in applying a "Code of Conduct".

There is an important point that is being missed in this conversation. There are facts that are undisputed by both sides of the argument:

- Should a person have a right to privacy? Yes

- Should a person be discriminated based on their beliefs? No

- Should a person in leadership be forced to expose their private life? No

There are two questions, however, that is causing everyone to trip over themselves and table-flip:

- Does a person's private life affect their public views?

- If a person in leadership has their private life exposed (fairly or unfairly), does that affect their leadership role?

If you quickly come to a 'Yes' or 'No' in the last two questions, then that is why we don't have constructive dialogue between people with opposing views. Again, we're not talking about blatant discrimination. We're talking about a position of leadership and influence.

For example, if a person has religious views that women should not work, should they be part of the open source community? Of course. Should they be a leader of the community and have prominent speaking roles?

It's no different than the 1st amendment. No laws can be made to punish you for speaking, but you can't just say whatever you want without consequence.

I'd hope that people would take a breath and really think about that. Is it discrimination if you ask that person to relinquish their leadership role? Who is excluded because of that person being in leadership? Who has been silenced out of fear that the power of leadership trumps their voice?

I personally do not know the answers to the two questions, but I'm open to hearing both sides. I also understand how difficult it is to have an answer when you're responsibility is to put people in leadership. With open source, it's even more complicated because you could 'become a leader' simply by being great at contributing!

> For example, if a person has religious views that women should not work, should they be part of the open source community? Of course. Should they be a leader of the community and have prominent speaking roles?

Doesn't this just kick the can down the street a few feet? It seems, and I may have interpreted it incorrectly, that the leader or leaders of a community must not personally hold any controversial views at all according to this. Speaking bluntly, I think that is impossible.

My question is:

Who gets to define whats controversial?

Everyone has an agenda. Seems to be that whoever is best at getting people outraged gets to control them.

The person in charge

"Well who gets to decide who's in charge"

Whoever takes charge.

It's like they're missing the point of OSS. If you don't like who's in charge, remix and make your own. Whoever is the more capable leader will have a successful project. "Beliefs" and all that other crap get left at the door, the race is for the medal - in this case whoever has the best project wins.

Though I suppose trying to achieve that with ideological witchhunts (and what, forming a 'cult of coding'? haha) is a viable strat too. LG was dominated by Kimura Kei for a while

By applying your explanation it could be that this whole situation is a power grab from people who want to take over the project. Does that make sense?

So? If the software they develop is superior, use it. If not, don't.

If you're so concerned about "who has power", either do a better job or learn to live with the tools they give you.

That's a good point but it also shows how easy it would be to discredit a whole project or maintainer.

> Who gets to define whats controversial?

I didn't make it very clear, that was exactly my point. Any view will be controversial to _someone_ regardless of the view. Which is why I posit that it is impossible to have a community leader posses non-controversial views. Unless of course the community is an echo-chamber, rejecting all who do not assimilate.

Thats true. You cant please everybody. Who ever made the info public did so with the purpose of discrediting the victim.

This is a truly personal matter that, in my opinion, bears no relevance to his public-facing leadership role and responsibilities. He's into BDSM, so what? If your PornHub/xHamster/whatever search history was exposed, how catastrophic would it be to your career? Would people that you respect immediately feign disgust, knowing very well that they have similar search histories? It's easy to point the finger when it's someone else taking the heat, but I guarantee that everyone who claims to be a member of the opposition would sing a different tune if it was their private life that was investigated and exposed. Pure hypocrisy.

It's GamerGate type shit all over again, chock full of faux outrage and manufactured drama. I think that sensational journalism has rubbed off on society. People are used to having their emotions exploited and being force fed specific facts sans context to steer their opinion and, at large, public consensus.

Instead of it being CNN steering the public opinion of Trump, it's a group of misdirected, misguided, uneducated, incompatible, unaccepting, pig-headed SJW-type individuals steering the dialogue regarding Drupal.

> People are used to having their emotions exploited and being force fed specific facts sans context to steer their opinion and, at large, public consensus.

It's worse than that. Many actually like it. Outrage is click bait because people like clicking on it. If you're reading it, it's for you.

People like a good two minute hate. It creates all sorts of interesting sensations.

> People like a good two minute hate. It creates all sorts of interesting sensations.

- Humanrebar, 2017

> It's GamerGate type shit all over again [...] it's a group of misdirected, misguided, uneducated, incompatible, unaccepting, pig-headed SJW-type individuals steering the dialogue regarding Drupal

remember when it just used to be about the software, guys...

"hey, look at this cool thing I built!" "oh nice, you should try X!" "ah yeah, that might work!" Anyone? No? Alright. :|

The three articles (the open letter, Dries' blog post and Larry's blog post) are unfortunately a little unclear on this unless you read them in their entirety, so it's worth clarifying: though it's discussed a lot, this is not at all about BDSM.

This is about Larry's belief in Gorean philosophy (which Larry chooses to conflate with his involvement in BDSM, in my view doing a massive disservice to the elsewise extremely benign BDSM community).

This isn't new behavior. There's a reason that phrases like "mob mentality" exist. There is a human tendency to join in with a swell of anger and bring it down upon some person for violating laws or beliefs.

The nice thing about the relatively recent past was the presence of tightly controlled mass media which didn't give reactionary, witch-hunt types a voice. The internet has democratized the sharing of knowledge to a degree never before experienced by humanity, but it has also given those who appeal to our baser, exclusionary instincts a powerful platform. Pleas for thoughtful dialogue and careful deliberation don't fill people with the addictive cocktail of hormones that the calls for beheading do.

If a person in leadership has their private life exposed (fairly or unfairly), does that affect their leadership role?

This has not been a controversial question in the modern nation state for nearing about 200 years now in "the West" until several small but very vocal groups have implicitly been taking a pick-axe to what I see as a pretty basic truth: the difference between corrective action in the public vs. the private sphere is a restriction on the public side to objectively measured action. Private thought in general doesn't hold water until violation of actual behavior can first be proven, and only then is intent needed.

You phrased your last two questions entirely differently from the first three. The first ones are global moral questions, for which answers can exist in the sense of personal opinions, groip consensus, etc. Meanwhile the latter ones are questions about individual behavior based on belonging to a group; there are no global answers. So the answer to both that I would suggest is:

Maybe, it depends on the individual. However, it is immoral to discriminate based on categories rather then individual characteristics, so their private life should not affect our actions towards them.

> Larry Garfield, a long-time, veteran contributor to Drupal was ejected from the community, allegedly not for breaking the Code of Conduct, but, to quote your own post on the matter, because “he holds views that are in opposition with the values of the Drupal project."

At some point, some open source communities will need to decide whether they work on open technologies or they are political activists with a political mission that serves the interests of a specific political side, or political doctrine[1] If I'm into, I don't know, some niche Porn that isn't illegal, can it be considered "offensive to women" and should I be ejected as a contributor because of my personal sexual tastes in order to satisfy those that might be offended by this, even if I never bring up that matter in public? Now, if I'm part of an atheist association, and I publicly question the reality of a mainstream religion, can it be considered offensive to Muslims and should I be ejected of a totally unrelated community because some of its members that are not even of the religion think that what I said is offensive toward Muslims?

1 : one can argue "free software" is political. It is, but it has to do with the protection of users and their right to access and modify source code. It has nothing to do with women's rights or making blasphemy socially unacceptable, especially when positions are taken outside the context of the project community.

Community leaders are "political activists" because they exclude members that don't hold their values? Don't most membership organizations (not to mention for-profit companies) work that way?

What values are you talking about? that's my point precisely.

The actual values are not important. They are merely a tool to achieve the desired outcome when no other avenues are available.

You lost me.

I don't think wanting to work on open technologies and other political activities is a binary position.

Open software is built by groups of people and one part of building a community it deciding what sort of people you want to work with.

It seems to me that the two things are not mutually exclusive, and more that every community is inherently political - if it isn't really aware of it, it's never been shook hard enough.

The political actions of communities come out of political consensus, which is exactly what's happening with this letter: people are trying to agree on political action. A "politics-free" community is just one where everyone already agrees, or nothing has ever come up for people to disagree over.

Plenty of open source communities are political beyond user rights. If you believe NSA should be able to watch everybody all the time, Tor people will kick you out.

------------

Gor is not just a flavor of porn, it is full philosophy of gender relationships. E.g. it does not just says "this gets me off", it says "this is nature of men/women, modern society is suppressing that nature and that is wrong". Some are in it for sex, but quite clearly others are in it because they believe in philosophy and attempt to live by it as much as possible/legal.

Is it possible to simultaneously believe that women are naturally submissive and happiest when they serve and simultaneously see leadership potential in women who is working under you? I dont know and I am glad that the question is not directly relevant to me.

However, if my boss would believe something like that, I guess I would have to either leave the company or accept I will be less likely to be promoted then male college of similar skills.

I have no idea whether Garfield is into Gor for kink or for gender philosophy nor whether that philosophy affected his leadership style. I dont care about whether he comes back or not. But, the more I looked into Gor the more it looked like way more then just another flavor of bdsm.

>Gor is not just a flavor of porn, it is full philosophy of gender relationships. E.g. it does not just says "this gets me off", it says "this is nature of men/women, modern society is suppressing that nature and that is wrong". Some are in it for sex, but quite clearly others are in it because they believe in philosophy and attempt to live by it as much as possible/legal.

It's a series of fantasy f*#%ing novels, ofcourse it's role-play. Serious role play maybe, and definitively weird, but the author is _still alive_ and his name is not L. Ron Hubbard. Is he participating in political activism with mysogynistic undertones? Is he otherwise projecting gor-related gender views onto non-consenting parties? No. He just wants to do weird stuff together with other people who want to do weird stuff, socially and sexually. To assume that he holds these views to be morally absolute for everyone is a gross misrepresentation and unfortunately typical of persecution of weird people.

"It's a series of fantasy f#%ing novels, of course it's role-play."

It seems so to me as well. There probably are people who take it a bit too far, just as there are in most fan groups (e.g., people who get cosmetic surgery to look like anime characters, etc.), but I don't recall hearing of any rash of abuse cases involving Goreans (apologies if that's not the right term).

I'm wondering just how far this goes. I have a friend who participates in Civil War reenactments (again, apologies if I don't get the terminology right). He plays a Confederate, and spends a considerable amount of time and money getting his gear and persona as close to perfect as he possibly can. That doesn't mean he really believes in slavery, or even that the South should have won the Civil War. Quite the contrary -- I'm 100% sure that he doesn't believe those things. This is just something he does for fun.

It seems to me to go just so far as one is willing to believe thought can be a crime in itself.

"Oh so you believe this or that? Well you now embody those beliefs and are complicit in all crimes motivated by them. Your mere presence is oppressive to people who have been slighted by actions or words motivated by the same beliefs. May your career end and your friends abandon you."

Being unfamiliar with this, from the starting few paragraphs I thought "oh man, they have a white surpremacist developer or something and now there's a scandal, huh". Then I learnt that he was ousted because of his sex life. What the fuck? What does it matter to anyone what he does with other consenting adults in private?

>> "The Gorean philosophy promoted by Larry is based on the principle that women are evolutionarily predisposed to serve men and that the natural order is for men to dominate and lead."

Yes, and?

While I'm not into this kind of stuff, this is 'acted out' in a recreational activity..

As one simple example, this could be his way of coping with the 'reality' that women are evolutionarily 'superior to men' or similar..

If the actual behavior hasn't impacted the community in a way that the community doesn't like directly, the 'problem' is the person making it their business to muckrake and air other people's dirty laundry..

Note that this isn't a quote from the link above, nor from Larry, and while I don't know much about Gor it's not a full or faithful reflection from what I understand of it. There is no shade of the BDSM community that does not value consent at its core. Fifteen years ago, I would imagine people would have and did receive the same backlash for being "outed" as part of BDSM communities that today are seen as "kink" and fully accepted by pop culture.

Also, side note and to actually quote the above link - I find myself "walking on eggshells" considering how to comment in this thread, and I think that reflects the same wider problems that are making this issue so catalytic.

It seems like Gorean is some shit people talk about before they cum. Sometimes I call my wife a whore, and than we cum and I go help with the household chores and changing diapers.

Larry likes to jerk off to weird stories, who gives a shit.

Make no mistake, inclusion and diversity at all costs is the new "religious" standard. Your personal beliefs do not matter. You will conform or you will suffer.

(Vote down, that's fine, but it's still true.)

Indeed, go on Stormfront and you'll find it a religious bastion of diversity and inclusion!

Communities have always been free to choose their members and morals. If I can kick someone out for being verbally abusive, why can't I do it for whatever the community agrees on?

I'm not too sure that diversity or inclusion has a net cost.

Diversity and inclusion have a cost of having to deal with ongoing disagreement and friction that comes from coexistence.

Diversity(tm) and Inclusion(tm) have a cost of inviting Diversity Experts to tell you why you cannot do any of this on your own and why you need to pay them for it, even though none of their materials or solutions have been peer-reviewed and the readily observable effect is that they make everyone miserable.

One is how communities work, the other is how protection rackets work.

I've started to mentally replace the words "inclusion and diversity" with "conformity" on certain places on the net.

Agreed. These people are essentially bullies acting from their ivory tower of unchallengable beliefs and morals. Their non-sense such as "he holds views that are in opposition with the values of the Drupal project." actually do more to suppress tolerance, diversity, and inclusion than encourage it. tl;dr think like me or I throw the dummy out the pram.

I wish techies would get back to focusing on tech, it seems every other tweet and hacker news post is something meta about diversity, inclusion, tolerance, racism etc..

They're in a capitalist meritocracy, this sort of nonsense is just their hilarious attempt to recoup the costs they sunk into this project.

Branch off into your own community and accept that you made a mistake jumping in without testing whether your "leader" was acceptable to your standard of "tolerance". It's not on them to change how they run something you literally gave up control over just because it was convenient for you at the time.

Lol @ them listing their donations and time 'wasted' on something they had no idea or assurance of control over. I'm reminded of the Bane scene. "I gave you a lot of money..." "And this gives you power over me?"

Next time, get it in (legal) writing, folks! :)

Well, in part everything you complain about is because the tech industry is suffering from the "focusing on the tech".

Focusing on the tech unquestioningly meant only the privileged (in one sense or another) were able to get access to the community, and so it has unwittingly become exclusionary. While we were all "focusing on the tech", the number of women and minorities in tech somehow and mysteriously plummeted. And software was made, even by big companies, that excluded huge swathes of people (hello Apple Health). And companies were made that badly suffered from this too (Uber).

So, belatedly, the community is addressing that, by trying to actively work towards diversity, inclusion, tolerance, etc. Tech being tech, this has meant a whole assload of bike-shedding and "works for me, close as wontfix", as this thread yet again evidences. Doesn't mean we still don't have the bugs, and should still be trying to figure out how to fix them.

The key is "tolerance" and "inclusion". Those are, of course, superior to intolerance and exclusion.

To have tolerance, you cannot tolerate intolerance. It is maybe illogical, but necessary.

I'd argue allowing some intolerance is required because no system is 100% anything.

Your comment shows the exact sort of thinking the people you're responding to are going off on.

The issue is people are trying to implement nonviolent communication principles in communities without learning how to process the world through the lens of nonviolent communication. And others are using the natural misunderstandings as evidence against nonviolent communication, as though the concept is the problem instead of people interpreting the concept in violent ways society teaches us to.

Karl Popper wrote on this subject and I've yet to find a suitable rebuttal. The intolerant cannot be tolerated because doing so would lead to the elimination of tolerance. His justification is whether the intolerant are willing to discuss things rationally or whether they will steamroll you without any concern for intellectual integrity.

This is a black and white interpretation. Here's your refutation:

When we try to outlaw people being themselves, we overlook their needs. That isn't a productive framework and will ultimately compile into systemic issues over time. Tolerating intolerance says nothing about timberline, types of intolerance, scale, etc. It lacks make and is therefore a problematic principle for governing human behavior.

Ok, but there is very clearly a boundary on acceptable behavior that we classify as not just "being yourself." How are you planning to draw that line? This isn't some unanswerable subjectivity we're talking about, and it's more a testament to the paucity of education in America that we can't recognize rational discussion from irrational anymore.

For most other people, it's a pretty clear line. Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but not their own facts.

No one says to be tolerant of everything. Don't be tolerant of intolerant public actions. But also don't be intolerant of private thoughts and actions.

I value free speech more than I value the system you're advocating. If "hate speech" is limited it becomes too easy to define anything you don't like as hate speech. Like Chronicles of Gor.

This is the same logic I used to hear friends, who were priests from the Catholic church, use to rationalize certain beliefs that were on the extreme right. In reality it's using philosophical doublespeak to rationalize a view that you believe. The mantra an tolerance and inclusion has become a religion with fundamentalists that exhibit the same hypocrisy that we've observed with other organized religions. Right now the fundamentalists are riding rough shot over many communities while a large majority of people are spiritual but not religious. Many personally reject fundamentalist interpretations of religion, including fundamentalist interpretations of Christianity, Diversity & Inclusion etc. but are spiritual in that they find good in many of the beliefs and goals. From what I've heard publicly and through the back channels this was a religious witch hunt. If you have nothing to hide, you hide nothing. In Drupal's case, it things were above board with this they would have been transparent.

In this particular case, who should have conformed and who had to suffer? Would you say that it was because the exact opposite of inclusion and diversity?

It's impossible to be absolutely "inclusive". Situations like this make the cognitive dissonance obvious.

1. There is no standard of what ethical behavior entails. Many thoughts are actually incompatible. In this context:

1a. Some people might think it's unethical or immoral to be violent even in a consensual sexual context. This could include certain religious people, but it could include certain kinds of pacifists and feminists as well.

1b. Some people might think it's unethical or immoral to have anything beyond a "don't ask, don't tell" policy. In this view, if you know about it and they didn't tell you personally, it's messed up.

1c. Some people might think it's unethical or immoral to be anything less than 100% supportive of any kind of sexual expression.

1d. Some people really don't care and are offended that their desire to be left out of all this isn't respected.

...there are certainly more positions and combinations of positions here.

2. There is the secondary question as to what means in the pursuit of (1) are ethical or moral.

2a. What information is public?

2b. Once something is leaked, can we use it? How do we pretend we hadn't learned something?

2c. What opinions are worth respecting? Understanding? Should we silence people with unconscionable opinions?

2d. Can we outright exclude people for having non-inclusive beliefs?

"Diversity in everything except thought" is the mantra.

The problem with this is that to solve problems you need diversity in thought: https://hbr.org/2017/03/teams-solve-problems-faster-when-the...

I've wondered this for a long time but never felt comfortable asking... Has ethnic/racial diversity in the workplace actually been shown to increase productivity or innovation, or is that dogma used to justify the practice?

The article addresses this question:

"Received wisdom is that the more diverse the teams in terms of age, ethnicity, and gender, the more creative and productive they are likely to be. But having run the execution exercise around the world more than 100 times over the last 12 years, we have found no correlation between this type of diversity and performance."

It is a social construct to try and keep everyone at peace. The alternative would be a society with fault lines along racial and religious beliefs. And this would most likely lead to conflict. So, if you don't want conflict, then you need to integrate in some ways. You don't want to have identities develop and take hold. At that point it gets complicated.

For instance, in Brazil, once you know you are a person confined to live in favelas forever, then you participation in the broader society will be very limited. And with that the regard for the rules of the larger society.

In Brazil, American ideas of affirmative action have been imported. This leads to unsavoury situations where nose width and skull shape are being measured to determine who gets a job.

http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/04/05/brazils-new-problem-with...

This actually proves that once the social cohesion has disappeared and that the fault lines have actually enlarged then these methods are just the tip of the conflict.

Finally, someone willing to stand up for the majority. When will this discrimination end? When will the weak and marginalized release their stranglehold on our society and let the rest of us fly free? Not a day goes by when I don't imagine what it would be like to not be able to say or do whatever I want and the fear of that makes me absolutely terrified. We must be constantly vigilant to ensure that fantasy never becomes a reality.

Cute, but your glib dismissal of this viewpoint is partly why Trump won.

Here's a little explanation of how people work: if a person holds a belief or fear, and one person demonizes then for it while another validates it, the person is going to be drawn to the validator. It's the same reason why gay pride has soared over the last few decades; as a gay person, would you rather listen to a person saying "you're perfect the way you are", or "you should be ashamed"?

Some people in the majority ethnic group are afraid that they will be attacked, in bad faith, for expressing a view in conflict with the current set of liberal views. By dismissing their fears and telling them to piss off, you're guiding them into the arms of Trump and his ilk (who genuinely hold extremist views). The right way to move people is through negotiation, not shaming and heckling. In this case, "negotiation" means understanding their goals and motivations, explaining your own, and finding a consensus agreeable to everyone.

And to preempt accusations: I voted for Sanders in the primary, Clinton in the general, and am constantly horrified by the Trump administration. I'm not defending genuinely hateful views. I am just aware enough of how people work to know that failing to listen because you're on the moral high ground is more likely to breed extremism than genuinely change minds.

I generally agree with you but the seemingly unaware irony of people up in arms for accusations made against someone for what they did behind closed doors got the better of me. I appreciate that this is a nuanced situation and my personal feeling is the best thing to do is apply tolerance equally to everyone as long as you can (ie, tolerating peoples intolerant beliefs as a way to teach them more tolerance) and I can't really see how ostracizing this guy will be a net positive at all but it also seemed as if there are things we don't know about the situation but we'll see if anything more comes out.

I am though getting tired of the "that is why Trump won" accusations that float around, everyone seems to have perfect hindsight now that its over but few people seemed willing to actually do anything to prevent it. The party of personal responsibility has done a great job of blaming the victim (once again) for why they were seemingly forced to elect Trump. The truth is though: we don't have to do anything, there are plenty of shills who will drum up fear, frustration, and anger against marginalized minority groups simply for their existence. Yes, we can give them ammunition but they also have perfectly good ammunition factories churning it out day after day. All it takes is one loudmouth freshman SJW filmed on a campus to bias millions of people while thousands of trained people try to educate others about diversity issues get totally ignored.

There is an inherent conflict between people who see more rights for others as less rights for themselves. Should we take the high road and stick to our ideals (even when it means accepting people who would see our rights squashed)? Absolutely, but if we think by doing so we will actually achieve our goals we are delusional. I find it endlessly ironic that people who are typically derisive of the left as being coddling have to be coddled by the left lest they inflict more discrimination on the rest of us. People who joke about being "triggered" are themselves triggered constantly even though they are typically part of the unchallenged majority. It is like an abusive relationship where you are walking on eggshells and if you get out of line (ie, by standing up for yourself) the result is your fault.

> All it takes is one loudmouth freshman SJW filmed on a campus to bias millions of people while thousands of trained people try to educate others about diversity issues get totally ignored.

Yeah, that's the truth, and it absolutely sucks. The conservative news coterie will give endless coverage of these incidents, priming millions to despise these people and their viewpoints. It only takes a small handful of people to ruin things for everybody, but this is also true of a few loudmouthed, asshole bigots on the right convincing the left that this is the majority view. This is why I preach the whole thing about listening, negotiation, etc. - it doesn't just apply to those of us on the left, there's absolutely a need for the right to listen thoughtfully as well.

I even feel this way about incidents that I am deeply, personally affected by. Climate change scares the shit out of me (look through my comment history if you need examples), so much so that I have struggled with depression and existential crises solely over this. Unless a hot war takes us out first, I'm firmly convinced that, if anything destroys humanity, this will be it. I'm afraid to have children, and terrified that the meaning I derive from life will be snatched away by stubbornness, greed, stupidity and laziness, which is heartbreaking. And yet, in spite of all that, when I watched a video of coal miners protesting environmental regulation that would take away jobs, I felt sorry for them, and angry at the climate change counter-protesters who were obnoxiously shoving signs in their face and shouting at them. Knowing that this will only make them hate liberals and environmentalists even more makes this sort of thing unacceptable. The best way to get what you want isn't shoving it down somebody else's throat unless you genuinely have the power to do so and enforce it permanently. In a two-party democracy, neither side has that power, necessitating consensus.

My feeling is that the only real way to solve the problems is a lot of actual direct communication, ideally 1 on 1 conversations but that means lots of people have to be involved.

I attended a protest that ended up being a big yelling match that I didn't want to be a part of and I was able to strike up a conversation with someone on the other side (not one of the rabid in your face protesters) and I found that pretty valuable. She thought Trump was chosen by God (and some other pretty wild stuff) but my guess is I had a bigger impact on her than the angry people that were on "my side" that she saw the rest of the day. I think if we have enough of that maybe we can change some minds but I don't expect anyone to simply come to an accurate realization on the state of affairs based on what they are exposed to in the media and on the internet.

You could have spared us the downvote bait but I do agree that this weird new "progressive orthodoxy" is worrying, and that's coming from a pretty hardcore liberal feminist atheist leftist globalist whateverist myself.

I've worked with pretty strict christians and muslims in the past without issue. As long as it remains in the private sphere I don't see why anybody would have issue with that. It's also interesting to challenge you world view from time to time, echo chambers are never a good thing for critical thought.

The whole keep-public-and-private-life-separate principle can itself be problematic. That is, it's not always clear what that even means. If it's the same as "never, ever do/say something offensive to current-day 'progressives'", then we have a problem.

Speaking as a Christian, I actively seek to more deeply integrate my beliefs into every aspect of my existence: how I do my work and fulfill my responsibilities, how I speak to and treat others, i.e. many aspects of my behavior that resonate throughout my daily life regardless of temporal or physical context (at the office, at home, etc., during work, during play). At times, this means my words and actions clash with the "progressive" culture of the software development world; that can happen because someone puts me on the hot seat, or because I choose to speak/act, according to my beliefs, in response to some evil that cannot be ignored. I do pro-life/anti-abortion volunteer work in my area — I don't wear it on my sleeve, but sometimes people ask, or maybe they've seen me out and about, so engaged. I have tech peers who've told me they find such activity heinous. I go to a church where most of the women in attendance (voluntarily) veil their heads during the liturgy — personal photos related to my liturgical life (an important part of every week/year, so media ends up quasi/publicly accessible via the usual social platforms) have... raised eyebrows among the same peers.

Who I am, what I believe — I categorically refuse to put a wall around those things so that "offensive" life-content doesn't leak into my professional sphere. At the same time, I don't actively seek to offend my tech peers and if I do get into a disagreement with someone, I strive to be patient, respectful, and caring. I have friends in tech who share much in common with all the above, but are more guarded (even fearful — that's really the thing) about insulating their traditional Christian lifestyles from their professional peers and employers. I certainly don't intend to out them, and I understand their fears, but that way feels duplicitous to me, and it's not a path I'll take.

I'm not saying that you should hide yourself for being christian. I wouldn't have any problem working with somebody having religious themed personal items on their desk. That's your private space as far as I'm concerned.

I've worked with a catholic guy who told me he prostested the same-sex marriage law in france. I completely disagree with his position but we just stopped the discussion at this point and we kept working together just fine. I would do the same if we worked together, probably.

Now if you kept bringing it up or even wear anti-abortion shirts or stuff like that then yeah, I might ask you to tone it down. But other than that it's really not my problem. The key element is respect I think. I respect you, you respect me and everybody's a happy bunny.

> The key element is respect I think. I respect you, you respect me and everybody's a happy bunny.

You sound quite reasonable, and I think you're right. :-) Other folks I've encountered are... not so reasonable.

> or even wear anti-abortion shirts or stuff like that then yeah, I might ask you to tone it down.

If someone wore a t-shirt in support of the LGBTQ+ life style, would you ask them to "tone it down"?

Maybe? What would it look like?

In general I find that it's harder to be offensive when you position yourself for something rather than against something. On paper an anti-religious shirt sounds more offensive than a pro-LGBTQ+ one, for instance. Both sound hardly appropriate for work though.

One is about telling other people how they should behave and possibly making them uncomfortable it they have had an abortion, the other is acknowledging the existence of people and their freedom to be who they are.

This is a pretty fundamental difference isn't it? No one is out wearing t-shirts telling other people that they should be queer are they?

And I'm assuming your use of the phrase "the LGBTQ+ life style" was a slip not an intentional denial of the many different lifestyles LGBTQ people have and that being L, G, B, T or Q is for most not a lifestyle but fundamental component of their person.

I'm not actually sure what you're getting at. I have two theories:

a) You are implying that this article is an exception to the rule,

b) This article is an example of the rule insofar as you can believe anything at all insofar as "practical" conformity is enforced regardless?

When your private proclivities don't vibe with the dominant culture (postmodernist/intersectional social justice activism) you can expect to be drummed out of open source communities - we've known this to be true for some time. Very pleased to see the open letter from the community come down firmly against this regressive practice, they are firmly on the right side of history.

> right side of history.

This phrase to some extent seems to have origins in dialectical materialism which is a marxist philosophy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectical_materialism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_materialism

I mention this because it seems at odds with your opposition to certain attitudes.

I appreciate the gesture, but I'm not familiar enough with dialectical materialism to gain much insight. Have I undermined my own point somehow? In reflection I can see how a phrase like "the right side of history" is somewhat unhelpful, since whichever side is "right" is completely subjective.

This philosophy is the background philosophy of marxism, and was essentially developed within this school. The gist is that that human progress (assumed to exist) is based on a materialist dialectic (action/response/synthesis) -

e.g. a sort of historical predeterminism that humankind is unstoppably destined for socialism once society 'evolved' to a certain level of productive capacity -

This view of progress is what leads to there being a 'right' and 'wrong' side of history, and as best I can tell the phrase it comes directly from marxists, and is rooted in in their philosophical view of society and progress, which doesn't mean one cant use that same sort of philosophy but leading to another in context, necessarily..

just a mention, since it seems like you might not like sounding marxist, not that that would in some cases be inherently a bad thing either.

Thank you for the explanation. Makes sense!

It sounds to me like some other asshole discovered that this guy was into some unusual stuff in his personal life, and decided to go out of his way to be offended about it, make a big stink about it and stir the pot.

Given the choice, it's the pot-stirrer I would kick out of my community. You know, if I had my own community. With blackjack...

> illegally obtaining information from members-only websites (by violating their terms of use)

IANAL, but since when have arbitrary website terms and conditions been automatically enforced by criminal law?

Does "illegally" mean criminal law? (Honest question.)

I assumed that it meant a civil law violation someone could sue over - usually "civil and criminal" cases like DRM violations are specified as such.

"illegally" doesn't just mean criminal.

Aaron Swartz case...

And a bulling case I forgot the name (they used the same law that was used in Aaron Swartz to argue that the bullying people were criminals because they broke MySpace TOS).

And a bunch of other cases... In US breaking TOS is literally a crime if you keep using the site (it is akin to virtual trespassing).

I think such law is bullshit... but it does exist. (CFAA I think is the law name)

And a bulling case I forgot the name (they used the same law that was used in Aaron Swartz to argue that the bullying people were criminals because they broke MySpace TOS).

Lori Drew, who was acquitted.

> We know that you have no desire for more press coverage, Dries. The last thing you want is to prolong the media parade that has drawn so much attention to the problems with Drupal governance.

That must be why they chose to do this in public rather than in a private letter.

As much as I agree with the contents of the letter I reject the way in which it was delivered, it is essentially blackmail. If you don't do 'x' we will leave would have been strong enough without making this yet another public spectacle because it pulls in the world at large to witness whether or not these demands are met.

I can't stand Drupal for many reasons (backwards incompatibility by design being the major one) but this is not a nice thing to do.

Allowing or organising a witch-hunt and irreparably damaging a career because you disagree with someone's sex life is "not a nice thing to do".

Posting doxxed information across the internet, along with euphemistic insinuations that he is an irreparable pervert, attached to his real name, forever to show up as the first result when you Google him ... is "not a nice thing to do"

Trying to hold your community leaders up to a higher standard, and refusing to partake in the same backroom whisper campaigns that you're angry about? That's just not even on the same level of "not nice".

All agreed upon. Still no reason to resort to a veiled version of public blackmail.

Buytaert is wrong, there is really no doubt about that. But if you want to make a point you simply send the letter to its intended recipient and follow up on the threat to leave if you are ignored or unhappy with the outcome.

If you want to increase the spectacle you do so publicly, with the direct result that Drupal gets hurt even further in the process no matter what the outcome will be.

Does Drupal get hurt even further? Or does Drupal look like a project with a strong community that stands up to perceived errors of its leadership by demanding better justifications? FWIW, I think many other communities would have imploded by now, and at least the posts that have been linked here have been surprisingly civil.

I might agree with you if it were a call to resign or similar, but they aim at getting (to them very relevant) information that has been demanded in public (and I have to assume in private as well) before, without result, not necessarily at a reversal of the decision.

Some of the signatories call for his resignation.

The problem here is that the producers of drupal are a much smaller set of people than the consumers of something like drupal. It's the consumers that will have to decide whether they want to base their next project on Drupal or not and all this infighting is giving of an aura of extreme instability. So as a result the drupal project as a whole will suffer because some fraction of that audience will decide to move on from Drupal.

Dries wishes are not the wishes of the community. To them, this is both an appeal to Dries to do the right thing, and to paint the community in a better light. And, more specifically, an attempt to distance the signers from the behavior of the rest of the community.

It's marketing. Nothing new with that.

> I reject the way in which it was delivered, it is essentially blackmail

Agreed. This line in particular got me -

> We unreservedly promise that if you do — but only if you do — we will have your back

Not exactly subtle. I'm surprised so many people put their name to this letter as alleged - I'm guessing they instead 'collected signatures' for a 'petition' then penned/published this - but I seriously doubt that so many would stop interacting with Drupal over this sort of thing. More likely they'd grin-and-bear it and still use the tool for their work, but not participate in the 'community drama'.

Software is ultimately about software, not interpersonal ethics. You can trumpet all you like with these pieces, but at the end of the day the people even reading are a tiny subset of the people using it, and even if they all leave and start advising against it, that software is still a solution in the solution space, viable to many customers who don't know or care about interpersonal dramas within its community.

Propriety is a poor excuse to let others control the conversation. From what I've seen, Dries and the Drupal Association have not invited good faith dialogue, quite the opposite. He's edited his statements silently and has subtly shifted his position (first a conflict about values, then about reported behavior). Comments remain moderated and reasonable ones have not been allowed through when they contradict the party line [1]. Many questions that were raised have been handwaved away or ignored.

Using PR-speak to sound reconciliatory while doing the opposite is a game two can play at. It may not be nice either, but it's better than trying to be reasonable against someone arguing in bad faith. That's a recipe for frog boiling and being a pushover. The idea isn't to endlessly escalate, it's to ensure both sides now have something to gain by cooperating and to lose by defecting.

[1] https://twitter.com/stefan_arrr/status/851795109716922370

Non sequitur, but you might be at least comforted by Drupal 9 abandoning the philosophy of backwards incompatibility. : )

http://buytaert.net/making-drupal-upgrades-easy-forever

Smart move on their part but about 5 major versions late.

I think free software is to some extend political. We try to work by a higher "inclusive" standard than what is found in society.

The letter to Dries writes:

> It is unacceptable to judge people based on unspoken, secret rules that they have no say in and cannot know.

Unacceptable? Tell that to the pope (pedo trials) and the US gov't (TPP, Guatanamo). They do this all the time. So again, if we agree this is "unacceptable" we say that many of our governing institutions are unacceptable, and thereby set a higher moral community standard then what we are governed by. I for one believe it is very important to do this.

> Ensure people carrying out illegal acts related to the conduct of others are reported to the proper authorities.

Here again it shows. "Illegal acts" are here scoped by their "relation to the conduct of others", yet are ultimately are defined by gov't. Possession of pot has been illegal, but hell no I'd turn someone in for that: I do not consider is punishment-worthy.

I'm really struggling to figure why I should give a fuck about what, who or how Larry Garfield fucks.

A lot of people are taking either stance: that a person's beliefs squarely should or should not affect their involvement in the project.

However - the third stance is that one needs to assess the material effect their beliefs may have on their day-to-day involvement in that project. In an industry with serious, systemic issues with gender balance, is it not reasonable to suggest a person promoting "Gorean philosophy" might execute poor judgement in the context of work with female collaborators?

But who does the assessing? What measure do we use to determine which beliefs will create which affects? Is a Gorean belief system more or less likely than an Abrahamic belief system to execute poor judgement with regards to female collaborators?

I think the problem with many of these approaches is this notion that we can predict ahead of time. I would agree with your third approach if you just changed the tense of the sentence:

> However - the third stance is that one needs to assess the material effect their beliefs _have had_ on their day-to-day involvement in that project. In an industry with serious, systemic issues with gender balance, is it not reasonable to suggest a person promoting "Gorean philosophy" _might have executed_ poor judgement in the context of work with female collaborators?

We can't assume behavior from stated beliefs, but past behavior and beliefs may factor into a case where wrong-doing has occurred. If I'm a satanist, that doesn't mean I'm going to sacrifice babies... but if you find me connected to a bunch of baby-sacrificing, then you better believe my stated Satanic beliefs will factor into the "motive" part of my prosecution.

Not only is this the "innocent till proven guilty" ethos applied generally, it's also going to be far more efficient to judge people case-by-case on observed actions/offenses than by trying to extrapolate potential actions from the subjective interpretations of their words.

You're right, and I probably should've worded it that way (I can no longer edit). I was using the term "might" in a suggestive, rather than speculative, way.

> the third stance is that one needs to assess the material effect their beliefs may have on their day-to-day involvement in that project

I know I'm "straw-maning" a little but why would it be any different for strongly religious people in Jewish, Christian, or Muslim community? Do you think they shouldn't put in charge of anything because their book might say bad things about gays or women, or non believers? Why this belief (Gor) and not the mainstream ones?

Was he "fired" because he acted on his beliefs? inside the Drupal community? toward another member of the Drupal community? Or merely because he had an opinion he never disclosed to a collaborator and someone who obviously didn't like him, went to great length to find dirt or an excuse to kick him out of the Drupal community?

With that logic it would seem reasonable to assume someone of any religion might execute poor judgement. There's always something to disagree with in any religion.

Aside from his private wedding speech thing, how was he "promoting Gorean philosophy" in the context of his Drupal work?

From the outside it's been hard to judge who's wrong or right here, the whole thing stinks to high heaven.

All I know is I wouldn't want to get involved with a similar big project these days. I guess you could just use a fake name, but that probably wouldn't hold up if you wanted to have any sort of leadership role.

I don't see a positive outcome in this unless Dries steps down. This is vote of no confidence and Dries should really see that. (Note: I don't follow drupal and this is the first I've heard of this, so... this is just from an outsider perspective.)

sorry but how does that work to be for tolerance and anti discrimination in the first place ? anti discrimination means you Do NOT tolerate people who discriminate, so you cant be tolerant at the same time. I always see this kind of contradictions in principles.

Totally agree. I'm fed up of the argument that goes "if you preach tolerance, you must be tolerant of intolerance", for my own understanding of tolerance. Yes, you shouldn't commit a violent act against someone because they are intolerant. No, you shouldn't have to accept their intolerance unreservedly.

I also have an issue with the part of the statement that reads along the lines of "we are against discrimination based on someone's race, gender ... or personal beliefs". Sorry, that's ridiculous. If someone believes Jews are parasites, I'm discriminating against them. If someone thinks women are inherently inferior to men, I'm discriminating against them. If I'm not allowed to react differently to someone because of what they believe in, go ahead and unplug me now because i cease to be a thinking human being.

So then how do you deal with people with such beliefs in your society? Do you shun them, throw slurs at them? What happens when one moves in to be your next-door neighbor? Do you try moving to places without them?

Intolerance of beliefs is incompatible with society, and society has shown no signs of changing. How would your solution address that? Indoctrination? Building an ideological "wall"? Killing those who do not meet your ideology, or wait and hope it 'dies out'?

What happens when they elect someone with such beliefs to lead you?

> So then how do you deal with people with such beliefs in your society

Challenge those beliefs. I believe i shouldn't be forced to tolerate them, though.

> So then how do you deal with people with such beliefs in your society? Do you shun them, throw slurs at them? What happens when one moves in to be your next-door neighbor? Do you try moving to places without them?

As long as they do not impede on my or anyone else Freedom's, it's fine for them to have their own beliefs about the world or whatever. Why should we ALL have the same beliefs anyway?

> Intolerance of beliefs is incompatible with society, and society has shown no signs of changing.

Sorry but society as a whole has NEVER collapsed no matter how many disharmonies there are or were amongst us - even civil wars do not bring down entire societies. There's a lot more harm to be done by putting limits on how people should think, and this kind of line of thought is actually what leads to conflict more often than not.

> What happens when they elect someone with such beliefs to lead you?

So what? Leaders who do not represent folks have been elected for centuries already, it's hardly something new. You know, live with it.

Who decides what is intolerant? Free speech becomes more limited over time as the definition changes to anything which hurts someones feelings for example. Or, in this case, ascribes to BDSM and fantasy lifestyle.

You are the thought police.

> You are the thought police.

Not at all. Anyone is totally free to believe whatever they like, I'm not suggesting making certain beliefs illegal. What I'm saying is that, if i run an open-source project, i should be free to work with whoever i want, based on their beliefs. Not based on the person they were when they born, but the person they have chosen to be. If that person happens to be a white-supremacist or advocates euthenising the disabled or promotes paedophilia, i will probably choose to not work with them, and i think i should have that right.

So anyone is free to believe whatever they like but if they'd like to join your organization they better shut up about it if they don't think the way you do? In effect you are policing thought.

The code of conduct just applies to behavior inside the community. It has nothing to do with stuff happening outside of it.

The community would not tolerate discriminating behavior against members of the community or while doing work for the community. But what you do in your private life is non of it's business.

I hope you understand what I mean.

While, in reading this thread, I understand how people might take offense to someone being excluded based on a privately-held belief, especially one which has not manifested into an actual issue of conduct.

But I'm not sure I mind when different standards are applied to any given community's "leaders" vs. its participants. Leaders ultimately represent what a community believes it should stand for. We have, perhaps unrealistically in some case, but justifiably always prosecuted leaders, in any context, for behavior, beliefs and statements that we would absolutely forgive/ignore for the "public".

It's one thing if we are talking about their actions that are part of being a community leader. IE: if a Drupal leader showed porn during a talk at a Drupal conference. It's another to say that their personal actions outside of this official role represent the community. This is why people say that their Twitter views do not represent their employer etc. because there can and should be a separation between the two.

My point was that "leaders" can not compartmentalize the same way a participant, employee or guest can. Leadership roles are generally, in our society, held to higher standards.

I'm also keeping in mind that had this person held views not that women are inherently inferior to men, but that blacks were inherently inferior to whites, there'd be absolutely no discussion about whether they should be removed.

You simply cannot hold that type of view and have any credible moral claim to a leadership role, even if your actions as a leader are spotless.

If you don't want to work with Drupal, then work with something else instead.

Open invitation: If you are looking for something to work on (i.e., the project is still pre-alpha quality), check out my work in progress: https://github.com/coreyp1/defiant .

I'm an 11+ member of the Drupal community, who wanted a fresh take on a framework. As developers, we have newer tools with different strengths than PHP. That is what I'm working on leveraging. Message me if you want more info.

"We believe that tolerance reserved only for people who think and act exactly like we do is no tolerance at all."

Oh my god. Then act like it.

Then let communities be communities. Remember LambdaConf and Moldbug?

Not taking sides, but I found this analysis by an experienced community manager interesting: https://subfictional.com/thoughts-on-recent-drupal-governanc...

"it's complicated"

It's complicated if you are driving an agenda. Otherwise you can conduct things in the open. In my experience the secret tribunals enable bad behavior and bullies.

It's about respecting the privacy of people that could have been harassed by Larry (and Larry's own privacy). How is that an agenda?

I don't see a "secret tribunal" here, more a `behind closed doors` trial (https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/%C3%A0_huis_clos). Nothing wrong with that.

Google cache:

https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Nw6rUD...

This is big departure from the blow back after Dries made a comment years ago at Drupalcon about encouraging women to enter the Drupal community as graphic design artists. Good for these women today.

I hope the community and project can be reconciled. Not for the sake of Drupal, but for everyone involved however tangentially.

Offtopic... Someone here actually develops software in Drupal? Most people i knew abandoned drupal years ago for Joomla or something in python like Django, its kinda weird/cringeworthy hearing news about Drupal the Community more than the Drupal project.

It convinces me Code Of Conduct are basically sticks that will not harm you when you are on the right side of them.

Do communities needs sticks to be driven one sided way like cows?

At this point it feels like they kind of defy their reason to be and are pretty misused.

My experience says that codes of conduct are written with the express desire of keeping all open source communities left-leaning.

I've talked to many people about the matter and some of them say that open source is supposed to be left-leaning, and that those are its principles. That ignores that right-leaning users should also be able to benefit from open source values (privacy, for example) and contribute code, and that not everybody who uses open source has to be a supporter of the open source principles (for example, I use an open source browser because it's the best, not because I like open source better than closed source).

As usual, depends on the contents of the code. That kind of legalese is just tooling to organize discourse.

You won't build an open minded community if its rules mandate righthink. Doesn't mean you can't try and protect people from the kind of stalking and abuse that has happened here.

It's a shame that we have to have more than "be professional and don't be a dick" as community guidelines, but if we have to might as well do it correctly.

Someone who doesn't know that he has to "be professional and don't be a dick" is likely to disregard the code of conduct. And you don't need a code of conduct to kick someone out of a project because he's being unprofessional and/or a dick. Therefore codes of conduct are useless.

I agree. It at least feels like it's more a way to showcase your beliefs and give a list of things that may be used to justify actions later, rather than something constructive.

> And you don't need a code of conduct to kick someone out of a project because he's being unprofessional and/or a dick.

Unfortunately, my experience is that you actually do need to be able to point to something (a) precise and (b) that the community broadly agrees is a valid reason, in order to kick someone out without practically dissolving your community. A code of conduct is simply an agreement which states the community's beliefs on what are valid reasons to kick someone out.

There definitely is an "oh, we're doing this now" moment when any project or group reaches a size where a code of conduct is published.

It's like wearing a cowboy hat to a meeting. It's not that there's anything wrong with the symbol itself, but it perhaps represents some tedious baggage

Well, what would a right-leaning code of conduct look like right now? "The Drupal project rejects the rights of gay people to marry each other"? "The Drupal project declares that men and women are better suited to different roles, and men will code and women will do graphic design"?

What are you proposing for a not-left-leaning code of conduct, either neutral or right-leaning?

Code(s) of Conduct should be used only for that second word - conduct. How you behave inside a community or conference; your personal beliefs should be kept out of it.

Just write code and stick to business, preferably under a pseudonym. This gets difficult when contributing to projects for which you need to sign a developer agreement for legal reasons though.

The Code of Conduct didn't even come into this - the community leader asked Larry to leave the community when he figured that the board reviewing the supposed violation wasn't going to find that it actually was a violation. Or, in other words, this was someone completely ignoring the process because he was in a position of power.

That's not true by anyone's accounting of the events, including the aggrieved's.

> That information, Garfield says, made it to Drupal's Community Working Group (CWG), which concluded there was no code of conduct violation.

Or, from his own writing on the subject:

> Eventually that information made it to the Community Working Group (CWG), who concluded "there was no code of conduct violation present for [them] to take any action on".

Larry also writes,

> Dries, from what I understand, was first informed, without my knowledge, of the matter in early February, by the CWG.

Curious that the CWG referred the matter to him as part of their documented process (i.e. when an issue exceeds the scope of their charter). You may not be inclined to believe a word they say, but at the very least Larry's timeline does not contradict this detail as provided by Megan / Dries:

> The Community Working Group, which is part of Drupal’s governance structure, provided conflict resolution. When it became clear that some of the issues raised went beyond the scope of their charter, they determined that it was appropriate for the matter to be escalated to Dries. This is consistent with their existing policy and process.

The FAQ section on this post provides the clearest timeline from the "other side" that I've seen: https://www.drupal.org/association/blog/working-through-the-...

Regardless, multiple decisions were made before Dries and Larry talked, and it is your characterization of Dries as a meddler who is circumventing a process that I am declaring untrue by anyone's accounting of the facts.

We don't live in a binary world, there are other options here besides Dries abused his power or Dries did everything right... for example, the process itself may be deficient and in need of reform. Before slinging mud, we should at least consider that possibility.

> we should at least consider that possibility

That would require that someone provides some evidence that this had nothing to do with what the accused suggests it's about - as it is, all we have is a short jump from being harassed because Gor to being kicked out of the community. That sort of thing is, unfortunately, quite common - I have friends within the scene who've lost their jobs because someone sent a picture to their bosses. The world is largely not a bastion of tolerance towards people who practice alternative relationship styles and sexualities.

I believe Dries's words in his apology post were sincere, so I do submit that as evidence but understand you may find him untrustworthy. However, the willingness of people who practice BDSM who actually work for him to speak out on that post provides even more compelling evidence that Dries isn't known for discriminating on that basis:

http://buytaert.net/comment/132641#comment-132641

If Preston and other BDSM practitioners like him are fired from Acquia or removed from the Drupal community, I'll eat whatever crow you care to dish up.

Unfortunately some kinks are judged harsher than others. For example, if someone got sent a picture of their employee engaging in some flogging or even caning in the privacy of their bedroom, it's unlikely they'd care - but e.g. a branding ceremony? Needle or scalpel play? Presence at a high-protocol, strictly gendered event (e.g. male clothed, female nude)? Making a speech at a wedding between people in a relationship based on power exchange, that touches on the inequalities those people have chosen to make part of their relationship? All of those things bother some people a lot, potentially to the point of severing all ties that they legally could.

If he has harmed someone in the community or been put in a position to harm someone by his place in the community, you'd think Dries would be able to say that. If there's a police investigation or court case sufficiently far along that Dries thinks it's likely it happened, you'd think he'd be able to say that. But he's said absolutely nothing aside from his vague "because equality" statement.

Communities have always worked as a disorganized sum aggregate of people people wish to interact with.

He didn't break their CoC, and he wasn't kicked out for a CoC violation. As far as their CoC was concerned, he was fine.

Completely turned off by the Drupal project. Don't you people have code to write?

TLDR?

You know how we always complain how the tech community is treated unfairly about women? How they think we politely ignore the gendered problems our industry faces? How we're not all sexist and we're genuinely trying hard to embrace and include female geeks and coders?

This thread. This whole thread right here.

Mind elaborating?

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