When should behaviour outside a community have consequences inside it?
mjg59.dreamwidth.org
mjg59.dreamwidth.org
Past transgressions now have an impact today often way beyond the statues of limitation. In most of these discussions the reason these statues exist are ignored. Discussions in one place affect another place. Behavior that is questionable in a classroom becomes national news. Postings in a closed online forum of sexual nature affects standing in an online collaboration community working on software.
When boundaries are torn down cultures clash. Some of it may be healthy. But without boundaries would there be culture?
Okay. Under my real name/identity, I was once upon a time a substantial contributor to the Drupal project, a PHP-based CMS/web dev framework.
Earlier this year, we had a kerfluffle where someone had a grudge against Larry "Crell" Garfield, a core developer, liaison to the wider PHP community, and just general pillar of the Drupal community for over a decade. This person shared activity that Crell had done in the "Gor" (kinda BSDM plus fantasy cosplay) community, which, IIRC, included private forum posts, a dating site profile, and a slideshow deck he had presented from a convention. All of this stuff was from private web sites; eg, ones where you'd have to at least sign up for an account to get access to.
The person with the grudge, who, as far as I know, has yet to be identified, provided this material to the Drupal Association as evidence that Crell, a typical SV leftist in most respects, was actually a closeted unrepentant misogynist who needed to be kicked out of the community. Battle lines were drawn, with some agreeing that he was trash while others felt that his out-of-community behavior had no effect on all the hard work he had done and could still do within it. And bickering happened instead of collaboration and coding.
Ultimately the Association came down on the side of the agitators and disinvited Crell from his speaking position at the next Drupalcon, where he had always been prevalent. Expectedly, he became quite bitter about this and has somewhat voluntarily withdrawn further from the community.
So now a talented developer and decade-plus community member has been effectively kicked out of the community for personal, private kinks he, by all accounts, took great care to keep private and separate from this community.
Due to this and other reasons, I now use pseudonyms when joining new communities, and now some of my best OSS work is being done under a pseudonym I have taken care to keep air-gapped from my real identity - not great for my career, but I know that I, as a human, have quirks and kinks as well that others would just love to judge me by, and it's apparently what we have to do nowadays in order to be judged by our work rather than our pasts and out-of-community activity. And, frankly, I'm so disgusted by what happened to Crell that I too have disengaged from the community and no longer use Drupal as my framework of choice (though there are other reasons as well for the latter).
So, no. Postings in a closed online forum of sexual nature only affects standing in an online collaboration community working on software if you make it so.
Crell's first post about the incident: https://www.garfieldtech.com/blog/tmi-outing - see others on his blog for more.
Looking at history I would even say that boundaries, as in the "need" to give a superior moral position to a favored class, whether an economic class, intellectuals, a military class, or priesthood, was always where these boundaries were. The thing you can't see is that your/our "boundaries" are no different.
And every single time, those boundaries turned out to be, not "for trade" (e.g. the Roman Empire), "for the military" (e.g. the second Islamic dynasty), intellectuals (e.g. the French revolution - the first part, or Communism in Eastern Europe) or "for morality" (e.g. the West in the middle ages). I mean, I'm sure there was a period of, say, a decade, where they actually did what it said on the label. It never lasted.
Every single time, those "boundaries" served to guarantee the comfort of a favored class. Firstly, to safeguard their positions of power and comfort, their fortunes, but later even their ideas and egos.
The real boundary we are wanting to impose is that "we are right".
And it's real, real simple. There is a tiny little issue:
We
Are
Wrong
Boundaries do impose structure. The structure does not change, and the world does. That's fundamentally why the boundaries are wrong and the structure will not hold.
I do not know how or where exactly we are wrong, but we are wrong (although I have some ideas: any 5 year old, old enough to talk intelligently, but not old enough to be assimilated yet, will tell you when you walk with them through any city what we are terribly wrong about. There's plenty, I might add).
And that sucks. If it turns out that we are most catastrophically wrong about a moral issue, it will suck REAL bad. And that's happened before. Plenty of times.
It is funny how you see the bay area aging. When we started out, most were in our late teens, early twenties at best. And of course we all felt the same: society is VERY wrong. In all sorts of ways. For instance, women are not different, and certainly not inferior. We KNEW that 20 years ago. But now we're 40, and we feel that, dammit, we're right. And these kids, who seem to prefer economic gains over social issues. Lazy bastards !
And, like the rich 30 years ago, we've decided (whilst having pretty much every creature comfort we like) that moral issues (that just happen to keep our place in society safe and secure) are real important. And these upstart youngsters (who do not in fact enjoy many of our creature comforts), they're bad, mmmkay ! Dammit ! They MUST be stopped.
They will, of course, defeat us. Nothing can stop them.
And they will clobber more than some of our ideas.
And, they will abandon some of our morals.
The thing is, this is a good and healthy thing to happen.
What are the ideas and morals that you think will be abandoned?
Well, for example, certainly authoritarianism has been on the rise. When it comes to democratic ideals like separation of legislative, executive and judicial powers there seems to be zero interest from younger people (see the Poland, Hungary, Austria and Czech situations). Also, when talking to Chinese, I notice that there is very little interest in making China democratic.
Freedom of speech has a very bad rap outside of America, mostly undeserved. Now I get that this is hard to see in the middle of the US, but 7.1 billion people don't have freedom of speech (roughly) and 300 million do. The thing is, those 7.1 billion mostly don't want it.
Even in America people don't uphold it very well imho. Obviously in the Bay Area high profile events have shown that private and, to some extent, government actions against free speech are tolerated.
So I think that freedom of speech and generally freedom will be abandoned to an extent. Why ? Simply because that has advantages.
Yes, as one of those poor 7.1 billion, I can barely contain my envy. Now let's have a look at the ranking of the US in, say, the World Press Freedom Index of 2017 (https://rsf.org/en/ranking). Could you please explain why the US, being (supposedly) the only country in the world that has freedom of speech, hasn't even made it in the top 40 of that ranking?
I don't see this obsession with America-style "freedom of speech". Sure, you can't go out in the streets and yell that you think that '<minority> are subhuman scum that deserve to be rounded up and transported to extermination camps' in most places (although I imagine that won't make you very popular in the US either, even if would technically be legal), but if you live in the nicer parts of, say, Europe, you won't go bankrupt when you need a hospital, you won't be living in a country with one of the highest incarceration rates in the world, you don't have a two-party system, your vote isn't worth more or less depending on where you live, etc. Also what's this "free speech zone" thing?
Freedom of speech isn't black and white, there are many shades of gray. If everybody feels they can speak their mind except for some people advocating genocide... well suffice to say I won't be joining Evelyn Hall in her fight to the death.
Boundaries are also essential for freedom. Without boundaries there is interference. Would you like to house anyone in your place? Would you like anyone to have a say how you spend your money? Do you understand the role of budgeting in an organization and the freedom that is bestowed to the budget holders?
edit: this is an interesting aside: "Coming up with a more formalised set of considerations for external behaviour would help there." Isn't this to some extent what religions have been trying to do for millennia?
I think this is backwards – the more formalized such considerations are the more conflict there will be. Formal rules invite 'lawyering' and lobbying and now your project or community becomes another battleground for never-ending political conflict. Empirically (but not rigorously, by me anyways), the best groups seem to regulate themselves informally.
"very disparate cultural backgrounds" should mean more than "how many angels dance on the head of a pin" level of disagreement between authoritarian fundamentalist sects, or in the context of the actual demographics of software development, which ivy league school a young wealthy urban coastal left wing white male attended. In a field suffering from a demographic crisis of non-diversity, it seems weird to propose a religious purity test to kick out the non-believers as some kind of inherent good, because the result of implementing a religious purity test can't possibly be good for diversity. The argument seems to be "If we just get rid of everyone who thinks differently than us using ever more elaborate formalized and authoritarian religious purity tests, then we'll have all the benefits of diversity with none of the costs" but I don't think the real world works that way.
Historically trying to strengthen a dying movement by radicalizing it even further from mainstream has generally failed to revive the movement. Its an interesting chicken vs egg problem where dying ideologies and radicalization usually correlate, and the question is causation, which causes the other? I'm assuming, given your support for radicalization, you're on the team that sees dying ideology as a cause of radicalization. I realize using logic in a discussion about religion is irrational in and of itself, but thinking purely logically, if you see the legacy ideology as dying, then why not "switch over" ahead of time and be ahead of the pack if the legacy view is going to die out and be replaced anyway? Or do you see it as, yes 99% of the time, historically radicalization has destroyed the movement, but this time radicalization is the occasional rare situation where it'll work? And if so, why this time with this movement? There doesn't appear to be any observable reason to think today's movement is unusual.
But as we've seen in the last year, complete anonymity and untraceability everywhere can have bad consequences; astro-turfing, smurfing, attention-ddos:ing, FUD, anti-net neutrality-comment identity theft.
In some of these cases a central e-ID (which a lot of nations have) could have mitigated those issues, in others, not so.
Ideas should live on their own merit, in which case the identity of the source is irrelevant, but (pardon my French) idiots make the case that logic and merit of ideas don't take center stage. In those cases I believe it's kind of relevant to know if you're buying into group think that is 80% bots, 5% trolls, 5% adversarial agents, etc.
Anonymity is one solution to the problem of being able to keep dissenting opinions, but a solution with severe side effects. Transparency with a strong protection of freedom of ideas is another route.
I guess to put it succinctly: I don't need to know the names or faces of the people I carry conversations with, only that they're real, unique people. It shouldn't matter, but recent history shows otherwise.
The protections of liberty afforded on paper don’t always play out in real life. In theory we have protections of free association, freedom of religion, free speech and we’re all entitled to equal protection under the law - this doesn’t always play out.
Too often mob rule has resulted in oppression of dissenting views and oppression of classes of people. Privacy, private communication, anonymous communication and pseudonymous communications are all essential for healthy society and discourse and cannot be written off because some would use them for nefarious purposes.
https://github.com/opal/opal/issues/941
It's interesting the "complainer" ended up being hired by github then fired from the same github.
Rephrase as: when should your public reputation among one set of people affect your public reputation among another set of people? When should that latter effect result in consequences?
And then the answer is obvious: whenever the latter set of people find your public behavior to be unwelcome, regardless of which context you chose to unveil it in.
To detach the situation from current feelings, let's take a time trip back to hypothetical year ~1975.
Let's say it's illegal to register a NGO, company or anything that has a rule of "no sexual group X allowed". Now let's say that there is some guy who is absolutely brilliant at playing the violin, but has at some point allegedly done some homosexual approach to straight guy. Which any gay would have just brushed away, but now it was taken as harassment.
We have obviously created a situation where it's impossible for that violinist to take part in any orchestra. No "only gays & women orchesta" is allowed by law. Society completely wastes that human resource. Some male musicians somewhere possibly have slightly better work security. But the cost is that millions of people never hear the recordings of that great violinist.
You have to pick:
A. Allow organizations to be completely self selecting. This would have a set of short term problems and it's currently not kosher at all.
B. Allow alleged transgressors to somehow wipe their record clear. Seems practically impossible during internet age and click headlines.
C. Force people to be cool about people who have allegedly transgressed in some way in some other social setting. But now you lose productivity of whole teams, not just some individuals here and there.
D. Lose a lot of human resources. And probably for petty reasons. If allegation is enough, you can destroy too competitors easily. As shown by the red scare, Stalins purges, etc.
This was originally a case about a programmer allegedly groping some women. Seems like if you could start a company of "former sexual harassers inc", you could soon hire lots of splendid talent dirt cheap. Then you just need to somehow hide the origin of the products being made to the consumers. But soon even that won't matter much if there is anything to be learned from the music industry.
It used to be that you interacted almost exclusively face-to-face, within a small community. One of the better consequences was a sort of instant feedback loop, where your actions that hurt others were quickly reflected back onto you: abandoned your ailing grandmother? The local grocer will stop giving you credit.
These were social feedback mechanisms. They have the benefit of being much more subtle than the criminal justice system, and kicking in much earlier.
It’s ridiculous how some in the tech community pretend these mechanisms don’t exist, or that they should not exist: every time you have decided who to invite to your birthday party, or who to sit with at lunch, you have taken such considerations into account.
People are social animals. They use social cues to reward beneficial actions, and punish even slight misdeeds. This is necessary to establish standards of behavior, or basic human decency.
There should be limits to this process, the most important of which is time. No one should be forced to reveal to his neighbors that he is a “sex offender”, ten years after drunkenly taking a piss in a public park. Nor should your teenage shenanigans be the top hit in google for eternity.
But standing a front of a synagogue on a Saturday, with a torch, a gun, a swastika flag? Yeah, you better believe your friends and coworkers will look funny at you come Monday.
Behavior outside a community should have consequences inside it when it has consequences inside it.
If your behavior outside of a community causes an uproar and crisis inside the community when it becomes known, it has already had a consequence inside the community. It will already have future ramifications. All you can do at that point is decide whether you want the future ramifications to include a commendation, condemnation or silence from the community.
Communities are not hermetically sealed environments. In my opinion it is silly and childish to pretend they are.
When "it becomes known" is a matter of one person going on a moral crusade to destroy the other person's reputation and position because of something about them, wholly unrelated to the project, which they personally dislike--is it still valid for there to be "consequences" within the community?
If so, it seems like only a matter of time for all of us, because surely all of us do things or hold opinions that someone else in a community we participate in would find unacceptable. Therefore, all that is required for anyone to destroy anyone else is to "cause an uproar and crisis" about them.
What will you say when someone causes an uproar and crisis about you?
Unrequited love sucks. Losing an election sucks. Being kicked out of a community sucks. Losing your job sucks.
Doesn't matter if you "deserve" it or not. Still sucks.
Maybe it sucks more when there's malice in the revelation, than if someone just sent an email to the wrong mailing list or if two people unexpectedly ran into each other somewhere neither expected the other to be.
But the bell has been rung. What do you want people to do, to treat their feelings like jurors, "that evidence has been obtained improperly, you are instructed to disregard it."?
You seem to be saying that the feelings of anyone in a community should serve as a veto on anyone else's membership in the community. Am I understanding you correctly?
When people seem to talk about consequence in this manner they seem to mean that 'People should stop caring about what other people have said or done', even if it means ignoring things like how a person believes you are literally a lesser human being due to some trait you were born with. 'Diversity of Thought' as a statement has been latched onto as being an excuse rather than its original purpose.
At the heart of a lot of this is the simple question: is our larger world supposed to be one big social group? Some folks think yes. For those folks, if you have a small community, it's a legitimate question as to how much "control" you should have on members when they are outside that community.
To me this is an answered question and the answer is no, small groups and large groups of people are completely different things. Trying to shoe-horn experiences and ideas about one group into the other group leads to nothing but heartache and disappointment.
But since so many folks are struggling so much, it's a conversation that needs to continue for a while. Hopefully it will lead somewhere positive.
ADD: I will, however, admit to having much frustration watching my tech friends struggle so much with concepts that should have been part of their early education. Speaking humorously, I reserve the right to buy an inflatable copy of "On Liberty" and start beating a few of them about the head with it if things don't change.
Also, just for fun, google "Ted Ts'o".
The wider political climate in world today is making have to be that simple.
While the article talks about more extreme cases like actual physical sexual assault, today far far far too many communities are using simple political disagreement and criticism and framing that as "harassment" using that "harassment" as method to remove any political dissenters from their ranks
I have seen it attempted (some times with great success) in several open source projects.
Personally I dislike the very concept of Codes of Conduct and I generally oppose most of the terms in many of the more modern Code of Conduct being pushed forward, likely as a result of my very libertarian political views. That said Codes of Conducts (should a community or project adopt them) should only be enforced based on actions WITH IN that community and/or toward people that are IN THAT community.
Not generalized actions of people taken in other communities with a different set of conventions and rules.
Code of Conduct should be seen as a contract of Behavior that all people agree to when voluntary associating with the community to treat all other MEMBERS of that community based on that code of conduct, it should not apply to conduct when interacting with people not a part of that community and thus never agreed to the code of conduct.
For example, as stated, the question includes questions like: - Should America care if somebody is convicted of a crime by a foreign nation?
- Should a school care if a candidate to be a teacher was discovered viewing child pornography?
- Should a job care if/why you got fired from your last job?
- Should you care why your ex's last relationship failed?
The answer to all of these is obviously "depends on the specifics." It's tempting to draw hard boundaries so as to prevent people from weaponizing politics. Unfortunately, I just don't think hard-boundaries are coherent here.
One thing some of the comments have touched on is the notion of "beyond the pale" - a term that somewhat ironically (for this discussion) refers to occurrences outside the bounds of British law. There are opinions that fall outside the standards of decency, and this can, legitimately, make organizations reluctant to work with some people.
Many issue positions, over time, can go from widely accepted, to controversial, to widely discredited, to beyond the pale, essentially and uncontroversially indecent. If this is the case, it's almost certain that we're going through this process right now. Unfortunately, there is also a strong political tendency to scold and smear and be as uncharitable as possible to the other side. In aggregate, people get accused of being on the "wrong side of history" at least twice as often as they actually are, since these accusations go in both directions on virtually every controversial topic.
I am disappointed in the contemporary trend to invest imaginary "harms" and propose remedies that, in the end, boil down to persecuting people for their beliefs. Altman is definitely right about the social atmosphere in tech. Imagining that we should, say, ban contributions to an open source project from someone who also participates in 4chan is part of the problem.
And I stick by that for communities I run. On every site I'm an admin/founder, the rule is that (legal issues excepting), we won't punish you for things done outside of the community. It's not our place to do so, and we have no interest in witch hunting or trying to find reasons to deplatform people for things they do in their free time elsewhere.
Examples of this:
Alan Turing -- father of Computer Science shunned, at the time, because everyone had value judgements regarding his homosexuality (completely irrelevant to Computer Science).
The Mozilla CEO fired for his personal donation in opposition to gay marriage. (Again, completely irrelevant to his relationship with the Mozilla project).
This, of course, continues further, with things such as Hollywood blacklisting (today) Conservatives, and formerly Communists.
The solution is simple:
Within a community, individuals should only be judged based on their contributions and value within that community.
If I am deeply opposed to gay marriage, but a fantastic coder, that should not affect my standing within a community that is entirely code focused.
If I strongly believe in UFO visitations, and disbelieve climate change, but am a great graphic designer, that should not affect my reputation as an artist.
Everyone is not expected to be right, or agreeable, about everything, with everyone else. Aiming for this is pointless.
This inability to separate emotions and passions from cooperating on a shared focus with others, of differing emotions and passions, but equal interest in the shared focus (community) is deeply damaging.
There are enough problems and difficulties getting skilled people together to work on something great -- there is no use at all in reducing that crowd of people further by limiting it to those who share ones views in any number of hot button issues.
Leave politics to your political circles, make your own impressions of people before making personal judgements from reputation, find every reason to work together, not any excuse not to.
I personally tend to break conservatively in my views, but I would be equally outraged if a liberal were fired for supporting, say, communist revolution. I certainly understand why people who hold certain views would want that person fired, but I have no problem separating that from their work. I wouldn't want them running my country, but Mozilla is fine.
I ultimately arrived at the outcome that in order to be consistent, I don't think it's OK for any _position_ someone takes to be considered for work performance. Actions, sure, but a position must have absolute freedom. So, if my CEO were to consider people who vote for republicans subhuman (not an entirely unlikely scenario today), but otherwise conducted themselves fairly, I'd be OK with it.
So, did Eich take a position, or an action? Are you really allowed to have a position if you aren't allowed to support it?
I'll say action, despite my bias urging me to say position. Was this action taken to support his desire to preserve something, or to deny someone else of something? If you're one of the people impacted by this action, does it matter?
These questions make it easy to see the tough position Mozilla was in. I'm not sure what conclusion I'd have reached in their shoes, despite my from-the-hip decision that he did nothing wrong.
So, lets pretend you work for Mozilla, you like the mission statement* and seriously believe in it/that your work is helping that cause. You also think it is a relevant part of your branding.
You really wouldn't have a problem with your CEO saying repub voters are subhuman? No clash between "open and accessible to all" and "subhuman"?
You wouldn't be upset at that violation of the creed/mission statement?
You wouldn't think it to be harmful to your companies branding? (And therefore to your company)
You wouldn't think it harmful to the "team spirit"/motivation?
I find that surprising, to be honest. ("Reason to fire" questions aside)
*
"Our mission is to ensure the Internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all. An Internet that truly puts people first, where individuals can shape their own experience and are empowered, safe and independent."[1]
If Brendan Eich has ever described gay people as subhuman, post a link. If he hasn't, this is a terrible and misleading analogy, and a violation of the Principle of Charity.
It is using an analogy the parent made in their argument.
Take it up with them if you don't like it.
QED.
They wouldn't say they consider republicans subhumans anyway, they'd find some existing objectionable term and rationalize the expansion of that to include mainstream republican views.
You are the CEO of Bread Inc. You make bread. You sell bread. As the CEO of Bread Inc., you make statements in the public about bread being terrible, that no one should eat it, and how you're only selling it because you like taking money from carb-loving hyper-idiots.
Would you consider removal from your post as justified in that situation?
Of course that CEO is working counter to his organization's goals. That's the perfect cleanliness of having organizational goals that are not subject to the religion, decade, loneliness, or stomach contents of the person currently interpreting them.
If your "mission" is nearly unusable as a mission, in that probably even the people in your organization can't uniformly agree on its application, the model breaks down. That's what you signed up for with fundamentally subjective pursuits.
So, if the CEO of Freedom, Inc said she hates freedom, that's bad optics and fire-able. If she applies her understanding of freedom in a way I don't agree with, that's a tough shit moment for me. And these are the situations we debate.
In this case, you concede the point that if what a CEO does causes bad optics, that is potentially fireable. To loop this back to the parent comment, this means sustaining an objection to Eich's firing, you would need to conclude that what Eich did was bad optics.
I hope you recognize that this position is contradictory with your previous statement: "You just shouldn't police beliefs, period."
2) It is obviously the apex of bad optics. My initial point is to demonstrate that the position that "You just shouldn't police beliefs, period" isn't founded in reality. Obviously you should. No one will defend the CEO of Bread Co.
Since we've established at the apex of bad optics that removal is permitted, the rest of the discussion isn't about whether or not removal is an option, it is a discussion of where along the spectrum of bad optics should it be permissible to remove an executive.
This makes the honest question to be explored "When should you police beliefs". At that stage of discussion, the context that we're complaining about removing matters. It doesn't at the level I'm criticizing.
What does it mean, then, to say we shouldn't police beliefs? I'd say it means we shouldn't police actions that are only expressions of personal belief.
"Personal" is important when we consider people, like CEOs, who speak for the company. The board has a right to expect the CEO to speak for them, and the shareholders, in turn, to elect a board that speaks for them. A CEO who officially says "bread is terrible, no one should buy it" has failed to perform that job. A CEO who says the same thing unofficially, or before being hired, won't be able to credibly perform the job.
A salesperson would have the same problem. The job demands saying "you should buy bread". Saying the opposite makes it impossible to perform the job, if the people you're dealing with learn about it.
OTOH, if a bakery worker or secretary, for example, says "bread is terrible, no one should buy it, I only work here because I need the money", I would defend their right to express their beliefs. If they were fired I'd consider that unjust.
There's some productive digging to be done there, but I've got work to get back to! Maybe another time.
I agree with that, but I also think a public comment about a personal belief can interfere with a job that involves speaking on behalf of others. When ones publicly known personal beliefs conflict with the beliefs one expresses while doing ones job, it causes a severe credibility problem, at least.
I'd say the other factor you mentioned is the conflict between "personal" statements and "official" statements. Some people do seem to be able to manage that, in part by avoiding uncompromising statements like "bread is terrible, no one should buy it". In your example, the conflict was so obvious and so provocative that it would be untenable and render the job of CEO impossible.
My point in making the example isn't to establish a framework for evaluating the Eich situation, but to indicate that it can be evaluated in the first place by showing an example in which a clear judgement can be made. This is contrary to your original emphatic position that "you just shouldn't police beliefs, period"
Defending Eich requires you not believe with enough conviction that his actions harmed the organization sufficiently to warrant removal. That's fine. You can fiddle with the conviction and harm knobs according to your beliefs. It does not, however, preclude anyone else from doing the same and coming to a different conclusion, which your policing argument would do, oddly enough.
If you want to go a different route and instead justify non-firing on completely separate grounds - that censuring political positions is, if consistent and widespread, noxious to society, or perhaps that the ambiguity in applying these standards is too high and might cause a chilling effect, etc - that raises different issues, but not those I was discussing.
And if said application of understanding is strongly disagreeable not just for you, but with a significant part of both the customers and the workforce?
Honestly it's way simpler than most people make it.
If speech is either not distinguished, or is indistinguishable from action, then there can be no free speech... or else initiating violence could not be a crime. It could get worse too. You could end up with no free speech and with initiation of violence by elites being legal or effectively legal. These cannot be desirable outcomes! Of course, if you don't value free speech at all, then you might not see a problem with these outcomes.
The distinction is obvious: you don't have to listen to a speaker, but you don't get a choice if they throw a punch your way. The distinction is about freedom on your part.
That said, we're all constrained in what we can say because we cannot stop others from judging us based on our speech, then acting on their judgements.
Imagine a CEO who never once behaves inappropriately at work, but on social media says that they have no problem with what Weinstein did (for example). Now how can subordinates not feel uncomfortable in that CEO's presence? Maybe we should say "tough", but real damage will have been done (to the company's brand, to its culture, and so on). The board of directors surely would have a cause to replace the CEO.
It is a fact of life that the higher one's social position, the more constrained (by the Overton window) one's speech is. But that's not the same as saying that speech is not distinguished from action. If there's an Overton window as to acceptable actions, it surely changes much more slowly than the Overton window for speech -- perhaps that's the real distinction to be made?
Do you think someone can really work effectively with their gay married co-contributors in this case?
Being inclusive is great, but you have to recognise that including certain people drives others away from the project.
Can an atheist work with a muslim?
In either case, the answer is the same: if the individuals behave professionally, yes.
If the married gay couple are the ones freaking out at work about my hiring someone who posted against gay marriage on his blog two years ago, they are behaving unprofessionally and should be let go.
If it is the anti-gay marriage advocate who is making snide comments about his colleagues at work (or, in the context of a non work environment, in a shared community forum), then it is he who should be excluded.
Can a Muslim person work with someone who believes the practice of religion should be outlawed and is working to make that happen?
There's no obvious delineation between belief and action and a the gist of what I was replying to was along the lines of 'can people work with each other even tho they have strong and significant differences in their beliefs or opinions'.
There's no way to even know a person's beliefs without some action on their part.
Take Brendan Eich – he donated to a group that was engaging in 'speech'. Are you claiming that all 'speech' is action? So how exactly is someone stating that they're a Muslim not an action in the same way? Are you saying it would be fine if Eich believed that gay marriage should remain illegal as long as he never expressed that belief in any way to anyone?
I don't believe I've made any assumptions about who is correct. I simply stated that there is a difference between working with someone who holds a belief, and someone who actively lobbies for that belief to be legislated. I think that's true irrespective of what those beliefs are, and the question of whether or not I agree with some specific belief or not is separate from "holding a belief" being distinct from "lobbying for that belief".
>There's no way to even know a person's beliefs without some action on their part.
Indeed, and this is one of the most vital distinctions between "discrimination" based on belief and aspect. You cannot not express your race or gender, or perhaps you can, but it requires expending significant effort. This is not true for beliefs, you can always not express a belief, even a strongly held one. I do it all the time.
>Are you claiming that all 'speech' is action?
I'm willing to claim that a donation to a lobbying group is an action. Would you disagree?
>So how exactly is someone stating that they're a Muslim not an action in the same way?
Does you being a Muslim convey any kind of information to me about the opinion you hold of me? Does you stating that convey any information to me? On the other hand, does you stating "I hate people with the username joshuamorton" convey any information? I'd say no, no, yes. That's the difference.
>Are you saying it would be fine if Eich believed that gay marriage should remain illegal as long as he never expressed that belief in any way to anyone?
I mean I absolutely do think that would be alright. I by no means think that people should be forced to express their views, so yes I would have zero problem with Eich choosing not to express his views.
I would expect so, yes.
Firearms are a huge part of my life, as is political advocacy for self-defense rights. I've worked with many people who disagreed with me on that issue to the degree that I expect that many people disagree with gay marriage. For the vast majority of them, it wasn't an issue.
Imagine you’re a gay man, happily married. You work at Mozilla.
Don’t you think it would be difficult to go into work, and report to your CEO, knowing that he had donated against gay marriage? That he feels your way of life has no place in America?
Mozilla is an outspoken champion of net neutrality, anonymity, free speech, open standards, and several other ideologies that emphasize freedom. How can you clap at an all-hands meeting when your CEO stands in front of the company and talks about the importance of these freedoms, while knowing that he also feels so strongly that your private relationship with your husband is so abhorrent that he thought it was a good use of $1000 to try to ban it?
If the liberals “win”, and guns are banned tomorrow, like they are in Australia, are you so committed to your firearm rights that you’ll consider moving to another country, or suicide because life just isn’t worth living? Do you think it’s ludicrous that gay people might consider those options?
Firearms are a choice. Being gay is not. Judgement against gay marriage is judgement against who you are. Judgement against firearms is judgement against a hobby.
Take the argument back 50 years. Do you think a white boss who donated money against equal rights could/would treat black employees fairly?
Imagine that you’re a gay employee at Mozilla. You’ve been gunning for a promotion into upper management, and someone else wins the position. Are you never going to wonder, “Does his skin crawl when we shake hands? Would I have won the position if my Facebook didn’t have pictures of me and my husband on it?”
Have you ever wondered if your love of firearms has impacted your professional career?
I get that it feels different to you - but I'm telling you in good faith that it doesn't to me.
> Don’t you think it would be difficult to go into work, and report to your CEO, knowing that he had donated against gay marriage?
Certainly. I've quit jobs because of similar issues. If someone feels about gay marriage the way I do about guns and the right to self-defense, it sounds entirely reasonable to me for them not to financial support people who actively work against their political interests.
> If the liberals “win”, and guns are banned tomorrow, like they are in Australia, are you so committed to your firearm rights that you’ll consider moving to another country, or suicide because life just isn’t worth living?
Yes. Five years ago when I was choosing a place to move from rural Arkansas to further my career as a developer, California, Illinois, New York, and several other states were out of the question because of their gun laws. Now that I'm more established, I'm moving back to Arkansas and a large part of that is the political climate here in Virginia.
Given the choice between disarmament and emigration, I'd emigrate. Given the choice between disarmament and death, I would fight. It's that serious of an issue to me and to far more people than you'd believe unless you've lived somewhere surrounded by people who share this view.
> Firearms are a choice. Being gay is not. Judgement against gay marriage is judgement against who you are. Judgement against firearms is judgement against a hobby.
Respectfully, you're completely wrong here. Firearms are not a hobby for me, they're symbolic of my entire cultural perspective. It is no more a choice than religious affiliation.
> Have you ever wondered if your love of firearms has impacted your professional career?
Of course it has. I'd be making significantly more money right now if I'd moved to San Jose, New York City, or even Portland.
---
I'm re-reading my comments above, and hesitating to submit them because I'm concerned that they might easily be seen as justification to lump me in with the GOP. Let me be clear about that - I don't consider myself a Republican, and I don't consider myself a conservative. I'm an extreme libertarian. I have no animosity towards homosexuals, and it doesn't matter to me how someone presents themselves or structure their personal relationships. "It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg."
The main point I'm trying to make is that online communities in particular are made up of people with drastically different perspectives on life. Some of those differences are obvious, but some are not. Some of them are expected to be respected while it's socially acceptable to disregard others out of hand. That's not right.
I think there's a very obvious difference:
(hopefully) Your views on guns and personal liberty are based on ethics and under the system you believe is ethical, personal liberty and firearms are important. You do not hold a code of ethics because it allows you to use firearms, but you believe you are allowed to use firearms due to the ethical system. (I may be mistaken here, but allow me to overstep and state that I'd find anyone who developed an ethical system to support their use of firearms downright scary).
For someone who is gay, there's nothing like that. They find different people attractive. No ethical systems to it.
In other words, "I love people of my same sex" is an axiom, "people should be allowed to use firearms" is a conclusion.
And why is that difference relevant?
I feel that I addressed that.
Why is a firmly held conviction less important than a physical attribute you are born with?
One thing though, having recently been in the Portland area I can tell you firearm rights are not as badly abused as the general Portland stereotype would suggest. Portland itself has a few silly gun laws, but Oregon as a whole has a decent CCW law which overrides those of the city. It's a surprisingly gun friendly place to be.
I respect that we live in a country where people have different political beliefs and we should engage with them. And I respect that a large part of the country feels strongly about owning guns. And I also understand that the Constitution has the second amendment -- and even though the first explanatory clause is invariably ignored by gun activists ("A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state") I leave it up to the Courts to make this decision. Incidentally, after McDonald vs Chicago it's likely that ALL cities including New York may eventually be forced by the federal government to allow open carry and concealed carry on the street!
That is why I upvoted this comment to counteract knee jerk downvotes.
To everyone who thinks Brendan Eich's support for Prop 8 is "different" than supporting a ban on guns, you have to ask yourself if you have a huge double standard.
It is not ignored, it is misrepresented and misunderstood by anti-gun activists, but I am not about to go into all the details of that here...
> Incidentally, after McDonald vs Chicago it's likely that ALL cities including New York may eventually be forced by the federal government to allow open carry and concealed carry on the street!
People with Licenses are not a concern, and should not concern anyone. Gun Violence against others is committed by criminals. Most "Gun Violence" committed by Legal Gun Owners is suicide which I believe should be legal anyway and not considered "Violence"
> I would make it illegal to carry guns outside the home / firing ranges / etc. because then we wouldn't have gun homicides the size of the Paris attacks every 6 days in the USA, even so.
Once you account for other sources and caused of Gun Violence (i.e the War on Drugs, and other government actions) the "threat" from legal gun owners is a statistical abnormality
If you want to reduce gun violence focus less on the tool (i.e the gun) and more on the causes of violence in general. Put that effort in toe Drug Abuse reform, decriminalization of Drugs, better mental health systems, reduction in poverty, inner city out reach and educational programs, about 1,000 other things that would be more effective at ending a lot of violence including gun violence than attempting to ban guns from law abiding people
Of course they concern people including myself! Just because someone has a license doesn't mean they won't do something stupid. That includes a license to drive cars. There are lots of restrictions such as speed limits, traffic lights and so on. And everyone is a "law abiding citizen" until their very first homicide.
>Once you account for other sources and caused of Gun Violence (i.e the War on Drugs, and other government actions) the "threat" from legal gun owners is a statistical abnormality
I am well aware that half of all gun violence is suicide, and I specifically exclude it from my estimates when I say that the USA has gun HOMICIDES the size of the Paris attacks every 6 days.
Just to be clear - mass shootings account for a tiny percentage of those, and the issue is not with assault weapons. It is with GUNS. More guns means more chances for regular people to get into spontaneous gun violence over altercations in a bar or on the street. Nevermind gangs and so on.
Yes I am NOT talking suicides.
My point, however, is that just as we are discussing things now, you should discuss about gay marriage and other things. And not just knee jerk fire someone when they don't bring their political views to work.
Really? Everyone is law abiding until they commit a murder...
>I specifically exclude it from my estimates when I say that the USA has gun HOMICIDES the size of the Paris attacks every 6 days.
It is completely absurd to compare a nationwide static about violence where many many many many individual events unconnected to each other occur to one organized event.
> Nevermind gangs and so on.
This is the core problem with your aurgument, France does not have the same Gang problem we have in the US, France does not have the same Aggressive Policing as we do in the US.
You can not simply "never-mind" the gangs, as the gangs are what account for the statistical differences between the US and France, if you remove Gang Related Homicides you get a comparable level of Violent crime between France and the US
>>>My point, however, is that just as we are discussing things now, you should discuss about gay marriage and other things. And not just knee jerk fire someone when they don't bring their political views to work.
I agree with this, Free Speech is under attack, not by government but by people that believe they have the right to not be offended, not be confronted with opposing views, to live their life in a echo chamber bubble where only people that agree with them exists.
When a Tweet or facebook post that some one finds "offensive" results in a national boycott to get an individual fired we as a society have lost all connection with the concept of Free Speech
Fine, if you want to be that pedantic before you address what I say, I meant "everyone WHO MAKES THEIR FIRST HOMICIDE is not a killer until their first homicide". So the phrase "law abiding citizens" doesn't mean you have "nothing to worry about".
>It is completely absurd to compare a nationwide static about violence where many many many many individual events unconnected to each other occur to one organized event.
It's not absurd at all if the other country (France) doesn't have gun homicides the rest of the time! And it's doubly not absurd when the President tweets this:
http://variety.com/2015/biz/news/donald-trump-paris-terror-a...
>I agree with this
So we mostly agree, but you chose to comment on the stuff we disagree on to pick a fight? :)
If you look at the criminal history and actions of most murders, homicide is not their very very very first crime. There is normally a pattern of behavior often time resulting in them losing their legal right to own a gun well before their first homicide
This of course does not apply to "crimes of passion" but Gun Control will do very little to prevent those murders it will just not be gun that is used to kill the person
>>but you chose to comment on the stuff we disagree on to pick a fight? :)
I am not picking the fight, nor did I bring gun control into it. I will however defend my right to defend myself using what ever tool I choose to including a gun. I will defend this right to self protection in all venues and at all times.
Important: disagreeing with or opposing a gay marriage law is really not the same as being against inclusivity, diversity, or gays. Some people will have both traits; the problematic (for lack of a less polite word) one is the latter, not the former.
This is a minor technical point that distracts from the main discussion, and doesn't really support the implication from your earlier comment that some gay people are against gay marriage rights. Saying method 2 is better than method 1 is not the same as opposing method 1.
What about outright opposing Method 1 because you don't think the Ends justify the Means? Even if you agree with the Ends? Even if you like Method 2?
I'm my experience, that gets me branded as a monster. I tend to keep my mouth shut.
The implication does not exist unless you want to put it there. I even added a second, longer sentence to emphasize that being against a particular law is not the same as being against gay rights. The fact that you insist the implication is there despite all that is precisely my point.
No adult should have to seek permission from government to form, codify, or have a relationship "recognized"
At most you should be required to file civil contract declaring a partnership has been formed between 2 or more adults, what the terms of that partnership are from a financial and property stand point, and should include a disillusion process.
That is a radical shift from what we have today, but "Family law" is a complete mess and needs to just be completely abolished and replaced with Voluntary Agreements and Civil Contracts outside the control of government.
The sexual organs don't have a pre-ordained purpose. The argument falls apart at the very first premise.
If the actual concern is that all of humanity will turn gay and then we will go extinct, well, it's safe to say I'm not too worried about that.
The parent's point about philosophical literacy is apropos here. Natural law and its underlying metaphysics is very technical and deep. It is definitely not falling apart by pointing out the obvious, that biology varies over time. In some respect, NL has dealt with that "problem" since the time of Aristotle. (For a start: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/essential-accidental/)
This may be true, but such endeavors must reconcile with modern scientific understanding one way or another, or they can lose validity/usefulness. I haven't seen any convincing efforts to do so.
Note, this would be less of an issue if they didn't make certain specific claims or rely on certain specific premises that the natural sciences directly touch. E.g. the "purpose" of sexual organs.
One relevant idea that has been growing stronger for me is that a philosophical endeavor needs some sort of strong, tangible connection to reality in order to have meaning or usefulness. Without such grounding, it is far too easy to end up with something that seems reasonable on the surface but may actually be nonsensical or illusory.
Even if he can manage to separate out his professional life from his personal life, that sort of belief poisons the well for people that have to work with him.
When those views become part of the public sphere they're put under scrutiny. Each person has their own individual limit for what they're willing to put up with, and a community in turn has a collective limit. There are some companies that might be more friendly, but I would imagine if you held an opinion like that in say, Seattle you might have a bit of trouble if it was well-popularized.
Actually to the best of my knowledge, it is the same, at least under US law. De facto discrimination is still considered discrimination.
This is difficult to discuss in the work place, because this makes it topical.
Yes.. But to be fair, adults are in short supply these days.
If gays wanted to prevent people who are anti-gay from marrying, then you might have an argument.
- marriage is a natural institution that the state recognizes (the state, technically, does not marry people)
- marriage is ultimately rooted in the intrinsic capacity (though not necessarily the successful exercise e.g. impotence does not render marriage invalid) for sexual reproduction and the complementarity of the sexes
Therefore, they hold that there simply is no such thing as gay marriage, and you cannot deny what does not exist.
Humans didn't invent gravity. This is why it is the same in the US as it is in Asia, as well as everywhere else in the universe.
Thus, gay marriage can easily exist. People simply have to believe that it is a useful abstraction.
When people with opposing personal views stop working together is when the problems occur. Echo Chambers and Mono Cultures lead to extremism in most instances. This is true no matter what your political or personal world view is.
Peaceful Collaboration in one area of life even with people that in other areas of life you disagree is essential to a functional society.
He was fired as CEO, not as CTO or any other technical position. The CEO is meant to represent the organisation. Denying rights to individuals goes against Mozilla's ethos and detracts from its campaign goals. Put simply, if the CEO isn't supported by their org then they are an ineffective CEO.
This implies Mozilla is intrinsically a political organization, because that’s an explicit stance on a political topic. I can buy your argument here about a CEO’s personal views being incompatible with their position, but it means we need to accept that the reason for that incompatibility is the organization must have political opinions.
Does Mozilla describe itself as a political organization anywhere? I can’t immediately find a statement of its principles/values.
Basically yes. Look at the "Mozilla Manifesto" ( https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/ ), some of which are quite political:
> 2. The Internet is a global public resource that must remain open and accessible.
> 4. Individuals’ security and privacy on the Internet are fundamental and must not be treated as optional.
> 9. Commercial involvement in the development of the Internet brings many benefits; a balance between commercial profit and public benefit is critical.
Mozilla violates its ethos and detracts from is stated goals all the time. From DRM Embedded in the browser, to Cliq Spyware, to the latest Adware forced installed on all users.
The idea that Mozilla is a virtuous organization fighting for the rights of the disenfranchised is long dead
1) those who don't know the time and place for their non community relevant outbursts ('meat is murder', 'homosexuality is a sin' are both irrelevant to 99% of tech or other industry community/work discussions) -- leave that for your vegan blog, or your church group.
2) those who are unable to behave courteously in the presence of someone they know holds differing views in some area they are passionate about. Just because I have read Jennys vegan blog, and know and disagree with her 'meat is murder' sentiment doesn't mean I can't work effectively with her.
People need to be able to separate their general leanings and passions from their commitments to a job or other community.
Choosing to to be apolitical is a political stance. It would be nice if we could magically divorce people's work from their stance, but their stance will affect how they treat their peers and juniors- this is how patterns of oppression become systems. If a person has beliefs that women are inherently less capable of work, they will be unlikely to volunteer women for promotions or even see their women coworkers as having performed the work done. If a person has beliefs that black people are more violent or thuggish, they are unlikely to view that black coworker asserting that a technology requirement is utterly stupid in the same light as a white coworker asserting the same.
I should emphasize these are not conscious, malicious behaviors. We are taught things about our peers and these teachings change our views on the context of the work of our peers. People rarely consciously, maliciously try to prevent the advancement of a disenfranchised group. Instead, their beliefs of that group prevent them from seeing that a member of the group deserves advancement.
People do not differentiate from the contexts of their pervasive views on how they view every other person around them. They do not cease being sexist because their workplace claims to be apolitical. It merely means they no longer have repercussions within their workplace for their beliefs, regardless of the countless absolutely unprovable ways these beliefs bleed into work.
White supremacists would argue that it is multiculturalists who seek the abolition of the white race through introduction of millions of high birth rate other demographics into white countries.
Pro-conversion therapy anti gay people would argue they are saving the individuals from mental problems, social difficulties, and other negative side effects of what they believe is a consciously modifiable behaviour.
"Racists" and "sexists" would argue that being aware of mean average behavioural differences in different demographics is not a negative thing.
However invalid these arguments may, or may not, be, it is not our job to attempt to generalise our expertise and judge anyone who holds a differing view.
Simple statistics says that there is at least one or two major issues which you are extremely passionate about, but simply mistaken. Same for me, same for anyone else.
That does not matter. As long as my opinions do not measurably affect my behaviour within a specific community, then it is not relevant. People should be judged by their individual actions within a given 'organism'/community/company/etc, not their viewpoints on tangentially related subjects shared with others in other communities.
Your logic is exactly what led to the exclusion of gays, blacks, communists, non christians, and other groups, in the 1950s and before.
You risk going so far in the other direction that you become exactly what you opposed.
A person can change beliefs about how you should treat gay people. A gay person cannot change their homosexuality to accommodate anti-gay people, and trying actively harms them.
" As long as my opinions do not measurably affect my behaviour within a specific community, then it is not relevant."
I am arguing that, in fact, opinions supporting the disenfranchisement of minorities affects the behavior of a specific community. Please see my previous example that someone who believes black people are inherently violent is more likely to view a black coworker asserting that a technical spec is stupid differently than a white coworker doing the same. Also see my previous example that a person who believes women are less capable in code is more likely to overlook achievements of their women coworkers.
I don't understand what you mean by my logic excluded other groups, and then you lumped in inherent traits (race, sexuality) with beliefs about how governments should form (communism). Race, sexuality, and gender are not leanings or passions. They are things that people cannot change about themselves, things that they cannot avoid the brunt of any oppressive belief or behavior regarding.
I think your claim here has a high likelihood of inviting a very unproductive (and potentially offensive) debate. I'm going to try to counter it in a different way while explicitly acknowledging this fact.
I think your focus in this claim is on the wrong subject. I don't think the parent's argument relies on your claim about the capability of changing beliefs versus sexual orientation being false. From my perspective, people have the right to personal beliefs which can be considered repulsive. People do not have the right to engage in violent opposition or oppression. I think that, if an individual is not actively campaigning for violence against another group, their personal beliefs about that group should be an inalienable right, no matter how ugly or wrong we think they are. If they are making people uncomfortable in the office, this becomes an issue of professional conduct, not one of personal beliefs. Frankly, I would consider virtually all political discussion one way or the other to be inappropriate in an office setting, and an unfortunate practice which only persists because generally only the opinions politically expedient for the organization are actually expressed.
If we step back from the problem of gay marriage and abstract this to opposing beliefs, it becomes very difficult to allow some beliefs and disallow others while retaining fairness and real diversity of opinion. We can stop people from engaging in violence against others or from using the office to discriminate against others. But we cannot cultivate an environment that filters out all the Wrong opinions while allowing all the Right opinions.
The point is that people's opinions always affect their behaviour (very often unconsciously).
Judge people on their behavior and results at work, not away from it.
Those examples indicate a violent agenda or an inability to separate private views from the workplace. That’s not the scenario the parent is talking about. The parent is talking about a situation in which someone has nonviolent, extremely opposite views from your own, and does not soapbox these sentiments in the workplace.
I submit that this isn’t a qualitative difference, it’s a categorical one, and that your examples aren’t comparable to “merely” politically controversial or unsettling opinions.
Is that an evidence based statement or supposition?
Might they be more likely to volunteer the women in their team for promotions?
If you like someone but think they are a bit useless I've found you tend to help them significantly more and try and raise them up.
This isn't necessarily true. People have for years been able to divorce personal or politic beliefs from their work and not let them impact their professional life.
Many (most?) religious believers believe that non-believers, or people of different faiths, will be justifiably tortured for eternity (or maybe just a really long time).
Obviously I was writing from the POV where it's not obvious what's correct (and indeed I personally don't think either belief is obvious).
If any of the religions that believe in hell is true, then the actual torture of conversion therapy is literally nothing in the face of divine damnation.
People are very bad at separating the personal from the professional. Indeed, many people seem to think it's their right to use the one to advance the other.
I felt alienated by that VP's comments. Not because of their contents, but because he felt so free to abuse his position.
I believe it can come from a good place, but it's at its heart a deliberate agitation step designed to create this friction. That's seen as a good thing, for now, until the prevailing societal winds decide to blow another direction, then we'll all realize it was a bad idea to force neutral parties into the fray.
I think it's perfectly fine to expect a gay man and someone who has antiquated ideas about gay men to be professionals, and equally fine to terminate either one if they can't be.
Probably quite relevant to his position as CEO of an organisation that employs (and would like to hire) LGBT people.
As long as his personal views don't impact his professional behaviour, the two are not connected.
When you frame his behavior the way you just did, you immediately position your perspective as right and the other perspective as wrong, but the parent’s point is that this isn’t relevant either way. His behavior was not expressed in the workplace, and he was not pushing a violent agenda. He doesn’t need to be correct in all of his personal views, he just needs to be capable of working with people of differing lifestyles, and he needs to segregate his own beliefs from the workplace.
I would add that for contributions outside of the community, they should be judged if they relate to that community.
For instance, if a a security expert, goes out to conferences telling people to use MFA, but privately tells people not to use it because it is "too complicated" that person would rightly be judged by the community. (Note: I mean they regularly make that reccomendation privately, not a one-off because they don't want to tell their grandparent to use MFA).
> The Mozilla CEO fired for his personal donation in opposition to gay marriage. (Again, completely irrelevant to his relationship with the Mozilla project).
This is complicated for roles like CEO, they don't have a specific _technical_ role. Their role is the define the vision and direction of the company. I believe that part of the CEO job to define the values and mores for the organization, if this is wrong, let me know as that is kind of fundamental to my point.
In that case, wouldn't it be right that that a CEO is fired for their values? Their values and what they want is the reason a CEO was hired at an organization. If the CEO's personal values do not match the values for the organization, it's a bad fit and they should part ways.
>This whole question really stems from a sad and pervasive tendency for 'intelligent' people to overestimate their general expertise
to
>Within a community, individuals should only be judged based on their contributions and value within that community.
and then justify that with
>Everyone is not expected to be right, or agreeable, about everything, with everyone else. Aiming for this is pointless.
I'm not sure you agree with yourself.
As much as you might like, you can't really separate some specific technical ideal of "value" or "contribution" from a person's actions on the whole. People are people, and communities are collections of people with human interactions and interpersonal relationships.
I'll also add that the false equivalence between excluding Allan Turning because he was gay vs. excluding people who express homophobic attitudes because they want to exclude people who are gay is just another way of stating "in order to embrace tolerance we must be tolerant of intolerance". Can we all finally accept that for the fallacy that it is?
As much as I wouldn't give any time to sociologists valuing Alan Turings genius within mathematics, computer science, etc., I'd have equally little time for mathematicians judging his sexuality.
The paradox comes from the fact most people (and it seems even more than most in this industry) believe themselves "special" or "above average" when in reality that can't be the case. You don't get to (or at least shouldn't) "buy out" of the social contract just for being spectacular (and again, odds are very poor as to whether you actually have anything unique to add).
This can result in tragedy, as in the case of Turning, or justice, as in the case of the laundry list of sexual predators falling from grace currently. Pretending everyone you disagree with is just "politics" ignores the fact that no man is an island and everything is connected. Once you realize you aren't special; the world/society doesn't owe you shit life will get a lot easier.
>>If I am deeply opposed <<a particular cause or ideology>> [but don't let it affect with how I interact with people in my role], but a fantastic coder, that should not affect my standing within a community that is entirely code focused.
Hollywood does not blacklist "conservatives". Hollywood (finally) blacklists people who have outright abused their positions, sometimes for decades, to rape women.
But if someone represents an organisation, whether internally or externally, their political beliefs are relevant; their actions are reflected as actions of the company.
Humans don‘t differentiate between personal and official life as much as you think they should, so unfortunately companies and organisations can‘t ignore what their representatives do in their spare time.
I disagree about the Mozilla CEO comment specifically. If something is antithetical to you and other community members, regardless of the original "purpose" of a community, so be it.
I just wish you could hear yourself. Were you writing in a different context, I'd think you were writing satire. It's the same reasoning that actual bigots used against people of different races: they had no rational reason to discriminate against them, but they had learned a massive, visceral backlash reaction, and rather than challenge themselves to overcome it, they just went with it and acted on it. Rationalizing away the cognitive dissonance, racism lived on. So, we got Jim Crow, etc.
Can people here just not imagine what it would be like to be gay and also be working for someone making political donations to anti-gay groups? Would you not think that would feel fucking awful???
This is in no way similar to a lynching, and one must be extraordinarily sheltered to find them similar.
He certainly was. I was there and I remember it very well. Twitter and the media went nuts, demanding he be fired.
> Serious questions about his credibility in adhering to values some people expected of Mozilla were raised
And Mozilla employees stood up for him, saying that he always treated all employees equally with respect and fairness.
> creating a PR issue for Mozilla which he was evidently incapable of managing. Mm
How would you suggest he should have "managed" it? Mm.
> This is in no way similar to a lynching, and one must be extraordinarily sheltered to find them similar.
It exactly is, and there's no need for you to turn to personal attacks against me.
Demanding someone be fired by the people with the authority to do so because you perceive that they are unsuitable for a particular role isn't lynching. It may be, in some cases, unjustified by he facts, but what makes a lynching a lynching has nothing to do with whether the accusations made are unjustified.
> It exactly is
I don't think you understand what a lynching is, because none of what you have described resembles one in any meaningful way.
I agree with this statement. A lynching is a lynching regardless of why it is done.
> I don't think you understand what a lynching is, because none of what you have described resembles one in any meaningful way.
I don't think you understand what a lynching is, otherwise you would recognize that a mob of people reacting emotionally to harm another person is exactly that. e.g. Webster, 1913: "To inflict punishment upon without the forms of law." That is literally what happened.
And he didn't get lynched; he just lost a job. Like so many gay people when they are outed. My sympathy for the guy is nearly zero.
I think his argument is: Everybody should do their work that is the purpose of the community. This is why they are member of the community.
He wasn't fired, he stepped down.
However, I see people's personalities informing how they behave in their occupation all day, every day. The notion you can subconsciously remove all of your biases before undertaking a project is, surely, inherently flawed?
We also deal with associations - the body of your work will be judged based on its context. Its context comes from who you are, what you believe, and your values (both work and personal based). Of course an artists' work will be looked at differently if they're a UFO believer or not. Of course people will question whether someone championing an inclusive organisation can really not support gay marriage. Of course people will look at the works of Roman Polanski through a different lens because of allegations. It's not enforced "political correctness" it's default behaviour of humans to make these links, correct or not.
Personally, I'm tired of the "leave politics to your political circles" response - politics has an impact on your worldview and thus influences your work.
I'm not claiming everyone should hold the same views, but the expectation that people with diametrically opposed outlooks on the world should "just get along" for the sake of a project seems absurd to me. It's why most companies have values, and is pretty much the only non-BS use of "company culture".
Replace 'outlooks' with 'skin color' and you can see why some people think that people should, in fact, "just get along".
There will always be friction between people based on their views - expecting everyone in a project to only be giving one part of themselves (only the bit relevant to the project) is ridiculous. I guess a roundabout way of saying you need to take people as the wholes that they are, not just cherry pick the parts you like and expect the rest to have no impact.
There is no way someone's skin color, in isolation, can impact me. If I know someone's views though, that means that they must have already taken some action that expressed those views.
That is empirically false, and one's skin color is never in isolation so its irrelevant. Everyone is subject to unconscious implicit bias (not just racial). http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-40124781
I'm specifically talking about how another person's skin color would affect me, not how I might change my behavior of them based on their skin color. Their skin color does not affect me. Their skin color might affect how I treat them, and my skin color might affect how they treat me, but their skin color does not affect me.
"I'm specifically talking about how another person's view would affect me, not how I might change my behavior of them based on their view. Their view does not affect me. Their view might affect how I treat them, and my view might affect how they treat me, but their view does not affect me."
It's no different.
Expressing their view took action, and their actions can affect me.
real shame we don't have a President Sanders...yes, really, oh yes I agree...
But if you think that "passive" political action (i.e just being present at a rally, not being a speaker) outside a community should not have consequences inside the community, i think i agree with you (for now, i don't have put much thought into it, my opinion is not definitive).
I think for most people, the lines are determined by the magnitude of the crime, but where those lines lie is a personal and communal preference. At what point is an injustice so great that it cannot be overlooked even in different contexts? And at what point is it so great that it cannot ever be redeemed in thr future?
No, but what does pedophila or rape have to do with software? You don't let convicted child molesters hang out with kids for obvious causal reasons but no such relationship exists with software.
Setting aside the question of "should Internet have reacted like it did" - the reality is that her employer had little choice, given the circumstances. Yes, it was "outside-the-community behaviour", but the business impact was immediate & considerable, I argue that for the employer there was only one reasonable/rational way to handle the crisis.
[edit] Or to take a somewhat extreme hypothetical example - I presume that if you found out that, for whatever reason, a prominent Mozilla exec was secretly funding anti-Net-Neutrality lobby (i.e "out of the community behaviour"), you would expect Mozilla to talk about it and "handle the issue", not just say that "sorry, his own money, his own personal time, he can do whatever he wants to".
What if you find out that the other other person supports strong enforcement of existing immigration laws? What if supporters of that policy are being labeled as a "white nationalists" by others? Is that really evidence of "white nationalism"? What if that person simultaneously supports significant changes to the immigration laws that would result in more legal immigration?
If the answer is no, I would kick them out just the same and that's ok.
People who are actively sharing white supremacist screed are not nearly in the same category.
Ex-cons have a shitty past. White supremacists are currently and actively shitty.
Here's an example situation: you know that a person trying to join a project related to managing money has a history of defrauding employers, starting mlm/Ponzi schemes, scamming people, selling personal information. Do you let them get involved with the project and wait until any problem occurs, because all the problems so far were caused outside of this community?
Exactly - a lack of trustworthiness can be demonstrated long before any crime has been committed.
> And how do you rehabilitate them without giving them the opportunity to participate in the community?
Your use of 'community' in this argument precludes there being an inside and outside, so it is not relevant to the question posed in the article's title. Furthermore, there is an answer - rehabilitation starts in environments where the risk is limited.
Authoritarian liberals seem to forget that what goes around, comes around.
I care about the security and correctness of the code. I only care about the author who wrote it if they are someone known for low-quality, insecure, or malicious code.
If Linus Torvalds is convicted of genocide and child abuse tomorrow I'm going to continue using Linux as usual.
If you're part of a group and a chunk of them decide to leave, there's no point saying "why do you care about X? It doesn't affect the group."
It's their right to leave.
The other side is that who you associate with defines that group. So if it was a murderer that wrote a file system, then the software project gets defined by that.
It becomes hard to attract contributors when the project gets defined by the actions of one of its participants. Project leaders then have to make a decision since inaction is also a decision.
There is a point where the shaming and shunning stops being useful and becomes bullying.
We see this all the time in politics worth people liking "their team" too much and denigrating normal citizens just for their opinions and choices.
I'm unaware of anyone ever making a decision about contributing to a software project based on secret police level surveillance of current team members political or religious opinions. Even classified DoD stuff I've been involved in isn't that creepy.
Its important to focus discussion on extremes such as murders when the actual goal is to make sure Republicans are unemployable.
I would not give their contributions extra attention (you should be suspect of all changes, regardless of the author) and I would not ban them from contributing unless they became disruptive or subversive to the project.
They served their time; you don't need to punish them further. They are probably even less likely to commit fraud when their employer is aware of a previous fraud conviction.
The worst fraudsters don't come with a "convicted of fraud" warning—they have evaded being caught and will seem just like any other contributor.
It is not about punishing them, it is about reducing the risk of others. Having served time is, at best, no indication of whether a person will revert to their former behavior.
> The worst fraudsters don't come with a "convicted of fraud" warning—they have evaded being caught and will seem just like any other contributor.
This is no reason for not using what information you do have.
Note: I see that you have edited your original post to address these points, but I think they still stand, as expanded on in the continuing discussion below. Your statement "they are probably even less likely to commit fraud when their employer is aware of a previous fraud" seems to be in agreement with what I have been saying.
- Small (and well scrutinized) patches from this person are fine
- At some point forgiveness is due, maybe 3 years is at that point depending on the severity of their backdoor