https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18061725
Another example: where I work, I recently took someone to task for saying "your shit is broken" in a very public thread. It's a phrase I've seen too many times at this company. Sure, it might just seem casual to a California millennial, no big deal, but it can come across very differently to someone from a higher-context and more status-conscious culture - e.g. most of Asia, and therefore a significant portion of our workforce. It can have strong and lasting effects on their willingness to engage with you personally, or with the broader community.
Am I saying that we should all dumb down our language to the blandest common denominator? F* no. The important thing is to calibrate your behavior to the environment. If you know the people you're talking to, and the subject of the comment is not personal, let fly. Knock yourself out. If you're talking to someone you don't know, in front of many others you don't know, and the comment could be interpreted as personal (hint: if "you" or "your" is in it), then maybe you should apply a measure of decorum and cultural sensitivity.
In fact, your attitude is highly patronizing and condescending, the fact that you don't see it, is problematic.
Linux Kernel was being run ok so far. Sure there were rants from Torvalds which went overboard sometimes but accept it as a quirk of the maintainer and move on. Including this COC is a huge can of worms though. Now you can be Brendan Eiche'd out of any open source project. When that happens, perhaps you'll be celebrating a win for your progressive values but a more real happening at that point would've been loss of good open source software which some of your pet minorities could have used.
Nor was I making you one. There's nothing patronizing about pointing out how language can affect different people differently. Surely you're aware that others do need and appreciate people who will use whatever advantages they have to help raise awareness of these issues. Please don't use your own personal good fortune to promote an agenda that prevents others from following you up the ladder.
Also, I'm not some super rich privileged person. As a matter of fact, I'm unemployed right now but privilege or no privilege, there's no reason to cripple good open source software which is already one of the most equalizing resources that has been produced by mankind.
Nobody is doing that. No one. That is not happening at all. I'm sorry, but people not being assholes to each other is not going to affect the quality of software in a negative manner.
(Unless of course you consider that patronising as well, in which case, my non-patronising advice would be: deal with it. Either way, I hope they'll still be able to make comments like the above in the future :) )
BTW, sarcasm is really helpful when dealing with non-native speakers. Your sincere concern for their well being just shines through.
To the extent it is politicized, it's politicized the way evolution and climate change are: groups who are politically opposed have opinions about the consequences of these studies. One or the other group sometimes finds empirical reality to be in conflict with the arguments they wish to make in support of their preferred policies.
There are typically many arguments for and against a particular policy, many costs and benefits. These costs and benefits don't hit everyone equally, which explains most of the difference in political opinion. One category of argument in the political debate is to claim that particular costs or benefits are illusory or of a different scale. The empirical evidence can show that this is false. This does not eliminate the debate. One would hope it would then proceed on different arguments, because denying empirical reality makes any resolution other than physical domination of one party by the other impossible. But even if it does, costs and benefits still fall unequally on the participants, meaning the political division remains. This difference in opinion is normal and legitimate.
[ETA I do not think it is pure coincidence that the group that believes it is more likely to win a contest of physical dominance is the one more likely to deny the validity of empirical evidence.]
https://www.thecut.com/2017/01/psychologys-racism-measuring-...
> exclusionary behaviour are the exception and most people abide by the golden rule
So the question for this has to be: when do you think the date was at which "most people" started to do this? Was it a mass conversion at the enactment of the US Civil Rights Act, or a much slower battle?
or TL;DR: bias is mostly a learned behaviour, with probably some inherent subconscious bias from our evolutionary roots.
The majority of people where at what times?
Does it actually matter why people hate, only that they do?
Your argument seems to be that all racism etc is systemic and structural, and therefore there's no individual responsibility?
Do you expect me to be an expert on the moral history of every group on earth? I'm not going to specify in exact detail, but my point is that I think people naturally default to ambivalence and have to learn (or be taught) to mistreat specific groups of people.
> Does it actually matter why people hate, only that they do?
Yes, it matters if you want to do anything about it.
> Your argument seems to be that all racism etc is systemic and structural, and therefore there's no individual responsibility?
Yep, pretty much. Or at least, most racism. Individuals are responsible for forming the opinions but to make any real difference you need to take away the reason they formed the opinion.
If you want to reduce oppression at scale, you need to address the systemic issue. Do you think a racist hates some set of people arbitrarily? Or do you think he might have a (obviously invalid) reason to hate them, such as feeling they are a threat, are inferior, can be exploited, are ridiculous and so on? Dig down into those reasons and I believe you will find a systemic root most of the time. Obviously that person shouldn't hold those views, but how are you going to address the problem? Attempt to force everyone with a bad opinion to change that opinion? Or do you address the reason they acquired the perception in the first place, meaning that the next generation has less reason to discriminate? I think the latter is more viable.
This is hard for me to wrap my head around, because in almost any social or work environment I've ever been in, cis-white-hetero-males make up a small subset of the population.
If I'm in a room full of (in my case) people much posher than me, and they all treat everyone in the room as they wish to be treated, that can easily create an oppressive atmosphere. Also, if I try treating them as I wish to be treated, and can easily be seen as a troublemaker.
Now I try to treat people as they wish to be treated (within reason).