Open Letter to the Linux Foundation | Hacker News Reader

Open Letter to the Linux Foundation

blog.cleancoder.com

572 pointsanujbahuguna603 comments

Here is the thread for more context: https://twitter.com/nebrius/status/1191821800302206976

I spent maybe 40 minutes last night trying to find out what Charles did that violated the CoC. The best I could do was find this: https://twitter.com/sarahmei/status/1187181890920312833

It seems like he was kicked from the conference for having the nerve to make a youtube video with his opinion.

If someone can show me something more significant... PLEASE... because i've been searching, I just haven't found it.

Sarah Mei has been involved in this type of attack before, so this raises alarm bells to me that she's at the center of another. I fear she's becoming a massive influence towards this kind of Stalinistic attack.

Good thing Sarah "shut the fuck up" Mei is here to police conduct.

Let me give an example of the kind of 'motive imputation' attacks she leads on a regular basis: https://twitter.com/sarahmei/status/1073251153360482304

This is exactly parallel to her current tweet which LF responded to.

Live by Twitter, die by Twitter.

oh my god, they are complaining about an acronym DDD, because it somehow sexual (not being a native english speaker, I fail to spot the innuendo). If there's anything to complain about ddd is the name clash with Data Display Debugger, a really cool debugger for linux.

I wonder about the callous ignorance of Sarah Mei, who purports to be a feminist but ignores such an important program written by another woman.

> because it somehow sexual (not being a native english speaker, I fail to spot the innuendo).

In the US, DD is a cup size for a brassiere, and thus indirectly refers to breast size on women. DD for sometime has been considered to be an uncommonly large breast size for a woman, especially a woman of otherwise more common proportions. DDD, being the next cup size up for reasons I don't understand (instead of cup sizes going E, F, etc), would therefore imply a woman even bustier than the supposedly uncommonly-busty DD-breasted woman.

Yes, I think it's silly, too. Human mammary tissue has exactly fuck all to do with programming.

That's an unreasonably huge leap for the audience to make that connection.

I wonder if the d3js project is next in the firing line

Can we just cancel javascript?

Can the letters "JS" be conflated with some other concept that offends someone who is inclined to make a stink on twitter and has a lot of followers? It could happen...

Unfortunately we'd probably just rename it something less offensive like ECMAScript.

“Later, in an effort to cash in on the popularity of Java the language is renamed JavaScript. Later still, in an effort to cash in on the popularity of skin diseases …”

As somebody else pointed or, that's the explanation Sarah Mei gave on Twitter in the past.[0] The tweet about them discovering "3D" is on point.

[0] https://mobile.twitter.com/sarahmei/status/10732511533604823...

She's not going to care about that.

"DDD" seems unacceptable, however "CoC" is. Go figure.

http://events19.linuxfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/...

if at least they were consistent bullshitters, but their stuff is mostly random

But in most of the world, DD Cup size is followed by E Cup, not DDD. Like most SJWs they taken an American-centric view of the world, which is apparently bad when others do it, but acceptable when they do it.

I'm so sick of this cancel culture bullshit. Didn't they learn about sticks and stones as a kid? Honestly, so many people these days need to eat some concrete to harden the fuck up.

"SJWs" "need to eat some concrete"? You sound like a wannabe skinhead teen. Your veiled calls to violence should have nothing to do with / have no place in coding culture.

This is a great example of SJWism.

Your amerocentric view of the world assumes that because we speak the same language we have the same culture. We do not. In my culture, telling someone to eat concrete is not taken literally. Its not a call to violence. Its a way of telling someone they need to increase their mental fortitude, that being upset because someone said something you didn't like is not a productive way to go through life.

I am not American. And the meaning of the English language does not change with your culture, which, I might add, does not get transmitted in writing. I am responding to your words only. Eat concrete is crass and violent. You can hand wave all you want. Try conversing without ad hominem labels and insinuations.

Surely, one obvious way to fix this, is that we need to start a petition for changing the name of dd utility

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dd_(Unix)

what a shitshow that would be

I’m still struggling to find the context for this whole thing. Where did you find DDD mentioned?

I believe it was a mis-reply intended for this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21485640

Ok, we've moved it to be a child of that comment rather than https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21486331.

This reminds me of some post by an SJW-type who complained about a makeup company printing the word “black / negro” on their mascara because it was somehow racist.

It’s easy to laugh at the sheer stupidity of that tweet. But imagine you wanted to use Domain Driven Design (or the Data Display Debugger, or the dd utility, or the D language) at an organisation that employs this person... and you get fired for it.

But all of this is on all their permanent records and when the pendulum swings the other way, they will have ample time to reflect.

Someday this type of thing is going to have a very clear connection to loss of a job or contract and someone is going to learn the term tortious interference. Then find themselves writing a bigger check than they thought they would be when they woke up that day. Paired with a groveling public apology.

Here is a Reddit story about some non-native English speaker getting fired in California over a variable name:

https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/dpcfns/i...

A large proportion of the more interesting and shareable stories are creative writing exercises. This is almost certainly one.

But that clearly must be a joke. Isn't it?

No; unfortunately, this isn't cherry-picked. Unlike with the accused this topic is referring to, Sarah Mei has lots of history you can scroll through. Another incident involved her attacking an author regarding a book on 'software craftsmanship' because - she claimed - the word 'craftsman' was definitionally sexist.

https://twitter.com/sarahmei/status/990265064866308096

Okay, now I saw two of the craziest things I ever saw today. Thanks, that clears it up for me.

The Linux Foundation seems to be a broken organization.

In that thread, there's a comment, "it's why we call them firefighters, not firemen"...

As someone in fire and EMS, around here, among us, including the females (this area has quite probably the highest proportion of females in fire and EMS in the country), there is an inherent pride in the title 'fireman', regardless of gender.

To us it implies "I don't 'fight' fire. I am a [man] of fire, who intrinsically understands it, lives and breathes it, and knows how to master (uh-oh) it".

Here in Wales all the female firefighters refer to themselves as “firemen” too, and proudly.

> all the female firefighters

Good for them! I'm personally agnostic about this, but you sound as if you know them all and you know what they think. It can be tricky to separate ones perception from reality.

By "all" I mean it is the norm. You could perhaps find one who didn't in Cardiff.

If we are going to change the name for "fireman" - the profession, we need to change "human" to something more appropriate like "homo idioticus" (i realize it sounds both homophobic and ableist), so does anyone have better ideas?

This kind of holier than thou, "fuck you I'm right", "you have no say because I say so", "I'm marginalized because I say so therefore my opinion trumps yours" attitude should be shunned and laughed at, not embraced and empowered. She's acting like she speaks for all women and they're all made out of glass. Somehow these people get away with equating sexual or lewd jokes as anti women, as if women couldn't possible make the same kind of jokes. Not saying that's whats going on in the DDD case though, but that's her angle of it.

Unfortunately, this kind of extreme SJW mindset seems to be winning ground in the name of inclusion by scared useful idiots. Tech used to be a relatively sane area where logic and accomplishments was what mattered, now you need to kiss these lunatics asses unless you want to be painted as a horrible person that hates everyone but white straight males.

It reminds me about how several of the subreddits for lesbians have been taken over by transsexual women that ban lesbian women if they argue about not being attracted to penis[0]. Saying you're against MtF transexuals competing against regular women in sports labels you as a TERF[1] and persona non grata in some circles, and those circles are gaining power.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueOffMyChest/comments/ddv8ep/lesb...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TERF

I'd like to point out that this isn't all trans women and some of us realize this takeover is absolutely insane. A lot of us want to blend into society and not cause any hardship to others, or any destruction of projects like this. Social Justice is going way too far.

Because of these grifters I don't even want to identify as transgender any longer.

> Stalinistic attack

Was Stalin known for unfair, politically biased code of conduct enforcement? Sorry, I don't see the need for hyperbole here. Even in context, yanking a ticket from KubeCon is hardly the same thing as being purged from the government, tried for imagined crimes and sent to a Gulag.

It is in line with the categories of the accusations made in that time. This is effectively a loyalty accusation: by seeking to mediate, he has shown himself to be insufficiently committed to the cause of racial and gender justice, which consequently means his motive must have been to defend the racist.

Yeah, but "making loyalty accusations" isn't exactly what Stalin is known for. He's known for a brutal purge that sent his political enemies to death camps.

To Godwinize for clarity: this is like using "Hitlerian" to celebrate a public policy achievement in passenger rail scheduling.

It is at the core of the worldview and ideology he espoused. The actions he is known for flow out from that ideology.

In this case I suppose "Stalinist" is a metonym for the apparatchiks who enforced ideological purity in institutions and made sure that deviants got punished.

Maybe it'd be more accurate to call it McCarthyist.

There is nothing more significant, their stated reason was "tone policing":

https://twitter.com/cmaxw/status/1192261086810116096?s=20 reply

Note that "tone policing" is only an offense when non-SJWs do it. When SJWs do it, it's known as "calling out" and should be encouraged. Example: https://lkml.org/lkml/2013/7/15/329

Punishing him for "tone policing" is like nailing Al Capone for tax evasion. Charles Max Wood's actual crime was being associated with John Sonmez, some brogrammer with a propensity to mouth off. In Scientology terms, he had an SP in his vicinity making him a PTS, and refusing to disconnect from the SP despite a direct order from his E/O meant he had an SP declare issued against him.

(Understanding Scientology will give you major clues into how social justice operates.)

Note that associating with John Sonmez is an unforgivable crime, but saying "white men in tech ain't shit" or "all whiteness is racist by design", as Kim Crayton has done, is not. This is because an often unstated assumption of codes of conduct is "we prefer the safety of marginalized groups over the comfort of privileged groups". (The GNOME Code of Conduct explicitly states this, almost verbatim.) That is to say, racism, sexism, and harassment are CoC violations if they are seen to "punch down", but not if they are seen to "punch up" by the CoC commissars who deliberate in secret. This is why Uncle Bob's letter will go unheeded. If action is taken by the Linux Foundation because of his letter, it will be against Uncle Bob himself for posting it. He suggested that legitimate actions taken against one who punches down are harassment, which is itself punching down, therefore harassment and a CoC violation.

> Charles Max Wood's actual crime was being associated with John Sonmez, some brogrammer with a propensity to mouth off.

Not saying you are wrong, but if that is indeed the case, then someone should come out and say that out loud.

Right now, having a person banned for no clear reason what so ever, only creates uncertainty and division in the community.

Edit: Having looked into it, "John Sonmez, some brogrammer with a propensity to mouth off", actually seemed to be trying to take the heat away from a woman being verbally abused and attacked on twitter.

One can obviously argue about the way he did that, but how on earth does trying to defend a woman make him a "brogrammer"? Your position seems somewhat biased.

I think Sarah Mei should follow her own advice & stop center herself at every conversation and opportunity.

He did not do anything.

The first offense is from his twitter account:

>Latter Day Saint (Christian), Conservative

The second offense is that there is a picture of him with a MAGA hat somewhere on the Internet.

That was enough for someone to say they're uncomfortable attending the same conference as him. Because he is a Mormon, he tried to solve the issue the Mormon way, offering them to discuss the issue. This was considered "tone policing" by the anonymous "Linux Foundation" account.

The raging assholes enforcing this fake social justice nonsense must be unambiguously called out by anyone with half a brain.

> The raging assholes enforcing this fake social justice nonsense must be unambiguously called out by anyone with half a brain.

Hear, Hear.

Cancel culture. Note how they don't persecute prominent people/leaders. They go after those who are more vulnerable.

What a time to be alive!

This has some very interesting parallels to the current drama at Stack Overflow w/Monica Cellio. Someone is accused of breaking the CoC. The governing body expels this person in a public an explicit way. Looking into the details shows that really that person was just not following $GROUP_THINK.

In Stack Overflow's case this seems to be headed towards a Slander/Libel. I hope we don't end up in a world where this is the only way to follow $GROUP_THINK.

> Someone is accused of breaking the CoC. The governing body expels this person in a public an explicit way. Looking into the details shows that really that person was just not following $GROUP_THINK.

Note that this is pretty much what you would predict if CoC's were inherently politicized statements, as much as a MAGA hat. Which is exactly what opponents of CoC's have been contending for a long time.

>Which is exactly what opponents of CoC's have been contending for a long time.

Sure, they can contend that all they want - funny how their actual actions are far more revealing than their words.

> if CoC's were inherently politicized statements

Aren't they, though, if it happens that what CoC's say align much, much more with one political group than another? This obviously implies that the latter group believes in conducting themselves quite differently than the code mandates, and they need to suppress those beliefs (or at the very least, not act on those beliefs) while engaging with the group whose code it is.

The problem is, Does the majority of the developers contributing to Linux believe in this code? Or is it forced upon them by political activist that doesn’t do much coding because they spend much of their time on ‘social justice‘?

Even with a majority, you've got some percentage having to deal with what the majority wants, which is a heavy dose of irony if the point of the CoC is blanket inclusion in the first place. The conclusion is that inclusion itself excludes those who don't like inclusion, and excluding that group is warranted, isn't it?

An inherent aspect of a CoC is that minority interests are protected from the tyranny of the majority.

The goal should be to increase the overall effectiveness of the group, and avoid marginalisation or exclusion of any potential contributors.

They don't have to be, though. It's just this particular one, the Contributor Covenant - which was written and propagated by online social justice activists - happens to be the CoC organizations are increasingly being asked/encouraged/pressured (depending on the organization) to implement.

I personally don't think the idea behind a code of conduct is bad at all, or that formally banning gender/orientation/race/etc.-based harassment and discrimination in open source projects is bad. It's just that the Contributor Covenant creators and advocates seem to have a much wider and stricter stance on what falls under that category than what I personally agree with, and some of them have a history of launching what I consider unjustified McCarthy-style witch hunts towards people who otherwise share a lot of their views.

And I think a lot of other people who don't fully agree with all of their positions are kind of forced to keep quiet about it and just enforce what's increasingly becoming the status quo. The people not afraid of the backlash and who openly oppose it are often pretty right-wing and tend to spend all day lambasting SJWs on Twitter, or whatever, which is often much further than what an average CoC-detractor may be trying to do. The more right-leaning you are, the more likely you are to be honest about your opposition to it, which over time makes left-leaning people less honest about their opposition to it. They don't have a good middle option. Like what all the other polarization in the culture is causing, a left-leaning person who isn't fully on-board usually has no good option but to capitulate.

> They don't have to be, though. It's just this particular one, the Contributor Covenant - which was written and propagated by online social justice activists - happens to be the CoC organizations are increasingly being asked/encouraged/pressured (depending on the organization) to implement.

I've heard/seen multiple accounts of anonymous drive-by commenters saying something to the effect of "I've noticed you have no code of conduct, and there are several pull requests by PoC that you have refused. You might want to consider adopting the Contributor Covenant." A sort of stealthy protection racket: "Nice project you have here. Wouldn't want a discrimination lawsuit to ruin it all."

I suspect the anonymous commenters are either Coraline Ada Ehmke herself, or one of her lieutenants.

> And I think a lot of other people who don't fully agree with all of their positions are kind of forced to keep quiet about it and just enforce what's increasingly becoming the status quo. The people not afraid of the backlash and who openly oppose it are often pretty right-wing and tend to spend all day lambasting SJWs on Twitter, or whatever, which is often much further than what an average CoC-detractor may be trying to do. The more right-leaning you are, the more likely you are to be honest about your opposition to it, which over time makes left-leaning people less honest about their opposition to it.

I'm left-leaning, and I'm sick of this shit. I've gotten downmodded here on Hackernews and elsewhere for it, and I'm kind of glad to see that others on various communities not related to Kiwi Farms or the alt-right are starting to come around. Back in the day, open source was the closest thing around to the promised cybertopia of AT&T commercials. It wasn't all holding hands and getting along, but you learned to grow a thick skin, focus on technical concerns, and -- with a bit of learning and practice -- be a bit nicer. I've seen Christians, Muslims, and atheists, people on the left and right politically, collaborate in this way. And it's being ruined by this sort of entryism. Open source (the Linux development process in particular) was built to be resilient to sabotage by government agencies and corporations. If I were just such an agency or corporation and I wanted to undermine or destroy open source, I would be paying very close attention to, if not actively exploiting, social-justice entryism because it seems to have found a weak point.

CoCs are always political.

CoC always are about promoting a specific moral framework, one where traditionally marginalized people are protected. So yes, going against that framework is going against the CoC.

> CoC always are about promoting a specific moral framework, one where traditionally marginalized people are protected.

What people have been "traditionally marginalized" in the world of FOSS, which now needs protection which will not be afforded to others?

As I see it, most CoCs are heavily biased political tools, weaponized by default to exclude anyone who disagrees with them.

As such they promote group-think and discourage diversity. Any forward thinking individual should naturally be opposed to such regression.

>Hi all, We have reviewed social and videos and determined that the Event Code of Conduct was violated and his registration to the event has been revoked. Our events should and will be a safe space

Could we try to be less orwellian? Are we really banning people who say things we don't like on YouTube?

Does this count as a social credit system?

No. A private venue or organization having rules of conduct does not count as a social credit system.

Aren't financial creditors also private institutions?

Yes, but I don't see the relevance. The use of the term "social credit system" is intended to imply an system of political oppression and censorship similar to that used by the Chinese Communist party, and further to create fear of the implied radical leftist/progressive agenda assumed to be behind codes of conduct by associating them with violent authoritarianism.

Being banned from a private venue is an expression of the right of free association. It is not a violation of anyone's rights, because one does not have a right to attend a private venue. It is not a form of political oppression or censorship, because one does not require attendance at a private venue to express one's political beliefs.

Therefore, because the rights of banned attendees have not been violated, nor their speech suppressed, nor has any violence been imposed against the banned attendees, or critics of the code of conduct, said code of conduct is not equivalent to the policies of the Chinese government or a social credit system.

Call it secret consumer score, it's the same thing.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/04/business/secret-consumer-...

"Right of free association", sure. So by that token, businesses should be free to refuse to "associate" with anyone for any reason. Guess what, that legitimizes racism and discrimination.

I used agree with (and sort of still do) the sentiment of private discrimination. The logic goes like this...

1. People should be able to control their own business 2. If they reject a group of people for a given reason, they can 3. Businesses that done reject this group will gain more business. (Both from the newly released group, and from patrons who are not rejected but are against the discrimination) 4. The rejected people could start their own business as a competitor 5. Discriminatory people/businesses are immediately identified.

It seems like it could just work itself out, but in Patrice I'm not sure.

Maybe I'm using the wrong verbiage, but I don't see the difference. If the "rules of conduct" extend into your personal life outside the venue, how is that not the same?

Demonstrating a lack of ethical values in personal life seems like a good measuring stick to whether one might demonstrate ethical values in a professional setting. But more importantly, how can participants interact with any event or process of an organization if they cannot trust those involved?

That sounds like a social credit system. Good behavior raises credit, bad behaviour lowers it.

> how can ... If they cannot trust

Bravery?

If someone says they're going to bomb an event on Twitter should they be banned? Yes, everyone agrees.

If someone says they're a race realist and that they're going to make fun of all the black people in tech should they be banned? Not everyone agrees.

If someone analyzes IQ studies about race realism to highlight the flaws in methodology but doesn't outright condemn race realism should they be banned? No, everyone agrees.

To claim that its 1984 because we're trying to work out the fuzziness in the middle is absurd.

OK, but to imply that the response to the "fuzziness in the middle" should be the same as the response to an extreme violation is also absurd.

Huh, that's not where I'd have assumed those lines were.

* Yes, everyone agrees

* Almost everyone agrees on this one

* Not everyone agrees, but the public consensus seems like they'd probably be banned.

I guess we just live in different filter bubbles.

If in one context someone expresses beliefs I find odious but they do not say odious things or behave improperly in another say tech conferences I think they ought to be able to come to a conference and talk about tech.

I don't say this because I want to help odious people but because I don't want other people judging me.

People have many different beliefs and it ought to be sufficient to respect one another rather than agree on all points.

What if merely not denouncing trumptards with sufficient vigor is sufficient to paint me as undesirable.

That's a fair fear to have and these are difficult questions.

But take what you advocate to its logical extreme: what if I say it'd be ideal if all minorities would die of terrible diseases to "cleanse" tech/the country/etc., but without calling for direct violence. It's an opinion. Would you be OK with me speaking at a conference and being given the associated prestige?

I would be totally OK with listening to your technical presentation. I'm not concerned with your other opinions. Or rather, I refuse to be forced by others to be concerned with your other opinions.

I'd listen to quality presentation on a technical subject that interests me even if the presenter was Hitler or Pol Pot.

I don't think I like the opinions of this Sarah Mei on Twitter, but I'd happily listen to her talk on another subject that does interest me.

Exactly this. And Robert Martin has made similar sentiments clear in prior discussions with her.

Would you still be as comfortable listening to a technical presentation by an advocate of violent ethnic cleansing of minorities if you yourself belonged to a targeted ethnic group?

Would you still be ok listening to “a quality presentation by Hitler” if you were Jewish and your grandparents died in the Holocaust?

Not the parent poster, but probably in a similar boat because I would be ok listening to "a quality presentation by Sarah Mei" even though I am considered a member of a group I have a creeping suspicion they would be quite happy to send to the "showers" if only the political climate allowed them to - and I'm very glad it doesn't! - and already had a number of relations get hounded out of society by their associates.

(Yes to the Hitler question too.)

Yes to both questions.

Hitler would have to be presenting something really outstanding to make it worth my while. Hitler and Pol Pot are extreme examples of mass murderers, of course. I'm resorting to such hyperbole to make a point: I'm not going to deny myself access to helpful information just because I can't stand the person offering it, nor do I believe it is reasonable to ask others to do so.

Operation Paperclip is a good example of this principle in practice involving actual Nazis.

Do you think your jewish, black or lgbt peers, for example, would answer the same? Would they also be comfortable with your "resorting to hyperboles to make a point"?

I'm not sure, I'll have ask if they're interested in Mein Fuhrer's Modern client side Javascript tutorial and get back to you.

Allow me to answer this question for you: As a Black man in tech (my skin crawls every time I have to make this clear i n these types of discussions because I absolutely DESPISE identity politics) I would answer the same. There, you have an answer from someone who's opinion carries more weight in this context because of the color of my skin. Also, Canada's great grandparent comment was less hyperbolic than yours.

Do you think Jews want the world to forget Hitler?

I'd wait for Hitler to finish presenting and then get a rope and hang him until dead. How we deal with extremes can be revelatory but often just muddies the water. For example here it introduces multiple novel elements that aren't present in the original example. The need for justice, personal threat, emotional involvement that nearly always destroys any hope of rational argument.

More importantly in America it can't be a moral crime to vote for the wrong side else we can't continue as a republic. Our country requires the ability to have regularly scheduled revolutions without being torn asunder.

The Republic is dead, there is no credible path forward that's going to continue it, in part because one side has stopped accepting the results of our "regularly scheduled revolutions" if they don't win. Which perhaps not counting G. H. W. Bush has been steadily more clear with each Republican Presidential election victory starting with Nixon before Watergate.

Sarah Jeong was actually _hired_ by the New York Times after tweeting the kind of vile language you are mentioning. So clearly it's not a problem for everyone. But I understand it's a whataboutism argument.

So my position is that organizations and individuals should, generally, be free to speak, and free to organize as they see fit (including hiring, or not, someone). Because it's the best way to minimize conflict.

I would agree with you, /except/ that we should also then hold organizations to their own standards, because if they violate them, it indicates that their proclaimed standards are disingenuous, and are covering for some other reason.

> If someone says they're going to bomb an event on Twitter should they be banned? Yes, everyone agrees.

What? No, not everyone agrees! That someone should be arrested, but keep his Twitter account. We have laws and law enforcement for a reason, and we don't need companies to play speech police, which, incidentally, in this particular case, would make law enforcement more difficult.

> If someone analyzes IQ studies... everyone agrees.

Unfortunately, you're wrong again. Some radicals would want you banned for merely using the word "race", regardless of context.

> What? No, not everyone agrees! That someone should be arrested, but keep his Twitter account. We have laws and law enforcement for a reason, and we don't need companies to play speech police, which, incidentally, in this particular case, would make law enforcement more difficult.

Exactly what I was thinking. And frankly, I'd rather have someone post "Imma shoot up ur confrence" and get arrested because of that post than have them avoid Twitter and instead, yaknow, actually shoot up the conference.

Who needs laws when you can just ban people from using an ATM if they disagree with the values of a bank?

Banning 1/3 of the nation who voted for a horrible person from every participating every again in social society in any venue right thinking individuals run doesn't seem like a grey area. Twisting "safe space" to mean a space free of people who hold bad opinions instead of a space in which you can expect to share your thoughts without being treated poorly again doesn't seem very grey.

> Could we try to be less orwellian?

I feel like we’re on track to having to sign a sworn affidavit that you’re not a Republican, and don’t support any Republicans, to get a job, renew your driver’s license, rent an apartment, get a checking account… it sounds ridiculous, but did where we are now just a few years ago.

I am surprised you feel that way in a time where much of our government is controlled by Republicans, including the presidency. I think I understand why you feel that way given how localized politics can be, but I would counter that it does seem unlikely the 50+ million registered Republican voters will be made homeless and jobless by the government they presently control.

Not all Republicans, just the ones in tech.

Plenty of leftists in tech who dislike identity politics too who would be at risk for cancel culture. Sarah is a radical centrist.

It's important to recognize that the ethical concerns with the current administration go far beyond the scope of simple politics. That's the fundamental issue at stake here. Are we willing to hold the line on ethics, while our political system is in turmoil. The political sphere may be willing to look the other way, but that does not mean our private intellectual organizations have to follow suit.

I think that means insisting on civility in our gatherings. Speaking out both in public and to the people we interact with against what is wrong.

I don't think it is served by trolling peoples internet history to discover if they ever committed any thought crime. Our country will be better off the more MAGAers either age into the grave or get off the stupid train. Keep in mind that many of them are already decent citizens in the way they comport themselves in their lives, in the way they treat the people they interact with. They have just bought into a moronic ideology and will vote to enable further stupidity that will hurt their fellows in a way they would never due if given that straight choice between good and evil directly.

Isolating that person instead of communicating with them is a missed opportunity that serves only to signal our virtue to our fellows. It is a choice to enhance our social status instead of our society. It's positively trumpian and it plays right into his hands by making that person more isolated and thus more vulnerable.

Doing the right thing is hard. Do it anyway.

> I think that means insisting on civility in our gatherings.

That's tone policing and a CoC violation. Marginalized groups have the right to be incivil.

This is where the logical insanity really begins to play.

Your ideology is constructed in order to grant 'incivility' (the moral permission to commit violence) to people based on whatever parameters are useful at the moment.

It's a horrendously incoherent worldview, and will shake itself to pieces.

People used to force gay people to do that

How the on earth did the kernel community allow these parasites to become arbiters of morality? And where is Linus Torvalds? He surely despises this nonsense as much as anyone.

Since Linus owns the Linux trademark, it seems it would be simple for him to step in by saying "Stop doing stupid shit or you are no longer the Linux Foundation". But maybe he can't do this because of this stupidity:

"The “Linux®” Trademark

For information regarding the Linux trademark, owned by Linus Torvalds, please see the Linux Mark Institute (administered by The Linux Foundation). Your use of the Linux trademark must be in accordance with the Linux Mark Institute’s policy."

It's clear the Linux Foundation has been given too much power. Whenever a group of people get too much power or money, someone in the group, almost by definition an asshole, will abuse it.

Every event organizer is the arbiter of morality within their own events. How else could it be?

Removing someone who behaves improperly or has a history of same is one thing. Removing people for thinking improperly is another.

I'm not sure why this is a hard distinction to grasp.

This SJW policing really sickens me. Brendan Eich, Curtis Yavin, Donglegate, "sexist" t-shirt astrophysicist, RMS, now this guy and who knows how many less prominent ones. And the problem is that it's so widespread. I don't know of any community which isn't infected by it.

And really, what can you do about it? If you are not already set for life you can't afford to step out against it unless you are willing to risk your livelihood.

Putting Yarvin in the same clause as Donglegate is a little gauche...

Yeah, Yarvin is a genuinely highly controversial figure who's one of the leaders in neo-monarchist and neo-reactionary philosophy. One could imagine there being controversies like this about him 20 years ago, before the current political climate. He knew what he was getting into.

The others are basically just people who were unfortunate enough to be saying the "wrong" thing in the wrong place at the wrong time.

His philosophy is crazy and most people consider it either laughable or offensive, but he was supposed to be giving technical talk about Urbit, so I don't see a reason why his philosophy should matter in that.

Just curious, are you set for life? If not, do you think you are risking your livelihood by leaving this comment?

He's probably hoping to remain anonymous...

My intuition is that Cancel Culture operates a lot like the Drug War. The vast majority of non-PC speech and illicit drug use skirts by the Eye of Sauron without getting caught. But every now and then some poor bastard has his life ruined because he's in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Saying that Cancel Culture doesn't do harm because people aren't afraid to wear a MAGA hat, is like saying the Drug War doesn't do harm because people aren't afraid to drop acid. Regardless of what percentage of people are caught, it's unjust to destroy someone's life because they put the wrong substance in their body or the wrong idea in their mind.

I was in no way suggesting that cancel culture isn't harmful.

>what can you do about it?

Never apologize.

My personal opinion - keep politics and religion the fuck out of the IT community.

I personally love building, coding, etc. I rather watch two people argue about emacs vs. vim; I vote vim. Or spaces vs. tabs; I vote spaces.

Remember the days when you could sit at work building something for your customers without having to hear about someone's political or religious views?

Pro Tip: Treat politics and religious like bedroom talk. Keep it out of the work environment. Leave it for the bar/pub, with your friends or on social media.

Now real talk - tabs vs. spaces? ;)

As IT becomes bigger, it inevitably attracts politics. Linux plays a big enough role in our society to attract all sorts of evil people. If you own a gold mine, you also need an army to protect it.

It's always had politics. It just used to be run by communists, anarchists, and libertarians. Then money got involved, and now it's run by social justice warriors.

That's the scary thing. He left it on social media and they went out and found it and used it against him. I 1000% agree with how you feel about it but this is a big issue when people go looking for someone's faults in their personal lives or past to try and publicly ruin someone's reputation.

But for real talk - I prefer tabs. They feel cleaner and you don't have to count. It's just one button and you're done. Who want's to push spacebar that many times?

Now I'm going to find your github account and comment on every line of code that has a tab! lol

Take back the tab comment and we'll be okay! ;)

You don't understand these zealots. They will crawl your entire online presence, from Twitter to Reddit to Facebook, and use everything against you.

Well, then maybe people ought to disregard it when someone is wearing a MAGA hat, or bringing politics up in any other way. Because not doing so will only lead some people to do it more often just to spite them.

If it has no effect, people stop doing it (same applies for overt racism, actually). If you want politics out of IT, then just ignore it. That's what they should've done, instead of calling it into everyone's attention like they did.

Hmmm, so exactly the thing that so many people said would happen has happened? Surely not!

CoCs are not laws. The purpose of laws is to define what is allowed by what is explicitly prohibited and by these being all that is prohibited. CoCs on the other hand are an ill-defined subset of what is prohibited that is selectively enforced for political goals. They do not bring any of the benefits of codified laws. They do not clarify what is and isn't allowed since they are so general that none of those who wouldn't grasp these rules intuitively would grasp them after reading a CoC. I see no value added by CoCs, only potential for abuse.

When Linux adopted the Contributor Covenant, it's author had this to say

> I can't wait for the mass exodus from Linux now that it's been infiltrated by SJW's Hahahah

> Some people are saying that the Contributor Covenant is a political document, and they're right.

Well the suspicion is that Linus's daughter Patricia got pulled into Coraline's stuff (she's listed as a signatory in https://postmeritocracy.org/).

"got pulled into"?

This explains everything. Linus himself is wealthy, doesn't report to anyone, owns a good chunk of shares in a few infra companies and can safely say f--k you to the SJW crowd. But he has a weakness - his kids and family.

Isn't it more likely that that just is and was her genuine position? Linus's daughter doesn't necessarily have to have the same political views as her father.

She likely has very different views. https://opensource.com/life/15/8/patricia-torvalds-interview

This explains a lot.

He wasn’t wrong on the second, it is very evident that it is.

Is anyone surprised by this? I certainly am not. It really is inevitable.

When the whole CoC was shoehorned in the Linux Kernel, many people warned that this was going to happen. We were just hand waved with "No such thing would happen" because the people behind the CoC were not racist, etc, despite when the previous events like the whole opal mess indicated otherwise.

The really ironic thing here is that America(and Silicon Valley) was built on historical events like this. A whole lot of geniuses and skilled people were driven to America by similar groupthink lynchings happening in Europe and Asia up until and including WW2. They built America into a powerhouse. If this continues to happen then Silicon Valley is going to get a painful history lesson they could have easily avoided.

> It really is inevitable.

Has there ever been an instance of a CoC being used in a reasonable way against an actually unreasonable person? From the history, it appears that CoC’s were designed to stop Linus Torvalds, specifically, but he’s still around (but he does seem to be afraid of CoC enforcers now).

> Has there ever been an instance of a CoC being used in a reasonable way against an actually unreasonable person?

Yes. Though, most CoC violations are handled privately for those involved so we don't hear much about them.

Yes.

[citation needed]

Part of a typical process is that these things are handled privately. Only the rare exceptions go public. That means those that know or can reference cases cannot share this detail. I would provide a citation if I could but I respect the privacy of the process so I can't.

The problem with this is it's the same argument that gets used to justify things like the Patriot Act. "The only times you see us use this power is in horrible ways, but we assure you, most of the time we use it for good reasons! We just can't tell you about it, because CLASSIFIED". In short, it's an argument that only works if you already trust the person making the argument.

IMO that shouldn't fly with the Patriot Act, and it shouldn't fly here either.

Shouldn't the ones handled publicly be handled with greater care given the scrutiny?

I remember watching randyben get banned from Kiwicon one year. It was very public. They said his talk violated the CoC without specifically mentioned which part and how. It was very public, announced in front of the whole conference.

> Yes. Though, most CoC violations are handled privately

That really sounds like abuse of power with extra steps. Either ALL of these violations should be private or NONE of them should be. Selectively enforcing something like this is just bias and vendetta politics

I think that a reasonable code would allow the punished party to publicly disclose their punishment, otherwise the punishers (for lack of a better term) would do whatever they wanted. But it should be private by default.

So maybe the expected outcome is merging of HR-SJW positions and NDA-CoC so that "everyone" can feel safe

I believe that many CoC violations would include private events which the victim would like to keep private. After all, there's a good reason why we don't make all the police reports about harassment public.

Sure but in those situations most like the CoC's like we are talking about (things like the contributor covenant) would not be need to remove the person that was abusive

I have been a part of many projects with out these types of CoC's where people have been removed from the project because they were an asshole, or the project is forked and the assholes are left behind

Historically that was the way of open source.

Today however it is much different... Politics and Social Status seem to matter more than Code, merit, and reality

I'd turn it around. Has there ever been an instance of a CoC being used in an unreasonable way against an actually reasonable person? There's been a few cases that blew up because the behavior fell into an arguably ambiguous zone, but I can't think of anyone who suffered real consequences and didn't have it coming. Just a little more tact and thoughtfulness on the offender's part would have saved a world of trouble.

Now I'm of two minds on this. I do sometimes miss the more freewheeling culture of the '00s, and feel like the need for constant compliance has drained the tech scene of some life... but honestly it's a small price to pay if the only alternative is tolerating fascists in your midst.

>Has there ever been an instance of a CoC being used in an unreasonable way against an actually reasonable person?

Said instance is the only reason this thread exists, no?

Absolutely.

I served on the exec board of a non profit org that used our CoC to adjudicate behavior (sexual predator, harassment, etc) that was not covered by our bylaws.

One big difference, why our CoC proved useful, was we had a trial. Plaintiff, defendant, evidence, testimony, jury, deliberation. All of it.

It was a lot of work. And EXTREMELY painful. But it worked. A popular leader had a day in court. And our org emerged stronger for it.

No such thing would happen" because the people behind the CoC were not racist

Read their tweets, many of them are openly and proudly racist, sexist and ageist.

>Read their tweets, many of them are openly and proudly racist, sexist and ageist.

Are they really? Or do they just dare to hold views that have nothin to do with sexism, agism or racism but instead just violate the "proper" political orthodoxy?

do they just dare to hold views that have nothin to do with sexism, agism or racism but instead just violate the "proper" political orthodoxy?

Well let’s see, what do you think about using “old”, “white” and “male” as pejoratives? No one ever seems to have violated a CoC for it.

FreeBSD - Randi Harper. Who ran an online anti-harassment support organization:

> you fucking suck

Changed her Twitter name to "Kill All Men".

Drank coffee from mugs with things like "Male Tears" on the side.

https://slate.com/human-interest/2014/08/ironic-misandry-why...

https://www.reddit.com/r/freebsd/comments/3z2sbe/randi_harpe...

etc.

“Joking” about killing all men to make men feel uncomfortable is still clearly harassment.

Especially when they don’t permit the “joking” excuses to anyone else.

Here's my personal litmus test:

If you replace one gender with the other or one race with any other race (etc, etc) and the new sentence is offensive, then so is the previous one.

Is kill all women offensive? Then you obviously shouldn't say kill all men.

Oh, I absolutely agree - my original comment was perhaps ambiguous. This was the hypocrisy of someone who actively advocated for CoCs to be introduced even as she was actively harassing people who didn't fit her world-view.

It is the lifecycle of great societies. It starts with a small group of independent thinkers who are less susceptible to mimicry, leaving the larger status quo. Then it becomes successful. Then it becomes the mainstream status quo. People who engage in mimicry (scapegoating) become the majority.

Bad times make hard men

Hard men make good times

Good times make soft men

Soft men make bad times

And so the cycle goes

My natural inclination is to agree and stand against this stuff which superficially really does look like hysterical moralism.

The thing that stops me and almost makes me side with the CoC crowd is that I've spent the last 8-10 years watching a wave of fascist and hyper-reactionary ideology sweep across hacker culture.

The existence of so much actual fascism, race nationalism, Naziism, ideological misogyny ("red pill" and "incel" stuff), etc. in so many corners of hacker/geek culture make the hard core SJW crowd look like they have a point. The stuff that revolves around places like Gab and /pol/ makes the craziest examples of "call out culture" and "cancel culture" look sane and maybe necessary.

It's like this.

Say you're in Salem. Say you're horrified at all the witch hysteria. Now imagine you go for a walk in the woods and come upon a circle of people chanting and sacrificing babies over a bonfire...

Hmm... now maybe those witch hunters have a point!

I feel a little like that.

What I really think is that everyone on the right, left, and just about everywhere else lost their damn minds for some reason starting about 2010-2012. The MAGA hat crowd and the "cancel culture" crowd are all insane and this is all crazies fighting with crazies.

This install is totally borked. Format and reinstall the OS.

I do feel the need to point out that the kennel CoC isn't involved in this particular episode at all...

The problem is poor governance.

Everyone has the right to appeal, sue for injury, etc.

Any entity acting as judge, jury, and executioner is the problem. Secret laws, secret courts, secret rulings are the problem.

Suboptimal CoC's are not (even remotely) the problem. Broken laws, policies, rules, procedures can be fixed. If we have proper governance.

We know this.

The two are tightly coupled. An intentionally vague CoC permits gaps throughout the governance system.

If CoC's were specific, they'd be called laws, rules, procedures.

CoC's like the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence exist to capture values, principles, culture, intent.

You're not exactly helping the case that this whole 'governance' is flimsy, a facade over arbitrary application of power.

What?

Which side are you on?

Pick a side.

I used to think The Great Filter as one of the explanations to the Fermi Paradox was just nuts - but sadly the last several years in particular have shown how it's absolutely possible. Apparently civilizations can be too successful.

Then again I suppose one shouldn't be too surprised; it would be easy to argue that Rome fell mainly because it became too successful and turned inward onto itself - much like many parts of our society are - the need for a letter like this to be written is proof there.

We don't live in a civil society, we are only at the beginning of a civil society. ~ Jacque Fresco

Uh, this imho sheds light onto another completely different but bigger issue:

Certain people or organizations, due to their size (organizations) or influence (people/organizations) become some sort of judges in moral topics and the problem here is that they usually have backgrounds in other stuff, have not been elected by anyone (often times they just start screaming louder, and people follow) and do not apply any form of fairness to the accused.

There is no form of due process, no hearings, just attacks.

This is not justice.

And let me be clear: this problem is beyond the specific political tone of this specific case, and happens on both sides of the political spectrum.

People just start throwing accusations at each other, and who screams the louder and/or manages to get more attention wins.

It's scary.

> Certain people or organizations, due to their size (organizations) or influence (people/organizations) become some sort of judges in moral topics and the problem here is that they usually have backgrounds in other stuff, have not been elected by anyone (often times they just start screaming louder, and people follow) and do not apply any form of fairness to the accused.

Indeed. And how far does this go? What if banks, or grocery stores, start denying someone services because they were the subject of social opprobrium? A conference is not quite the same thing, but it is still a means by which some people are able to derive their livelihoods.

They already do. Some, for example, refuse to allow gun shops to use their clearance networks.

I heard an interesting idea today. "Boomers" have been criticizing "young people today" for being "snowflakes". It might be the case that with their fresher perspective on technology and culture, the younger people realized the perilous path involved in taking action now. Older, less savvy people are being caught unaware of the ramifications of certain types of speech and action in the modern world.

New ideas come and go.

Most of the "free love" generation came along thinking their parents were squares and that they were creating a new, better society. Drug overdoses and HIV turned that ship around quick.

Maybe it's more accurate to say that the better ideas resist change.

Entrenched ideas resist change. Some of the worst ideas in human history have been the ones that have stuck around the longest. It took over a century to adopt the heliocentric model which was centuries after Aristarchus of Samos first proposed the idea.

Ptolemaic cosmology was hardly a bad idea. It was the simplest model that fit the available evidence for a long time. The Heliocentric model didn't really make sense until Newton's theory of gravitation was developed.

https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-great-ptolemaic-sma...

Makes me wonder if there are any nutty ideas today that are right but seem to not make sense because we are missing a vital piece of theory that would explain how they work.

Dark matter and dark energy come to mind.

Those are more like the crazy complex epicycles in Ptolemaic cosmology. They point to something seriously wrong.

I'm on the fence about the revisionist view that the Ptolemaics were rational at the time, but in a way its optimistic. I have always been suspicious of the "only people in the last 500 years had brains" bias. I wonder if all ages have had that bias?

>I have always been suspicious of the "only people in the last 500 years had brains" bias. I wonder if all ages have had that bias?

This is an incredibly interesting point to consider. I would like to say that yes, every age had this kind of a bias, but perhaps that's not true. Life was rather similar during the time of the Roman Republic and the beginning of the Renaissance. The daily life of average people, their wealth and tools weren't that different. They certainly have much less difference then the difference between the start of the Industrial Revolution and today. Perhaps people in previous ages didn't have this kind of a bias because they didn't see such a huge change in people's lives?

One thing that we seem to be adopting as a society is the idea that we need some kind of reasonable evidence for our beliefs. Usually this means that evidence based on the science of nature prevails, but we haven't really been able to push this onto all areas of life. I certainly think that we've managed to cover more fields than in the previous ages though.

Once I gained a sense of how deeply, horrifically stupid most people are, a lot of my questions about historical populations clicked into place really seamlessly.

Looking at the way most people (including most I know) approach both factual and moral questions, there's no belief in history that seems implausible, from chattel slavery to the humors theory to epicycles to the Inquisition. Most people really don't have the capacity to believe anything but what their social environment tells them to, and it's much more productive to consider the incentives and available information of the narrow few who are capable of doing so.

Some of the ancient justifications for heliocentrism included "fire is awesomer than earth"

> It took over a century to adopt the heliocentric model which was centuries after Aristarchus of Samos first proposed the idea.

Hindsight is always 20-20

I think many young people, including those referred to as "snowflakes" are hardly being cautious with their online behavior, or what they say to people.

They gave rise to Snapchat, knowing that they'd want to control what went on the record. Now they're the first to figure out the new rules of public communication.

Boomers were criticized by their parents for being soft and lazy.

To be fair here, back in the 1990s, when Usenet was king, one common FAQ said words to the effect that “you should never post anything online that you don’t want to be published on the front page of The New York Times”.

There’s a reason why I deleted my Twitter years ago; it just is not possible to have civil discourse and well-made arguments in 160 characters (or whatever Twitter’s limits are these days); instead it’s like a bunch of chimpanzees throwing poop at each other.

Scott Alexander recently posted a long entry where he, among other things, misses the kinds of long winded rational arguments places like talkorigins.org had over a decade ago:

https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/30/new-atheism-the-godles...

As a young person, I have to say I agree with the "boomers". People are way too thin skinned and find excuses to become offended.

Freedom of speech and the ability to have different opinions is infinitely more important than people's feelings.

It's a mistake to classify ethical norms as politics. We just happen to be living in an of era populism where rampant unethical normalization is masquerading as politics.

A honest look at society forces us to recognize the trade-offs that exist between values. Politics is how we negotiate conflicting values.

Fighting over ethical norms is actually a pretty good definition of politics. Or one key aspect of it, at least.

Exactly, people saying what is happening with Trump "politics" is really out of touch with what is going on. This is a fight for America, it is not politics.

A fight for America, and a fight for what it's values are is exactly what politics is about. I mean, politics isn't really about voting about the color of a bikeshed; rights of people and ethics and how we negotiate large swathes of population having conflicts is the core of politics, and only when there's a consensus about the big things (which is not the case today) then "politics" becomes arguing about trivialities.

At no other time in history have so many American considered just voicing support for a democratically elected leader is some kind of hate crime. It's honestly a little fucked up.

How about try talking to that person, having a conversation, finding out that maybe, hey maybe, you actually agree on a lot of things? We did that in the Bush era, and that man's administration (Cheney, Rummy and Wolfie mostly) wanted to start a war with every nation in the middle east (and did get a pretty good start .. a start that Obama kept growing on mind you).

When you classify everyone as "the other," you are no better and maybe a little worse, because you don't allow yourself to listen.

In other words, the other side should accept us, regardless of our politics, because that's human thing to do and politics should not interfere with normal human endeavors. But we are OK to exclude the other side because it's beyond politics, those guys are just pure evil.

I hope you are smart enough to recognize it can't work this way. There always have been politics and it was always "fight for America". Even before there was America, actually. If you want to have any civil society, you need to learn to engage with people who disagree with you. If you can't, both sides lose.

>happens on both sides of the political spectrum

Can you provide any examples to support this?

There appears to be a sizable segment of society that is unwittingly expanding their definition of politics to encompass civility and human decency. To treat them as if these are somehow merely political opinions, rather than the foundations of professional ethics. We're living in an era of political extremism and populism, and it's going to clash with everyday and professional life. This is not the fault of those holding the line of ethics. It should be seen as a wake up call that the things being touted as opinion and politics are actually far outside the realm of normal. And while this is somehow being tolerated in the political sphere, there's no reason to expect that to be the case in smaller more intellectual areas, such as the Linux Foundation.

Have you considered that maybe it might be the other way around? Issues which where formerly just a matter of political opinion are now being presented as moral issues, and that as a result anyone perceived to be on "the other side" (regardless of any nuances present in their actual opinion) must be a dispicable human being who deserves whatever consequences they receive for their iniquity.

(And before you counter with an extreme example of a truly dispicable opinion, consider the context here: is what Mr. Wood said here in any way comparable to the example you're about to give?)

No, I'm quite certain that people deserve to be treated with equal dignity and respect regardless of their gender, sexual orientation, race, national origin, or disability. Perhaps in the past this masqueraded as a political question, but it's too late to put that cat back in the bag. If we're sophisticated enough to hold a conference on the future of open source service orchestration, surely we have it in us to call a spade a spade and keep our conferences safe from bad actors.

I agree with you. But if you're going to call a spade a spade, you should be able to describe its spadery. In what way is this banned individual a bad actor?

No one has been able to specify any evidence. I'm tracking any dead ends I run into when asking for evidence under the hash tag: https://twitter.com/hashtag/LinuxFoundationKangarooCourt

What privilege to insert oneself into an organization that exists because of the hard work and dedication of others, fix a problem that didn't exist by harassing the powers that be into accepting a set of rules you've imposed, and then begin using those rules to retroactively punish anyone you don't like.

The people who should be blamed for this aren't social justice types. They're just doing what they do. It's the spineless leadership of these organizations that allow interlopers to destroy that which was built by others as an exercise of their new power.

at first it wasn’t clear if younwere talking about uncle bob inserting himself or the linux foundation insert thenselves.

Spineless? KubeCon uses a system of racial preferences when giving out free tickets [1]. The leadership isn't spineless, they're evil and they believe in this stuff.

(Hell, they also have preferences for gays, as if they're a marginalized or underrepresented group. That's batshit crazy.)

[1] https://events19.linuxfoundation.org/events/kubecon-cloudnat...

>Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s diversity scholarship program provides support to those from traditionally underrepresented and/or marginalized groups in the technology and/or open source communities (including, but not limited to: persons identifying as LGBTQ, women, persons of color, and/or persons with disabilities) who may not otherwise have the opportunity to attend CNCF events for financial reasons.

This is so confusing to me. What if you don't belong to an underrepresented or marginalized group but also don't have the opportunity to attend CNCF events for financial reasons? What if you do belong to such a group, do actually have the money to attend, but lie and say you don't so you can easily get a free ticket? If they're going to help people because of financial issues, why does it matter if they're, for example, homosexual or heterosexual? Just because you may face other difficulties in life due to being homosexual that you may not have otherwise faced if you were heterosexual doesn't mean your lack of money is somehow more real than a heterosexual person's lack of money.

If they want to provide support to such a person, why not donate a percentage of the proceeds to LGBTQ organizations, for example, instead of letting them attend when someone who didn't share their birth characteristics but is otherwise in the same position can't? To use an extreme example, a gay person born to poor parents in San Francisco probably has a big leg-up in life over a straight person born to poor, meth-addicted, petty criminal parents in Idaho (accounting for cost of living differences etc., so the poor SF family has more money in total). Why not make the scholarship uncontrollable-attribute-blind and just make it based on financial need, or a combination of financial need and open source contributions, or something?

To LGBTQ HN readers, how do you feel about policies like these?

(Also, I don't think is at all "evil", as the parent said. Just baffling and ideological.)

It's done while shouting about "post-meritocracy" too which makes me think it's a selfish way for unskilled people to insert themselves into projects and make claims about being contributors

Regardless of what he did or didn't do (I don't have any information on that), I find the phrase "we have reviewed social and video" concerning.

What does that have to do with the event and its code of conduct?

https://events.linuxfoundation.org/about/code-of-conduct/

> Individuals who participate (or plan to participate) in Linux Foundation events should conduct themselves at all times in a manner that comports with both the letter and spirit of this policy prohibiting harassment and abusive behavior, whether before, during or after the event. This includes statements made in social media postings, online publications, text messages, and all other forms of electronic communication.

Thank you for providing the source.

That sounds incredibly far-reaching.

It sort of is but it basically just means they can ban anyone from their events at any time for any reason--and they pretty much have that right anyway CoC or no CoC.

Are the participants of the epic flame wars of the 90s immune from retroactive CoC violations or is there a statute of limitations?

I'm sure that policy is enforced in a fair and totally non-arbitrary fashion— have they banned Linus Torvalds from their events? He's "tone policed" way harder than this guy.

I regularly see posts that are...intense...on this forum, and many others. They make anything that Wood did seem pretty tame.

I guess any organization has a right to do whatever they want with their hosted services, but you might ask a certain Ms. Streisand about how certain small issues can blow up.

There's a good chance that Mr. Wood will suddenly see a great deal of rather...strident...support, as a result of this. Robert Martin is pretty cool, but not everyone is Uncle Bob.

Now I know a thing about this Wood guy that I would never have known without UB's complaint. It does not, in fact, inspire me to lend him support, or even the clean socks I am led to guess he lacks.

Another result of UB's announcement is that I have noticed Uncle Bob, appropriately or ironically, shares initials with the infamous Undefined Behavior.

One of the features I really want in both Facebook and Twitter is the ability to mark people as enemies. Starting with a small number (eg 100x) of friend/enemy labels, they can use graph analysis algorithms to infer my level of friendship or antagonism towards everyone in the network, following the ancient principle that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. It would be very helpful for me to be able to click on a new person's profile and see how aligned we are. After all, I don't want to go to parties with my enemies, I don't want to work for companies run by my enemies, I don't want to contribute to projects initiated by my enemies, etc, and I assume my enemies feel the same way about me.

Strongly agree. "People you may have blood feuds with"

In Steve Jackson Games' card game Illuminati (probably the most accurate model of online communities today) the fanatic is the opposite of the fanatic.

This, btw, is why I have separate twitter accounts for my silos of interest: my fellow programmers don't care about the non-tech podcasts, I follow, my politics, my religion, my hobbies, and especially my views on Star Wars -- I have separate accounts and separate social circles for each of these topics. I'm surprised so many people use just one account for everything because any two people, selected at random, can find a reason not to like each other. I prefer to keep a tight focus.

But it feels natural, too.

The reality of our lives well before internet is that we don't speak the same topics, or not the same way, whether we're at work, or between close friends, or at home, or in public, etc.

We have 'circles' or 'domains' in our social lives.

That's the one thing Google+ did right, by the way. The one thing 'groups' features are just abysmally bad at modelling in online environments – despite e.g. RPG having solved those mechanics 20 years ago. I think it's on purpose, because blurring those psychological lines somehow must yield higher ROI, in some way or another.

I keep one account for everything because I want to draw people who are like minded to my circle. I don't want to hide that. I am who I am.

But are you, really? As an amateur radio operator my interests and social circle have almost no overlap with my interests and social circle as a programmer, and almost no overlap with my interests and social circle politically, religiously, etc. in a very true sense I am several different people at once and if my hobbyist self manifested at work to the exclusion of all else the best I could hope for is that I be asked if maybe I should take a day off and rest. I don’t expect to find people who overlap with more than one of my interests but am overjoyed when I do. I can’t imagine being a bigger jackass than to manifest all of my interests to all people at all times and express a “this is who I am, take it or leave it!” attitude. The greatest joy in life is finding a good friend or even best friend who shares three or more of these interests. Heck, our spouses don’t always share more than two!

We, the people, should just make a new Linux Foundation and new FSF. The current ones are clearly broken. Postmeritocracy my ass.

Or even a more broad software development community that strives for fairness and well-thought guidelines instead of the current ones.

It’s ironic how the excess of political correctness is distancing people more than the original problems PC was aiming to solve.

There is a twitter feed where more is discussed, this is a good starting point:

https://twitter.com/CHERdotdev/status/1190404796924268544

This is the person and comments he is discussing:

https://twitter.com/mimismash/status/1185942308769976320

For anyone who sees this: the link is being flag- and vote-brigaded, rather than being discussed, about an hour after it was listed. The same conduct that spawned the letter is being applied here to attempt to mute dissent.

Alright, I've spent a couple hours trying to figure this out. Correct me if I'm wrong here. Asking the "woke" individuals on twitter what Charles did wrong will invoke a response of "F you do your own research it's obvious what Charles did wrong."

Man A said something racist to Woman B, Charles then stepped in and said "let's have a reasonable phone call and sort this out civilly." What gets more interesting is Woman B has at least one tweet saying "White men in tech ain't shit." So she's definitely racist. edit: (could be wrong about who is who here, but someone involved in getting him banned definitely said the white men in tech comment.)

Charles is getting this hate because by saying to the "Obviously racist" man A, "lets have a civil phone call about this," He's obviously siding with racists instead of siding with the marginalized minorities. (sarcasm)

Charles is getting tons of comments that he should shut the F up and listen to these marginalized groups instead of trying to butt in and make himself look good. Charles is Mormon, 9 Mormons were just burned alive in Mexico, so obviously Charles has no idea what it's like the be a part of a hated, marginalized group.

edit: Sorry it's hard to tell, I'm definitely being sarcastic in parts of this post.

Opinion here, I think people on twitter are working very hard to turn "differing politics" into "unacceptable bigotry." And it's definitely working. It seems the original racist guy mainly has a problem with affirmative action. And he definitely doesn't use current politically correct speech around gender either. But is that grounds for banning a dude just for associating with the "racist guy". I'll leave that up to the reader to decide.

What is happening to the USA? I am honestly more scared for our country because of the current pervasive political divisiveness than I am because of climate change. At least with climate change you have a few decades to prepare. The USA wasn't anything like it is now 20 years ago in terms of divisiveness, and it seems like the divisiveness is getting worse every year. A "cold civil war" I've heard it called.

> 20 years ago

It wasn't even like this 4 years ago.

It's almost like something really divisive happened within the last 4 years or so. I can't imagine what.

You bet - the political elites got thoroughly rejected and the resulting temper tantrum hasn't stopped yet!

The next five years should be even more exciting.

EDIT: we really need to stop referring to them as political elites; that's giving them too much credit. The wannabe political elites then - because obviously they weren't as elite as they thought - ha!

Somewhat less divisively: what ought to have been a routine democratic election took place which a lot of people invested a lot of emotion into. It’s hardly the first time a world government has had a political upset, but it does seem to be the first time a significant segment of the population lost sight of the fact that democracy only works when everybody accepts the results, even if it wasn’t the result they voted for.

I don't believe your assertion that it was the losers who didn't accept the results. The person most prominently questioning the integrity of the election was the winner. He spent months putting out strange lies about about "3 million invalid votes" and opened an advisory committee to investigate election integrity. He's only escalated it since. A couple of months ago, he claimed that the 2016 election had 16 million fake votes.

Stacey Abrams

Did she say something about Trump's election being illegitimate?

I don't think that outweighs the literal years of the RUSSIAN COLLUSION nothingburger, if you're going to talk about bogus investigations.

One of those two investigations produced 34 indictments, convictions, or guilty pleas (one of the indictments is on trial today!). The other accomplished nothing but disbanded itself after a judge ordered that the Democrats appointed to the committee should be allowed to see what the committee was doing.

One of them was headline news for years on end before fizzling out after it became evident that it didn't even come close to the supposedly imminent impeachment of the president. The other was a minor thing that nobody really took seriously and ended years ago.

"Well, other than 34 indictments and convictions, it was a nothing burger..."

"Well, other than the interruption, Mrs Lincoln, how was the play?"

I mean, I was argumentative AF on facebook as long as 8 years ago.

Maybe you missed donglegate six years ago. These people aren't new, but they seem to be gaining in numbers and influence.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/03/how-dongle-jokes...

This is why I moved out. Look up the DAFT.

Don't try to logically think your way out of issues that weren't logically entered into in the first place, it's pointless.

These folks don't want to resolve anything, they just want to point at a "bad guy" and have them be harmed.

> ...He's obviously siding with racists instead of siding with the marginalized minorities.

Hopefully you aren't being too serious. I could easily imagine someone saying that who was taking B's side in the dispute. No one should be banned from a conference and slandered as a hateful, violence-inclined etc. person for trying his best to de-escalate a conflict, no matter how misguided and perhaps even outrageous.

I read that as sarcasm, but yes it is a little hard to tell.

Is there any way to have evidence for what you're saying?

I've been looking for at this HN thread and there still hasn't been any evidence of the original tweets.

Why would people be mad at Charles for "let's have a reasonable phone call and sort this out civilly."?

There seems to be some missing information including a video that no one has posted.

I doubt 10 people know the real story behind this. Everyone here should practice the MYOB principle.

edit: DuskStar - I obviously edited this substantially, because I added nothing of value and only served to continue discussion of this submission. Both of the conclusions you jumped to are incorrect, it's a shame we were unable to have a mutually respectful exchange about it.

EDIT: My apologies for the lack of conversation here, then.

Original comment:

I'm confused by the significance of that link. Are you trying to suggest that since he was against firing James Damore, or since he's complained about character assassination in the past, his future opinions should be ignored?

What is the MYOB principle? I did a Google search, but Google seems to think I'm looking for a company out of Australia that makes accounting and resource planning software for businesses. Given your commment and the context of this thread, I suspect that's not what you're referring to.

I'm guessing MYOB => Mind your own business.

It's also clear as mud how things got from a tussle on Twitter the whole content/participation of which is also pretty fuzzy to a ban from a conference that had no apparent connection. (The conference is in about a week so nothing happened at the conference itself.)

The Linux Foundation did do a code of conduct post thread on Twitter which, among other things, mentions you can violate an event CoC before an event although it's also unclear what that means. I'm sure more than a few of the 10,000 people attending Kubecon have, at some point in their lives, done something to upset someone else on Twitter.

That was actually their stated reason: "tone policing":

https://twitter.com/cmaxw/status/1192261086810116096?s=20

So that means they fully accepted and swallowed Mei's fabricated, ascribed motivation.

Wonderful. Another big score for Mei's list of successful reputation attacks.

Isn't policing tones what CoC are about?

I'd like to point out that this "racist guy" has also never said anything racist. The WORST thing he said was told a black woman to "shut your mouth"

For anyone who wants to hear Mr. Sonmez's side of the story, here's a video on the topic from his YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4yYSi32fKI

Saying that making a complaint public and it's answer public constitutes harassment just sounds trollish. If it all happened privately he would have complained about that as well. Actually he does when he says the exact motives are hidden.

I find it funny that the tech community, here like in many instances, is struggling to reinvent the wheel.

Processes to handle violation of rules and complaints exist, they are called tribunals. They are based on a few things that are there for a reason:

- clear written rules

- independent judges and executives

- appeal procedures

- public process

- contradictory procedure where plaintiff and defender are heard

If you are going to enforce rules without these, you'll always be called tyrannical

> Saying that making a complaint public and it's answer public constitutes harassment just sounds trollish

Have we really reached the point where people think it’s normal to run every proceeding live on Twitter? Imagine if this was at an event, and a person was wearing a “I love HN” hat”, if another attendant stood up on a chair and started screaming from the top of their lungs “This makes me feel uncomfortable!!! It’s a violation of the CoC!!”.

Would your first thought be “this is a great process” or “perhaps we should tell the screamer to stop yelling and talk to the officials”.

It constitutes harassment because the aim here was not a proper review of a potential Violation, but an attempt at instilling mob mentality against an individual and forefinger due process in evaluating the case.

As for the complaint about exact motives being hidden. The argument is only that since the rest was conducted in public, the public should have transparency into the motives and review. Which seems reasonable as a response to this case, not as a general rule.

First, twitter is one of the many public medias. If something is appropriate publicly, then it is appropriate on twitter. It all depends on the rules.

> if another attendant stood up on a chair and started screaming from the top of their lungs “This makes me feel uncomfortable!!! It’s a violation of the CoC!!”.

First, you'll have to admit, putting on twitter would be far less disruptive.

Then, if people in the community value a CoC (I personally am on the fence over that tbh) they should value a fair process and examine the complaints they receive.

"No, that complaint is frivolous" could be the judges answers. And quickly they'll discover why there are penalties for frivolous lawsuits.

> It constitutes harassment

Exactly. And its great that there is a process to file your complaint!

> Which seems reasonable as a response to this case, not as a general rule.

Yeah, so what is the problem again?

But generally, you want as much of the judicial process open. You want to know what was done, what the witnesses confirm, how the defendants pleaded and how the judges reasoned on the conclusion.

Closing one of these parts has to be done only consciously for protection reasons, which in that case, I see none.

Events have occured just fine for a long time without these rules. Meanwhile the introduction of the CoC (which many have rightfully called out as being mostly political) has caused nothing but constant outrage, grief, and general chaos for everyone involved.

I think back to the epic flame wars of the 1990s and wonder why nobody has retroactively applied CoC infractions on all of the offending parties of the past. Would there even be a Linux Foundation left if we did that?

Who is honestly suprised? This is the inevitable outcome of all these modern CoCs.

Through the history, we've learned that the trial shall be hold at open court. It's not that open court is best to protect the plaintiff/defendant, but it's least harmful way to ensure fair trial.

The history proved countless times that the secret lawsuit filling, followed by the secret court judgement was not gone well.

Even in the world where be judges, prosecutors and lawyers requires years of formal training and qualification, we had and are continuously having so many harmful judgement and only after decades if not centuries later, when complete third parties who doesn't share the outdated moral of that time can have the truly fair view of that event.

Even worse, in the context of OSS community, the people who judge are not lawyer, probably no formal training on law and moral. They are in the current position because they had been contributing the OSS for long time.

So. I think it's best to handle these situation to the traditional court rather than private decision from self-elected OSS chair.

If a well-known white supremacist political commentator got into Linux and wanted to do an introductory talk on some Linux aspect at the conference, should the conference be obligated to accept them just because they haven't been found guilty of ... what?

If I hosted a party (or a conference), and a large fraction of the people I talked to at the event told me that person X at the event was creeping on them and they weren't coming back if person X was there, do I need to wait for person X to be found guilty of being a creep to ban them from the next event?

Event organizers should have more leeway over their events than just "keep convicts out".

Not saying that the conference organizers necessarily made the right call here with Charles Wood, just arguing that they have the right to make such a call. And people have the right to argue that it was the wrong call. I'm just disagreeing with the concept that it wasn't even their call to make. It especially doesn't seem to make much since to expect that the current court system can handle this call.

Summary:

> In summary, it appears to this humble observer that The Code of Conduct process at The Linux Foundation went very badly off the rails with regard to Charles Max Wood. That LF owes Mr. Wood, and the Software Community at large, a profound apology. That LF should keep all future Code of Conduct complaints and decisions personal and confidential. That LF should publish and follow a well defined process for accepting, reviewing, and adjudicating future Code of Conduct complaints. And that some form of reparation be provided to Mr. Wood for the public harm that was done to him by the careless and unprofessional behavior of The Linux Foundation.

> Yours

> Robert C. Martin.

> That LF should keep all future Code of Conduct complaints and decisions personal and confidential. That LF should publish and follow a well defined process for accepting, reviewing, and adjudicating future Code of Conduct complaints.

How any organization of any significant size can adopt a CoC without having these types of policies in place is madness. Especially handling it in private first!

As someone not from the USA, I'm mystified by the implication that wearing a political party hat (the currently elected political party at that) makes a place unsafe. And not even wearing it at the event, but at some place else, some time in the past.

I'm glad that brilliant people like Uncle Bob mention how... strange this stuff is.

There are people who end up conservative for predetermined reasons, like where they were born or what religion they were born into. Statistically you inherit your politics from your parents. Some of those people will become good developers and engineers. Should they be forced to stay in the closet or be ridiculed or fired? Should they scrub toilets instead?

True. Upbringing and parents can form a foundation, but reality can shake it, too.

I voted solely for Democrats in every election (local, state, federal) from 1980 until 2012. By then, though, the party I had always supported was telling me that I'm inherently racist by consequence of being a middle-aged white male; that I don't pay may fair share in taxes (though I do); meritocracy is now bad; capitalism is now horrible, most all problems are due to white males, ...

I found myself quoting Reagan, although I despised him in my 20s (many of us at the time believed he would lead us into WWIII). He said "I didn't leave the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party left me".

Let's not lump conservatives in with Trump supporters. It's unfair to conservatives.

In other words-- a hiring process would look at things like team cohesion, but also take into account that an applicant's potential difficulty in that area may likely be due to circumstances that were outside of their control.

I've always found that a fair idea. Oddly, this is the only reference to that idea I've seen on HN that didn't have a bunch of child posts attacking it.

There is a reason it's illegal to ask about political affiliation during job interviews in the US.

I think you are trying to be tolerant, but are you implying that people cannot reason themselves into conservative views?

Aside from employing Torvalds, LF has a lot of really muddy business. The whole OpenAPI gang is a shame on FOSS, and this is just something I touched professionally.

What's the backstory on OpenAPI for someone completely unfamiliar?

Er.. in short, tech-blind industry representatives are using the LF brand to advance their careers, and LF insiders are helping them out of sheer kindness.

Context!

Here's John's side of the story.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=HvjQ3Mx-jWg

Main thread from cmaxw weighing in. No issues with him): https://mobile.twitter.com/cmaxw/status/1187108668606541824

Kim Crayton's oh so enlightened response (scroll to the top): https://mobile.twitter.com/e_p82/status/1187175306010005504

Personally, I find the behavior absolutely unacceptable. Two people can agree to disagree, but if someone flat out rejects coming to the table in the first place, you are in the wrong, which seems to be the MO of John's accusers. Sarah Mei at least is one of the same folks who was involved with the "cancelling" of Richard Stallman.

I probably missing context (I for sure haven't spent much time on looking into it, and don't plan to), but it seems to be a call to come to the table with someone who's self-described actions are:

> "Because this, my friends, is how you deal with SJWs. You troll the hell out of them and they have no weapon they can use against you.

Stop fighting them with logic. Just say inflammatory, illogical things to them."

https://twitter.com/simpleprogrammr/status/11861277413907415...

I don't think you should assume people are in the wrong just because they do not want to spend time playing nice with that.

This is the most enlightening post I have seen on this page. Thank you.

So outside this individual case, how open or public should these types of decisions be made? For transparency, shouldn't people that are part of the community know when these actions/accusations take place and what/how decisions were made?

> First let me say that I find it highly problematic that the complaint and the decision were public. Indeed I am surprised that LF would accept a publicly submitted code of conduct complaint. I am much more than surprised that LF would ever consider publicly responding to such a complaint.

Transparency is good though.

There is nothing less transparent than giving a public judgment without any of the reasoning that led to that judgment.

"Our events should and will be a safe space."

Seems like a pretty clear reason. He demonstrated that he promotes a hostile attitude toward marginalized individuals who they want to attend the conference.

How? There's been a lot of motivations ascribed to him, but where has he concretely promoted or performed in a hostile way?

There is, not publishing anything at all would be worse in terms of transparency. I will agree however that publishing the reasoning would be much better.

I'm not surprised by this. Kubernetes specifically got a very left activist community. Anyone even slightly disagreeing with the vocal minority is being shamed on Twitter under the excuse to keep it an "inviting" and "open" community. I hope everyone can see the irony here.

This part loses me:

"Indeed I am surprised that LF would accept a publicly submitted code of conduct complaint."

Of course they should accept a public complaint, this isn't a secret society, it is an open source society, not a secret box where you can only complain in private.

Public complaints such as these are a form of public harassment, which is forbidden by the CoC.

If there's going to be a public show of it, then the decision making process should likewise be transparent and open. That it wasn't falsifies your claim about it being an "open society".

These points were of course addressed in the letter.

Your statement that a public complaint == public harassment is an inference.

A pretty reasonable one, since people got Wood kicked out of a conference for trying to help and be civil.

This whole discussion thread has really made me disappointed with the HN community. Almost every reply is expressed in the same, alt-right terms ("SJWs", "free-speech", and mock outrage, as evidenced by the outsize number of f-bombs). Inexplicably, the scapegoat throughout seems to be a woman.

Take stock of your anger. Our industry is dominated by men, in a culture that has repeatedly shown to be hostile to minorities of all kinds, women, and people of color. Is this the best you can do? Even if this particular incident is unjust in your opinion, you are certainly not the victim here. At most you are asked to moderate your already dominating voices, slightly.

I never saw nearly as much engagement with posts that document actual abuses of financial or professional hierarchies: systemic rape, discrimination, harassment. But god forbid someone got reprimanded for being a bigot in public (or whatever this story is about). Conferences are well documented source of toxicity in our profession. The means to remedy the problem may be clumsy, but instead of punching down, try understanding what these policies mean to address and suggest something constructive.

No refunds for canceling KubeCon registration after November 4th.

I understand the title used on HN tries to follow what the article title is, but it is thoroughly useless in giving me any information on the link. Why should I even open this link?

I don't see whats wrong with the title? The article is exactly what the title suggests - An open letter to the linux foundation

> I don't see whats wrong with the title? The article is exactly what the title suggests - An open letter to the linux foundation

The problem is the title gives you no information about what the letter is actually about. An open letter could do anything from raising an important for the community...to something that's tedious and irrelevant (e.g. "An open letter to the linux foundation about the lack of vegan food in the cafeteria").

That seems to be general policy. I track title edits and they are frequently (though certainly not always) made less informational: https://hackernewstitles.netlify.com/ .. there are pros and cons so it's not a clear cut good or bad thing.

Fascinating! Thank you!

Indeed, why should one.

This letter doesn't really inform the reader of anything. The very fact that it talks around the issue so much that you cannot even discern at all what the issue was, hints at "I don't need, nor do I want to know".

See my comment for the gist of the article.

Is Linus going to be banned from LF conferences for the ugly words he said about people?

Okay I went digging for context.

There are some comments here about 'ddd' but AFAIK that drama is not part of the sequence of events in this drama. (instead that appears to be a separate issue worth it's own facepalming)

It appears to me that the sequence of events goes something like:

A person tweeted that she's glad she's not getting into tech today because the violent language used by people promoting diversity would have scared her away (actual tweet is removed, but here is the proximal discussion:) https://twitter.com/Aimee_Knight/status/1185755719762620416

People piled on and responded abusively.

An acquaintance of hers, John Sonmez a lifestyle vlogger (who's shtick is apparently telling people how to be a man) waded into twitter and aggressively told off everyone who was attacking in an effort to deflect the attacks, here is his video talking about what he did: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvjQ3Mx-jWg He was about one notch more civil than the sterotype of a foul mouthed 13yr/old boy playing a first person shooter on xbox. (or at least I don't think he actually told someone that he *ed their mother... but you get the idea...)

Predictable consequences were predictable and included getting his books pulled by publishers and other serious fallout.

Charles Max Wood (cmaxw), subject of the open letter, was friends with Jonh Sonmez and was pressured to disassociate with John. He said he didn't approve of John's remarks but declined to disassociate, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5jY1FQHLdk and tried reaching out to people to insert himself as a mediator. https://mobile.twitter.com/cmaxw/status/1187108668606541824

This was not welcome by some people who described his calls for civility as tone policing. (and worse: https://mobile.twitter.com/KimCrayton1/status/11871112486783... )

A 2016 picture of cmaxw visiting the trump tower wearing a MAGA hat, was found and was used to support an argument against cmaxw: https://twitter.com/nebrius/status/1191821800302206976

The events covered in the letter pick up from there.

[If I'm entirely off place, lemme know quickly so I can fix or nuke this post. I freely admit that I am entirely incompetent at sorting out twitter dramafests, I try to never use twitter: It says right in the name what it's for: Twits. And who has time for twits?]

I remember sitting in a session at a linux foundation conference where someone on staff at TLF was the speaker and took a shot at President Trump and his supporters. It was subtle but unmistakable. I think the shot likely violated the CoC but nothing ever came of it. I can't find a session video or I'd link it.

I remember hearing it and thinking, statistically speaking there are supporters of Trump in the audience. Later, when I brought this up with others, I found someone who was a Trump supporter who is uncomfortable about that attacks on Trump and Trump supporters are allowed. The CoC notes unacceptable behavior includes, "offensive or degrading language".

I share this because the linux foundation is over a global community of people from various countries. People have different opinions on politics and other beliefs. Open source is a place where people of many differences can come together.

Having personally seen a bias against Trump supporters makes me want see this be handled above reproach.

You have misunderstood this movement. It's not about fairness or stopping discriminatory behavior. It's about banning all opinions except the sanctioned one.

"Do not speak unless you are one of us, do not think unless you have been told how to, do not hold us to the same standards as we hold others."

Those should be the mottos of these idiots.

Just keep telling yourself that.

Actions speak louder than words.

Charles Woods was denied a pass to Kubecon on the basis of his podcasted support for attacks on women and black people in tech by Mr. Somnez. It had absolutely zero to do with MAGA hats.

War Is Peace, Freedom Is Slavery— and Witch-hunting is Tolerance.

>The timeline of events, as far as I can determine them, is as follows:

-content that has a lot of missing context-

Is what is described what actually happened?

It seems like the writer might not know either.

That's why the letter is a request for clarity in light of seeming impropriety.

Good thing illumos implemented the CoC a few weeks ago, we wouldn't want anyone to miss out on the cancel culture!

https://illumos.topicbox.com/groups/developer/T89a037970789a...

Those of us who warned against the CoC's who were lambasted are over here saying "I told you so" but will continue to be ignored. I have had multiple very liberal hacktivist type friends approach me asking how we are going to avoid these things being used to weaken the FOSS community, and I don't have a very good answer other than we need to fork the orgs... but now that even our former arch enemeis (microsoft) have become funders and influencers in those orgs, it's a large uphill climb to get any org-fork to relevance. Certain people and orgs who have always hated FOSS are probably giggling in the corner as we all turn on ourselves.

Does the CoC even apply to conferences? Or the rest of the foundation? I thought it was just for the Kernel development process?

it's probably not the same CoC. Lots of conferences have CoCs, and the CoC aren't always the same as any related software projects.

COC's being used as a weapon to purge political opponents? Shocking, who could have predicted it.

Damn, this letter really highlights the sad state of things :/

It appears that someone who wore a pro-Trump MAGA hat to a software conference is being punished for violating an event Code of Conduct. Unless there is a general ban on hats and clothing with political statements at software events, this is clearly discriminatory.

"The Linux Foundation received a public tweet sent to the @KubeCon twitter address. That tweet recommended that Kube Con discontinue their association with Charles Max Wood. The reasons given in this complaint were his request for an open and civil phone call, and a picture of Mr. Wood wearing a MAGA hat.

The Linux Foundation publicly replied from the @linuxfoundation twitter account as follows:

Hi all, We have reviewed social and videos and determined that the Event Code of Conduct was violated and his registration to the event has been revoked. Our events should and will be a safe space."

> It appears that someone were a pro-Trump MAGA hat to a software conference is being punished for violating an event Code of Conduct. Unless there is a general ban on hats and clothing with political statements at software events, this is clearly discriminatory.

You don't know (and this letter's author doesn't know) that wearing a MAGA hat was what they considered a violation of the code of conduct.

In fairness, the letter's author seems more concerned about how the complaint was handled in public regardless of what it was about.

> The reasons given in this complaint were his request for an open and civil phone call, and a picture of Mr. Wood wearing a MAGA hat.

It is the only possible conclusion given this information. Is there more?

This is what they said:

> We have reviewed social and videos and determined that the Event Code of Conduct was violated

It could have been "he wore the wrong hat" but it also could have been "we looked and he was harassing people on Twitter".

The whole exchange was public. LF might not have banned Mr. Wood for wearing a MAGA hat (the true reason they banned him was probably to avoid a confrontation with Code of Conduct zealots), but it sure looks like it based on the public tweet exchange.

Literally the only evidence presented was a polite call for discussion, and a picture of the guy wearing a MAGA hat. Then the org directly responded, saying they reviewed the evidence and found he violated the code of conduct. Regardless of what they may claim or of how much anyone may try to dissemble, the MAGA hat picture was clearly the impetus for the decision.

That's what Uncle Bob is insinuating, but is that what really happened? I can't even see the tweet he's talking about. He mentions an @KubeCon twitter account. That account is not associated w/ the event.

I think he's talking about this tweet:

https://twitter.com/nebrius/status/1191821800302206976

https://twitter.com/KimCrayton1/status/1191697390799130624 is the tweet that got him 86ed from the convention. In addition to the hat photo, there's also a 30 minute video where he talks about diversity, twitter, etc

> general ban on hats and clothing with political statements

In some schools of thought, a MAGA hat is a hate symbol like a swastika armband. They view it differently than they would a Republican National Convention hat. Whether they're right or wrong, these are the people writing and enforcing codes of conduct these days

> In some schools of thought, a MAGA hat is a hate symbol like a swastika armband.

Excuse me, but what could ever be hateful about making America great again? Doesn't this rather suggest that these schools of thought themselves are being quite hateful towards America? It's sure convenient that "these are the people writing and enforcing codes of conduct these days", because if they weren't, the case for banning them as CoC violators would be pretty clearcut.

>Excuse me, but what could ever be hateful about making America great again?

The belief that what has weakened America is multiculturalism, immigration, feminism and racial diversity, and that what is needed to make America great again is reversing the aforementioned trends, and restoring to heterosexual, Christian white males their former status of cultural and political hegemony.

The Trump campaign has never made such a claim, though. They pushed "draining the swamp" in Washington D.C., nothing much about reversing "multiculturalism, immigration, feminism and racial diversity".

I don't necessarily approve of the pitchforks coming out at the sight of a MAGA hat, but it's either delusional or just intellectually dishonest to deny the racial component to Trump's rhetoric.

Just like everything in California causes cancer, everything Trump says has racial components.

Sheesh - for a racist spouting rhetoric full of racial components Trump is pretty awful at actually being a racist. Just look at his immediate family! He's not only an incompetent politician he's an incompetent racist!

I'm not asserting that Trump is personally racist, nor that all of his platform is racist. I think the term 'racist' as a concept has such divergent meaning across society that it's rarely useful. I'm saying he is leveraging the dimensions of the current political landscape to his advantage (something he has bragged about having no scruples in doing), which includes exacerbating racial tension. Is it more a projection of his followers than himself? Probably.

It's either delusional or just intellectually dishonest to impute "racial components" to Trump's rhetoric. He, and MAGA types in general, is not racist nor has anything he's done explainable by "racism". The persistence of imputing "racist!" belies projection, lacking an objective basis. We really, truly, don't care what race anyone is; what matters is hard work, abiding by laws (including immigration laws shared by most nations), and earning your way. Alas, those seeking racism everywhere see racism everywhere, especially in designated opponents.

But enough of his supporters have that the culture of support for Trump has been conflated with support for those other, far more toxic ideals.

Trump supporters can pretend that American white supremacists and neo-reactionaries didn't flock to him like moths to a flame and turn his campaign into a referendum against the loss of white male political and cultural relevance and the advance of progressivism and feminism, or that they aren't tainted by association, but that is what happened.

Trump supporters were perfectly aware of the racial narrative forming around him, and they chose to embrace it, rather than fight against it, because they found common ground with the racists in their hatred of the left and Hillary Clinton. They don't now have cause to complain about being tarred with the same brush.

If it's OK to exclude people thanks to 2nd degree taint like that, does this mean it would be fine for a conference to exclude everyone who supported Bernie because of his association with AntiFa?

"white supremacists and neo-reactionaries" are practically non-existent. Try actually understanding your designated opponents, instead of slapping nasty labels on them. We did NOT "choose to embrace a racial narrative", it was imputed on us and we don't know how to fight it effectively (a la "I don't believe X!" "well, that's surefire proof that you believe X!").

That "belief" is what you want "them" to believe, so you can degrade & oppose them as inherently evil. Pardon the mind reading; it's the conclusion I come to when subjected to such bad-faith & ignorant labeling. It's baffling to accuse Trump of such bigotries, when he specifically hires immigrants from around the world, married an immigrant, has such a high percentage of women on staff, and has long been lauded & awarded for promoting racial diversity - and his followers share & support his mindset thereof. Seems opponents want MAGA types to be racist, sexist, xenophobic, etc and go to great lengths to impute such labels thereon - when such labels absolutely do not apply.

I, and many others, are seriously outraged at this chronic & intentional libel of our sociopolitical positions - especially by those touting the banner of "tolerance & diversity".

That has got to be the biggest strawman I've ever seen in my whole life!

You're misled, that's a political ideology driven by hate, not a "school of thought".

I've observed that there is often more to the story in these sorts of cases. Not always, but >50% of the time. The little thing everyone is reacting to is usually the last straw.

The same often holds true with outbreaks of political protest, like the ones in Chile right now. The mainstream story is that the protests are over a subway fare hike, but the reality is that this was just the lightning rod event.

> It appears that someone who wore a pro-Trump MAGA hat to a software conference is being punished for violating an event Code of Conduct.

Check the date on the picture...

It appears that someone who wore a pro-Trump MAGA hat in 2016. And is thus banned from a conference in 2019.

Are you saying there is evidence to suggest this was the reason they revoked his conference pass? I believe that this was just a part of his character that has come out since then.

Whenever I saw news like this, I feel the system designed for USA might be close to expire, mean it is no longer working for the goodness of the people.

Left and right can no longer tolerate different opinions at all, left controls most of the media and universities and to some extent, the social media, so in most cases, it actually is the left bullies the right, to the point some of the left just lost their mind when they spot a MAGA hat, this is insane.

the left combined with socialism agenda looks great on paper or ideology, but it will kill the society for good. I have long been thinking that we're doomed, the current system is an version out of date, and there is no new release on the horizon, chaos is the only step next.

So what did this person do? Just wear a MAGA hat? What kind of world do we live in where we consider supporting a democratically elected political candidate a code of conduct violation?

I was at the KiwiCon where Ranty Ben got kicked out. I want to be fair: I thought his talk was stupid and not very useful. But I don't think he should have gotten kicked out. The organizers wouldn't even say why he got kicked out. They didn't say how he specifically violated the Code of Conduct. Was it the ASCII art Goatcx in PGP signing art? Was it the comment about how if you did x to secure yourself you'd be "about as inconspicuous as a tr* Polynesian girl in the desert" or "lesbian f* porn" ?

Hackercons have never really been professional. Later on in that same conference, a Mac kernel hacker did a talk on gdb where he said it was so terrible it'd be like grabbing pig balls. He had a Photoshoped image of the organizer holding some pig balls. The organizer came out, looked at it as the audience laughed and walked off. Obviously they were friends; it was a joke, but I ask you ... what if he had chosen one of female organizers instead?

In such an environment, where is the line? We do we even consider kicking someone out because one person was offended? I realize non-hackercons need to be more professional. Yet, we don't throw people out for preferring emacs vs vim, and we shouldn't throw anyone out for their political beliefs.

I used to take principled free speech position in these kind of arguments. I have for Maybe 10 years.

I stopped when I realized that not once, in all the hotly debated discussions I had, I found anything of value in the person being censored. Actually in most cases, removing them provided a smoother environment/community/event.

I stopped caring about hate speech removal when it is actually about hate speech. Now I worry about state censorship more and stop defending trolls and Nazis.

Interesting how different your experience was.

I saw the opposite, where repeated removings/suppression of people with different views resulted in the creation of echochambers from which little of value emerges.

I am not talking about removing people with different views, I am talking about removing people who promote hate speech.

Someone has a talk saying "Linux is the worst thing that ever happened in IT", let her in. Someone has a talk saying "Arabs are inferior people and if you shut that opinion down you are a snowflake", shut him down.

Like you, I used to conflate the two, now I see how different it is.

> I am not talking about removing people with different views, I am talking about removing people who promote hate speech.

Who gets to decide what counts as hate speech? You? Why do you get to make that call and not somebody else? The distinction you're attempting to draw does not exist: you're talking about censoring people based on whether they agree with your perspective. Free speech for the purposes of saying only inoffensive things is not free speech.

Hate speech has some fairly clear legal definitions in many places. It is speech that singles out negatively a group based on [make a list of criterion]. Typical list: gender, nationality, ethnicity, sex orientation, skin color, preferred text editor.

Honestly, I have yet to find a minority that I find problematic to include to classify hate speech at a tech conference. I am super vocal about my hostility toward every religion, I just shut it up at tech conferences. And when I do talk about the religions I find stupid, I am not calling their supporters names. That's really that simple.

> you're talking about censoring people based on whether they agree with your perspective.

On inclusion of other people? Hell yeah. Except I am giving objective criterion to judge it.

> Free speech for the purposes of saying only inoffensive things is not free speech.

I agree with that sentiment. However, I see nothing of value in purely offensive speech. Once again, I am still waiting of a single example of hate speech that would be valuable to a discussion and that can't be replace by non-offensive one.

Any time you give people a button labeled "make my opponent shut up", they're going to mash it all day regardless of the ostensible purpose of the button. Preventing someone attending a professional conference because he agrees with half the country on a controversial issue is simply unacceptable in a democracy regardless of what words you use to justify this behavior.

Who are you to demand that people prove that speech is worthwhile before being able to speak? Why should their ability to speak depend on your evaluation of their speech's discursive worth? You're just using a lot of words to claim that you should get to decide what people are allowed to say.

> Any time you give people a button labeled "make my opponent shut up", they're going to mash it all day regardless of the ostensible purpose of the button

Bis repetita, that's why you don't have a button: you have a process.

> Preventing someone attending a professional conference because he agrees with half the country on a controversial issue is simply unacceptable in a democracy regardless of what words you use to justify this behavior.

Please don't refer to US as "the" country, some of us come from another country, maybe even a democracy with gasp different rules.

And well, I agree it is certainly problematic, but the problem lies in the fact that half of your country defends hate speech. Which can be defined objectively, and has been by laws in my country (France). I used to be a fan of the first amendment, to believe in the slippery slope fallacy that it would lead to more violent censorship, that it would lead to the removal of controversial but worth content.

I have yet to find a single example of that.

> Who are you to demand that people prove that speech is worthwhile before being able to speak? Why should their ability to speak depend on your evaluation of their speech's discursive worth? You're just using a lot of words to claim that you should get to decide what people are allowed to say.

Dude, I know I am pretty cool, but why do you think you have to ask me? Where did I propose you send me an email before speaking? Or that I set rules myself? I am merely saying that hate speech is something that can be clearly defined, that it has been in a way actually enforced by tribunals in France, that it does not lead to censorship of worthwhile content and it is applied a posteriori, not a priori.

Believe it or not, we manage to have a healthy democracy while still forbidding people from wearing nazi apparel (which is still illegal in France)

And this process is a kangaroo court, to all appearances, until they show the evidence by which they made their judgment.

> And well, I agree it is certainly problematic, but the problem lies in the fact that half of your country defends hate speech

What definition of hate speech are you using and what event does it apply to?

On a related note, here's some statements that may or may not be hate speech:

1. Africans are stupid and criminal, we shouldn't let them into the country.

2. Transsexuals are crazy people. They need medicine, not coddling.

3. Muslims have evil beliefs and blow people up and I don't want them in my country.

4. Homos are unnatural, spreading disease and sickness. We need to keep our children away from them so they don't catch the gay.

I've written all four to imply a large amount of ignorance and strong emotional motivations, but they are nonetheless a crude attempt to express a public policy and a reason for it. Should they be banned?

Should they also be banned if written in the form of an eloquent 80 page paper with precise terminology, strong citations from numerous studies and polls and a grounding in commonly accepted principles in political science and ethics (assume such a thing were possible)?

Yes, all these 4 statements would fall under hate speech laws in France.

And yes, people have tried to turn these prejudice into eloquent pages with precise terminology or into stand up comedy and have been shut down for it.

Shockingly, France is not a den of conformism yet. It is in the US that Charlie Hebdo covers are censored and where people "agree to disagree" instead of exploring their disagreements.

> Once again, I am still waiting of a single example of hate speech that would be valuable to a discussion and that can't be replace by non-offensive one.

So, you want people to make some statements that, depending upon their country of origin, might result in criminal or social penalties (including losing their job) because if the those statements were ever tied back to them it might be seen as endorsing "hate speech"? You realize how freaking insane that is, right?

You claim to be inviting argument, and yet you endorse a system which would penalize people for accepting that invitation.

Listen, if you really need an example or two of meaningful ideas that might qualify, I'll provide. But it ultimately doesn't matter whether you consider them a valuable contribution to the discussion, what matters is whether other people have the right express what matters to them. If they don't, then the root of these problems can never be addressed.

So you would let yourself be treated by a doctor that is open with wanting people like you to die? You want police that have stated they hate people like you? You'd trust a cleaner that despise you?

I will let you state your opinion, but you don't get to demand immunity from consequences.

Some opinions are genuinely indefensible.

> I will let you state your opinion, but you don't get to demand immunity from consequences.

Oh, you'll let me? How magnanimous.

How about:

* Nobody asked you.

* Who do you think you are that I would need your permission?

* I wasn't asking permission. I was asking for a indication of interest in genuine conversation. Something you clearly lack.

* What opinions I hold regarding controversial issues are my own. What I was offering was examples of (potentially) prohibited things some people believe that are more nuanced than the cartoon bigotry.

* whatever. Didn't say I consider myself as some benevolent dictator. It just means it doesn't seem bad enough on its own to require proactive intervention.

* see above

* your misinterpretation of my comment almost seems deliberate, so "no u"

* while they surely are your own, you don't get to demand that other people must ignore their own concerns if they belive your opinions make you untrustworthy or dangerous to them.

I am allowed to base my own opinions about you on what opinions you say that you have. And I am allowed to refuse to associate with you.

If you openly tell people that you want people like me dead, I will never let you do any job for me where my life might be at risk (like medical jobs or similar). You don't get to demand undeserved trust.

So, just to be clear: I don't want anyone dead, and especially not because of their status as a member of some demographic. Nobody posting here to debate these issues does. Why you even bring it up is a mystery to me.

The whole point of this conversation was the suggestion that there might be non-"hateful" ideas being repressed, and important conversations that are prevented, that are prohibited by hate speech legislation. To suggest that I might actually want other people dead is a far reach.

I'm not quite sure what there is to misinterpret. Whatever your intent may be (and if it is different that what I describe here, please clarify) your words are pretty confrontational. You suggest I might want people dead, and then seem to vaguely imply you might have some ability to stop me if you don't like what I have to say. You talk about "letting" me share, and about "proactive intervention". What exactly would "proactive intervention" look like? Are you a moderator, or someone else with authority here? Are you someone with the ability and willingness to dox random anonymous strangers on the internet? Or are you just another member here with the ability to downvote/flag?

I'm bringing it up because it's relevant because other people do that. What you personally believe isn't relevant to this argument, because this argument of mine is about the worst content which your proposed rules would protect. Because it WOULD protect bullying and racism and other abuse online under the label "protected opinion".

You would make it literally illegal to counteract such behavior online.

Your rule would necessarily punish Facebook for banning stalkers, punish reddit for banning racist subreddits if they're not strictly illegal, and so on.

The rule you suggest would protect their ability to harass others regardless of if that's what you intend or not. You can't just handwave away those consequences.

Can you prove that it's in fact not super trivial to circumvent bans on non hateful ideas (in non-totalitarian states)? Are here not millions of more websites besides Facebook et al? Is it not easy to go to another website?

The fact is that your proposed rule is far worse than the alternatives.

You're suggesting it's a better tradeoff to forcibly kill quality standards online so that everybody can express literally anything that's not illegal, when it's equally possible to just... Not make a law like that, and instead encourage people to go to other websites.

Each and every person should have their individual freedom to set their standards for what opinions and beliefs they approve of (the edge cases where certain collective decisions are socially harmful are covered by antidiscrimination law).

This extends also to website owners. This means that I as a forum moderator (in a different place, on reddit) has the freedom to ban others from my forum for engaging in what I consider abusive behavior. I get to decide if and when I want to take action.

The admins on Hacker News can likewise ban me from here.

Proactive intervention usually involves government censorship or police action, but can also be considered to cover blocklists and spam filters online.

Each and every one of us decides over our own "domains".

In spaces where I'm not a mod/admin (most of them, that is), "letting you" only means not reporting the account, etc.

Today's trade-off is that every person either accepts the rules for approved content that somebody else has set on their own website... Or your start your own website. Or both at once for that matter, it's trivial to visit multiple websites at once since most browsers have tabs.

If your opinion is banned in one place online, it's easy to go to another to post it. That's how the web worked since the very beginning!

> The fact is that your proposed rule is far worse than the alternatives.

What proposed rule? Please quote me so I know what you're talking about.

> Each and every person should have their individual freedom to set their standards for what opinions and beliefs they approve of

Exactly! Which is why I oppose hate speech legislation. I believe that I, as an adult, have the freedom to hear whatever opinions or ideas I wish and the responsibility to come to my own conclusion on the truth of such ideas. To use the force of law to restrict the expression of ideas merely because they cause offense conflicts directly both with my rights and responsibilities.

> Proactive intervention usually involves government censorship or police action, but can also be considered to cover blocklists and spam filters online.

My question to you, is what are you specifically threatening the context of this specific conversation? It sounds like you're not threatening anything beyond the powers granted to every user on this site, which makes your initial comment look like nothing but useless posturing.

I'd worry that the doctor might recommend dangerous and ineffective treatments, that the police officers would arrest me on false pretenses, and that the cleaner would steal my belongings and poison my groceries. So, yeah, I'd fire the cleaner, switch doctors, etc.

But... would I let myself attend an industry conference that's also being attended by someone who voted for a politician whose opinions or policies are hostile to me?

Yes. Of course.

I'd also attend a conference that's being attended by someone who thinks I'm going to hell when I die. I'd even attend a conference where one of the speakers thinks that. Because I don't have to trust conference attendees or speakers with my life or health; I don't have to interact with them at all, and if I do, it'll be in a busy public place; and if they were the kind of person to go into a blind rage when they meet someone like me in public, they probably would've done it already and gotten caught.

There's a very wide range of sleazy but not illegal behavior as well as hard to prove illegal acts which also might affect the equation.

For a conference organizer, the primary question is how to make it a positive experience for as many visitors as possible, and that's the criteria they will use when determining who gets to visit.

If allowing a particular person to visit means several others will refrain from visiting, is it then a good idea to permit that? That's a value judgement for the organizers to make.

And if you think they made the wrong decision, feel free to tell them so or even to boycott it yourself, giving them a reason to consider other potential solutions.

>If allowing a particular person to visit means several others will refrain from visiting, is it then a good idea to permit that? That's a value judgement for the organizers to make.

That's part of it, but it's also a value judgment for everyone else to make.

In many cases, the rest of us in society care enough about how those decisions are made that we've passed laws prohibiting businesses from rejecting customers for certain reasons.

For example, if your market research shows that allowing Jews into your event results in lower overall attendance, because too many of the other potential attendees are anti-Semites who refuse to go to an event that allows Jews, you still don't get to ban them. We've established that making those opportunities equally available to all religions, ethnicities, genders, races, etc. is more important than maximizing profit. Even when that discrimination isn't illegal, it's often frowned upon by the culture.

And one reason for that is that we distinguish between the business deciding you can't visit them, and you deciding you can't visit them. We expect businesses to be inclusive, even if that means more people choose to exclude themselves -- because this way, the people who are excluded at least get a choice.

>And if you think they made the wrong decision, feel free to tell them so or even to boycott it yourself, giving them a reason to consider other potential solutions.

I've got no reason to attend a Kubernetes conference anyway, but I have the same interest as any other member of society in ensuring that people get treated fairly.

We also purposefully do not extend that protection to literally everything distinct about a person. Even stuff like California's laws only protect employees from their employers when engaging in political action.

There's no universal legal protection against an entity responding to another person's general beliefs, if that entity consider those to be harmful.

We do not want to obstruct society from holding people accountable for harmful behavior.

Please do provide.

Why is this question even being asked?

The answer is everybody, in their own respective spaces.

It's not me but not others. It's me AND all others.

If I run a bar, I get to kick out customers who voice despicable opinions. Exact same thing applies if I run a shop, a web forum, or a conference for that matter.

All of us gets to kick out people who behave badly from our own private spaces, nothing obligates me to tolerate abuse.

Free speech does not mean freedom from consequences. It does not mean the right to an audience. It means you get to say your opinion without the government interfering - and then other people get to decide how to react to it.

Freedom of speech without the right to react and respond to what others say would a horrible idea. Partially because it entirely invalidates the reason for why speech is supposed to be free. If you can't change things based on what you learned from what you heard, why even bother letting people speak?

If this means somebody else bans me from their space for being offensive, then so be it.

> If this means somebody else bans me from their space for being offensive, then so be it.

I suspect that if I banned the followers of a religion I found "offensive" from an establishment I owned, you'd be writing a very different post. The problem with the free association argument from censorship proponents is that they've never consistent about it. They're happy to talk up the rights of institutions to exclude right up until the moment that they themselves are excluded.

A functioning society is one in which you don't put your livelihood at risk by agreeing with 50% of the population on a matter of public importance. Violating this principle is tyranny, and I don't care what elaborate justifications anyone comes up with to explain it away. You don't get to try to win political fights by personally ruining regular people on the other side.

Not really. It would be quite illegal in most places, sure, but I simply wouldn't want to go there in the first place if you banned people like me.

Of course that becomes a problem is a large part of society does the same. Which is why such laws against the exists. But I wouldn't be the one pursuing this.

Especially for online spaces. There's just too many options for it to be reasonable to be pissed about getting banned from just one or a few places. It's always possible to create your own online space, if necessary. And right to speech isn't a right to an audience. You get to speak your mind, but people will only listen if they want to.

But keep in mind that there's a bet good reason for why most antidiscrimination laws deliberately limit the contexts in which they're applicable and what groups they protect. Very few jurisdictions protect opinions on their own.

I don't care if an antivaxxers works at a bakery. I'd be pissed if I hear one worked as a nurse at a hospital I go to, and that they refuse to carry out vaccinations. Some opinions are dangerous when held in certain contexts, and requires a reaction. This is simply about safety and protecting society. You can hold an opinion that terrible opinion elsewhere, where you don't hurt people.

At some point, you have to understand that the person putting their livelihood at risk is the person themselves, and that firing them is just as justified as firing a drunkard from a machine shop.

You're not arguing in good faith here.

You'd have to be completely insane to conflate "Linux is bad" with "Arabs are inferior," and I don't believe that you ever did.

Supporting a democratically elected candidate, especially outside of the conference in question, can not be conflated with claiming "Arabs are inferior" at a fucking talk at the conference.

You people are so swept up in ideology that you are willing to immediately jump to completely unrealistic positions, that nobody on the opposite side holds, and sidetrack the original discussion into arguing about the position you imagine that your opponents hold.

You're fighting ghosts to feel self-righteous.

I am answering to someone who conflates hate speech equals to "stating opinions I disagree with". I am glad my example was clear enough to show you how absurd this equivalence was.

> Supporting a democratically elected candidate, especially outside of the conference in question, can not be conflated with claiming "Arabs are inferior" at a fucking talk at the conference.

How about "African countries are shitholes"? "Mexicans are rapists"? You wear a person's symbol, you claim ownership over their ideology. And I know historical comparisons are tired, but there are a few racist and genocidal leaders who were democratically elected.

As a European friend, I am sad you are at that point in the US, but yes, one side of your politics is really fucked up to the point of being toxic. It is racist and misogynistic. A community has to choose between being inclusive of women and minorities and being inclusive of people who reject them.

> You're fighting ghosts to feel self-righteous.

When you grew up in some parts of Europe, you learn to fight when some ghosts rise. More than half of the people I work with could not contribute in a world where sexism and racism would reign.

Why did you assume I'm from the US? I'm from a progressive Scandinavian country and would be considered slightly left of center here (which is far-left in the US.)

Trump never said "Mexicans are rapists," he said something along the lines of "They're not bringing their best people... their rapists" which could be misconstrued as "they're."

He did say that African countries are shitholes, while complimenting my country, which wasn't great for our public image worldwide, but I did chuckle at it. It's the sort of off-hand stupid wording you'd hear at a bar late at night, which I figure is part of his appeal to the people that actually like him. Not a good look for a president to be sure.

Trump is not the ghost of Hitler, it can be fun to argue in that kind of hyperbole but he really isn't. And ~50% of the American voting public chose him over Hillary, because it was a shit sandwich vs giant douche race, you can't reasonably suggest banning all those people from Linux conferences.

> And ~50% of the American voting public chose him over Hillary, because it was a shit sandwich vs giant douche race, you can't reasonably suggest banning all those people from Linux conferences.

That is a very different situation to choosing to wear a MAGA hat. Choosing to wear a MAGA hat at a large event is a conscious decision to broadcast your endorsement of Trump's policies, ideology, and everything else. It means you want people to know you agree with Trump's stance on immigrants, women, and all the other shit.

Maybe such people still shouldn't be banned from a Linux conference, but they absolutely should be considered as racists and misogynists.

If he wore the MAGA hat at the conference, I would actually be somewhat with you on this, in such a case I think staff should initially politely tell the person to take the hat off and escalate from there. My reasoning for this would be that someone walking around with such a hat at a conference is probably just begging for reactions, and US politics doesn't really fit into a conference environment.

However, you're being disingenuous. He didn't wear it at a large event, he thought it would be a fun idea to put it on in front of Trump Tower and share a picture of it with his friends on social media. That's something I might even do as a fun tourist picture, and I really don't like Trump.

This conference is not banning him for conduct at the event, they are banning him for an innocuous social media post on his personal twitter account, a week before the event has even begun. They are just policing the political views of attendees. That's what people have a problem with.

That’s absurd. Should someone walking around wearing a “Black lived matter” hat be banned as well because it’s potentially controversial?

When did it no longer be okay to express unpopular political views?

I find such reasoning absolutely ridiculous. Personally it brings me great sadness that the ideals of free speech - the ideals, not the legal meaning - have been so happily stomped on.

Yeah, I agree that it's a sad state of affairs. But the US political landscape is currently so torn and people are ravenously defending their own team in a fight away from the center, so much that I can just imagine the shitstorm you'd unleash by wearing a maga hat at a primarily left leaning conference like the Linux foundation conference.

It's not good, it's not healthy for anyone, and I'm wondering how long its going to go on for.

You have to keep in mind, that for the most staunch Trump opponents, any mention of him is likened to a personal attack, they honestly believe that supporting him is on the level of full blown white supremacy and fascism.

And in that climate, even thought it goes against my principles, I would advocate for everyone to just keep their political leanings to themselves at all times in these "professional" gatherings where it shouldn't matter where you stand politically. At least until things calm down.

Man I have to sympathize with you here. It seems no matter the opinion you express people are jumping down your throat. I just want to say that, to me, it appears you’re doing a good job of expressing your opinion in a kind way.

I would love to see hostile tensions like these die out online very soon.

You should really watch the clip again before you get behind Trump on this one. He definitely refers to mexican immigrants as rapists, although of course "some, I assume, are good people". I'm surprised by the amount of people trying to play semantic games with what Trump is saying in general, the sentiment is clear to everyone. Trying to deconstruct it in hindsight to his favor is.. pointless.

Argue however you want about that you should be able to express your opinions, but please stop trying to sugar-coat Trump. His rethoric is toxic, it's marginalizing minorities and it's affecting how it is to live as a part of a minority and it shows, not only, from the hate crimes rates.

You yourself are interpreting it the worst possible way, out of context.

What's the context? He was talking about people coming here illegally.

Basic common sense would dictate that many gang members, drug runners, criminals in general that we know are coming here, are doing so illegally. As he said, I'm sure some Mexicans that come here illegally are good people, but pretty much all of the influx of criminals from outside our country come here illegally (including people regularly facilitating illegal travel).

You can choose to lie (to yourself and others) about the context of his statements, as if he was referring to ALL Mexicans, but anyone interested in knowing the truth should indeed find his statements for themselves, completely in context.

He's said enough things to criticize that one shouldn't need to stretch the truth to do so, but the desperation of ideologues knows no bounds.

> I am talking about removing people who promote hate speech.

This is pretty off-topic given that there was nothing interpretable as hate speech done here. But I want to note that was how the two left wing echo chambers I saw started (the right wing ones took a different turn).

Initially they just banned people who made statements that were simple expressions of hatred. But people generally express views on a bit of a bell curve, so all the people whose curves had a portion inside the banned space left (often self-censoring for a while, then leaving). After that, the cultural interpretation of the rule changed a bit and it started including statements about groups (e.g. Mexican immigrants are [way more likely to be] rapists). Once all the people who expressed such a view were gone/silenced there was a popular update to the forum rules that clarified and banned a bunch more things. This process repeated a number of times.

First comes the change in rules, the vocal population changes. Then a cycle of changes in enforcement and interpretation of the rules interleaved with changes in the vocal population. Then another rules change. Repeat a bunch of times to end up with an echo chamber that I think the hn population would consider "full of ridiculous SJW nonesense" based on the commentary I've recently seen here.

> in all the hotly debated discussions I had, I found anything of value in the person being censored

I think history is a better guide because we can more clearly see what was valuable. Things that were censored in the past:

* Heliocentricism

* Evolution, esp of humans from other apes

* Capitalism/market economics (in socialist states)

* Currently mainstream views about biology (e.g. Lysenkoism)

Free speech is a "hits" business: most of the value comes from a few incredibly valuable ideas that someone powerful is trying to censor. The damage done to Russia and China under communism easily exceeds all the extra "smoothness" that they got out of censoring those who disagreed with them.

Yes, which of these views would have been shut down by a policy forbidding hate speech?

I am now mostly worried about state censorship, which do remove things like the items you list.

Censoring hate speech and people who promote exclusion of minorities? I have not a single example of it being detrimental to a healthy debate.

I'm pretty sure that all of those views were censored because they were immoral according to the dominant ideology of the day, and in every case it would have been argued that this time the censorship was good because the dominant ideology was good, whereas previous instances of censorship were bad.

How would someone in the USSR know that censorship of opponents of Lysenkoism was bad? As far as they were concerned, the people being censored were evil counter-revolutionaries of whom nothing good could come.

Wouldn't "only censor/condemn hate that's tied to a protected class" be a decent test? Where protected class is defined as the stuff people cannot change about themselves. This test seems quite timeless and orthogonal to the problematic "immoral."

White male is decidedly a protected class with that definition.

Disclaimer: I am Asian and like to point out irony, don't lynch me.

Yes and? Hate speech against white male would be brought down as well.

Let's dive into that: here are tweets made by the accusers leading to Linux Foundation's judgment. https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/dtnamp/linux_foundat...

Well, have clear rules, clear penalties and due process, saying crap about any skin color is hate speech. You have no shortage of that in the US right now.

That's not my country and not much of my business but if half of your country is fine using its free speech defending KKK apologists and the other half only meets that with apathy, don't be surprised if some Black Panthers come back to life and use their own free speech fighting back.

And maybe I am less shocked by this affair because in many European cities, wearing a MAGA hat would be seen pretty close as wearing nazi insignia. Under it, lies either someone very racist or someone very confused. And either way probably someone that is not going to have a constructive participation.

So yeah, probably lack of clear rules, lack of due process, I hope that's the takeaway they'll get from it.

Arbitrary enforcement of vague rules is authoritarianism, but you can have clear rules and due process to limit hate speech. It has been done successfully in several places.

I agree with having clear standards. I think the proportions in the US are not quite as dire as you portray.

That's true, he is "just" at 40% of support among voters.

He still has won an election in a country that pretends to be democratic, so I'll politely assume he was the choice of the majority.

That's a far cry from 'defending KKK apologists'. Then again, having seen other responses you've made in this post, I'm skeptical I should be trying to persuade you.

What you think MAGA stands for is not what it actually stands for. You're stating all kinds of extremist positions that 99% of people in the US do not hold.

Anyone can stir up outrage against a made up situation.

> in many European cities, wearing a MAGA hat would be seen pretty close as wearing nazi insignia

Which ones?

No lynching here; another comment of mine points out irony as well. That said, white male isn't some sort of exception just because some do/did abhorrent things -- the white males who don't (and they certainly can't control whether they descend from those who did) do abhorrent things don't deserve it. Feel free to define a set of people who suck based on their actions, but white male can't be an analogue for that definition.

I think you're misunderstanding the reasons for free speech.

As soon as some entity gets a license to start banning speech, you have given bad ideas an advantage over good ones.

This is because a bad memeplex can co-opt the censorship apparatus and kill off any competitors without having to face them in a fair fight.

The criterion you mentioned about hate speech etc is extremely flexible and dependent on a bunch of definitions and interpretations that the censors will be in control of - exactly the kind of thing that the free speech principle protects us from!

> and in every case it would have been argued that this time the censorship was good because the dominant ideology was good, whereas previous instances of censorship were bad.

The idea of general progress is a fairly recent one. At the times of Galileo trials, many people would have proclaimed with pride that they were following the pure and unalterable criterion of the glorious classics of antiquities.

Notwithstanding that, our modern understanding of the evils of censorship is not just based on a shift in morality, it is based on a reasoning on the nature of debate, science, uncovering of truth and the importance of controversy.

There are places where, if you have a good argument, one can argue about the differences between genders, ethnicities, religions (<- God knows I waste so much time on that subject) or sexual orientation. One is allowed to propose an argumented view at odd with the majority.

Once that is preserved, I do not see what discussion of value is suppressed by suppressing hate speech.

Using Galileo as an example isn't very useful since even though it turns out that he was right, at the time he didn't actually have real proof so the church was right to tell him not to publish his opinion since he didn't have adequate evidence for his position. The problem the church had with him wasn't that they thought that the sun had to orbit the Earth, but that he wouldn't stop trying to make people use his method without actual proof.

But who decides which opinions are possible to exclude without being detrimental?

Turtles, all the way down!

None of these examples are hate speech.

There is a formal legal definition of hate speech in the countries where these laws apply and it would be nice if people arguing against those laws would accept that, instead of continuously conflating things that are not hate speech.

Interesting argument. By the same token, we should remove all cyclists from all roads, as it would provide a smoother transportation experience.

Well we do so when we want to go very fast e.g. highways.

Right, and going to a conference is like driving on a highway?

I don't know, I don't play football.

Car roads, bike roads, bus roads. With some intersection. I think that's the ideal

Did Mr. Wood engage in hate speech? If so, what did he say that constituted free speech.

One of the other individuals involved in this row has said previously "white men in tech ain't shit". Should this individual be allowed to participate in tech conferences?

I know neither their rules, nor what was said there. I can only tell you that systems exist that allow:

- hate speech to be objectively defined

- due process to exist in processing complaints

> "white men in tech ain't shit". Should this individual be allowed to participate in tech conferences?

All I can tell you is that it would probably be judged hate speech in France and fined if said publicly. I know nothing of the rules and penalties this specific place's CoC implements. And I'll be the first to say that it is problematic if the rules in the matter are not written.

But I am sure the tech world, through its typically clumsy approach of human affairs, will end up having enough jurisprudence to piece out a workable code.

> All I can tell you is that it would probably be judged hate speech in France and fined if said publicly.

Extremely unlikely. Members of the P.I.R. (black/arab racialist party) and other organisations who swim in the same waters have been spouting many many worse things. Or a few of the crazy chicks who took over the U.N.E.F. (student union) and have said stuff like "the whites should be gassed".

Did anyone care to bring their case to court? IF they did, I am pretty sure they would be found guilty.

Hate speech is the only speech that needs to be protected. If speech doesn't offend or upset anyone, then there's nothing that it needs to be protected from. Your reasoning is upside down.

If you find someone's opinion disagreeable, you don't shut it down, you refute it. Shutting it down just tells me you have no counter arguments, so maybe they have a point and I should listen to it.

Understand the Streisand Effect.

Technically it's possible for speech to be offensive/unpopular/blasphemous (and thus need and deserve protection) without being hate speech. Hate speech is a specific kind of offensive speech. Other than that you're spot on though.

Well, someone that finds speech offensive/upsetting/etc can pretty much call it hate speech. So in the end, hate speech can be anything that upsets someone.

I mean, you can reasonably define hate speech as something any reasonable person could agree is actually potentially harmful (like promoting some kind of prejudice in some dangerous ways), and I presume that's how it's defined under legal terms, but colloquially people most likely won't be doing that.

> not once, in all the hotly debated discussions I had, I found anything of value in the person being censored.

This says much more about you than about those people. Shame on you.

You ask what he's done? I and others have been repeatedly asking the same thing, and not one person has provided evidence beyond the initial, flimsy accusation.

In attempting to gather such dead ends under a hash tag, https://twitter.com/hashtag/LinuxFoundationKangarooCourt

The mob generation of these accusations are more thoroughly documented in https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/dtnamp/linux_foundat...

No, the CoC violation was for making a video, in his very popular podcast channel, supporting the "right" of Somnez to attack women in tech. Since Woods was coming to Kubecon specifically to podcast it, this made several women going to Kubecon feel very unsafe.

> supporting the "right" of Somnez to attack women in tech

Clearly false, borderline slander.

Actually what Somnez did was trying to take heat away from a specific tech-women being attacked in a twitter flamewar, by instead creating heat for himself.

He did this by being generally obnoxious and impolite, and thus an obvious target to follow/tack on to instead. This part was clearly successful and the harassed woman got less heat for it.

However he told lots of tech-people to "shut up". The problem? Some of those people were women.

If he found their opinion offensive or racists, should he not have told those people off because they were women? Should he have treated them differently? Really?

Personally I don't think so. Because IMO that would be the text-book definition of actual sexism.

That seems to be a key distinction.

If I fire an arrow in the dark, and it kills a person of color, does that make it a racist act of manslaughter?

Of course not. Racism denotes the motive of the attacker, not just the nature of the victim. Both have to be present for racism to be a factor.

That may or may not apply here, but I would need to see the video. Regardless, I've seen the 'ascribed motive' attack applied practically nonstop during this whole debacle, conjuring racist motives on the basis of a person of color making an accusation of racism, and not any acts of Charles Wood himself, including the aforementioned video. If that was key evidence, no one has brought it forward.

Just... don't. use. Twitter.

I mean, dear god, it's a cesspool of incivility. It's very structure discourages civil discourse because everyone is trying to be the most pithy.

And clicking on the links that are supposed to be the 'context' around this shit show.... how on earth is anyone supposed to navigate that mess?

No, just stay far, far away.

Every day someone somewhere gets fired for something they posted on Twitter. I've never heard of anyone getting hired for a tweet.

I got, sent out a tweet looking for work and got an interview the next day in my city. ended up working there for a while.

I hired someone from something I initially saw them Tweet about.

I've been hired because of Twitter twice.

... until you say that, and they spring out of the woodwork.

It's just a thing that never comes up.

I haven't had a twitter account for years (and in fact block all twitter domains on my home network). I fail to see any upside of it especially when something like this happens. There seems to be potential backlash for posting anything these days; are there any downsides for not posting or having an account to show off who I "follow"? Is my e-cred lacking because of it?

My WireGuard server hosts my DNS server which NXDOMAINs all social media and ads for my machines.

If I really want to see what's up with some mess like this, I at least need to spend the 15 seconds it takes to turn WireGuard off.

I entirely agree. I tried Twitter years ago, but had no patience for it. It's like Usenet, but with "threads" that are much harder to follow.

But if you must use Twitter, you gotta play safe. If you work for a living, your real name account must be 100% work focused. No religion or politics. Nothing at all controversial.

And it it amuses you to join the fray, use a pseudonym. Seriously, with solid OPSEC. Because your career may well depend on it.

You're right, but you missed the biggest part of the problem. The "nothing at all controversial" part changes, often without warning. Your history, however, is immutable.

I think the only way to fix it is for everyone to be cancelled.

If you exile enough people, pretty soon that itself becomes a problem.

We're currently in this dangerous middle point where people think it can't happen to them, or that the accused probably did something wrong.

There's a chance we might be creating a permanent underclass of people who have said or done unacceptable things in public. If that's 10% of the population, that's a big problem. But if it's 50% of the population, that's actually a smaller problem.

Is it possible that the ethical thing to do here is to join the cancellation brigades?

That is a good point. I did lots of wild and crazy stuff back in the 60s through the early 80s. And then I did est/Landmark. And learned how to be rigorously professional.

But I'm lucky. There are very few public records about my dissolute youth. Maybe a couple news reports, that don't mention me by name. Maybe a few photographs. And lots of memories that could still come back to bite me. But nothing like it is today.

Today, it's necessary to start the "nothing at all controversial" act very young. So that's something parents need to be teaching their kids. Along with "don't play in the street" and "don't accept rides from strangers". Plus using pseudonyms, with VPNs and Tor. And never trusting that "friends" won't sell them out.

> I think the only way to fix it is for everyone to be cancelled.

That doesn't work. Because there are multiple factions that cancel each other. So what you'll get is not just a permanent underclass, but permanent castes. Which will hate each other.

And given the demographics, it seems like what you're calling the underclass will be the majority, and will elect governments that pretend to cater to them. And the woke will end up working for social media etc, who will pretend to cater to them.

> Is it possible that the ethical thing to do here is to join the cancellation brigades?

One aspect of saying nothing at all controversial is being ambiguous. You want all factions to think that you're one of them. It's like playing a double, triple, etc agent.

I joined twitter in 2013 or 2014 for the math community. It was great. We were all posing little problems to each other. Then 2016 came, and it was never the same. Now you can't the politics seeping in. The way twitter shapes you and almost makes you respond is terrifying. I quit earlier this year and am glad I did.

@ mods I 100% understand why this is flagged and it is already being a mess but it has 100+ upvotes in <1 hour. If possible I think this issue is important enough to some such as myself in the community that this post should be allowed on the front page.

I don't understand. Are people mad because he posted a picture of himself in a maga hat? That seems awfully milquetoast. You know you live in a bubble when you want to black-list half the nation for a common political view.

Edit: it seems that people are annoyed because he's tied to a guy named John Sonmez. Any context on why this guy is bad? It looks like he caters to the same crowd Jordan Peterson does, but hasn't said anything offensive? The most I can find are references to "SJW"s, which doesn't sound particularly bad (especially when you consider what people on the "other side" say/do).

From the most recent controversy - he seems like a pretty odious person?

https://twitter.com/simpleprogrammr/status/11860996963909632...

I agree that guy sounds like a jerk, but he's not the guy who got kicked out of a conference. It was someone associated with him. And I believe the rationale for that guy getting kicked out was wearing a maga hat.

He participates a flame war on the internet! No one has done this since Hitler!

Seriously whats so bad about that tweet? He is a bit rude "shut your mouth", but so are 90% of the other participants. The parent tweet could be interpreted as much more rude -- She is assuming her collegaues are racist just because they are saying that "she should be happy to work there" I'd say that to almost everyone in IT, just compare the job to anything in retail or a school teacher.

Please let the Linux foundation know how you feel directly:

events@linuxfoundation.org

I like the open and public way of handling such matters. You won't have much transparency in private and that is dangerous. However, i am against their decision. All these "community guidelines" and "code of conduct" bullshit just get abused to attack and censor people.

Two men walk into a bar one wearing “si se puede” and the other “make America great again”. The bar happens to be in Silicon Valley......

Article flagged, because despite the relevance to a tech community, and the high profile of R Martin, some people in HN can't help abuse "flagging" for things they disagree with.

To be clear: The article was flagged, not that I flagged it.

To call something like this orwellian is to misunderstand and disrespect the whole concept of what orwell was warning about in the first place. Im not going to reply because the quality of theses conversations are simply apologist at best and I dare not say what they are at worst, if you think this is a left right thing you've not been paying attention. With that said, I think as usual an xkcd sums this up better than I could in many paragraphs.

https://xkcd.com/1357/

Can you explain how that comic applies in this circumstance?

What grinds my gears about situations like this is that the people inventing and enforcing these so-called CoCs are never actual engineers, just individuals who have somehow infiltrated the engineering community and are dictating to its authentic members.

That's an interesting point. Can you share more about who is an actual engineer and who isn't? Is this a certification? Do you consider yourself part of the engineering community, and if so, how does someone get admitted, either by your standards or the standards of the community?

> just individuals who have somehow infiltrated the engineering community

That just means they're being good social engineers.

The really troubling thing is how people like this “Sarah Mei” are allowed to call shots. Why does anyone even give credence to what she says? She’s clearly a power-hungry megalomaniac who spends all of her time “calling out” people who violate her religious beliefs (Intersectionalism / Foucaltian Power Dynamism).

Sorry, not everyone is a member of that religion, so we should not be policing based upon your own personal religious beliefs.

So his complaint is they accepted a public complaint and responded publicly, he thinks this is evil incarnate, but he is going to justify publicly posting his lengthy complaint about the whole thing based on "This was all done publicly."

My knee jerk reaction is to think of my mother saying: Two wrongs don't make a right.

(To be clear, if this were framed differently, I probably wouldn't have a problem with it. But as it is, it just reeks of "Do as I say, not as I do.")

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