Hacker News Reader

Comment by centimeter | Hacker News Reader

They’re also super weirdly political. As a not-especially-political guy I’m super turned off by all the “activism” I see coming out of the community, even where it’s totally irrelevant. I remember seeing a whole thread about how the rust mascot crab is canonically non-gender-binary or something. Wtf?

View on HN

If discussing the gender of the crab is politics, then surely assuming the crab is one gender or another is also politics. The idea that you can avoid politics in anything is a lie told by people whose beliefs conform to mainstream society. What you're really asking for is everyone to agree with the mainstream view.

It's kinda like the old military policy of "don't ask don't tell" - the policy wasn't actually don't ask don't tell - the actual policy was "pretend to be straight". Guys didn't get in trouble for talking about their girlfriend.

Beyond that, as someone that doesn't care about politics, I just skip the thread. There are dozens I don't care to read about. It's just another one. No big deal.

If communities want to go down that road, fine, but then they need to get out of this weird limbo where some views are allowed and some aren't. That means that someone must be just as free to say, "I believe the rust crab should have a normal gender because non-gender-binary is not a thing." without getting banned or cancelled. Right now it's reverted to a very don't-ask-don't-tell-like environment where one can either speak in support of such things or not say anything at all, effectively pretending to agree just as in your military example servicemen had to pretend to be straight.

In my experience many people (unfortunately) generally feel free to disparage non-gender-binary concepts on internet communities

Maybe in other places on the internet, sure, but I was referring mostly to the code-of-conduct-gated development communities that pretend not to discuss politics while allowing specific viewpoints above others.

I can see a difference between light-hearted speculation about an imaginary crab's gender and saying that non-gender-binary people don't exist. Can you think of any reason why one of these might be allowed, while the other might not be?

I guess I can't, because they're both political statements. Politics is either allowed or not. I assume, however, you have some reason in mind, by how you phrased the question.

Interesting - well, honestly, not sure how anything wouldn't be political if discussing a crab is politics.

Not that that's necessarily wrong - I'm definitely sympathetic to the argument that the personal is political. But that argument would justify more technical communities taking political stances, not fewer.

Discussing a crab is not politics, but attributing to it a non-existent gender is intentionally contrary to most people's social beliefs (especially outside of the SV bubble) and is thus political. Calling it a normal boy or girl isn't.

If, however, some community members wish to do that, they open to others the option to speak their minds on the topic, including stating that such an action ought not to be taken because no such gender exists. Contrast this with how most "codes of conduct" are written: they would permit community members to speak in favor of such a decision but not against it, as doing so would be "hateful", "bigoted", or "exclusionary".

> If discussing the gender of the crab is politics, then surely assuming the crab is one gender or another is also politics.

A) sane and professional communities just don’t talk about irrelevances like this at all, which is my point

B) if some fringe political belief rejects some standard bread-and-butter assumption, it’s not really useful to describe running with the default assumption as “political”

“If abolishing private property is politics, then surely locking your door is politics.”

Don't think of it as a community being political. It's not like people pick a programming language and then suddenly one day decide to be political, in part due to their programming-language choices.

Think of it instead as "people who are political" looking for a community (not necessarily because of that community's politics, but often for orthogonal reasons, e.g. a language being relatively new and so not yet used by anything they dislike) and then those people being political about their programming wherever they land. If some percentage of programmers are like that, then just statistically, some language is going to end up with a lot of them, whether its maintainers wish to cultivate the community image as being such or not.

My first reaction was: why is a non-gender-binary crab mascot considered "political"? I'm assuming this came up incidentally in the context of its name and pronouns?

By this implied definition of political, more or less any human social interaction is political in the broader view.

You're right that it's primarily a social issue, but people will always try to use the state to enforce their social beliefs, so they become political. See New York City's ordinance that can cause those who won't use a made-up "pronoun" to be fined [0], undoubtedly a use of force by the state to enforce a certain set of beliefs.

[0]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...

It’s one example out of many where rust users bring a political topic (and yes, post-gender queer theory stuff is political) into a discussion where there’s no reason to do so except to leverage the discussion as a platform for boosting your political belief. It’s very unprofessional, very counterproductive, and a huge turn off for people who don’t have the same fringe politics.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com