Some people are power hungry and use words to get power. They are exposing themselves in the silliest ways. Pure vanity.
But that's their only usecase, isn't it?
CoCs are just a convenient document aimed at helping out Cardinal Richelieus finding ways to hang you under the guise of breaking acceptable conduct.
I mean, CoCs aren't aimed at changing people and make everyone nice. CoCs are aimed at providing a basis to persecute those who arguably don't comply with a given notion of acceptable conduct, punish them for their sins, and turn them into examples to enforce a chilling effect on the community.
This example shows a CoC working exactly as it was intended to work.
People have turned a blind eye to the oppressive and abusive nature of the CoC concept because they tend to believe that it can only ever oppress those we deem undesirable. But unless you're the one doing the oppression, nothing ensures that the rules only apply to those you don't like.
I think part of the problem is that most CoCs are copy-paste jobs. They're put in place as a matter of fashion. What they really need to be is a statement on the commitments of the leadership. And they are meaningless if the leadership is not trained on those commitments.
They really have, because that's the sole reason they exist.
It's like arguing that a oppressive totalitarian regime doesn't have to oppress their citizens.
> (...) they can be tools to communicate to good-faith actors that they will be welcome and safe.
CoCs aren't welcoming letters. CoCs are designed with the express purpose of letting you know that you will be punished if you do or say anything that the leader's deem unacceptable, and to be used as the basis for persecuting and punishing you if you still fail to fall in line and comply with the leadership's will.
Hell, you don't need to communicate to anyone that they can and will be safe. Either that's already implied, or means nothing if you don't plan to act on it. In fact, it's patently wrong that the goal is safety. It is not. The goal is compliance and submissiveness.
A very large group of people have stated many times that that is not the case. They do not feel safe. It's continued assertions that bludgeoning people is the sole reason CoCs exist that make those people feel like they are being completely ignored.
> or means nothing if you don't plan to act on it
That is literally what I said. "And they are meaningless if the leadership is not trained on those commitments."
But what does that even mean in the context of an open source project? How is anyone actually “unsafe” from someone who may be on another continent and have no idea where they live? The word “unsafe” doesn’t mean anything any more, it’s just used to silence debate. “I feel unsafe so you should merge my PR without doing any code review” is what they mean.
It wasn't until PyCon that I considered anyone could be for for a joke(?) told to a friend next to you, overheard by someone who was supposed to be a developer advocate!.
But not a developer themselves. The industry is overrun with these “tech-adjacent” roles that add only marginal value, if any. Members of this group seem to be the driving force behind CoCs.
An alternate possibility is that you don't understand what people mean when they say they feel unsafe. Do you feel you have invested effort into empathizing with these concerns, or would you say your are more dismissive?
That is a possibility, but it’s unreasonable to expect that a person can redefine a common word in their own mind and expect everyone else to telepathically know what they “mean”. Especially in a primarily text based medium.
I mean, the word is used a lot. You even referenced it being commonly used. Have you tried to understand it?
It is enough now.
And this is coming from someone who wasn't allowed to play in the schoolyard as a child, someone who was knocked in the head by an older classmate, got beaten etc while teachers looked the other way. This went on until I learned to fight back and I got a teacher who didn't care that I was outgroup and stood up for me.
My mind and body knows a bit about this and I'm confident that what we are seing here isn't a solution rather than extremists making things worse.
One aspect of this newfangled definition of safe is that women can feel confident existing in a space without fear of being sexually harassed. Is that worth considering? Is that a political game?
That the current approach is playing right into the hands of the bullies.
Or do you think it is the awkward ones who are sitting on the CoC tribunal?
As far as I can see this is yet another place for the socially and politically strong ones to get their way.
> One aspect of this newfangled definition of safe is that women can feel confident existing in a space without fear of being sexually harassed. Is that worth considering? Is that a political game?
I'm absolutely fine with women feeling safe. In fact there are at least a couple of women around who are thankful because I have fixed them a job or something. (To be clear, I help everyone, not only women.)
It is absolutely worth considering such things, which is why we (at least were I live) have laws against such things, and also why I am in favour of those laws.
What I am not in favour of is independent kangaroo courts popping up everywhere, making up rules as they go, combining the role of judge, jury and executioner etc.
Kangaroo courts are for war, and even then only when there's no other option.
Would it be fair to say that you believe the majority of CoC reports are due to a misunderstanding of a well-intentioned behavior on the part of an awkward individual? If so, where does this idea come from?
> It is absolutely worth considering such things, which is why we (at least were I live) have laws against such things, and also why I am in favour of those laws.
To pursue something legally requires a formal legal process, evidence, lawyers, etc., and has strict penal consequences. Would you consider there is a need for a more informal process where the consequences is being kicked out of an event?
> I'm absolutely fine with women feeling safe.
But you aren't fine with an organization creating rules to help women feel safe. Why is it an abuse of power, acting as "judge, jury and executioner," to remove someone from an event or organization who causes women to feel uncomfortable?
If you don't understand why it's necessary at times to clearly state what bigotry is, and why it's unacceptable, than you need to learn a bit more about diversity topics.
They (CoC)s shouldn't be used to play power games. It's totally appropriate to call out situations where a CoC is used incorrectly.
Oh really? This discussion is about someone that was persecuted and punished for violating a CoC. Do you see any bigotry involved in this story?
According to Wikipedia, No true Scotsman, or appeal to purity, is an informal fallacy in which one attempts to protect a universal generalization from counterexamples by changing the definition in an ad hoc fashion to exclude the counterexample.[1][2] Rather than denying the counterexample or rejecting the original claim, this fallacy modifies the subject of the assertion to exclude the specific case or others like it by rhetoric, without reference to any new specific objective rule or criterion: "no true Scotsman would do such a thing"; i.e., those who perform that action are not part of our group and thus criticism of that action is not criticism of the group.
Now, with this definition in mind, let's review the context of this discussion:
> Using CoC's to backstab people is not going to end well.
> But that's their only usecase, isn't it?
> No, CoCs are meant to clearly state that bigotry is unacceptable.
> Oh really? This discussion is about someone that was persecuted and punished for violating a CoC. Do you see any bigotry involved in this story?
> This discussion is about someone being punished by a committee for something that wasn’t in the CoC, as you can read in the article.
So there was a debate about whether CoCs can be used as a weapon. gwbas1c rejected the idea that CoCs could be used as a weapon. barumi referenced OP article as a counter-example, to demonstrate an instance where a CoC was used as a weapon. pindab0ter then resorted to a "no true scotsman" fallacy to reject this counter-example. According to pindab0ter, this was not a "true" example of someone utilizing a CoC for attacking people, because the victim feels like they did not violate the CoC to an extent where such an attack was justified. This line of reasoning can be used to exclude all examples of people using a CoC as a weapon. After all, if someone feels like they violated a CoC and deserved their punishment, then they wouldn't characterize the situation as an "attack" in the first place.
barumi referenced OP article as an example of CoC as a weapon.
pindab0ter argues this not a fault in the CoC itself per se, but in how it was enforced.
That's a rather charitable interpretation.
The context here was weaponization of CoCs, and OP article was referenced as an example of this weaponization. It seems very clear to me that spindab0ter was arguing that this is not an example of weaponizing the CoC.
Your alternative interpretation doesn't really resonate for me, because it sounds like a "no no, guys, there was nothing at fault in the CoC itself" to a subthread where nobody claimed there was anything wrong with the contents of the CoC in the first place.
Edit: I'm not sure what is even meant by "weaponize." Is the implication that somebody at the conference had vendetta against OP? It's clear that CoCs give people more power, which is a weapon, in a sense. Would reporting someone for CoC violation for sexual misconduct at a conference be an example of weaponization?
I don't think pindab0ter would agree with this interpretation. @pindab0ter, if you are still following the thread, can you clarify this with a yes/no answer: do you count the OP article as an example of CoC weaponization?
> I'm not sure what is even meant by "weaponize." Is the implication that somebody at the conference had vendetta against OP?
Yes.
> It's clear that CoCs give people more power, which is a weapon, in a sense. Would reporting someone for CoC violation for sexual misconduct at a conference be an example of weaponization?
Well, if you dislike someone's political views, and then you hatch a plan to make up fraudulent sexual misconduct allegations with the hope of "canceling" someone, I would describe that as "weaponizing" the CoC. But if the allegations are genuine and without ulterior motives, then I would not use that terminology.
Really? I thought it was more people being overly sensitive, and the enforcement team not using their brains. I think pindab0ter would agree that it was improper enforcement of the CoC. I'm not sure anybody can speak to the intentions of the people that reported it with certainty.
> Well, if you dislike someone's political views, and then you hatch a plan to make up fraudulent sexual misconduct allegations with the hope of "canceling" someone, I would describe that as "weaponizing" the CoC
Is that consistent with the thread? Are you arguing that the majority of CoC reports are outright lies? I thought this thread was about the use of CoC to enforce a code of behavior, and if stringent enforcement counts as misuse.
Let's stop the speculation on what pindab0ter would or would not agree with. Clearly you and I interpret their message in completely different ways, so unless they want to come back to clarify their statement, let's just stop with the speculation.
> Is that consistent with the thread? Are you arguing that the majority of CoC reports are outright lies? I thought this thread was about the use of CoC to enforce a code of behavior, and if stringent enforcement counts as misuse.
Look, you asked me to define "weaponize" within a specific context. So I gave you 2 examples: one where I thought use of the term would be appropriate, and one where I thought the term would not be appropriate. I was trying to answer your question about the definition of a word, that's all. I have no idea what proportion of CoC reports are outright lies or half-truth motivated by hidden agendas.
Also, I don't like that you're trying to reframe OP's experience as "stringent enforcement". The case described in OP is clearly selective enforcement, which is pretty much the opposite of stringent.
> This discussion is about someone being punished by a committee for something that wasn’t in the CoC, as you can read in the article.
I said:
> I think pindab0ter would agree that it was improper enforcement of the CoC
Does that seem like speculation? This thread is getting a little disjointed. We can't seem to agree on anything.
We already went over this; you interpret pindab0ter's message in an entirely different way than I do. When pindab0ter says "punished by a committee for something that wasn’t in the CoC", you somehow interpret that as "improper enforcement of the CoC", whereas I interpret that as enforcement action unrelated to the CoC.
Anyway, there's no point continuing this. I think it's pretty clear what pindab0ter was trying to say, but you have a completely different interpretation. Unless pindab0ter wants to come back and clarify, let's just stop this here.
That's not what I said.
You seem to be focused on detailed differences in meaning but missing the thrust of these arguments. You claimed Scotsman fallacy to a perceived specific meaning of the sentence, but it didn't fit in context. In general you seem to be not aware of the contextual meaning of what anybody has said here.
> That's not what I said.
Yes it is, you literally just said "I think pindab0ter would agree that it was improper enforcement of the CoC". See, you said "enforcement of the CoC". As in, CoC was the thing that was being enforced. Now you're trying to claim that "enforcement" was not related to "the CoC" in that sentence? Wow.
If you took a random person off the street, showed them that sentence, and then asked "what was being enforced", any English speaking person would be able to identify "CoC" as the thing that was being enforced (albeit it was enforced improperly). So clearly, in that sentence, the enforcement action was in some way related to the CoC. I don't know what kind of mental gymnastics you're trying to pull by claiming that the sentence means something else.
> You seem to be focused on detailed differences in meaning but missing the thrust of these arguments. You claimed Scotsman fallacy to a perceived specific meaning of the sentence, but it didn't fit in context. In general you seem to be not aware of the contextual meaning of what anybody has said here.
Look, I was trying to be nice earlier when I said that you and I interpret pindab0ter's words in a different way, and that we should leave it at that. I don't actually think your interpretation is plausible. I think it's obvious to anyone who read the original comments in context, that pindab0ter didn't consider OP to be an example of "weaponizing a CoC". You can play word games all day long and talk down in a condescending tone, but I don't know what you're hoping to achieve with that.
I said "improper enforcement of the CoC". As an example, "improper enforcement of the law" might suggest that something was enforced which wasn't the law. Is there a reason you're set on this interpretation of my words?
In this, and the Scotsman case, you seem to have chosen an interpretation fits your argument. I'm not sure this is a good way to carry on a conversation, though. This whole discussion was about whether pindab0ter made a valid point. It's not clear to me you are interested in understanding the point made. Maybe it's easier for you to label it as a fallacy. I know that's something I do frequently when I don't understand something -- assume it's incorrect.
No, you can't keep making up new meanings for words. "Enforcement of the law" means that law was being enforced. When you add "improper" in the front of it, it means that law was being enforced improperly. For example, when a police officer harasses a person on the pretext of enforcing the law, that would be improper law enforcement.
> This whole discussion was about whether pindab0ter made a valid point. It's not clear to me you are interested in understanding the point made. Maybe it's easier for you to label it as a fallacy.
If pindab0ter wants to come here to clarify that they actually meant that OP is a valid example of enforcing a CoC, I will take their word for it. Otherwise, I'm not going to entertain "hidden meanings" for the words that they already spoke, I'm going to assume that they meant what they said.
To be clear, in this example, the officer is enforcing a law that doesn’t exist.
> Otherwise, I'm not going to entertain "hidden meanings" for the words that they already spoke, I'm going to assume that they meant what they said.
Be honest with yourself.
Maybe it's worth looking at this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24945750
Ordinary people still get in trouble because others enjoy being judge, jury and executioner.
Both are opinions, and I honestly don't see why one would be bigotry, but not the other. Hence the only thing I conclude is that CoCs are actually about politics, but framed in a very nice way, pretending to be based on empathy and inclusion, making them very hard to object to.
In the US, we've usually had reasonable parties in power, so it really didn't matter what your politics were.
Now... Not so much; and it goes both ways, too. There are loonies on both sides of the aisle.
I've always seen CoCs as needed for situations where a conference has a transgender person and a "poorly socialized conservative." Or a Christian proudly wearing a cross and a "poorly socialized liberal." Situations are even simpler; it could be a conference with a female speaker and a man who still believes in strict gender roles.
Unfortunately, the above situations come down to "political belief."
In general CoCs enforce a very American world view, one where I as a non-American do not feel welcome.
To use an extreme example for the sake of discussion, would you similarly feel that excluding a skinhead with Swastika face tattoos from a scientific conference constitutes an unacceptable example of political oppression? If not, is it because they cause minoritized people to feel unsafe and unwelcome? Where do you believe the line should be drawn?
Can you expand on this, explain the connection? In particular, why the former (belief) would influence the latter (behavior)?
I firmly believe, based on overwhelming evidence, that genetics makes most people perform terribly in technical roles. Fortunately, there are a few bright, above-average exceptions that perform amazingly. If someone proves they're competent, I'll treat them competently, but at the same time it doesn't make sense to assume that the average person could be anywhere near competent.
Edit: answer to your second question: I try to be inclusive, I don't believe in drawing lines, at least not when it comes to belief (only behavior).
It's not universally the case, to be sure. If you voice your belief that women are intellectually inferior, you will likely make them feel excluded. In general, there is a relationship between a person's beliefs and behaviors which I regard as self-evident.
> Edit: answer to your second question: I try to be inclusive, I don't believe in drawing lines, at least not when it comes to belief (only behavior).
People tend to act in accordance with their beliefs. I don't think I track your perspective. Do you really believe that, say, a person with white supremecist beliefs, again, as an extreme example, will generally act welcoming toward minorities? You seem to believe, well, as long as they don't explicitly disrespect someone, it's fine. But social behavior is a lot more subtle. People can tell if you hate them.
Professionals tend to act professionally. Just because most people are horny & sexual doesn't mean that they need to hump each other at work or at conferences. I expect professional behavior regardless of your personal beliefs. Now, personally I'd prefer people to also look professional (fully clothed, no religious symbols, ...) so I wouldn't necessarily disagree with such rules, but they're usually (as evidenced by this very OP) applied inconsistently, politically.
> but they're usually (as evidenced by this very OP) applied inconsistently, politically
Do you have the impression OP was a political disagreement?
> Professionals tend to act professionally.
Yes, but people aren't robots. These are still human interactions between people. You develop personal relationships at conferences, or fail to. People with a hostile attitude toward minoritized groups, whether explicitly expressed or not, are going to make these people feel less welcome, and as a result, they will have a worse outcome at the conference.
I thought they were used to codify acceptable and unacceptable conduct.
The big theme in all the most exasperating cases, whether to do with HOAs, CoC enforcement, or even the police seems to involve:
1. wide difference between rules as written and agreed to versus how they are applied
2. unchecked power for enforcers, who can flout punishment/scrutiny, as above, for reasons below
3. insufficient interest from parties not directly impacted
On the other hand, the whole CoC thing feels like it was created by people on a power trip, and/or as a virtue signalling instrument to appear "inclusive", and/or a convenient character assassination tool that can be selectively enforced. Keep in mind that "violation of the code of conduct" sounds much worse than "this person offended me/made me uncomfortable" even though in most cases they are used to refer to the same thing.
People for the most part know how to behave themselves, disagreements can be resolved in private between the involved parties and if someone keeps being a dick you just don't engage with them (note that a CoC will not change anything if the person intends to keep harassing their victim). We've been working fine like that, both online and in the real world without any CoC (the law is enough to deal with actually serious cases).
A CoC doesn't add anything to people already acting in good faith (other than being a thing they can be "cancelled" about), but does nothing against a dedicated malicious actor who couldn't care less about it anyway.
Someone wanting to instigate drama and intentionally get offended must've said something about "inclusivity", everyone jumped on it as a virtue-signalling tool and now here we are.
> We've been working fine like that, both online and in the real world without any CoC
I'm not sure what you consider "fine". Misogyny has been par for the course for a long time. Not to mention verbal degradation of e.g. ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. We have not suddenly removed these formerly accepted behaviors, even though things have gotten better.
It is possible that there really isn't a problem in communities you engage with, and that consequently their CoCs make little positive impact. But do you really know what kinds of inappropriate remarks e.g. women around you face? It is easy to dismiss anyone who had such negative experiences as a professional victim, but surely the world doesn't just consist of "perfectly reasonable and encompassing people that know better than to offend", "harassers that purposely ignore any community guidelines"?
In short: Yes, CoC creation and enforcement will naturally appeal to certain groups of people that have more personal motives than those of the community. The same is true of HOA, police, unions, workers' councils and so on. But please be careful to dismiss their usefulness due to this.
While I don't think this point is necessarily wrong, surely we can agree that in recent years there has been expansion of what is considered abuse. As with any push to change ideas, not everyone is on-board.
Is being subjected to a micro-aggression abuse? 20 years ago you'd only get a "yes" from a few activists / academics. Today you'll find a vocal (and growing) minority claiming it is a form of violence.
We don't all agree on the new rules, and CoCs are a method of making everyone follow them.
Indeed! See "Misogyny was par for the course". I understand that's not what you are getting at specifically, but the whole point is that just because it's been acceptable before doesn't mean that it's right.
> We don't all agree on the new rules, and CoCs are a method of making everyone follow them.
Exactly! The intent is to cause a change in behavior, and that's not going to happen if everybody has to sign off on it. Most people don't like having to change their behavior.
Again, CoC enforcement is not without its flaws, and policing interpersonal interaction is never going to be a hard and fast thing. But CoCs give everyone tools to nudge behavior away from what is objectively causing (subjective) distress.
Rebelled against? By whom? If you want to speak at this conference, you have to play by their rules or you won't get invited. Even if you do get invited, and you're not nice, you'll get humiliated and driven to tears. If there's going to be a rebellion, it's by would-be speakers at the conference, but that would be against their own interest: they like to speak at conferences, so they won't. So anyone who wants to speak at this conference will be turning a blind eye to this. Would-be attendees also won't be making a fuss, conferences with interesting speakers tend to attract large crowds. A handful of would-be rebels won't make any difference.