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petesergeant

> the ecosystem is essentially a microcosm of the US political landscape

what does this mean?

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Difficult. I will attempt to answer this in a way that won't upset people and may be informative?

Here are two ways of looking at it:

a. People in the USA* have massive fights about things that no-else cares about, and software projects put up a statement about those. This is off-putting to everyone else.

b. The USA is ahead of the curve on some political movements, and the article is expressing conservatism/anti-conservatism/a reaction towards being expected to act according to morals that aren't majority accepted in their country yet.

To decide for each particular movement whether it's (a) the wave of the future or (b) a passing fad? Who can say? You are supposedly an autonomous moral being, so use your own judgement.

*This is true of any place and any people, but everyone else has to put up with the USA's quirks because rich influential explosives. You could substitute Twitter for the USA here. Hey, who gave Twitter all those stealth bombers?

I think the short answer is that the US is the dominant soft global empire (which is to say this is not merely military, but also economic and cultural). What happens in Rome ripples outward into the broader realm.

But I also believe that another contributing factor is that Americans, regardless of political affiliation, often demonstrate a presumption that their own provincial squabbles, concerns, and anxieties are shared by everyone else on the planet. This is not categorically unique to Americans, but such presumption is reinforced by boorish imperial egocentrism.

And, of course, some people simply don't have the sense, consideration, and social grace to know what the appropriate time, place, and means are for expressing political convictions, and as a result, obsessively pollute all manner of social interaction with the aforementioned topics.

I think this is mainly in reference to John De Goes, founder of the ZIO framework:

https://typelevel.org/blog/2019/09/05/jdg.html

https://meta.plasm.us/posts/2020/07/25/response-to-john-de-g...

It's hard to answer meaningfully without risking starting a pointless debate in the comments or being fully honest, but I will try:

There are two FP ecosystems inside the Scala community with a very adversarial relationship towards each other. The root is that many years ago the lead developer of one of those FP communities allowed (based on community feedback) a speaker to give a technical talk. There were some people demanding that he'd be cancelled based on his right-wing views. This evolved into a full-blown conflict with serious accusations over the years about political alignment.

I am not a member of the Scala community but are interested on the language and somehow this conflict kept popping up. I agree with the author about the "US political landscape" microcosm: the conflict felt absurd and completely blown-out of proportion to me as an european.

Note this all happened years ago and thankfully the community has very much moved on.

Travis one of the guys involved has even left Scala to do his activism work full-time.

I don't think the community was allowed to move on. JdG has repeatedly behaved like an asshole and poured fuel on the fire with Typelevel people who never cared about that original LambdaConf drama and his feud with Travis. Instead of moving on, he decided to make more ennemies, to the point several library maintainers don't want to touch anything even remotely related to Zio.

That speaker wasn't just anybody with 'right-wing views', it was 'Mencius Moldbug' himself. (See, for example: https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2013/09/technology-...)

I think I meant "fair-right" (that's why there was a hyphen) and wanted to avoid a more exact characterization to avoid sparking a debate around it.

constant drama.

Travis Brown (a very sociopathic and toxic, straight up unstable person) tried to cancel John A De Goes, total shitshow ensued. FYI, Travis has created scripts to auto-dox people on Twitter if he doesn't like them. Travis also left Scala ecosystem after lashing out at literally everybody including Martin Odersky

Reason: De Goes invited a speaker to his LambdaConf conference, without knowing that speaker was involved in white nationalism (US). I don't remember the exact details, but it was a huge scandal

De Goes tried to reason that all kinds of people should be included in the tech conferences irrespective of their political background. Being stubborn as he is, I don't think he ever apologised. De Goes was later booted from cats project, one of the reasons why he started Zio.

IMO De Goes is a great project leader still, and many Scala devs are moving to Zio.

I might be misremembering but wasn't there a pro slavery angle as well?

Jesus. Yeah, I will stay with TypeScript.

Keep on posting. Me waiting for season 2.

You're joking but this stuff has been going on for longer than most Netflix shows :D

small edit: JDG did not invite the speaker, they applied to an anonymous call for papers, once it was accepted, it was later revealed he was Moldbug. JDG, after polling other under represented speakers, decided not to rescind the invitation.

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