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An important recent learning about programming adoption is that a good community is absolutely key to drive growth. Makes sense to establish the principles.
It is quite literally the opposite of what you and others supporting this are claiming it to be
All you have to do is remove the weird bit about “nazis”, which is irrelevant and adds nothing of value to the statement anyways, and you’re not really going to scare any normal person off. But this is just over the top and literally the only purpose it could serve is as an exclusionary political signal.
Who are the excluded people here and what do they not agree with?
it’s ambiguous but the implications are clear
If you are a Christian, someone who would use this phrase would likely call you a Nazi. If you don’t want to abolish the state of Israel, they might call you a Nazi. It could be any issue really. But to actually be “safe” in an environment like this you have to align yourself roughly to the politics of the DSA or you aren’t welcome.
I guess you could say at this point that “Nazi” has devolved into being a sort of a political slur referring to anyone who is not sufficiently leftist.
I am probably overreacting to this because I have encountered it in the workplace before. Politics constantly being brought up inappropriately & the only safe move was to go out of your way to signal to the right people that you were on their “team”. The occasional political witch hunt over nothing would happen. A good portion of the company spent most of the day talking politics instead of working but I assume nothing was done out of fear of retaliation. A lot of really bizarre things, but hopefully not the norm.
You have no idea of that whatever footer they put on their page, short of one that is 'we like to call people Nazis'. The reaction is as if someone's already called you personally a Nazi and the footer doesn't do that.
Again, I get the discomfort with the perception you might have different political views from whoever wrote that footer. But that's the discomfort of difference that comes with everyday life. Nobody has called anyone a Nazi, that's not a reasonable extrapolation from either the footer or your unpleasant personal experience combined with the footer.
Are you familiar with the Paradox of Tolerance (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance)?
It is best understood as a social contract - in order for a group to function, people need to tolerate each other. People who don't obey that social contract are therefore not eligible for being in the group.
An example: I once had someone tell me to my face that I shouldn’t have an engineering job at all because no white men without a college degree should be “allowed” to. At work. However, this person was involved in ERGs and close with people in HR, so I didn’t have much choice but to just accept it and move on.
Another good example I’ve seen personally: employer hires a new CTO. He sets up the second phase of our interview process to be a phone call with him, and out of dozens of candidates he only allows Muslim candidates through this process. This was the clearest case of discrimination I have seen. When someone on my team speaks out about this, he’s fired and we are all scolded about racism being unacceptable.
This isn’t a social contract, it’s organized harassment and abuse by politically obsessed weirdos and it has no place in any professional environment.
Everyone knows this and it is highly controversial which is the point. I don't agree with any of these things because I know what they mean in reality.
This message is right in your face, it isn't like you have to search for it.
on a surface level the statement isn’t controversial in any way, but the particular language that’s used signals something else entirely
It's very normal.
The type of statement isn’t really the issue, but the specific language used being in the form of political slogans and the “Nazi” bit. I don’t remember seeing anything quite like that on the Go page. Or any other programming language’s page.
The daily standup is not the right forum, for example. The pub after work? maybe.
The previous part of the community statement gets the "we're going to be nice, and not discriminate, and focus on the language itself" point across just fine.
Signaling that you want to inject politics into an inappropriate context signals that you may be the type of project that will do unpredictable things when the political mood strikes and makes it less viable to depend on you.
It's this "turn everything into activism" bullshit that people across the the political spectrum engage in on social media that got me to cancel all my social media accounts some years ago (present company excluded).
If you came into my FAQ and wanted me to put medical advice in it we would not see my refusing to engage with the concept with it as medical advice in itself. (I would not be seen as either for or against the medical advice, in fact people would wonder why the heck you were suggesting I put medical advice in my software FAQ!)
"this isn't the place for that" used to be a very well understood concept, and everyone was able to respect that, whether it was in the workplace or over Thanksgiving dinner. We just stopped enforcing that and started treating "not here, not now" as though it were taking a side.
When you draw up rules for an FAQ you're delimiting a box and saying "the stuff inside the box is part of my model, and the stuff outside it is not". The person suggesting you put advice about raising suckling pigs in your Emacs FAQ (picking the most extreme example I can think of) is suggesting you redraw the box - change the model. I'd still say the decision to redraw the model or not is a political decision. I'd also say that saying "no" is obviously the right decision. But still political.
I admit my definition of political (any action or decision that affects how people relate to each other or how resources and opportunities are allocated) is maximalist. We could, at root, be talking about different things.
I suppose I have to agree with you that the statement itself is political, given your definition. In which case I'd simply re-phrase my argument. We used to have political neutral zones, where we agreed that we'd try to avoid overt political discussion, and we'd politely ignore those little statements that are "still political". In your example we would all be able to agree that "no" is obviously the right decision regarding the FAQ additions, and we'll all politely ignore the fact that we have differing opinions about the politics of raising suckling pigs. Neutral territory where we can put aside our differences and focus on something bigger.
We've lost a lot of those spaces, which is sad because those neutral zones are critical for the functioning of any ideologically diverse group of people. We have a word for a space where everyone must agree, and must all say all the correct phrases: cult.
We need to build communities, not cults. And to do that we need to be able to agree to disagree about things.
(Back when I was doing a lot of Ruby "Matz is nice and so we are nice" seemed to me to be about the best community code of conduct you could hope for!)
Foucault wrote: "This book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought [...] breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other."
This is good too: https://eukaryotewritesblog.com/2021/05/02/
But it all sums to "the map is not the territory".
Broadly agree with the thrust of what you're saying, disagree with some of the fine detail.
Suggesting to mention Nazis in the FAQ is extremely political. Closing, ignoring or fencing the ticket is much less political.
It's up to everyone whether you want to raise or lower the levels, keeping in mind what you actually want to accomplish.
This kind of thing is clearly virtue signaling and flag waving.
You may as well have a banner that says "conservatives not welcome".
It's their project, and their choice. I just find the whole thing tiresome.
Probably wouldn't have otherwise.
Based on the comments here, I'm not the only one.
So, nice way to build a community?
Where "inclusive" actually means the opposite.
All this sort of thing tells me is to avoid this community because accusations of bigotry are going to start flying over the smallest of arguments and I have no interest in having people try to ruin my life because of their unhealthy obsession with politics
Personally I'll use any technology regardless of the politics, but engaging with people is another matter.
The statement was perfect until that last line.
Whom did they call "nazi"? Anybody?
If they didn't call any particular person "nazi" then it's unprofessional to suggest they did that.
1. Black lives matter.
2. Trans rights are human rights.
3. No nazi bullsh*t.
Phrases 1 & 2 are well-recognized political slogans, and I don't like some of the organizations that have very vocally rallied behind these slogans.
Do you think that makes me a nazi? If not, how welcome do you think this makes me feel?
But the idea that it would even be a concern for there to be “nazi bullshit” in a programming language would require such an absurdly broad definition of nazi that i can only assume whoever wrote this would consider a large % of Americans to be Nazis. This is inherently exclusionary. The statement is bullshit. It isn’t “Friendly <3” as the heading would suggest.
I’m wondering why you’d do that.
1. Black lives matter.
2. Trans rights are human rights.
3. No nazi bullsh*t.
Phrases 1 & 2 are well-recognized political slogans, and I don't like some of the organizations that have very vocally rallied behind these slogans.
Do you think that makes me a nazi? And if not, how welcome do you think this makes me feel?
How would you feel if my org stated “all lives matter” and pretended not to see the problem?
PS: we know you know this.