Comment by WCSTombs | Hacker News Reader

Comment by WCSTombs | Hacker News Reader

> Overloading the discussion of the bylaws change (47 out of 177 posts in topic at the time the moderators closed the topic), which created an atmosphere of fear, uncertainty, and doubt...

> Defending “reverse racism” and “reverse sexism”, concepts not backed by empirical evidence, which could be seen as deliberate intimidation or creating an exclusionary environment.

So simply having an opinion and expressing it counts as "intimidation" now? I have to point out that one aspect of an organization's culture that actually creates hostility and exclusion is punishing people for engaging in good-faith discussion. (And if the dialogue in question was not in good faith, why not put that at the top?) It's not enough for someone to engage in the process and help the team reach the best outcome. Their opinion must also be the correct one, or else.

Look, I'm an outsider here, so there are obviously a lot of details I'm missing, but this doesn't look good to someone reading it without context, and I don't think it makes the PSF look good. How it reads is "hey, we're writing to let you know we're banning someone. We won't say who it is, and we won't say exactly what they did, but the two top things came down to differences of opinion."

I would love to be wrong about all of this, because I especially don't like seeing it in an open-source organization that's so integral to my own work.

This is why I am generally not a supporter of these CoCs based on how I have seen them play out negatively over and over again, and I share the same sentiment as others in this thread that have mentioned the same.

My understanding based on talking to others who DO like them, is that the rules they put in there are an attempt to show contributors (and potential new contributors) that they will be welcome in this community and shouldn't have to worry about being harassed or ridiculed etc. in the hopes that they can point to specific violations and have moderators deal with it if something happens.

But moderators already had that power. And the terms they use in these documents are quite subjective, and so the interpretation ends up being left up to the moderators, which was already the case anyways. Then you have the people who weaponize the document specifically to use their own interpretations in ways that conflict with how the moderators view it in order to stir up drama and "cancel" people they don't like.

Other projects who try to be more democratic such as Nix etc., from what I can tell, end up getting too focused on endless discussions and disagreements over terminology that not much ends up getting accomplished that way either.

Even when people say simply to keep "politics" out of discussions, then there is always disagreement about what is considered politics, including the people who point out that it's impossible to do anything that's NOT considered politics to someone e.g. "everything is political" if you look at it that way.

I'm not sure what the solution is but I'd be interested to hear some ideas.

The claim that there’s no empirical evidence of “reverse sexism” is particularly absurd. Women can be just as sexist as men, especially since society deems it to be socially acceptable for women to denigrate men (“men are stupid”) or to objectify men in a way that would lead to severe social consequences if a man were to make similar comments about women.

I suspect what they mean is that they don’t consider such things to be within their definition of sexism because of their socialization. Nothing about empiricism.

You are missing a key point of their worldview: *Everything* comes down to 'critical theory' in one way or another. Whether you are focusing on race, sex, or anything else that can be the subject of criticism the outcome is the same.

Women CANT be sexist, because 'men' have more privilege and historically have less authority. So as the oppressed sex, they can't be sexist because they 'lack power'. So statements like "I hate all men, they are stupid violent thugs" are not viewed as sexist.

The same goes for race -- while you didn't call it out specifically, it's the exact same mindset. It doesn't matter if a BIPOC person literally kills a White person and says "I hate all white people and I killed them because they are white". This is not racist to these people, because that person supposedly lacks 'power'.

They (hypothetically) had and utilized the power to kill, but that isn't 'real' or 'institutional' power, so it simply does not count.

Both concepts are equally stupid and fly in the face of reality. And the inevitable outcome is CONSTANT conflict.

The conflict stems from being 'critical' of these different institutions and people who have 'power' or 'privilege' -- but the cycle never ends, so even if you manage to remove all Men or White people from existence, a power vacuum will exist and the criticism will be levied on whomever fills the role.

It's the perfect way to perpetually conquer and divide, where you get to claim perpetual victim status, while ensuring the voice of the majority -never- matters because of their supposed 'institutional power'. The end result of this thinking will be less tolerance, less diversity, and more asinine stuff like this python situation.

They mean EXACTLY what they said, take them at their word.

Not that I agree with it, the argument about “reverse sexism/racism” is that the judgements are based upon the identity group as a whole not as an individual. When taken in aggregate it is deemed that the smaller group is the one discriminated against.

The answer to this is to argue that it’s incorrect to take an overall statistic and apply it to an individual or smaller organisation in that group.

The thread is here: https://discuss.python.org/t/for-your-consideration-proposed...

The person in question is Tim Peters.

It’s weird to not name them, but not linking to the thread is appropriate.

I skimmed through that looking for the context. It seems to be that Tim didn't want the governing group to have even more power to kick people out of the project, argued his point eloquently and was then kicked off the project. E.g.

> Like David too, I’m not opposed to making it impossible for the Board to do this on its own - I just want a higher bar than a simple majority vote. My years on the Board matched David’s experience: votes were usually unanimous. If there’s reasonable disagreement, under most systems of juistice that favors the accused

Initial impression to an outsider is that python's council is in the wrong here. Read a fair amount of that thread now and Tim seems pretty reasonable to me. Which does align with my mistrust of CoC structures I suppose.

This is of course one specific point out of the 10 listed points, and not the sole reason that the ban was implemented.

That list is all pretty vague.

That the tipping point seems to be disagreeing with expanding powers of the council is suspicious.

>This is of course one specific point out of the 10 listed points

One specific point out of several more equally bogus points a person with an actual conscience would have felt shame to bring up as an excuse to suspend someone like Tim.

What makes this "discussion" even more suspicious is how the (arguably justified) fear that this could lead to a Nix-style takeover is answered each time with "no problem here, just The Nix Community^tm doing what's right".

Of course, your interpretation will vary with your ideology.

> The person in question is Tim Peters.

For those who don't know, Tim Peters is the inventor of Timsort [1], the built-in sorting algorithm used in Python, Java, JavaScript (V8), and Swift.

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

> The person in question is Tim Peters.

> It’s weird to not name them, but not linking to the thread is appropriate.

It looks like they're applying the Met Police standard: even discussing it in specific terms is "an offence" because of the potential for attracting sympathy for the offender.

Stepping back to observe a general pattern: When an organization permits and spends a disproportionate amount of time on nonsense and/or unfair governance then it could be too caught up in drama like ideological wars instead of its original mission. At that point, high performing and interesting people disengage or find another organization that doesn't waste their time or energy.

The SF MoMA case follows a similar pattern. [1]

1. https://www.npr.org/2021/11/05/1052650979/mcwhorters-new-boo...

> Defending “reverse racism” and “reverse sexism”, concepts not backed by empirical evidence

Yeah, racism and sexism goes in all directions, at relatively equal rates. The key thing being the _power asymmetry_ that makes certain groups differently visible (and effective in their bigotry) than others.

Saying that bigotry does not flow in a particular direction is cultivated ignorance at best, and maliciously dismissive bigotry at worst.

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