The "Code of Conduct" Must Die [video]

There seems to be a bit of rhetorical sleight-of-hand here.

How, precisely, does an "anti-harassment policy" do anything about "predators"?

What sort of "predation" is possible, even in theory, in the context of, say, a GitHub issue tracker?

>The first point that bad actors are booted from organizations is false

I consider many of the people currently enforcing codes of conduct for major organizations, and advocating for their implementation on new projects, to be "bad actors". Of course, explaining the harm they can cause wouldn't fit in the margins here, so to speak.

No, "the game has already been lost" because - in Lunduke's view - the distinction in question is trivial and a matter of common sense.

Whatever you may believe to be the "point of a CoC", in practice they have repeatedly been seen to be used against contributors for their political beliefs (or even apparent political beliefs) regardless of any connection to the project. For example, Opalgate was motivated by the apparent beliefs of a maintainer expressed on Twitter, and nothing to do with any content of the code, nor documentation, or communication on any issue tracker or anything else. The same reasoning that was used to argue for ejecting the maintainer from the Opal project would apply equally well to every project; but that is directly counter to the spirit of open source.

In other cases they simply had no connection to reality. In Tim Peters' case, for example, his supposed defense of "reverse racism" and "reverse sexism" (I understand this to mean defense of the use of these terms; if they meant defense of the actual acts of discrimination, that's a) even more ridiculous and b) easier to pattern match to the conduct of the Code of Conduct Work Group itself) was nothing of the sort, as he explains (https://tim-one.github.io/psf/silly). No reasonable reading of the text supports the accusation. Similarly for the other charges for which any actual corresponding post or other action can be identified.

Then again, in Tomazos' case (previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42291638), evidence indicates that a paper title supposedly offensive to Jews was... simply not deemed offensive by Jews (including, for example, Lunduke - who has previously written and spoken extensively about anti-Semitism at OpenSUSE). Pattern-matching the title to that other bit of historical propaganda is perhaps a leap of logic many people could make, but no reasonable person could possibly read it as an endorsement of anti-Semitism. Similarly, for example, for the supposed dog whistle to be found in that (apparently already taken down) logo for the Boost project. Incidents like this tend to come across to me as just projection (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_projection) - or as we used to say it, "the lady doth protest too much, methinks".

>On the other hand, the subtext of opposition to CoCs is always evasion of accountability.

On the contrary: from what I have seen, those who oppose codes of conduct are typically calling for greater personal accountability - in the form of those who object to political views in a place where they're explicitly tolerated, taking voluntary action to ignore them (including for example technical "blocking" measures). To they extent that they oppose being restricted from, say, using specific words or phrases incidentally on an issue tracker (i.e., in the course of trying to explain an actual issue, and not with any intent to actually advocate any particular politics), they don't see any question of "evasion of responsibility". Because that would entail accepting that there's any reason not to say whatever supposedly objectionable thing. The point here is that they actually disagree that the supposedly objectionable thing is reasonably objectionable or that anyone should be restricted from saying it.

Keeping explicit political advocacy out of a "professional" space is another matter altogether. It's already unwanted because its off topic and a distraction. Like, to my understanding, the way HN is supposed to work - submissions are supposed to be insightful, not just the OP sharing political views by way of an opinion piece that agrees with those views.

I don't think Lunduke's work is particularly insightful; it's repetitive, and his videos largely consist of him reading out his own blog pieces. So I actually flagged the submission myself. But as long as people are going to discuss the topic, I'm not going to stand for such misrepresentations of Lunduke's apparent actual views or position.

Conflating all your political opponents with each other, showering them in boo words and denying their self-identification is hardly any better. It's worth taking the time to understand what people who disagree with you actually believe. If what you say here reflects your actual beliefs, then you simply believe falsehoods.

>Codes of conduct are useful because they give a community the tool set for preventing the warping that these people cause on their surroundings.

Putting aside that the referent of "these people" is unclear (and that I've seen many other people branded bigots simply for using analogous language), I have no idea what "warping" you have in mind. Lunduke is not advocating for the injection of any kind of political ideology into any open source project, nor into the teams that work on them. He is, in fact, advocating for the polar opposite of that.