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Comment by astanm | Hacker News Reader

This, from the Ruby CoC, is key:

> Participants are expected to be tolerant of opposing views.

If you can't tolerate that others will have different perspectives to you then it means you're likely to be a very difficult and inflexible person to work with.

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This is one of those things that falls apart on the actual content. If you have a trans contributor and someone who comes in with trans-eliminationist rhetoric, you can't then turn round and say the trans person is being "inflexible" for refusing to work with them.

That would be covered under the next part of the Ruby CoC:

> Participants must ensure that their language and actions are free from personal attacks and disparaging remarks.

And anyway, rhetoric which advocates for killing groups of people would be very off-topic for a programming language discussion forum. Unlikely it would come up in conversation except for deliberate trolling.

Holy moly, what kind of open source projects are y'all working on? I don't even understand how these topics could come up in a Pull Request. Are people writing and reviewing code in these projects?

Two ways I've seen it come up:

1. Someone posts something on twitter that someone else finds offensive

2. Someone proposes a CoC rule banning bigots from the community, which raises the question of "who defines who is a bigot"

TFA mentions a third way; a remark at a conference is overheard.

Likely more than 50% of the world's population agrees with viewpoints that some would label "trans-eliminationist rhetoric". So if you are saying anyone who ever expresses such viewpoints–even in forums completely unrelated to the project–is barred from contributing to it, you are potentially excluding more than half of contemporary humanity.

A community doesn't exist for "the majority of the world". It exists for its community. If a community doesn't want bigots (as they shouldn't), they absolutely should exclude them.

I just haven't seen CoCs effectively reduce the bigots in a community; they either are toothless, or have teeth and lead to a j'accuse breakdown.

It is a tiny fraction of the people I know and have interacted with over an extended period of time who has not made a remark that could be construed as bigoted.

I have seen moderators called bigots for suspending (instead of banning) someone who made an inappropriate remark.

My wife and I have been accused (behind our back) of misgendering someone when we were using the pronouns that we had privately confirmed she preferred.

If you create a CoC with real teeth, then instead of the BDFL or core team or whatever controlling who is in the community, it's the people in the community who are most interested in accusing people of violating the CoC that have control over who is in the community.

If a community wants to exclude many millions-even billions-of people around the world, including the population supermajority of dozens of countries, and all those who seriously believe in the traditional teachings of any one of several major religious traditions-and denigrate those people it excludes as “bigots”-well, maybe that in itself is a form of bigotry, and hence their labelling others “bigots” is a case of “the pot calling the kettle black”

Would you feel the same way if it were eliminationist language, but against Jews, or African-Americans, or Irish-Americans, or Men?

So, if a person is a traditionalist/conservative Orthodox Jew, who holds traditional “non-affirming” views on LGBT issues-do those views count as “eliminationist rhetoric”?

If a project decides it won’t welcome people who believe what almost all conservative/traditionalist Orthodox Jews believe (even if they keep those beliefs to themselves in project forums), it is essentially deciding that Jews (of that kind) aren’t welcome-isn’t that antisemitic, and in itself a species of eliminationism? (not with respect to Jews in general, rather with respect to Jews of that kind)

And the same point holds for “Sunni” or “Shi’a” or “Catholic” or “Protestant” or “Eastern Orthodox”

There's a clear difference between respecting people and hate speech; no project should welcome someone who contributes inappropriate insults and off-topic rants.

If that stereotypical Orthodox Jew wants to be a valuable community member, they can keep their hostile opinions to themselves, and nobody will consider them troublemakers.

Obviously they won't feel welcome because they realize that the majority would despise them as bigots if they expressed intolerable opinions, but hopefully it can become a reason to question their ideology.

I think the distinction is whether they express their views in project settings or in unrelated settings. If they express them in project settings, then I can’t see how that could possibly be on-topic, which makes it disruptive behaviour. But if they express them in unrelated settings, and then someone else brings that to the attention of the project-well, then it has nothing to do with the project, so the project should refuse to get involved

"someone else brings that to the attention of the project"

This is what an intolerant troublemaker would do, demonstrating that they are worse than the restrained bigot they are denouncing.

The will to hurt people is, or should be, a good indicator of which side is more wrong.

Do you want me eliminated?

I don’t want anyone “eliminated”… the problem is what does “eliminated” mean? If it means “rounding up people and shooting them” then of course I oppose that. But what about the conservative Jew/Christian/Muslim who believes that when Moshiach/Christ/Mahdi comes/returns, gender dysphoria will cease to exist-is that belief also “eliminationist”? I think religious freedom means we need to tolerate the existence of such beliefs even if we believe they are wrong. Excluding someone from an open source community because they hold traditional religious beliefs on gender and sexuality-especially if we assume they keep those beliefs out of project forums where they aren’t relevant-that’s religious discrimination, and in my view it is wrong, and (in some jurisdictions) it may even be unlawful

The correct answer is reacting harshly to "trans-eliminationist rhetoric" from a weird extremist, with an ultimatum or immediate expulsion, before the trans contributor complains.

If someone is posting along the lines of "send them all to the death camps" etc. on the mailing lists or discussion boards, for any group, that would be covered under the other items in the Ruby CoC, where participants are expected not to harass or disparage.

Also it would be very off-topic for a programming language forum.

Someone will say that that person shouldn't be bringing any sort of politics into it, so they should be removed, no CoCs needed for that.

Then someone will point out that they might have this stuff on their Github profile, or website. They're free to do so, of course. But it would be wrong to remove them for that, right? But then any trans contributor that sees this crap is what, forced to work with them anyway?

Too bad. People you interact with every day have views that are abhorrent to you. Suck it up. The community is not your internet police.

Something, something, paradox of tolerance.

Diverse views on software development? Great. Diverse views on whether various groups deserve human rights? Not great.

The latter would be off-topic for a programming language discussion forum, certainly. But working with others that happen to hold differing views on that topic? Not a problem.

It would be unreasonable to expect everyone to have the same perspective on political issues.

It baffles me how much political every aspect of life has become. We can't just talk about things and hold genuine discussion. It always boils down to "us vs. them" standpoint.

What would genuine discussion look like on the topic of trans people existing? I'm not sure I would know how to identify it even if it existed.

You have demonstrated exactly the point I am making.

I think we are likely to disagree on whether "group X is not entitled to human rights" is a legitimate political view

As long as these views aren't thrashed out in the collaborative spaces to which the CoC applies, it doesn't really matter.

(As a personal preference, I'd rather not know the political views, legitimate or otherwise, of people I work with. It's not relevant.)

If said people kept their opinions to themselves, the issue would never arise in the first place. Pretty much the whole problem in semi-public spaces like this is that folks with strong reactionary beliefs don’t tend to leave them at the door

`s/reactionary//` and you'd be right in your second sentence. It doesn't matter if it's action or reaction, people with strong beliefs, strongly held tend to be holding them because of some core set of ethical or moral principles and those things eventually are revealed in the day-to-day work.

As to your first - if people with a strong set of ethical and moral principles "just shut up" about what they considered ethical and moral essentials ... then they wouldn't be who they are. The only people who don't show what they hold good are people who don't hold as good much of anything.

Now if we're just talking "opinions" here (about things that are not ethical and moral, merely matters of taste), then yes, a person with "strong beliefs strongly held as a universal principle" is someone who is just an ass. But if I know someone is a raving Detroit Lions fan "on the internet", what kind of a person am I if I can't work with them?

Except people have enforced CoC's against people for expressing views on other platforms because those views make other people feel unsafe in those collaborative spaces.

I have only ever seen CoC's abused to push out people with anti-social just views.

It's almost like theese two should not collide in any context from either side...

It's not been my experience that racists/sexists/homophobes/antisemites/etc can keep it strictly professional with members of the group they hate

It's the well known correlation between stupid opinions that can do no good and stupid people that cannot control themselves. We should worry about the bad cases when oppressors are in power and able to do significant harm and/or manipulative sociopaths using hate speech as one of many tools.

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