Ethical Code – Let's Clean Up GitHub
ethicalco.de
ethicalco.de
"people publicly posting code with comments that could make so many people feel awful, unwanted, and excluded"
Really? REALLY?
Let's call this for what it really is shall we?
A group of vigilantes being dicks to people who they feel are being dicks, because of something as intangible as "hurt feelings".
Oh please, are they feeling privileged enough? In my day bullies left bruises and broke bones, not offended and hurt feelings.
I'm offended at your offence to being offended by the word "fuck" in a comment someone else wrote. If you really want to do something, write some code. Make some art. Build something. Don't bully some other guy/girl/furry/etc into sanitising their code for the newspeak of the day.
Will Wheatons law applies here - "DON'T BE A DICK"
I think you missed the entire point of this article. While I agree with you that it shouldn't be up to a group of people to decide what should and shouldn't be allowed, the entire idea of this campaign isn't to rid github of swearwords.
What they're wanting to achieve is to clean up the blatant/pointless derogatory terms. I mean why does someone think a commit message "What kind of massive faggot tries to use gayQuery with node" is acceptable.
When toxic or just obnoxious people are instructed to hide behind crisp language, you only find out about their toxicity or obnoxiousness in person.
We now how a set of people who think they're judge, jury and executioner on terms they don't think other people shouldn't use.
Not only that, they are hiding behind the political correctness flag. Let's call it for what it is shall we? Bullying. Plain and simple.
If you honestly believe this to be "bullying" or "vigilantism" then you're rocking one serious persecution complex with this issue. For people like us, this shit is actually important. You're complaining about generic curse words like "fuck" and "shit" and entirely missing the point.
Slurs like those mentioned in the article aren't just words, for people who have had to live with those insults our entire lives, they have history and they have been used to insult and oppress us. Get the fuck off your high horse because _you're_ not offended and perhaps put yourselves in the shoes of someone who has had these words used against them, spat with bile and venom, for decades.
Also, in "your day" you ended up with broken bones, well that's great, I've got two dead friends who committed suicide because of words like these over the years. This isn't a dick waving competition, this shit has serious effects on people.
If turning the tables to people you agree with causes an action to become worse, you're applying special pleading.
I'll try and keep calm when I explain this because, quite frankly in context, this is a ridiculous thing to say.
Consider, if you will, which of the following constitutes harassment or bullying.
a) Peppering your code with racist, homophobic, sexist, transphobic, or generally any other type of bigotry and posting it in a public place.
b) Correcting code which contains bigoted slurs, submitting a pull request and saying "Hey, I removed the stuff that makes people feel bad, would be super rad if you accept".
If you picked option b, I'm sorry, that's the wrong answer. But I'm a pretty nice guy, so I'll let you have another try!
from the site: "We can’t force developers to change their code - but eight hours of pull requests from ethical coders the world over might just make people stop, think, and change their ways."
In context this sounds like a bully tactic, regardless of how good of a cause it is.
Edit: it looks like they've addressed the idea of spamming developers in their FAQ now, so this is basically all moot.
I think it was Neal Stephenson?
Because while I am in favour of carefuy chosing your language when picking names for stuff and leaving messages I worry that this kind of thing in the wrong hands can go too far.
I'm not sure what the research says about effective methods of asking people to make a change. I'm going to need something substantial to persuade me that this is a good method.
> We the people.
No, it's the brigade that decides.
So, a GitHub Ethical Brigade who will harass repos because an individual in the brigade decided to take offense?
Please tell me more about how feeling insulted and marginalised is a good thing.
I just hope those who join this project don't eventually make it a them vs. us thing: "look at these disgusting dudebros who refuse to change these words!"
There's already lots and lots of negative flak in regards to sexism about Silicon Valley and IT-culture, which doesn't help when the "normal" non-IT population already sees IT-people as a bunch of hateful nerds with absolutely zero social skills.
This is a good action in that it's an open signal to change things - it might not achieve much, but it's a signal.
[1] https://github.com/search?l=python&p=1&q=nigger&ref=searchre... link from http://tommorris.org/posts/8053
Because your comment kinda comes off like that.