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New GitHub Upgrades Respond To Recent Complaints (thenewstack.io)
destinyland writes: Last week GitHub announced the ability to create templates for Issues and Pull Requests, in an apparent response to an open letter signed by 600+ project maintainers. "This is the first of many improvements to Issues and Pull Requests that we're working on based on feedback from the community," "wrote Ben Bleikamp, Product Manager at GitHub. The original letter, hosted in a "Dear-Github" repository, noted that "If GitHub were open source itself, we would be implementing these things ourselves as a community..." But this week GitHub continued releasing new improvements, offering a new feature with to upload files directly into repositories without leaving their browser.
Your reaction to them implementing a feature that people had asked for is to...suggest moving to something else?
I think the row is about the Open Code of Conduct that GitHub claims to support, not its terms of service.
The Open Code of Conduct, for the most part, is a reasonable document. If I had a project I cared to implement it for, I would implement v1.0 sans this excerpt (not fixing the UTF for /.):
Our open source community prioritizes marginalized peopleâ(TM)s safety over privileged peopleâ(TM)s comfort. We will not act on complaints regarding:
- âReverseâ(TM) -isms, including âreverse racism,â(TM) âreverse sexism,â(TM) and âcisphobiaâ(TM)
- Reasonable communication of boundaries, such as âoeleave me alone,â âoego away,â or âoeIâ(TM)m not discussing this with youâ
- Refusal to explain or debate social justice concepts
- Communicating in a âtoneâ(TM) you donâ(TM)t find congenial
- Criticizing racist, sexist, cissexist, or otherwise oppressive behavior or assumptions
That part of the document makes no sense to me and seems to throw the rest of the document out the window. This is little different from the hostile environment I encountered at Grand Valley State University in Michigan, USA around the turn of the century.
The first point is the bombshell. Sexism and racism are not allowed except for the sexism and racism that are allowed. The second and fourth points are acceptable; not everybody is a good communicator (not saying I am). The fifth point I'm ambivalent about. The third point is the detonator cap because it shuts down dialog; combined with the first point, we have a real can of worms.
If I have a disagreement with a womyn-born-womyn who is sending me hateful messages, am I allowed to pull out my trans status so that I can make a complaint that will be heard? Who determines whether I'm eligible to be part of either/both the female demographic or the transgender demographic? What if I get shouted down for having male privilege? Will my trans status protect me from that or does it count as protected reverse sexism? Nobody knows.
This is the danger of statements like the quoted excerpt. Somebody wrote, "All people are equal." Then the social justice crowd came around and scribbled beneath, "Except some people are more equal than others."
I really think the social justice crowd does not know what it is actually like to face systematic, institutional discrimination. I do. It's not nice. I have no intention to ever again allow myself to be subjected to institutional discrimination again. I am an individual. I am not accountable for the actions of others. My individuality will either be recognized, or I will go elsewhere.
The social justice crowd seems hell bent on holding the wrong people accountable for the career choices of womyn-born-womyn and for the sexual harassment that gaslighting asshole managers pour on women. Yes, it bothers the hell out of me when womyn-born-womyn $x holds me accountable for womyn-born-womyn $y's decision that being a mother and a wife is more important to her than pursuing a career. It bothers the hell out of me when womyn-born-womyn $z uses sexist language (a plumber is always a he, a doctor is always a he, a nurse is always a she, etc) and it bothers the hell out of me even more when $x holds me accountable for $z's internalized misogyny.
In that scenario, all that $x has accomplished is convincing me that having a tech career is just too toxic. S/he hasn't created a single womyn-born-womyn programmer. Since I can never be certain who's a TERF and who isn't and when I'm more equal due to being trans or less equal due to assignment to the male gender at birth, I'll just leave tech. Nobody cares about the gender situation of somebody who's flipping burgers and whether or not they might secretly have male privilege.
There needs to be dialog about these things. Shutting down dialog is the first sign of a hostile environment.
(That's a 50 DKP minus if you respond to me again as though I'm a man who regularly sexually abuses women.)
So you look at someone who appears to be white and male and based only on gender and race you ASSUME that they must also be rich and personally guilty of some *-ism or another?
If you somehow have proven to you that they are wealth impaired you presume them to be ignorant?
I note that you seem to have no problem using the pejorative "redneck".
Even if reverse racism were remotely equivalent to racism, which it is, because it is racism, plain and simple.
It's incredibly hypocritical to think any grouping of people is without fault. Racism is racism, and it should be treated as such no matter which grouping of people is attacking which grouping.
An allegation of reverse racism is an allegation of racism, just different to the perceived-most-common-form and thus should be treated exactly the same as any other allegation of racism. (And like any other allegation, an individual allegation may or may not be true, no matter if it is 'reverse' or not.)