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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 20, 2023

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Hi 👋🏾 I used to participate in /r/TheMotte. Are self-CW posts allowed?

subject: wokeism in tech, another wrongthink-ban incident

tl;dr - I recently got banned from the NixOS core community (including GitHub) as a result of a rather biased application of their Code of Conduct.

Here's the full text of my post including the timeline of events and analysis: https://srid.ca/nixos-mod

We'd generally prefer if off site writing is supplemental rather than required.

A summary of the issue would probably be enough. Plus feel free to share your opinions on the whole thing.

A summary of the issue would probably be enough.

  • I responded to a forum post about survey design commenting that we should remove the 'gender' question.
  • A week latter someone that appears to be a woke leftist replies to my comment by posting a dubious study on gender bias (that Scott Alexander has critiqued several years ago) to effectively bait me into a debate that doesn't go well.
  • This user basically paints me as far-right extremist and engages in personal attacks because I had a link to https://srid.ca/unwoke (for raising awareness only) on my forum profile
  • Instead of sanctioning the user, I get banned (mod threatened me to remove that profile link as well as an image of a steak!), because the mod team is ultra-woke.
  • I post a poll on Twitter with most people in favour of my side.
  • Some in the community start a discussion after this ban demanding more transparency, but the mod team insults and ignores such requests.

I think wokeism is dying down, except for strongholds like this which may take much more time to abate.

Plus feel free to share your opinions on the whole thing.

I do see the point of /u/dr_analog - I realize, after this incident, I should have just avoided threads like that, but in all fairness - I could have never guessed that a simple dispute like this would have ended up in total ban in not only Discourse but also Github and Matrix. Nevertheless, well here I am - having experienced my first "cancellation" and it was a stressful 1-2 weeks. A friend with whom I shared all events as they unfolded better summarized it here on the GitHub commit thread.

What was the 'gender' question and what did you give as your reasons for removing it?