site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

20
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

deleted

From my experience, I would estimate people who do forks for woke reasons run out of steam very quickly, because maintaining a fork of any project that does something substantial is a lot of boring and thankless work, and "to spite somebody" is usually not a good source of motivation for that. I've seen several such occurrences and it never survived long.

I also don't think "hostile fork" is a right expression. Forking a project that you don't like something about - whether it's code or maintainership - is an absolutely normal thing to do in open source. That's literally what the whole thing was designed for. If you fork and do better job - great.

The thing that makes me really frown upon it is fake CVEs for the purpose of hurling abuse towards somebody they hate. The whole security notification system (CVEs, etc.) run basically by a lot of people voluntarily cooperating, often when it's not even their paid job. Breaking this system would have enormous costs and huge real-life consequences. Corrupting such systems for political purposes is about as bad as making a fake bomb threats. Maybe even worse as there are actual threats around. Of course, it's only Minecraft but who knows if this mindset spreads where it could reach...

From my experience, I would estimate people who do forks for woke reasons run out of steam very quickly, because maintaining a fork of any project that does something substantial is a lot of boring and thankless work, and "to spite somebody" is usually not a good source of motivation for that. I've seen several such occurrences and it never survived long.

I'd be inclined to agree, but in this case it seems that all the maintainers Lenny ousted are now working on Prism. Only time will tell but I'd wager a guess that they are simply going back to business as usual, only without Lenny (or any other people they deem a "right-wing bigot").