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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   36148 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022

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Is there an explanation anywhere, for the uninitiated, why leftists like codes of conduct so much? What does introducing a code of conduct accomplish?

It excludes the outgroup, or at least forces them to adopt your norms.

But all the CoCs I've seen seem pretty banal. How does it exclude people? A right-wing person can just focus on the actual development and not get involved in the political disputes and they should be perfectly fine.

Are you actually kidding? The default template for all tech codes of conduct specifically states:

[COMMUNITY] prioritizes marginalized people's safety over privileged people's comfort. The administrators will not act on complaints regarding:

'Reverse’ -isms, including ‘reverse racism,’ ‘reverse sexism,’ and ‘cisphobia’.

Communicating in a ‘tone’ you don’t find congenial.

Criticizing racist, sexist, cissexist, or otherwise oppressive behavior or assumptions.

I refuse to believe you have not seen this. It's the most common one out there. Look me in the eye and tell me you're not trying to gaslight people.

The default template for all tech codes of conduct

It's the most common one out there

Github's two default choices are the Contributor Covenant and the Citizen Code of Conduct, and neither of those documents contains that passage. It's true that a quick Google search for "will not act" "reverse racism" turns up quite a few hits, but I think you need more evidence for your inflammatory claims.

A quick Google search for "code of conduct" reverse turns up a few:

GNOME Foundation:

Safety versus Comfort

The GNOME community prioritizes marginalized people's safety over privileged people's comfort, for example in situations involving:

  • "Reverse"-isms, including "reverse racism," "reverse sexism," and "cisphobia"
  • Reasonable communication of boundaries, such as "leave me alone," "go away," or "I'm not discussing this with you."
  • Criticizing racist, sexist, cissexist, or otherwise oppressive behavior or assumptions
  • Communicating boundaries or criticizing oppressive behavior in a "tone" you don't find congenial

GeekFeminism's Recommended Community Anti-harassment/Policy:

COMMUNITY NAME prioritizes marginalized people’s safety over privileged people’s comfort. RESPONSE TEAM reserves the right not to act on complaints regarding:

  • ‘Reverse’ -isms, including ‘reverse racism,’ ‘reverse sexism,’ and ‘cisphobia’
  • Reasonable communication of boundaries, such as “leave me alone,” “go away,” or “I’m not discussing this with you.”
  • Communicating in a ‘tone’ you don’t find congenial
  • Criticizing racist, sexist, cissexist, or otherwise oppressive behavior or assumptions

IIRC, the GeekFeminism policy recommendation in particular came out right when these started showing up in a lot of open source projects and is probably responsible for a lot of the culture war surrounding this due to being widely cited.

EDIT: The links at the end of the GNOME Foundation's code of conduct include more examples, eg this template has an example section on reversisms.

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