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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   36150 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.

OK, this is my fault. Hanlon's razor and all that.

The phrase "all the CoCs I've seen" implies I've seen a decent number of them. In fact, at the time of writing that comment, I had only really seen two: the one that was removed from PolyMC (linked in the top comment) and the Wikipedia/Wikimedia "Universal Code of Conduct". Those two just happened to be fairly reasonable (in my view). The W3C CoC you linked below is egregious, and I can see how that sort of CoC could become a culture war battleground.

That, along with the comment by @thrownaway24e89172, answers my original question. My understanding now is that CoCs do not necessarily need to be designed to enforce wokeism, but actually existing CoCs often are. And I suppose a CoC that amounts to "be nice to each other" is kind of pointless, so people who are trying to get a CoC adopted usually have an ulterior motive. The PolyMC CoC still seems innocuous, though.

I’ve been in a group that tried to do things like banning “slurs” like “crazy” (even when used innocuously, as in “how crazy is that”) because it’s “harmful to neurodivergent and folx with mental illnesses” or something of that nature, explicitly in their CoC. (I wonder if it’s still up there?)

That said, this was also a group that had a serious discussion on their slack (or discord? Idk) about whether they should ban food photos because it’s exclusionary to people with eating disorders. I have to assume not all places are this nuts.

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