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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 23, 2023

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There have been calls to have WOTC outsource this to an independent tribunal.

This is exactly the kind of thing that happened with Codes of Conduct across the programming sphere. Demand a CoC, accuse the project owners of being incapable of properly policing it, point to a panel of hyper-progressives who you recommend to administer it instead, and use it to ban all dissent. Bonus points for making sure to put in that even the project owner is not immune from being removed under the CoC, thereby assuming total power.

Tons of well-meaning idiot programmers fell for it and a few were even ousted from their own projects. Let's see if an actual big company has the sanity antibodies to tell them no. If they don't, I won't feel sorry for them -- this is the audience they wanted, after all.

In this case it's clear it didn't start that way. WOTC created a new license and the objections to that license were genuinely because it was going to screw everyone over. Nobody demanded the hateful conduct clause before WOTC put it in.

But now that it's there, it's blood in the water regardless. So yeah, they might have just handed that crowd a gift apropos of nothing, but it sure sounds like they're leaping on it now it's there.