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PaperclipPerfector  30d ago (text post)   26847 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 15, 2024

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I didn't claim Vaxry is blameless or looks good, or even that his faults were merely insufficient empathy. From my first post:

And to be fair, there's some pretty embarrassingly childish behavior, there: a couple years ago Vaxry joked with wanting to get AIDs as a the same as identifying as gay, and separately a moderator screwed around with a user's public profile (then at the time, the only way to put pronouns up) for yucks.

But there's a bit of a problem.

There's a paradox of tolerance issue here, banning is not the only way to exclude bright people from your community. You can also do it just by being an asshole to them. Some people are brilliant assets that turn dumb if you start overtly politically attacking them. Some people need to be able to express the "nasty" things they believe to be true to think properly. This is a fundamental competing access needs issue that you can't just gloss over by never banning anyone.

As a nitpick, Popper's Paradox of Tolerance wasn't using 'tolerance' to mean 'things that progressives like today', but the simple possibility of open debate and discussion.

But more critically, few if any people who try to bring this more expansive non-Popperian version forward do so in any even-handed way. Vaxry's Discord isn't part of freedesktop.org. Vaxry is not accused of behaving poorly in FreeDesktop.org spaces, and I've not been able to find any evidence of such, whether because he's autistic enough to follow their rules in their spaces, or just from lack of opportunity.

You may say that there's a competing access need, but the modern-day variant turns into an insistence that the competition is over. If Vaxry and his cohort can't "express the 'nasty' things they believe to be true to think properly" in a Discord and github issue specific to their project, they can't be 'acerbic' anywhere -- and that's very clearly the target that the FreeDesktop.org held. In that view, the choice is between 'banning' people in the sense that they feel excluded and turned around because of things they found by digging at depth into it, and just directly actually-banning people. The first group will always be able to expand their ranks and justify greater interdiction.

And, to be blunt, the direct-bans get no small amount of people knowing that they'll be excluded by assholes, anyway. It's just that the banhammer-wielders are sort of asshole that the people in charge like.

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