On Sat, Jan 05, 2019 at 04:24:32PM -0500, Scott Kitterman wrote: > I also have a lot of sympathy for people who feel they have been > marginalized and it being worth working on making them feel welcome/not > marginalized, but I think it has limits (and maybe this is the core of my > concern relative to the CoC). Not everyone can be accommodated. There's > broad agreement that someone who insists on an unfettered right to be an > ass (for most any definition) isn't going to be made to feel welcome, but > there's also a limit to how far the project can reasonably go in catering > to people's concerns without it getting ridiculous. > To pick a completely different type of example of the same kind of issue: > Military pilots of aircraft with ejection seats are limited both to a minimum > and maximum height. It's not fair that if that's your dream job that you are > excluded because you are too tall or too short, but it just isn't economically > or operationally feasible to develop, test, and maintain a wide variety of > ejection seats to accommodate the full range of the human condition. > All accommodations have practical limits. In my reading of the Diversity > Statement and CoC, I don't see that recognized and I fear how far it will be > taken in the future. I actually think the Diversity Statement does capture this, in the phrase: "as long as they interact constructively with our community". There are people from marginalized groups in our society that have been so traumatized by their experiences that they *cannot* assume good faith from white cis het men. That's not their fault; nor is it Debian's fault. But as a project whose membership includes an awful lot of white cis het men, if someone finds themselves unable to engage constructively around the work of creating a free operating system without blaming their colleagues for past traumas experienced elsewhere, I don't think they are going to find a home in Debian. (In truth, I think they are unlikely to ever make it far enough to apply for DD given the obstacles involved.) The corollary is that white cis het men who are participating in these wider systems of oppression should not be allowed to retraumatize those from marginalized groups within Debian - *including* by mocking or downplaying the significance of that trauma. It's a natural human reaction that when one white man sees another superficially similar white man experience consequences for his behavior towards people from another group while protesting his innocence, the first man worries he will also be unjustly persecuted for doing something that he didn't know was wrong. But just as with the #HimToo movement, this isn't supported by the actual data. Over two decades of Debian history and hundreds of white men, and only one has found himself expelled by the project for this class of conduct. This is hardly the opening salvo of some great purge. -- Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world. Ubuntu Developer https://www.debian.org/ slangasek@ubuntu.com vorlon@debian.org
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