At 2019-07-02T08:42:43-0400, Sam Hartman wrote: > The tone is absolutely civilized. > > And yet, the cost to people who have to do this education again and > again is really high. Yes, and therein rests the utility of allies. Speaking for myself I'd like to endorse the contributions to this thread of Jonathan Carter, Russ Allbery, Ole Streicher, and Colin Watson. They've expressed many things I have wanted to say, often more diplomatically than I think I would have put them. Consider this also: We do need to engage with our membership when they feel marginalized and invisible, even if they do not identify with a widely-recognized minority group--the varieties that rightly get attention in the name of social justice. But we need to understand in explicit terms why we engage, and how we do so. First the why. Over the past 30-40 years, the children of working professionals--a class which I believe characterizes a large majority of our contributors--have become economically squeezed and indebted to an increasily greater degree. Young people can work very hard, as hard as they've ever seen people from their parents' generation work, and yet are often stuck living with those parents, or other relatives, in deterimental domestic relationships, or in circumstances that are altogether precarious, deprived of independence. They feel that opportunities which older generations enjoyed have been denied them through no fault of their own. This feeling is usually vague and accompanied with a great deal of emotional frustration. What is most often missing is a sense of autonomy, a sense of control (or at least meaningful influence) over one's future. There is no shortage of diagnoses for this feeling, and not all of them exclude the others. I will avoid listing them here because they are familiar to anyone who has studied the topic in any depth. The Debian Project offers an environment where people can embrace responsibility, enjoy community, and build professional skills to a point where they are competitive with university graduates for remunerative labor that pays well enough for one to live independently. I do not conjecture; this was my story starting in 1998 after a university experience I'd prefer to forget in some ways. Some people will come to the Project with a lack of social polish or attitudes that don't mesh well with the community. This could be due to psychological issues, bad life experiences, immature political views, the socioecomic frustration I mentioned above, and/or an eccentric sense of humor. The younger the cohort we draw new members from, the more of these we're likely to see. That's part of the price of appealing to the young. I trust that the hazard of not appealing to the young at all is obvious. The good news is that young people grow up--much more reliably than old people do. We can engage them, shape them, help them learn, and also learn _from_ them, often about technological innovations but in other ways too. Note the word "engage" in the foregoing. Some of the most difficult but most enduring learning takes place through discourse. That's the "why". The "how" is tougher, because not everyone shows up with attitudes that promote a healthy society, even a microcosmic one like the Debian Project. This happens, I think, when people feel themselves to not truly be part of the project. They feel they have little stake in the well-being of the people involved in it. I can concede that there are people who sincerely have no idea: * why we don't observe a "WASP" history month; * why Nazis seem to be so prominent at white pride rallies; * why anarcho-capitalists are frequent allies of white supremacists; * why gender pay inequity is a problem; * that gender identity and sexual orientation aren't perfectly fluid; * and why it is not obvious that people should choose to be straight and identify with the gender identity of their chromosomes even if gender identity and sexual orientation were perfectly fluid. ...but much of the time, I suspect, people come to us with supposedly critical questions about the above not out of a spirit of inquiry but because they have been conditioned to practice disruption by troll culture (incels/MRAs/4chan/etc.). Somehow, they imagine, they are frustrating the designs of some conspiratorial force that wants to alter their way of life (even if they find the way of life they're actually experiencing to be a miserable one). It's important to recognize when engagement has a component of sincerity (expecting purity here is too optimistic) and when it is just someone trying to poke our anthill with a stick. Meeting fellow Debian contributors in person helps us not only gauge their sincerity, but tends to establish or remind us of the humanity behind the names. As a rule, the more we socialize, the more we will become socialized. That's facilitation. That's community-organizing. If you're helping make opportunities for that happen, that's leadership. Some contributors will not want to bond (or be bound?) with us that closely. They will jealously defend their independence and freedom to hold views that the rest of the project finds dubious. If they value the project anyway and mean to contribute for the long haul, they'll be pretty guarded about engaging on those subjects. They don't want to be socialized to that degree. But if they're not poking the anthill, and the only way you can found out their bad politics is by freak chance or compiling a dossier on them--and if you're doing the latter you need to ask yourself why--their net contribution can still be positive. Sam, you mentioned having resources ready to hand, a kind of diversity FAQ. This can be tremendously valuable (especially for people like me who aspire to the term "ally" but still have much to learn), but it's not going replace engagement. On the occasions where someone is trying to learn, they are trying to grow, and if they're struggling, a tome of some orthodox wisdom is not necessarily going to be helpful to them. Once in a while it will, but don't count on it to always suffice. How often have we figured out a bug in code only once we tried to explain the logic to a colleague whose help we sought? Sometimes the process of talking through a proposition at a conversational pace is what illuminates its flaws. I don't think we will ever be free of the sort of labor you describe, and which exhausts and exasperates those who have already suffered much. We not only need to screen our project against those who seek nothing but its disruption, but engage in the hard work of weeding blinkered and trollish attitudes out of otherwise sincere contributors. I think our Project can be (and perhaps is) a haven from the toxic politics of ethnic supremacy and patriarchy, but only in a relative sense. Perhaps more provocatively, I suspect that if we had a _perfect_ refuge from such problems, we'd rapidly innovate a _new_ unjust power hierarchy, because that is the pattern that human history suggests. Moreover, in any sufficiently benevolent social order, the incentives to defecting become so great that the occasional cooperator will turn defector, like some species of frog that spontaneously change sex. To conclude, I would advise caution when attempting to moderate discussions with respect to political content; not because I fear you will be too successful and harm the Project, but because I think you will end up frustrated and I don't want you to burn out. Let me propose a novel metric, based on a couple of favorite aphorisms, for determining whether an issue is "political", once we have set aside open problems in mathematics and the physical sciences. "Politics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards." -- Max Weber "The work is slow. The ape is old." -- Leonard Cohen I submit that the hardest problems that we face are the political ones; as a corollary, that we can infer the quantity of political element of any challenge in proportion to its perceieved difficulty. Less abstractly: Any social problem that seems to resist solution has a political element. Those who benefit from the status quo will be the first to agree that no such political element exists. I'm not wedded to it, but I'm going to try it for a while and see if it's good for thinking with. Regards, Branden
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