At 2019-12-13T11:36:00-0500, Sam Hartman wrote: > This offended word keeps coming up from people who are concerned about > the code of conduct. > I'm kind of confused, because I don't see it anywhere in the CoC, nor > do I see people who tend to favor the CoC using the word offended. > Who's ever said you can't offend people? > > Yeah, purposely going out of your way trying to offend people is very > likely disrespectful. > > Not caring about the impact you're having on those around you is also > likely disrespectful. > > But where and how did this ever become about being offended? Complaints about mistreatment and injustice are reframed by political conservatives as a tactical maneuver to drain a discussion of any content relating to mistreatment and injustice and convert it instead into a conversation about arbitrary rules of etiquette, on par with distinguishing salad forks from meat forks and whether belching at the table is considered a compliment to the host. Relatively few people are conscious of this; they absorb the rhetorical tricks of their political affinity group often without understanding or even wondering about the mechanism by which those tricks operate. Tricks that work to shut down the opposition tend to stick, however, and offense-reframing has proven successful, so it gets used at every opportunity. That part is deliberate and conscious. Similarly, the harassment and belittling of genderfluid and queer contributors to many different fields has been perceived as effective in reducing their level of participation, self-identification, and "outness". This is why I identify these practices and their practitioners as politically conservative. I care little whether they cast ballots for Tories, as reprehensible as that is--but it is not a coincidence that you will find authoritarian and conservative politics more strongly correlated with obnoxious treatment of Debian's nonbinary users and contributors than liberalism and socialism are. And that in turn is in large part why initiatives like a diversity team or anti-harassment are "controversial"; conservatives intuit that they are potential obstacles to their unchallenged assertions enforcing the norms of the bigoted past that linger into the present. Existing mechanisms of dominance and control are, broadly, what conservatives seek to conserve, which is one reason why U.S. conservatives, small-r republicans by instinct and seldom agitating for a hereditary monarchy, correctly claim the legacy of Edward Burke, as militant a monarchist as one can find. The "controversy" is that some people want the boot heel off their necks, and conservatives want to keep it there. When one ventures that it is incompatible with the Debian Project's values to maintain the boot heel where it is, the conservative will squawk about his--yes, his, can anyone name a concrete exception in our community?--free speech being infringed. They recognize that the language of rights and frame of self-expression is potent, which is why they attempt to seize it and change the subject from, say, a trans person seeking support for their transitioning process, and onto themselves as being "honestly concerned" with that person seeking attention or validation of their "defective" identity. The conservative seeks to drive such people away, cow them into silence, or harangue them into "passing" as "normal" by his narrow standards. In other words, to shut up and stop being so political. Conservatism cannot tolerate tolerance. I do not claim this as a novel insight[1]; I believe it's been noted on this very forum before, more than once. Is there room for conservatives in the Debian Project? Perhaps--if they're willing to keep their heads down, shut up about "politics", and work hard to pass as eusocial human beings. If this sounds harsh, understand that I've been watching this dynamic in the project for over twenty years; I had little patience for it in 1998 and I have less for it now. Most importantly, understand that it's not like there is nothing in it for the conservatives in such an arrangement--it is hard to overestimate the amount of utility they derive from claiming that their foes are hypocrites[2]; since the Debian Project does not pay monetary wages, one can scarcely imagine a currency they would value more. So don't take their piteous wails too seriously; conservatives also generally valorize stoicism, hence their idolization of laconic men of action like Clint Eastwood's Man with No Name. I do acknowledge that there is a hazard in prescribing boundaries to discourse, and particularly in impaneling a committee of guardians to police it; we can all think of examples from the history of totalitarianism--my favorites are not from the Soviet Union but from the United States, in the form of the Catholic Legion of Decency (1933) and the Motion Picture Production Code (1934). In capitalist societies, you see, we mistrust the state and prefer to delegate our thought control apparatus to industry cartels and churches. A common feature of the aforementioned institutions and of Goskomizdat in the USSR and the PRC's Propaganda Department is a lack of accountability to the people they govern; but in Debian any Diversity/Antiharassment teams would be delegates of the elected Project Leader or enjoy no special privileges at all. It is not obvious to me how there is much scope for such a team to overrun its charter. To date, all tears I've seen shed over AH and listmaster activities have borne a distinctly crocodilian tint. Finally, I freely admit that my commentary is subject to critique as being (1) provocative of politically conservative contributors to the Debian Project; and (2) excessively lengthy. I regret the second. Regarding the fist, I would note to anyone contemplating retributive activity (such as escalation to listmaster or the Diversity team), that I can only be arsed to compose an email to a public Debian mailing list on average about once a year since 2015. Ask yourself if I'm worth the candle. :-P Warmest^WMost fiery regards, Branden [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance [2] https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha
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