I support the open letter by Drupal developers protesting the attempted expulsion of Larry Garfield from the Drupal commmunity.
As a Drupal contributor who has never in any respect attempted to tie the project to his beliefs or lifestyle, Garfield deserves the right to be judged by his code alone. That is the hacker way; competence is all that matters, and no irrelevance like skin color or shape of genitals or political beliefs or odd lifestyle preference should be allowed to matter.
That I even need to say this in 2017 is something of a disgrace. The hacker culture already had judge-by-the-code-alone figured out forty years ago when I was a n00b; the only reason it needs to be said now is that there’s been a recent fashion for “social justice” witch hunting which, inevitably, has degenerated into the sort of utter fiasco the Drupal devs are now protesting.
Thomas Paine said it best: “He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.”
It doesn’t matter how much you dislike Larry Garfield’s personal kinks. If you don’t defend him now, you may have nobody to defend you when some self-declared commissar of political and sexual correctness – or just a censorious project lead like Dries Buytaert – decides that you should be declared an unperson.
You shall judge by the code alone. That is the only social equilibrium that doesn’t degenerate into an ugly bitchfest with expulsions controlled by whatever happens to be politically on top this week. It was the right community norm forty years ago, and remains so today.
Well said.
Larry was not himself content to judge on code alone when he helped lead the charge to eject me from a group I helped to found. Cf. https://groups.google.com/d/msg/php-fig/w38tCU4mdgU/ww0kKM0vAAAJ ; I can go into greater detail as needed. (Thankfully, he and his conspirators failed at the attempt, though the process itself was punishment.)
>Larry was not himself content to judge on code alone when he helped lead the charge to eject me from a group I helped to found.
Two wrongs don’t make a right.
And, in any case, being expelled for disruptive assholery within a group (which is what Larry clearly thought he was doing, whether or not he was justified) is not the same as being expelled because Larry didn’t like your sex life or your politics or whatever.
Expelling someone for disruptive behavior in a group is not judging by the code alone– perhaps you should rephrase your motto.
More generally, blind auditions led to more women being hired by orchestras. Has the ability of the hacker community to judge by code alone been tested?
>Expelling someone for disruptive behavior in a group is not judging by the code alone– perhaps you should rephrase your motto.
Judge by the competence alone, perhaps, where competence includes ability to mesh with others. Nevertheless I am reluctant to change the banner statement. We need people to start from criteria least vulnerable to political ratfucking and concede as little as possible to criteria that make political ratfucking easy, and “he’s an asshole” is notoriously vulnerable.
>Has the ability of the hacker community to judge by code alone been tested?
The only serious attempt I know of has been subjected to methodological criticism. Nevertheless, it is noticeable that the authers went in expecting to find that female-identified contributors had difficulty getting commits accepted, and instead found they had a slight but probably insignificant statistical advantage.
Context is dead.
The Left has achieved a significant victory over the past few decades.
We are now approaching their desired situation where the context of your politics precludes and overrides any other context, yes, including (very much orchestrated to be so) competency.
There are “right” beliefs, and “right” thoughts and anything else, eliminates you from participation in any way.
The mask hasn’t slipped, the left has taken it off and is coming to take away from all of us “that which they think they need”. Exclusion is the rule. Kafkatrapping is rampant. The left looks upon its evil and believes it an absolute greater good. The believe themselves to be soldiers of destiny.
I don’t believe the effort to re-instate this developer will succeed, but I hope that it does, because maybe this tide can be turned. But I’m not at all confident the left can or will be stopped. I fear for the future. We let them train two GENERATIONS in how to destroy the nation, it may be well past time we’ll be able to stop them.
> We need people to start from criteria least vulnerable to political ratfucking and concede as little as possible to criteria that make political ratfucking easy, and “he’s an asshole” is notoriously vulnerable.
Yet by code alone can be misconstrued as accepting some crap that we would not put up with. Like disruptive behavior or judging others with stupid, irrelevant criteria. See the gap? You’re making a sound judgement and call to action against someone by judging something about them which is not code. We need to find a better way to express this idea.
I like competency… It is incompetent to oust someone for things that don’t matter.
>You’re making a sound judgement and call to action against someone by judging something about them which is not code.
I see the problem. I don’t see any rhetorical hack against it that is obviously an improvement. And, um, sorry to sound egotistical, but I really am an expert at this kind of thing. I’ll give it more thought.
Hear, hear!
I think Pieter Hintjens had a good answer – “Give them enough rope to hang themselves, then kick them out.” People who don’t play well with others will tend to write bad code – or write code that may be good by itself, but doesn’t interact well with other people’s good code, which is another way of saying, “They write bad code.” This is not a perfect rule, but it’s better than any alternatives that I know of.
http://hintjens.com/blog:120
Instead of being disruptive in the various forums, it is better to submit a major patch of better code demonstrating things work better your way.
It wasn’t in opensource projects, but as a contractor at least twice I completely rewrote a fully working prototype with test fixtures because I got tired of politely arguing the old codebase was beyond patching.
Criticizing other’s code (including designs) is not showing your own code is better.
Although I prefer it if someone wasn’t, an asshole that writes, cleans, fixes, and documents really good code is still better than someone who minimally contributes code but does contribute lots of criticism, even if it is polite.
BY CODE ALONE YE SHALL KNOW THEM
You can find people to do the other related work, but you want good coders, and it is rare to find more than one supercoder on any project.
In relation to this it’s also worth noting a reply I got regarding the whole Hugo/Puppy affair – I was explicitly told that correct politics _is_ a major measure of quality.
If one of the coders on the project is disrupting by not judging by the code alone for others, they should be ejected.
The CoC is “Everyone shall judge everyone by their code alone”.
>If one of the coders on the project is disrupting by not judging by the code alone for others, they should be ejected.
The CoC is “Everyone shall judge everyone by their code alone”.
That may do as a solution to the “How do you justify ejecting a disruptive asshole” problem. If you attack people rather than code, you’re not doing it right and need to be gone.
>You’re making a sound judgement and call to action against someone by judging something about them which is not code.
“You shall judge by only the code and acceptance of this statement.”
There, fixed.
“I do not give one milli-micro-nano-fraction of a fuck what race you are, what gender you are or identify as, who you want to sleep with, how old you are, what your height or weight is, what if anything may be different about your body or brain, what language you speak, what country you’re from, what God you pray to, where you work, how much money you have, et fucking cetera. Is your contribution any good? That’s all that matters.” – From the Erbosoft Project Code of Conduct, rev. January 2016
Perhaps I should change that to say “who you want to sleep with and what you want to do with them while in bed.” Or maybe the “et fucking cetera” is enough.
In any event, I now have ample reason never to use or recommend the use of Drupal to anyone, ever.
While I agree with the sentiment of only looking at the code, this is a PHP CMS we’re talking about. If it founders because of SJW bickering rather than technical competition, who cares? It was never going to last anyway.
One wonders if open source these days is going through a more hard-core version of Sayre’s law, “Academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low.” Tough to avoid in these communities that are more about status than money.
I’d already walked away from Drupal a while back after trying it. Is it far more extensible and ultimately powerful than, say, wordpress?
Sure.
Even then, the steps required to get anything basic done were… onerous. Modular “plug in your own WYSIWYG text editor” is nice. Not picking a reasonable default like TinyMCE to ship as the configured default – bad. I may code HTML by hand, but most clients I have would never do so. Ditto having to install picture uploading functionality before you could add picture objects.
At least they incorporated most of the functionality from the object editor kit that was considered a de-facto minimum to really get things done, change page layouts, etc.
@ESR
> I really am an expert at this kind of thing.
You don’t say :^) Still thought it worthwhile to add nuance to the bug report.
@Joshua Brulé
>I think Pieter Hintjens had a good answer
The answer excellent. but the answer is to the question “how do I deal with bad actors (with the best possible result for the community)?” Not “what’s the best way to transmit the meme that describes our policy?”. “Everyone shall judge everyone by their code alone” is what we have right now. Because of the way he wrote, it seems that it’s the principle he used – and deemed easiest to communicate, too.
While I agree with the general slant of the idea, I see a few stumbling points.
I.
It bears reminding that these claims about how coders ought to be judged is not intended to be backed by force, but rather by individual actions such as rejection of commits, refusal to use the app, etc. Any coder judged, is never judged universally, nor objectively.
II.
“Quality of code” is a vague enough metric that it’s vulnerable to gaming. There’s no push-button way to evaluate code quality, so working with a sizeable commit that’s plausibly feature-rich but non-trivial to adapt the other code to may end up hinging on whether everyone likes the author. This may sound like an edge case, sure… but so is Garfield’s and Eich’s.
III.
I was once on a project where one programmer was pumping out code that got things done, but was impossible to work with. For example, he quickly developed a style guide that demanded everyone document and organize their code in a standard way that he had no trouble obsessively following, but that slowed the rest of us down to the point that he would get frustrated, code his own version of what had been tasked to us, and then begin complaining that we weren’t pulling our weight.
Now, I will admit that one could make the case that his general beliefs manifested as code that wasn’t fully getting things done, but only by arguing that “getting things done” included “cut the style BS down to where the other programmers can code their parts on time” and “stop letting your beliefs inform the way the rest of us should develop, to the point that it’s distracting”, or generally, “don’t be an asshole about your commits”. And at this point it looks very close to “get your politics out of here” or, everyone’s favorite catch-all: “be a good fit with the team”.
Note that “to the point it’s distracting” is arguably me smuggling in a belief that programmers are entitled to a development safe space. I think we aren’t; there’s a point where we have to suck it up and double-check our code quality if Linus rejects our commit and chews us out in email or something.
OTOH, in this other project, it was getting to the point where if we didn’t write our code Just So, it wouldn’t interface properly with Mr. Myway’s. Who’s in the wrong in a two-way API mismatch war?
—
Are these notable problems? If so, do we have good ways around them?
> Are these notable problems? If so, do we have good ways around them?
Some thoughts; I am not pretending to be an expert on this sort of thing.
I think these are real problems, but we cannot, and should not expect to come up with a memorable, accurate, fully-operational maxim that solves them. To steal a quote from (I think) Meredith Patterson, modern sociopathy has grown up with systems and learned how to use them against us. If we precommit to solving every social problem with a push-button rule, then it’s just a matter of time before someone figures out how to abuse it. I don’t think of “You shall judge by the code alone” as a steadfast rule, but a very firmly worded suggestion that should alarm and dismay us if it’s ever casually ignored. In particular, I don’t think anyone was seriously claiming Eich was removed because he was writing bad code, or making it hard for other people at Mozilla to write good code.
>he quickly developed a style guide that demanded everyone document and organize their code in a standard way that he had no trouble obsessively following, but that slowed the rest of us down
My instinct is, “This guy sounds like an asshole” which is a decisively ‘non-code’ judgement. And this sounds like an annoying edge case to the “You shall judge by code alone” maxim. But I think I’d hit this problem at the, “This is a bad style guide” level not a “You’re a bad person level”.
@Mike
Because not fighting them when it “doesn’t matter”, or when it would be rude, or a thousand other reasons is exactly how we got in this mess in the first place.
Or put another way: First they came for the…………
It’s the edge cases that make these kinds of dictums difficult to implement. Perhaps we can bring back dueling or mortal combat in the arena as a means of discouraging the faint-of-heart chickenshit complainers. When you aim to kill, expect a like response.
Coming in from the outside, maybe the extended version can be “You shall judge by the code alone, and the judgements you make shall be part of your own code.”
Just make sure that it’s the hill you want to die on. There’s no shortage of things you can choose to get outraged over; the question is whether the treatment of guys who join a women-as-slaves subculture is your priority.
>the question is whether the treatment of guys who join a women-as-slaves subculture is your priority.
Garfield’s particular offense is completely irrelevant to the principle at issue.
@Paul Brinkley
> This may sound like an edge case, sure… but so is Garfield’s and Eich’s.
No. Your examples are all generally about code, or work-related dynamics within groups of coders. The two cases you are conflating them with were – from what I can gather as an outsider – politically motivated witch hunts with no connection whatever to coding issues.
I agree that they appear to be politically motivated witch hunts. But they were also edge cases. They were not the norm.
Were Garfield’s and Eich’s views impacting the ability of colleagues to produce code? I sincerely doubt it in Eich’s case. Best I could tell, Eich wasn’t bringing up same-sex marriage all the time at Mozilla. (If he had, they wouldn’t have had to dig for a donation record before summoning the Crusade.) Likewise, if Garfield were honking off about whatever peccadilloes he had at every scrum, this wouldn’t have suddenly come up now. Therefore, someone had to go out of their way to out Garfield.
That said, these are two edge cases which people are trying to extrapolate into a general rule about what to do about coders who are productive but disagreeable.
Eric’s staked out what I consider to be a solid default rule. Which is to say, I agree with Joshua Brule that we’ll get nowhere if we insist on a universal simple litmus test. Default: if it’s not code related, assume the coder is still valuable, in absence of further evidence; by inference, if others try to shun the coder anyway, assume they’re in the wrong.
That said, I still notice that the exceptions to that default remain within easy sight, at least for me.
My instinct is, “This guy sounds like an asshole” which is a decisively ‘non-code’ judgement.
Interestingly, my instinct said, “this guy sounds like he’s being framed as an asshole by someone else who might be the real asshole”. Even though I was the framer.
Which made me chuckle a bit. But also reminded me of a habit I have of checking both sides of the story. (Was Garfield maybe being an asshole in other ways, and they picked this lifestyle thing to nail him on instead because it was more expedient? I’d support that open letter too, but if I looked deeper into the matter, it’s possible I might qualify my support.)
@esr —
> Two wrongs don’t make a right.
Agreed. And yet, “sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander” …
> And, in any case, being expelled for disruptive assholery within a group (which is what Larry clearly thought he was doing, whether or not he was justified) is not the same as being expelled because Larry didn’t like your sex life or your politics or whatever.
… because maybe that is what he thought he was doing, but maybe not. I will point out that the failed attempt to expel me was initiated some time after I helped resist the introduction of Coraline’s COC into the PHP project, which I think is fair to file under “politics.” Obviously nobody came out and *said* that was the focus, but if you look at the complainants and correlate them with the ones pushing the COC, there’s significant overlap. (I know: not scientific, but still.)
In any case, I stand by my main point: if Larry was willing to judge others on non-( code | productive-output | technical ) measures, then perhaps he should be a little more willing to be judged by others in the same way. (I do hope that he has learned from this experience that it is a terrible thing to inflict on others.)
p.s. FWIW, here is my initial response to Larry’s list of charges on behalf of the complainants: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/php-fig/w38tCU4mdgU/EUehhuf6CAAJ
>if Larry was willing to judge others on non-( code | productive-output | technical ) measures, then perhaps he should be a little more willing to be judged by others in the same way
My other commenters have evolved the correct response to this, I think. In the hypothetical that you were behaving like a disruptive asshole (I am not alleging this) then you were attacking people rather than judging them by the code alone, and placed yourself outside the protection of that rule.
If your resistance to a CoC was involved, that is another matter. But I don’t know that, and apparently you don’t either.
@Paul Brinkley
You seem to have an unusual definition of what “edge case” means. Eich’s appears to be exactly a center mass example of what ESR is talking about.
Because of private behavior entirely unrelated to his work he became the target of a political witch hunt. How is that an “edge case”?
>Eich’s appears to be exactly a center mass example of what ESR is talking about.
It should be, as it was the case that really alerted me to the problem.
@esr —
> If your resistance to a CoC was involved, that is another matter. But I don’t know that, and apparently you don’t either.
Sure; it’s not capital-K “Knowable” in an absolute sense, without someone coming out and saying “it’s TOTALLY about the COC thing.” Being more familiar with the community and its history, I think I might be a better judge; but then, as the one who was attacked, I might not be. The deniability on their part is plausible, especially to “outsiders.”
Having said that, at least one of the complainants referred to the COC incident more than once; here is an example: https://archive.is/1MiVA From this and other comments, I think it’s reasonable to infer that the attempt to expel me was in some ways politically motivated. (And these are the people Larry allied himself with.)
In any case, I hope I have successfully pointed out that, while it is terrible that Larry was subjected to the sanctimony of others in this way, he was fine subjecting others to his own sanctimony, and that should temper our sympathy for him in this specific, limited situation.
@Michael
You seem to have an unusual definition of what “edge case” means. Eich’s appears to be exactly a center mass example of what ESR is talking about.
Sorry – I mean it’s a edge case relative to all programmers. Most programmers are either productive and generally agreeable and getting acclaim, or unproductive and being generally ignored. A small minority are productive and generally disagreeable and consequently on the bubble.
And remember, I mentioned all this in the context of cases where the code is plausibly good, but non-trivial to get working with the rest (or hard to test or whatever) – cases where I’d most expect the rest of the team might say “the code wasn’t that good” when in reality it was “we couldn’t tell if it was good, but Bob is a commie, so we decided not to go through the trouble”.
These are either both common or both on the edge, depending on context. I think y’all aren’t really disagreeing with my point here.
@Paul Brinkley
“Sorry – I mean it’s a edge case relative to all programmers. Most programmers are either productive and generally agreeable and getting acclaim, or unproductive and being generally ignored. A small minority are productive and generally disagreeable and consequently on the bubble.”
Ok, thanks. I now understand how you’re using the term. But I’m gonna disagree, for 2 reasons:
1) They’re edge cases only if you assume it can/will only happen to a few people. It appears to me any of us could end up as the target of a witch burning. So the “cases” could be said to include everyone, sooner or later.
2) I’ve seen no evidence that either Eich or Garfield were “productive and generally disagreeable and consequently on the bubble”. Seems to me they found themselves on the bubble through none of their own doing (as regards their behavior in the community/workplace).
@Nancy Lebovitz
There’s a reason that same orchestra study is so frequently cited, as it’s basically one of a kind. If bias were really so pervasive, we would expect to see a large number of similar studies all pointing in the same direction, but instead the same few studies get cited over and over again.
Moreover, it’s no coincidence that virtually everyone who mentions the orchestra study cites secondary sources, because reading the original paper tells a different story. In addition to relying on an intricate (read: fragile and error-prone) statistical analysis, the paper includes details that cast serious doubt on their methodology and conclusion.
In particular, on page 17 we find this astonishing admission:
In other words, the “bias” the authors so carefully tease out of the data is reversed in semi-final rounds. The authors speculate about the cause of this reversal, but admit they have no firm explanation, which suggests the possibility of a serious methodological flaw in their analysis.
I’ve seen this same orchestra study cited dozens of times in the mainstream media, but I’ve never once seen anyone mention this serious discrepancy. This is a strong indication that such stories exist to promote a political agenda rather than the truth.
There was a study where they used voice masking for coders being interviewed
http://blog.interviewing.io/we-built-voice-modulation-to-mask-gender-in-technical-interviews-heres-what-happened/
>There was a study where they used voice masking for coders being interviewed
That’s is very reminiscent of the GitHub study – a slight but not statistically significant advantage in being identified female when a disadvantage was expected.
That I even need to say this in 2017 is something of a disgrace. The hacker culture already had judge-by-the-code-alone figured out forty years ago when I was a n00b; the only reason it needs to be said now is that there’s been a recent fashion for “social justice” witch hunting which, inevitably, has degenerated into the sort of utter fiasco the Drupal devs are now protesting.
To paraphrase Trotsky, you may not be interested in the Cold Civil War, but the Cold Civil War is interested in you.
How about “You shall judge only based on contributions to the project(s)”.
There are some that can’t code that contribute by doing non-coding things, such as bug reporting and documentation, while there are coders that contribute a bit of code and a lot of misery. We need more of the former, and ideally none of the latter.
>How about “You shall judge only based on contributions to the project(s)”.
In theory, I like it. In practice, political ratfuckers will argue that acts of sabotage like writing a totalitarian Code of Conduct are “contributions”.
The maintainer should judge code contributions by the quality of the code (“I’ll accept your pull request if it makes my project better”), and mailing list access by one’s behaviour on the mailing list (“Stop top-posting or you’ll get banned”), etc. I’m not sure what the scope of Mr. Garfield’s removal was- surely if he sends a patch it can’t be treated worse than a drive-by patch?
I’m shadowbanned from github (when I log out, my profile turns to 404 and my comments disappear; log back in and there they are). I don’t know what the offence was, but apparently somebody doesn’t like me; well, cut off your nose to spite your face if you like. It’s your own code that suffers.
Eric,
But code alone is not the only necessary contribution to open source projects. Open source also needs documentation, UI/UX design, graphic design, QA, support, etc. Some of these must be provided by specialists, as coders cannot be trusted to provide them to the standard of quality expected by the user base. How does “You shall be judged by the code alone” account for these contributions and their contributors, who may not be coders?
>How does “You shall be judged by the code alone” account for these contributions and their contributors, who may not be coders?
If we need to, we can play definitional games with the word “code”.
But I don’t think we’ll need to do that explicitly. The intention of the line is quite understandable.
>the question is whether the treatment of guys who join a women-as-slaves subculture is your priority.
I’m trying to think of a single example where the major plaintiff in a landmark civil liberties case was some sort of spotless angel.
Ernesto Miranda? Clarence Gideon? Larry Flynt?
I mean, Miranda was an actual rapist, not just some dude who plays BDSM games with consenting partners.
>I’m shadowbanned from github (when I log out, my profile turns to 404 and my comments disappear; log back in and there they are)
I saved them the trouble and just nuked my repos myself after they hired Coraline Ada to be their political commissar.
@esr:
>>Eich’s appears to be exactly a center mass example of what ESR is talking about.
>It should be, as it was the case that really alerted me to the problem.
Speaking of Eich’s case, how should one act with respect to a project that engages in witch hunts when one is, so to speak, a witch? I am an evangelical Christian with fairly traditional views on the topic of homosexual marriage (though perhaps more willing than some to accept its legalization, should it ever be legitimately legalized by legislation or referendum as opposed to judicial putsch, provided that it remained legal to oppose it) . Now, I was never much of a Firefox user to begin with, but I have actively avoided using it since Eich’s ouster. If it were just a matter of my views on how software should be developed, I’d probably write a letter to Mozilla saying political witch hunts aren’t cool, and letting them know that I would avoid using Firefox in the future as a result of Eich’s ouster, and that would be that. If it were just a matter of my religious views, I’d view continued use of Firefox as inimical to my own interests and that would pretty much be that. Given the two together, I’m inclined to wonder if the second factor is influencing me more than the first, which makes me less confident that I’m reacting well than if I held either set of views alone (if not for the views on software, I wouldn’t see much worth salvaging in Firefox, if not for my religious views, I wouldn’t see Mozilla’s actions as directly inimical to my interests, and I wouldn’t see as much problem with acting reflexively in my own interest even if I did, so, having decided that Mozilla’s actions were wrong, I’d be less likely to examine myself for hypocrisy and cut Mozilla slack).
In other words, what would you do if some kernel dev came under fire for some view you share, and (speaking very hypothetically!) Linus were to condemn it as unacceptable and show the guy the door? Let’s say that the accusation made was “This guy’s a gun nut!”
>In other words, what would you do if some kernel dev came under fire for some view you share, and (speaking very hypothetically!) Linus were to condemn it as unacceptable and show the guy the door? Let’s say that the accusation made was “This guy’s a gun nut!”
Raise public hell and switch to *BSD, of course. Why is this even a question?
“That I even need to say this in 2017 is something of a disgrace.”
Americans and sex, not a happy relationship (not only Americans). This is part the rise of puritanism.
What makes this case so absurd:
A nerd punished for participating in role-playing games!
@Jeff:
> Some of these must be provided by specialists, as coders cannot be trusted to provide them to the standard of quality expected by the user base.
For UI/UX and graphic design, it’s worse: Coders and users, or different segments of the user base, cannot be trusted to have the same idea of what “quality” means. Your pretty, intuitive, interface is the interface that gives me eye cancer and destroys my productivity.
Jon Brase
“Your pretty, intuitive, interface is the interface that gives me eye cancer and destroys my productivity.”
There is only one truely intuitive user interface. And, yes, it has been known to destroy productivity.
> Raise public hell and switch to *BSD, of course. Why is this even a question?
Because when members of the group being witch-hunted react that way, it risks tit-for-tat spiraling political sniping. Or, to put it another way, I don’t trust my judgement as much to be free of political or other ulterior motives when I have skin in the game as when I don’t.
If Linus booted a kernel dev for being a “gun nut”, I’d almost certainly switch to BSD, because I’m not, and will almost certainly never be, a gun owner, so I can be relatively certain that my opinion that gun ownership is essential to the maintenance of a free state is not influenced by my interests and biases as a gun owner (since I’m not one), and, indeed, my position on gun rights is about the opposite of what would be predicted from my emotional reaction to being anywhere near a gun, on either end.
On the other hand if Brendan Eich were to contribute to the kernel, and Linus were to boot him for the same reason Mozilla did, my general inclination would still be to switch to BSD, but, having skin in the game, I’d be more inclined to wonder if having skin in the game was making me overreact, just as I wonder in the actual case of Eich and Mozilla.
>Because when members of the group being witch-hunted react that way, it risks tit-for-tat spiraling political sniping.
You call it spiraling political sniping, I call it taking a principled stand for my values. I sure as hell would never kick someone off one of my projects for having political views opposed to mine; such behavior is invidious and must be protested loudly and publicly, on exactly the “You shall judge by the code alone” principle.
> In any case, I hope I have successfully pointed out that, while it is terrible that Larry was subjected to the sanctimony of others in this way, he was fine subjecting others to his own sanctimony, and that should temper our sympathy for him in this specific, limited situation.
The point I think you’re missing is two-fold.
First, people don’t get less sympathy/support when they’re wronged if they also act similarly in other contexts. Both wrongs are deploreable and should be addressed as individually as possible. “They had it coming/It’s OK because of the way they treat others/etc” is political ratfuckery. It’s waiting until an opportune moment and trying to dogpile on unrelated items.
Second, the point about judging by the code, is about separating the many parts of everyone’s lives. As much as possible, accept those parts that coalign and ignore the rest. If someone is being a jerk in a part that coaligns, deal with it there,as it is germane. If it’s not relevant, then bringing it into scope is reducing the benefit achieved in the common area.
“In theory, I like it. In practice, political ratfuckers will argue that acts of sabotage like writing a totalitarian Code of Conduct are “contributions”.”
Sure they are. But that does not preclude you from judging them based on that contribution. A totalitarian, Ehmke-style Code of Conduct is fully as negative a contribution as, say, a rewrite of GPSD in Visual Basic, and deserves exactly the same kind of rejection.
@Winter
“Americans and sex, not a happy relationship (not only Americans). This is part the rise of puritanism.”
“What makes this case so absurd:”
“A nerd punished for participating in role-playing games!”
Winter, completely agree.
But please note that the puritanism here is being driven by leftists – the “stay out of our bedrooms” crowd. Hypocrites, as always.
The crowd I run with are all conservative fundamentalist Christians. Most all of them would have an immediate “Ewwwww!” reaction to anything resembling BDSM. But they would also quickly follow up with “what you do on your own time is your own business”.
Yes, this case is beyond absurd. I appreciate ESR taking a no-compromise stand on it.
@Michael
“But please note that the puritanism here is being driven by leftists – the “stay out of our bedrooms” crowd. Hypocrites, as always.”
I have not seen this puritanism limited to the “left” in any useful sense of the word. Remember Nippelgate? And the bathroom laws? Here are a number of Right wing puritanisms:
These States Still Ban Cohabitation, Sex Toys… And Gay Marriage
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/03/06/gay-marriage-bans-_n_4907115.html
States where sex toys are illegal:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_obscenity_statute
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Obscenity_Enforcement_Act
The Complete List of Weird Sex Laws in the U.S.A.
https://observationdeck.kinja.com/the-complete-list-of-weird-sex-laws-in-the-u-s-a-1485048155
And then we have your VP that does not want to eat alone with women:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/31/mike-pence-doesnt-eat-alone-women-speaks-volumes
What if the comments in your code are offensive? It’s easy not to get a joke.
What about your variable names? I see “cnt” a lot.
Why do sympathy and support have to be directly linked both ways?
Dan R > people don’t get less sympathy/support when they’re wronged if they also act similarly in other contexts
I reserve the right to support the rights of others while feeling unsympathetic to their plight. To misquote Evelyn Beatrice Hall: “I find it difficult to sympathize with the plight of a hypocrite, but I will defend to the death your right to freedom to the very witch hunts you would use to persecute others.”
Matters of principle need not be matters of personal sympathy. I thus sympathize with the suggestion of Paul M. Jones to “temper our sympathy for [Larry Garfield] in this specific, limited situation” if Garfield did, indeed, lead a witch hunt to persecute someone for irrelevant perceived wrongs.
Of course, I haven’t looked into the details of these events, so all my talk is just about the principle rather than the circumstances at hand.
I sure as hell would never kick someone off one of my projects for having political views opposed to mine
Hmm. What if the view in question were that other programmers can and should be kicked off for their views?
(Stipulated: I’m making a bad case here which would lead to bad law. I’m not trying to make law out of it; just exploring.)
>Hmm. What if the view in question were that other programmers can and should be kicked off for their views?
I don’t run my projects as democracies. If one on my committers were to express that view, I would tell him very firmly that that shit is not going to happen here, but I would not view it as a blocker to accepting his commits.
Developers have politics. Commits do not. This is not even difficult, and I’m puzzled by people who somehow manage to think it is.
@ESR:
and @Irving Rivas:
I have an even stronger objection than Irving; I do not think Hintjen’s answer is good, but he makes one point which deserves more notice (emphasis in this quote is mine):
This, I feel, is the primary black mark against the “Social Justice Warrior”—and perhaps the missing element of this discussion. When one encounters a clash of belief/values, there are (broadly speaking) three possible responses:
1) stay silent and either follow the crowd*, or leave;
2) demur, either politely or violently screaming, until the group relents; or
3) seek an understanding of the group’s current position, and only afterward explaining their objections, if any remain.
The problem, as I see it, is not the behavior that Eich or Garfield or whatever following target du jour have committed; nor is the problem that I object to defining that behavior as wrongthink which should be punished in any context. The foremost problem is that SJWs have chosen route #2 above: insisting that they, regardless of their actual, official role in the community, are the sole legitimate judge of right and wrong, and feel entitled to enforce this belief upon the rest of the community.
[*: In all honesty, I believe this half of choice #1 is a failure mode worse than #2, but this is both irrelevant to the present discussion and poses different hurdles for discussion / detection.]
@ Winter
“And then we have your VP that does not want to eat alone with women:”
Sounds like a smart guy to me.
If one on my committers were to express that view, I would tell him very firmly that that shit is not going to happen here, but I would not view it as a blocker to accepting his commits.
And what if that committer somehow managed to acquire the authority to reject commits before their views on this had become known?
I can see how it wouldn’t be difficult for you; you’re probably much better than average at evaluating code quality in isolation, and you’re probably either sole lead on your projects, or sharing it with leads of like policy, or have little problem with forking a project if its current leads are too infatuated with their social brand.
I suspect most other programmers feel more desperate. The open source development market can remain in thrall to causes du jour longer than they can remain intellectually invested.
>And what if that committer somehow managed to acquire the authority to reject commits before their views on this had become known?
All questions similar to this have the same answer: if you do not yourself judge by the code alone, you forfeit the protection of that rule and can be kicked out for disruptive assholery.
“What about your variable names? I see “cnt” a lot.”
I’ve often wondered what French radfems/bluenoses think of Lisp, what with those cons all over the place.
“Here are a number of Right wing puritanisms:”
Link to the last time any of those were actually enforced? Against someone who wasn’t intentionally trying to provoke a test case? kthx.
The British didn’t repeal their law against witchcraft until 1951. Nonetheless, it had been quite a while since anyone was hanged as a witch.
“The Complete List of Weird Sex Laws in the U.S.A.”
Many, perhaps most, of these are made-up bullshit. There is no law against moose having sex on the streets in Fairbanks, Alaska, nor, as far as I (or Google) can tell, has there ever been such a law. The Kentucky statute against dogs “molesting people or property” is using an an entirely different sense of the word “molest” from the sexual one. And so on. Many of the others seem like they were adopted for practical reasons rather than “puritanism”. For example, the one forbidding you from allowing a dog or cat in heat to wander the streets.
@Winter
The fact that you would even think to post a link to HuffPo is the stuff of belly laughter.
“And then we have your VP that does not want to eat alone with women:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/31/mike-pence-doesnt-eat-alone-women-speaks-volumes”
I have the same rule, as does every Christian man and every careful man I know. There’s nothing controversial or unusual about it. And enforcing “purtianism” on oneself is entirely different than enforcing it on other people, which is the topic at hand.
Off topic:
Eric: the “Who is ESR” page on catb.org, you comment on the tendency of the hacker community to give its heroes three letter handles. A very interesting datapoint in the history of that practice is an old Unix v6 image floating around in the net from inside Bell Labs, that, if you boot it up in a PDP-11 emulator, includes the user accounts “ken” and “dmr”. Also, according to his Wikipedia article, RMS had user accounts under his initials at Harvard and/or MIT in the same time period (early 70s). My speculation on the origins of TLHs as marks of status is that as timesharing emerged in the 60s and early 70s, most hackers were working on building the systems they were working with, which meant that they were fairly free to choose their own usernames, and many chose their initials, as it was a fairly easy way to generate a concise and likely-collisionless username. As computing and the hacker community grew through the 70s, the early hackers became heroes due to their status as founders, and, simultaneously, sites grew large enough that newcomers were more and more often assigned usernames rather than allowed to choose their own. By the early 80s, a freshman starting as a computer science major would have seen a fair number of high-status figures with TLHs (I will call these individuals the Ur-TLHs), and then a swarm of newcomers like himself with handles assigned by site policy. At some point, newcomers started naming hackers they respected with TLHs, whether or not they had TLH use accounts.
An interesting test of this theory would be to interview likely Ur-TLHs and see if they perceive a TLH to be as much of a status symbol as younger hackers.
>My speculation on the origins of TLHs as marks of status is
…to my knowledge, exactly correct in every single detail, including accurately identifying the original TLHers of which I was not in fact one – not in the sense of having that kind of prestige at the time.
An interesting detail is that I used to use “eric” but changed to “esr” sometime around 1987 (I think) because “eric” was not distinctive enough in the space of USENET posters. One of my friends grumbled at the time that he understood the necessity but that it meant the ‘net was getting too large, less intimate.
>An interesting test of this theory would be to interview likely Ur-TLHs and see if they perceive a TLH to be as much of a status symbol as younger hackers.
I don’t think you’d get a simple an answer as you want. I think the old-timers fully understand that having a TLH is a status symbol now, but not one they intended to claim.
Back in 2011 I speculated that for reasons of population growth leading to collision issues, “ESR” might have been the last universal triletterization, and the only later counterexample proposed was a bit doubtful (I had never heard of the guy by either TLH or full name). There pretty certainly have not been any since.
That suggests that the sample space is so small that it underdetermines with respect to any single theory. Going through the candidates in my head I’m pretty certain there haven’t been even two dozen TLHers (in the univeral-title-of-respect sense) and it might be less than a dozen.
My wife Cathy wandered in while I was typing this and pointed out something which, if I’d ever fully thought through before, I had forgotten. She proposes that RMS was the “original” triletterization, which both created a model for later ones (JWZ, ESR) and retrospectively gilded earlier ones such as ken and dmr. I think there’s something to this; in particular, it’s the later ones that are normally capitalized – I wouldn’t write KEN at all and would be reluctant to cite DMR.
@Michael eo
The point of my post was that American puritanism is not a project of only the left.
@Winter
“The point of my post was that American puritanism is not a project of only the left.”
I didn’t say it was. I pointed out that the puritanism on display here is of the left – who swear they don’t do such things.
American puritanism (which doesn’t mean what you apparently think it does) has essentially defined left for nearly 600 years.
Um, what?
First, are you dating American puritanism to… before the European discovery of America 525 years ago?
Second, what exactly do you think American puritanism means — capital-P Puritanism centred on reform of the Anglican church, but in America?
Third, have you heard of the Sixties? The argument is probably stronger that the left has defined itself in opposition to existing puritanical norms since (at least) then, especially on attitudes toward sex – homosexuality, sex-education, etc.
>She proposes that RMS was the “original” triletterization, which both created a model for later ones (JWZ, ESR) and retrospectively gilded earlier ones such as ken and dmr. I think there’s something to this; in particular, it’s the later ones that are normally capitalized – I wouldn’t write KEN at all and would be reluctant to cite DMR.
I wasn’t actually counting “ken” as a TLH, as it’s his first name, not his initials (but Kernighan, also from Bell Labs, used/uses “bwk”), I was pointing to “dmr” as an example of a TLH , and just mentioned “ken” because that account existed on the same image and you hardly ever hear of one of those two being mentioned in the context of Unix without the other. In any case, even if we count “ken” as a TLH, it would almost certainly not capitalize fully even if “dmr” did, as a first name written all-caps would just look weird.
Anyways, one question that it occurs to me to ask is “did being associated with the Unix/Usenet vs.PDP-10/ARPANET branch of hacker culture make any difference to the way a TLH was used, particularly with respect to capitalization?”
ISTR that the DEC OEM OSs universally smashed case(?), and, indeed, many Jargon File entries that I can think of that came from that branch of hacker culture are generally written upper-case: “ITS”, “TECO”, “EMACS”, etc. Is it possible that capitalization of TLHs is only really a thing among hackers associated with the PDP-10 branch (either through having been part of it or through close association with people who had), and that your instinct not to capitalize “ken” or “dmr” comes from the fact that you never saw members of their community refer to them in caps? I don’t think “the later handles are generally capitalized” quite holds water because RMS on the one hand and dmr and bwk on the other were roughly contemporary. Meanwhile, RMS was definitely from the PDP-10 branch, ISTR that you cut your teeth there, and while I’ve never heard of JWZ being directly associated with the PDP-10 branch, he was involved with Emacs, which came from that direction. (The evolution of the capitalization of Emacs itself is interesting: PDP-10-era references to it are all-caps, its executable name on modern systems is invariably lower-case, and it’s generally referred to in writing as “Emacs”).
In “Who is ESR” you also put forth the theory that Linus was never TLHed because there is less risk of aliasing problems associated with his name, but a can poke a small hole in this theory: in non-geek culture, “Linus”, with no other identifier, is strongly associated with the cartoon character, so there is an aliasing risk. I think the more likely explanation is that by the time the kernel had established Linus’s hacker bona fides to the point where he might have been TLHed, its name was firmly entrenched as “Linux”, which in turn guaranteed that no handle other than “Linus” would stick to him. (And it’s a good thing he didn’t have some project that got him TLHed before the kernel: I’d hate to try to pronounce “LBTx”!).
>Is it possible that capitalization of TLHs is only really a thing among hackers associated with the PDP-10 branch
It seems unlikely to me. I started in that branch, but I was triletterized by Unix people.
>your instinct not to capitalize “ken” or “dmr” comes from the fact that you never saw members of their community refer to them in caps?
That, on the other hand, feels right.
>RMS on the one hand and dmr and bwk on the other were roughly contemporary.
Not quite. dmr/bwk were famous a few years earlier; dmr, notably, from the late ’70s, bwk I’d say from around ’81. RMS, on the other hand, was not yet a legend when I first met him in ’79; one would have to date the period of his stellar fame from the GNU Manifesto in ’85. Those year separations may not sound like much, but the tech was mutating fast in those days; I was there and I think they mattered.
I would not overlook the possibility that RMS is capitalized because it was already a well-known TLA among the electronics set.
>I would not overlook the possibility that RMS is capitalized because it was already a well-known TLA among the electronics set.
I have seen a form of RMS’s signature in which he part-assimilated it to the notation for Root Mean Square in statistics.
@Christopher Smith
“American puritanism (which doesn’t mean what you apparently think it does) has essentially defined left for nearly 600 years.”
I use this American definition:
And I see it gravitating towards sex.
Um, what?
d5xtgr: I think I recognize this, Christopher Smith appears to be peddling moldbuggery. I advise you to just give up that tangent unless you’re prepared to read several hundred pages of esoteric, poorly-edited reactionary theory arguing, among other things, that the current American Left is cladistically a branch of Christianity (what is the moral arc of the universe but whitewashed divine providence?) and that the First Amendment has a gaping security hole there.
Thwarted by the Eric Conspiracy! All part of their cunning plan to make you add your distinctiveness to their own!
Mike Pence, a conservative VP serving under an unpopular President, does not want to set himself up for scandal by putting himself in a position where he can be readily accused of sexual harassment in a public he-said-she-said shitshow and the media will pronounce guilt before the first lawsuit even gets a docket number.
That doesn’t sound crazy. It sounds like good opsec.
@Winter
Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
H. L. Mencken
Yep. Sounds exactly like the American left.
Another flowery way to say it, from “A Man for All Seasons”:
William Roper: So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!
Sir Thomas More: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
William Roper: Yes, I’d cut down every law in England to do that!
Sir Thomas More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down, and you’re just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!
(full disclosure, I found this in another comment, on another essay about a similar topic)
And here’s a concrete example of the Devil turning ’round on you.
@Jon Brase:
The issues with UI/UX and graphics might be more easily discernable than those with code, but I’m not convinced they are worse. Just as tourists eventually destroy the object of tourism, good code will attract ill-conceived marauding pull requests, and uncritical acceptance of those would eventually render the code a slow, buggy, unreadable, unmaintainable mess.
Linus’s ostensibly intemperate reactions work well for him and for Linux — it’s a big project, and his responses are actually quite useful at teaching would-be contributors that his time and attention are limited resources.
Some smaller projects are very inclusive and collapse under their own weight; others are run by would-be Torvalds clones who mistake his crankiness for the cause of his success.
But for most small projects, a more successful approach combines relatively high merge standards with temperate constructive criticism about unmerged code.
@esr:
> It seems unlikely to me. I started in that branch, but I was triletterized by Unix people.
Well, by that time the PDP-10 had died and the two cultures had mostly merged. Are you saying that you were triletterized by people who at the time were using Unix, or are you saying that you were triletterized by people that you’re sure had no connection to the PDP-10 culture? The first is, for the late 90’s, fairly tautological from my understanding of the history, the second is an interesting datapoint.
The latter case would indicate, assuming that my idea that capitalization of TLHs was a PDP-10 culture thing holds any water, that the two cultures had merged completely enough by the late 90’s that capitalization of TLHs had become universal.
Does it sound generally plausible that Unix culture, early on, did not capitalize, while PDP-10 culture did? Can you think of any early pairs of roughly contemporary Unix and PDP-10 TLHs that would serve as examples or counterexamples?
> RMS, on the other hand, was not yet a legend when I first met him in ’79; one would have to date the period of his stellar fame from the GNU Manifesto in ’85
I had been going off your statement in “Who is ESR?” that Stallman was “already a hero when I was a fledgling programmer in the early 1980s, who was generally known as RMS even then.”
>Are you saying that you were triletterized by people who at the time were using Unix, or are you saying that you were triletterized by people that you’re sure had no connection to the PDP-10 culture?
I am sure of the former, and not sure of the latter.
>Does it sound generally plausible that Unix culture, early on, did not capitalize, while PDP-10 culture did?
Of the former I am sure; of the latter I am not. I think the handles of some early PDP-10 hackerswere not routinely uppercased,
>I had been going off your statement in “Who is ESR?” that Stallman was “already a hero when I was a fledgling programmer in the early 1980s, who was generally known as RMS even then.”
That is true, but the group to which he was a hero was much smaller and much harder-core then – I think numbered in the hundreds, not the hundreds of thousands it probably is today. He shipped the first Emacs months after I met him; that was a big step in the growth of his reputation.
I had always assumed that TLHs happened because of name-space restrictions. 8 character names were common, and you had to put your mark on things (files, test-users, etc.) so that you knew what was yours and what was not.
At least, that’s what I used to do, and I learned it from folks who’d been doing it long before me.
>I had always assumed that TLHs happened because of name-space restrictions. 8 character names were common, and you had to put your mark on things (files, test-users, etc.) so that you knew what was yours and what was not.
8 Characters, specifically, was a DOS restriction, and not relevant to the hacker community at the time in question. OTOH, ISTR that TOPS-10 had a 6 character filename limit (1 PDP-10 machine word with 6 bit characters), but TLHs were in use even in the Unix community where there were no such limits. I think the bigger limiting factor was typing time: at the baud rates then common, a fast typist could outtype their modem.
I’m glad the “Who Is ESR?” page was brought up, because I’d appreciate some clarification on this passage: “…like the song goes, it took me twenty years to become an overnight sensation.” What song is that? (I only know it’s not the Raspberries’ “Overnight Sensation”.)
>…like the song goes, it took me twenty years to become an overnight sensation.
I just identified Hell No I ain’t Happy (2003) by a Southern alt-country band called the Drive-By-Truckers, but I think it’s an ironic reference to something in earlier country music – I’m certain I wrote that earlier than 2003.
The page is dated Nov 11 of 2003.
>The page is dated Nov 11 of 2003.
Content is older, though. I’d never heard of the Drive By Truckers then – I didn’t know of them until I went Googling. No; I remember this much, there was some female trad-country singer who used “took me twenty years to become an overnight sensation” riffing on her own career.
Eddie Cantor?
https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/e/eddiecanto309843.html
http://www.azquotes.com/quotes/topics/overnight-success.html
https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/keywords/overnight_success.html
>Eddie Cantor?
Hah! I betcha the female country singer I vaguely remember was quoting him!
“You shall judge by the code alone.”
Unintended consequence alert: this statement can reinforce the arrogant fallacy that technical prowess confers a moral right and duty to rule others. Sort of the technical equivalent of the old “white man’s burden”. Never underestimate or denigrate the value of project leadership and management (done right), even if those contributors aren’t the ne plus ultra of technical competence.
Explicitly fight the (e.g.) SJWs on the moral level. “Show us the code” rhetorically undercuts their credibility and commitment to the shared work. Simultaneously and continuously vision cast the organizing purpose of the collaboration. Explicitly point out that the (e.g.) SJW entryists are denigrating and devaluing the contributions of the non-political technical contributors with their accusations of injustice. In contrast, express your appreciation and admiration of the code contributors. To that end, “you shall judge by the code alone” can be a powerful rhetorical rallying cry.
Hi ESR,
Consider this situation, What if the commiter is a pro ISIS but a competent coder. If he has to only submit the patch there is no problem, but the reality is the patch must be reviewed by other contributors and conversations must be exchanged. Do you think still the “You shall be judged by code alone” rule will work. The other anti ISIS contributors will feel uneasy to exchange conversations for a good reason. What are your thoughts on this kind of situation.
>The other anti ISIS contributors will feel uneasy to exchange conversations for a good reason.
That the other contributors should get spines. And that person can, quite properly, be told not to wave his politics around in project communications channels.
> That the other contributors should get spines.
I did not mean that the other contributors are afraid to make the conversation. Just that they are completely against things such as sharia law e.t.c and are not willing to participate in the conversation with the guy because he might end up as the project maintainer and might use the other peoples work against them.
For example, if a pro ISIS competent coder starts contributing to the linux kernel project and takes over the position of the maintainer of the project by sheer competence then the other anit-ISIS contributors will feel like they had worked hard against themselves. Don’t you think that “You shall be judged by code alone” rule leads to “You shall be ruled by the competent coder even if he is an ISIS(or any unethical ideology)”.
>Don’t you think that “You shall be judged by code alone” rule leads to “You shall be ruled by the competent coder even if he is an ISIS(or any unethical ideology)”.
Of course it does. But as long as what he is contributing is code, that doesn’t matter. I mean, unless you think his code is going to blow up a schoolbus or open a slave market or something? I think the project lead might something to say about that.
EDIT: Note that my sarcasm was not directed against the idea that your hypothetical ISIS supporter would want to do such things in the real world – the evil of such people should never be underestimated. I was snarking at the idea that his code contributions would do them.
@Johnny
(or any unethical ideology)
Who decides this? Name any ideology / belief / passion / practice / -ism and there will be somebody who thinks it’s unethical.
“Judge by code” is the closest you will come to something workable in this venue.
While the details still aren’t out on the excuse of protecting Garfield’s victims, the story here appears to be slightly more complex than being simply about his kinks. It seems like it might be more about the sexist/misogynist views associated with Gor that he might also have and the ways in which he has allegedly expressed these and other unpopular political views in some of his messages on Twitter and the Drupal issue queue (these were on-topic for the conversation taking place). Here’s a Twitter thread by a Drupal core committer talking about some more of these. He has also been accused of stalling progress on efforts of making DrupalCon more diverse because he said he wanted wait for a couple more conferences to gather data before taking action.
In addition I would speculate one or more people may have also complained because he brought his “slave” to a code sprint.
“I am officially not taking a position on that question at this time, because my own views on the matter are not relevant to the point I am making.” My, what shocking, horrific bigotry we have here!
If suggesting that college women would be sexually assaulted less if the binge-drank themselves into vulnerability less often is “misogynist” and “Gorean”, then I think we could stand to have more misogyny and Goreanism.
The quotes from Garfield incline me to sign up on his side, actually. I’m seeing ethics and good sense from him, answered by blithering idiocy from his attackers.
@ESR
A related question, I’ll use a hypothetical version of the SNMP library search as an example:
Suppose I had found a library that technically exactly what was needed, but the BDFL had recently become a rabid SJW (or been replaced by one). Having a depended on library go to hell is not an acceptable outcome for a project that is looking at 50+ year time horizons minimum, regardless of whether that library is needed for core code, or utilities.
The problem is that the libBDFL can be expected to destroy the project over the course of a couple years, if that. But the library is technically good. I see two answers to this:
1. Use it. The code is good, and if the expected happens it can be forked.
2. Don’t use it. The code may be good, but it is inviting a chaos timebomb into the project that *will* trigger at a random time.
Now, option 1 is of course how things are supposed to work, but there will be a threshold of expected chaos above which it simply isn’t worth it. So which is it?
>Now, option 1 is of course how things are supposed to work, but there will be a threshold of expected chaos above which it simply isn’t worth it. So which is it?
Use it. The code is good, and if the expected happens and if it isn’t forked, we can maintain it. SNMP isn’t that complicated.
“I’m seeing […] blithering idiocy from his attackers.”
You expected anything else from a gaggle of SJWs? They make up a stupidity laser: one’s stupidity bounces off of others, and gets amplified and reinforced with every bounce before finally escaping into the world to wreak damage wherever the beam passes.
I’m in favor of the neutral consideration of code quality when judging patches and such.
As the second-order discussion about people and effects seems unavoidable, though, I wish to contribute an opinion there that having ISIS members or other distasteful outgroup sending in patches to your project is a good thing and should be encouraged.
Because if a generic Opposition Man is contributing code to your project, that implies Opposition Man is spending time peacefully (if perhaps uncivilly) working on a project with people he disagrees with, which is good in itself in addition to being time not spent on the thing you hate. Whereas if you kick Opposition Man off, this will probably result in Opposition Man spending less time peacefully collaborating across the opinion spectrum, while having more time for Oppositioning, now with a little extra incitement to oppose you.
@nry:
Morbidly fascinating.
Did it occur to you that posting an open Communist emitting Communist duckspeak might not be a very good idea to make your case? Because I read that thread, read the linked articles and now I want catch56 persecuted and punished. Perhaps by being exiled to the Haiti he likes for its supposed role in ending slavery (for which read: murdering all the whites, including women, children and anti-racists, then reintroducing slavery in all but name, generally becoming a hellhole and arguably delaying the wider abolition of slavery by giving people certain ideas about what a state of freed blacks would look like and how they’d behave).
In the current progressive idiom, I believe I would say that catch56 makes me feel unsafe due to his support for both the most murderous thing in the world in general and for certain atrocities in specific. He is the moral inferior of neo-nazis, and that takes some doing.
@Erik
I was merely providing more details. I didn’t mean to give the impression I’m saying removing Garfield was justified.
@nry: You are rather giving away your position by something which may just have been a bad choice of word on your part, but which may have been not:
> While the details still aren’t out on the excuse of protecting Garfield’s *victims*,
(emphasis mine), when there is no evidence that he has actually caused harm to any person, or to any software project, other than by virtue of someone taking a dislike to him. Mere hurt feelings don’t count.
Ian Bruene: you are missing the third, and correct, answer: Use it, but fork it if necessary.
Consider what happened recently around another hot-button controversy among open-source hackers: systemd. When Debian decided to adopt systemd, the Devuan project was started. Not because the Devuan maintainers disliked Debian — because they liked it, just not the systemd bit.
Devuan currently has more uptake than even I anticipated. I thought for sure that, barring a few but-muh-unix-philosophy shitstirrers (of which I was one), the Linux community had unilaterally embraced systemd, but enough opposition exists to maintain interest in projects like Devuan and adopt it as a base for other distros/projects.
If you think that being run by an SJW is really a risk for a piece of critical open-source infrastructure, the answer is to start maintaining a branch of that piece of infrastructure yourself so you can tell the SJW to go sod if you wish. Open source means you are free to do this.
Expanding on the ISIS hypothetical – Eric, you’ve posted at least once that I recall about receiving death threats from some Islamist (or somebody pretending to be one). Would it bother you having on your dev mailing list someone who elsewhere espoused Islamist ideology and who you suspect might wish you harm? How much extra caution do you have to exercise when there’s a discussion on-list about e.g. an in-person meeting, and is that extra cost/worry worth it?
That’s the scenario that gives me some sympathy, especially considering that I’d expect the frequency at which one encounters expert programmers who would pose a risk to women to exceed that at which one encounters expert programmers who are also Islamist agents.
>Would it bother you having on your dev mailing list someone who elsewhere espoused Islamist ideology and who you suspect might wish you harm?
That’s the wrong way to ask the question, because it makes the answer about muh feelz rather than objective behavior. Even if it bothered me, my principles and my duty would require me not to act against that person out of mere botheration. Even werewolves and Islamists have the right to have their commits judged by the content of the work alone.
But if the dude threatened me at a FTF meeting, he’d get a strong reaction. Previous discussion applies; if you judge others by anything other than their code, you forfeit the protection of the rule.
> Devuan currently has more uptake than even I anticipated. I thought for sure that, barring a few but-muh-unix-philosophy shitstirrers (of which I was one), the Linux community had unilaterally embraced systemd, but enough opposition exists to maintain interest in projects like Devuan and adopt it as a base for other distros/projects.
It’s interesting: I’ve got a bit of a “but muh Unix philosophy” attitude (for example, I’d like every window to be a device in a “/dev/vfb/*” tree), but PulseAudio, one of Poettering’s previous projects, never really bothered me that much, despite not being as Unixy as I’d like. And systemd didn’t bother me much at first. I use my machine primarily as a desktop, and systemd doesn’t seem to fall over too hard in that use case. But I’ve been growing to hate it: I do do servery things with my machine (and with a Raspberry Pi I’ve got set up as a timeserver) and systemd seems to fall over in puzzling and infuriating ways for some of those use cases (which wastes my time). I’ve seen things like services mysteriously not starting at boot, but starting just fine manually, systemd pegging CPU usage, etc. Dealing with systemd is beginning to cost me time and effort that I don’t want to spend, and one of these days I may just switch to Devuan or a derivative.
@James M: I don’t approve of the decision. I was just repeating what the current party line from the people involved in the decision is. The system that allowed this to happen is set up so that nothing about these proceedings is supposed to be public so they claim they know of wrongdoings that (apparently) not even Garfield is aware of.
Almost nobody in the Drupal community is happy about how this has been handled even though quite a few people seem to think the removal is warranted just based on his opinions… It will be interesting to see what comes out of DrupalCon Baltimore this week.
More concretely, then, would you be willing to tolerate the increased friction costs of maintaining your physical safety in light of the heightened prior that the contributor will do violence to you?
I absolutely agree. The sticking point (to me at least) is not how their commits should be judged, but whether they should be welcome to fill other team member roles: moderate the project forums, organise conferences, and so forth. Judging a commit is comparatively risk-free – you can read the code and discover exactly what you’re getting. Predicting the behaviour of a being with free will is definitionally impossible.
I’d be surprised if it were otherwise. To be clear, the hypothetical risk I meant was not “He might utter threats if we meet face-to-face,” but rather “He might harm me without further warning if we meet face-to-face.” I think that’s closer to the left’s concerns about sexual violence, which are at least notionally the current political motivation for expelling people from communities, rescinding invitations to speak at conferences, etc.
>More concretely, then, would you be willing to tolerate the increased friction costs of maintaining your physical safety in light of the heightened prior that the contributor will do violence to you?
I’m a 27-year martial artist and routinely travel armed. Anyone who screws with me will get killed if I feel seriously threatened; bullet or blade or bare hand, I can do any of those if I have to. Against an an unarmed amateur I could probably control the situation well enough to only have to disable him.
> I think that’s closer to the left’s concerns about sexual violence, which are at least notionally the current political motivation for expelling people from communities, rescinding invitations to speak at conferences, etc.
Women who claim they fear sexual violence and then don’t (a) arm themselves to disable or kill attackers, then (b) take responsibility for their own safety, are just posturing for emotional or political reasons – if they really feared, they would really act.
Those who don’t choose to defend themselves like adults…well, I’ll help them if I’m nearby, because that is what a man properly does, but I won’t willingly tolerate any “safe space” bullshit from them. People who choose to behave like dependent children should not get to set terms for the interactions of adults.
Further relevant point: I not infrequently teach both armed and unarmed self-defense to women. I view this as part of my duty.
Final relevant point: I view “the left’s concerns about sexual violence” as largely a sham, a lever on political power. If they really cared about what they claim to care about, they’d be teaching women self-defense en masse.
>Final relevant point: I view “the left’s concerns about sexual violence” as largely a sham, a lever on political power. If they really cared about what they claim to care about, they’d be teaching women self-defense en masse.
This is what worries me the most about their mindset–many on the left think what they are doing IS a form of self-defense. It’s the “if I can remove the threat before it actually comes to the point of violence, then I’ve done a good thing” mindset. To me, it stinks of an extension of the view that “I can do whatever I want, regardless of the consequences, and it’s your (society as a whole) obligation to not take advantage of that.” One of the discussions above linked to an article about the thought that if women weren’t binge drinking to the point of blacking out that they would be less likely to be raped; somehow this was seen as a bad thing to say when it should be an obvious truth. If you are aware of your surroundings, it is far more difficult to be taken advantage of. Being drunk does not give an attacker the right to take advantage of the situation, but who in their right mind thinks that an attacker gives a hoot about anyone’s rights? Protect yourself, don’t rely on the nanny state to do it for you.
I’m of the opinion that I should be able to do what ever makes me happy (life, liberty, and all that) as long as it doesn’t infringe on the constitutional rights of someone else, or pose an unacceptable risk to cause harm.The popular view today seems to be “I can do whatever I want, regardless of whether or not it harms/offends someone else, but you cannot do anything to harm/offend me.” I don’t understand why everyone is so up in arms about potentially offending people either, but that’s another discussion entirely.
@ESR
Clever. You seems to have figured out something the Dark Enlightenment is mulling for a while. One basic failure mode of human interaction is competitive signalling spirals. It has many flavors, from the golden toilets of the newly rich to the synthol injected arms that nearly led to amputation for some really stupid body builders. But the specific form here is called holiness signalling spiral.
The root trouble with moral goodness is one way you can get social status points of this kind – good guy cred – is to condemn the moral failures of others. You always seem to be better than the people you judge. This can easily lead to persecution spirals and Salem witch hunts, it is a feeding frenzy, everybody proving their virtue by loudly condemning the lack of virtue of a randomly selected scapegoat. We tend to believe this lead to things like the great terror and persecution of Jacobin and Communist periods (Nazis not, theirs was more centrally organized and less spontaneous, apparently, it seems to have have different reasons).
This is precisely why the DE likes to be a bit cynical and “evil”, because we realized, paradoxically how evil good can be i.e. how much hurt and pain can the pursuit of moral goodness or at least the social appearance thereof can cause. Everybody who wants to seem like a really nice guy could decide one day to prove his niceness via accusing someone else of being evil and thus destroying them socially. Thus, loudly signalling that you are “evil” is a form of a social contract to not do it to each other. It is a promise that I will never hurt you through trying to prove my goodness via accusing you of evil.
But that is mostly just fun. The real practical solution is to find good Schelling fences, acceptable behavior that has no slippery slope towards virtue signalling competitions and make them cast in stone standards. And “by the code alone” is an excellent solution for this.
Here is a challenge. Figure out the ethical theory as well. I.e. create an ethical theory that 1) predicts well what most people would call acceptable, not saintly, but acceptable good behavior 2) has some inherent protection built-in against trying to gain social status by trying to seem extremely saintly and/or against trying to seem extremely saintly VIA accusing others of evil. That would be highly useful.
We should realize that if evil mostly means harming or hurting people, most of the time someone wants to harm others, he will accuse them of being evil and thus the intended harm being a just retribution or defense. Thus accusing anyone of evil is basically like winding up for an attack. It is nearly a NAP violation. This means any good ethical theory should make accusations of ethical violations be highly risky unless really well substantianted, and maybe even then. But that would hinder the punishment of actual violations, which is a paradox. Thus, maybe the only solution is that the accuser gains no status. Ideally, even fully justified accusations should carry some kind of a cost.
The root issue is perhaps that there is currently no social cost to accusing Larry’s sexual practices of being evil / unacceptable.
>Clever. You seems to have figured out something the Dark Enlightenment is mulling for a while.
It’s not my personal insight. The hacker culture had this figured out long ago. As usual, I am mostly just articulating its folk wisdom.
>Here is a challenge. Figure out the ethical theory as well.
That’s not a challenge either. It’s called libertarianism.
@TheDividualist
“The real practical solution is to find good Schelling fences, acceptable behavior that has no slippery slope towards virtue signalling competitions and make them cast in stone standards.”
Dude. Humanity has been working on this since before forever. You may as well say it would be real practical to make pi a rational number.
Note that “judge only by the code” was the hacker norm for decades and was as well established as a “cast in stone” standard can be. But it too crumbled before the strain of violent witch hunters and huntresses we now battle.
>Dude. Humanity has been working on this since before forever.
No, not really. You can assert that only by leaving out or underweighting the “Schelling point” part. What humanity has been doing forever is arguing about morality; systematic thinking about ethics from a position of neutrality about prior moral and religious and political claims is much more recent and specific.
@TheDividualist –
> The root issue is perhaps that there is currently no social cost to accusing Larry’s sexual
> practices of being evil / unacceptable.
Sure there is, and you’ve already identified it (probably without realizing it). To the extent that rational, clearly-thinking people realize that attacking Larry is evil, and shun his attackers, they (“good” people) thereby cause them (“bad” people) to lose social status, network opportunities, etc.
You don’t go “signaling” with your virtue – affirmatively or negatively. You just act virtuously and respond immediately and directly to others’ presence or absence of virtue. This does require a certain cold-blooded indifference to the “feelings” others report. But if they aren’t being immediately and directly affected by you, or aren’t directly affecting you, who gives a rat’s ass. (Of course, “affect” includes people you have intentionally included in your ‘circle of care’ – family, close friends, etc. I do care about the feeling my wife reports due to my beliefs, behavior, etc. Because I have decided to care – not because some screeching rando told me to.)
@esr
“You can assert that only by leaving out or underweighting the “Schelling point” part.”
Ok. I was meaning to argue against the notion that there’s some system of ethics out there that a) everyone will agree on, and b) is not subject to the myriad failure modes – all we need to do is just go find it. If Bigfoot existed we’d probably have found him by now, same for this.
> if you judge others by anything other than their code, you forfeit the protection of the rule.
So now the rule is “judge by the code and by your estimation of whether they have followed the rule”. So much for ‘alone’.
How about judge the code by the code and judge other stuff (including presence in social venues, suitability to leadership roles, etc) by a range of things relevant to that respective element of someone’s participation. Saying “judge by the code alone (or whatever value of not-so-much-exactly-alone)” kind of omits the matter of to what purpose the judgement in question is meant to be used.
@ESR
Let me rephrase the question: BOTH sides have very old traditions in US culture, as in, Jacksonians vs. Salem Puritans. Jacksonians surely have evolved some methods to stop Puritan style harmful virtue signalling escapades in their ranks, and yes it must be related to libertarianism but probably something not as simple as the NAP. Rather something along the lines of either not assigning social status points to pharisee virtue displays or at least not assigning social status points to that specific kind of virtue display that operates via accusing others of vices. It is a question of culture now, Eric, not government. Thankfully, the government is not very involved in open source development so one has to approach this culturally, not politically.
You’re a Jacksonian swordsmith in 1820. Someone accuses another smith of regularly beating his wife. The woman says nothing, it is unsure whether because it is not true or she is scared. The woman has no backup like brothers or friends. The accuser is not very well known in the community, you don’t know if he is a generally honest and sincerely concerned dude, or a social climber who wants to look like a paladin of goodness saving a victim and it is entirely made up. What do? Culturally, not politically. More importantly, what is the meta-theory behind what you do?
(I get it, “then you can’t make no swords around here no more” is likely the dumbest of all possible options, so that is out, one either has to act decisively and intervent, or ignore it.)
>More importantly, what is the meta-theory behind what you do?
I ask her minister if she shows any signs indicating the accusations to be true. Part of the social function of clergy in those societies was to keep an eye on this sort of thing.
In fact, the most likely resolution of this problem is that if her minister thought the problem were acute, he would quietly clue in the most influential men in the town. Who would then have a talk with the accused and make clear that abuse is no way for a decent man to behave, and that miscreants have been tarred and feathered for less. (One known and relatively large class of tarring-and-feathering victims was men who failed to provide for their wives.)
Absent a correction in behavior, rough communal justice would follow.
I trust the meta-theory is relatively obvious here.
@Michael
“I was meaning to argue against the notion that there’s some system of ethics out there that a) everyone will agree on, and b) is not subject to the myriad failure modes – all we need to do is just go find it.”
If Yudkowsky is right, we have to find it or an AI will turn us into paperclips. Yudkowsky’s big insight is that ethical philosophising is no longer just masturbation: it is writing specs for coding a superintelligent AI and screwing up or not caring about that spec and ending up making a superintelligent AI anyway can lead to literal mass murder. This is a chilly prospect. We humans can afford to ignore the longbeards of the philosophy departments and just base on our actions on conscience, instinct and social convention. But an AI not… so this is sort of getting really important. Meanwhile, Google is writing algorithms to reduce the rankings of hateful or non-PC websites. So this is actually getting relevant.
@TheDividualist
“Yudkowsky’s big insight is that ethical philosophising is no longer just masturbation: it is writing specs for coding a superintelligent AI and screwing up or not caring about that spec and ending up making a superintelligent AI anyway can lead to literal mass murder.”
This is an interesting line of thought. But it presupposes that everyone would agree to be under the thumb of this AI. Having observed the antics of AI writers (e.g. Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) I can barely imagine anyone being that foolish.
I suppose the retort is that we won’t have a choice. We will be forced by either the AI itself or it’s purveyors. Which brings us back to the only system of “ethics” that has ever had any real longevity: might makes right. Note that this is exactly the ethics of the left in this country, so no surprise there. Put me in the “no thank ye” column.
If the point is that we should exterminate all “longbeards of the philosophy departments”, you are on your way to a compelling case.
Or maybe all research/development into AI should be verboten. I’ve read enough sci-fi to be convinced such is not farfetched.
@Random832
All protective rules have an implied meta-rule: “If you willfully violate this rule you lose all of the protection you receive from it.”. This is no different.
@Michael
Perhaps you should have read enough economics, or military history, or more SF. This solution results in AI being worked on only by those with evil intent, and a precious few working on defenses (Who is going to fund or even know how to build effective defenses when everyone is relying on security through obscurity?). Plus we all know how enormously well bans work, right?
If you want to guarantee doomsday, then just nuke the world and have done with it. For most of the population it will be a relatively quick, clean death.
> All protective rules have an implied meta-rule: “If you willfully violate this rule you lose all of the protection you receive from it.”. This is no different.
The problem is that this makes whether someone has violated it subjective. They may, after all, consider the person they did not apply the rule to to have likewise lost its protection. And someone else may consider you to have violated it by revoking its protection from someone who they don’t agree deserves it. And round and round it goes… an eye for an eye makes the world blind.
Far more stable to say that one’s ability and willingness to impartially evaluate code contributions matters not at all for their own code contributions and matters a lot (more than their code itself even) for, say, leadership positions where they are in the position to reject someone else’s code contributions.
>The problem is that this makes whether someone has violated it subjective.
No more so than any other ethical rule that involves evaluating the actions of human beings, and a good deal less so than most. To meet your implied standard for non-subjectivity we’d need a benevolent AI or something.
Let’s not be silly here. Of course “judge by the code alone” doesn’t cover every edge case. It’s an expression of intent that points at a particular style of decision making, one which hews to objective criteria as much as possible (does the code work?) and actively resists the injection of personalities or politics. And we know it works because we have decades of experience with it – as I keep pointing out, I didn’t pull it out of my butt yesterday. It is, as the Dividualist points out, a Schelling point.
@Ian Bruene
Perhaps you should have read enough economics, or military history, or more SF. This solution results in AI being worked on only by those with evil intent, and a precious few working on defenses (Who is going to fund or even know how to build effective defenses when everyone is relying on security through obscurity?). Plus we all know how enormously well bans work, right?
Perhaps you should read what I wrote.
I didn’t say the rule was a good idea or that it was feasible, only that it is not farfetched. That a rule is bad, impractical, or has unintended consequences has never yet given pause to the improvers of the world.
> and actively resists the injection of personalities or politics.
You’re not resisting it very will if you’re willing to reject someone’s commits (i.e. “you lose all of the protection you receive from it” – all means all, and without it being all it raises the question of why whatever part is revoked was important for anyone anyway) based on their perceived violation of the rule. What’s wrong with saying commits* are commits and other things are other things?
Why should I judge anything but the code by the code alone?
*and purely-technical contributions generally – i.e. “the code”.
>What’s wrong with saying commits* are commits and other things are other things?
I don’t think I even understand your argument any more…
>Why should I judge anything but the code by the code alone?
…unless that’s it. In which case:
Because the purpose of the rule is to prevent ratfuckery based on personal or political differences. Like Larry Garfield being kicked off a project where he seems to have been a worthy, productive contributor because somebody thought his sex life is icky. Part of the point of “judge by the code alone” is that Larry Garfield’s sex life is not anybody else’s damn business.
> and actively resists the injection of personalities or politics.
Hey ESR — I’m sorry, I don’t mean to keep harping on this, but Larry himself was demonstrably fine with judging on “personality” in the FIG debacle (and perhaps on “politics” but that’s not as easy to demonstrate). So I get you, I’m on board with “judge by code alone” and have been for as long as I can recall, but I also want to be careful about giving the benefit of that rule to those who do not want to give others its benefit.
> if you judge others by anything other than their code, you forfeit the protection of the rule.
Does this apply only to the extent that your in-project contributions violate the rule? Or does a minor transgression in-project open up all of your out-of-project activities to attack?
>Did it occur to you that posting an open Communist emitting Communist duckspeak might not be a very good idea to make your case? Because I read that thread, read the linked articles and now I want catch56 persecuted and punished.
Yes. If we’re going to start burning witches, I vote that we start with Communists. They quite clearly pose a greater threat to individual safety than Goreans do, given that the comparative body count is somewhere around 100 million to zero.
Recall Rusty Russell’s If you didn’t run code written by assholes, your machine wouldn’t boot“….
> I believe I would say that catch56 makes me feel unsafe
See, the problem is that when twerps like catch56 feel unsafe they go whining to the power structure (that they claim to hate).
When I feel “unsafe” I make sure a rifle’s handy (Sometimes that’s a metaphor, sometimes it’s not.)
A bit off-topic, but related.
I have stubled upon a very bizzare example of rampant SJW-ism (although I hope that it is more like this blog post…). “The Architecture of Open Source Applications” open book (with chapter on GPSD in Volume II by ESR) announced the following (http://aosabook.org/en/index.html):
This issue (attempted expulsion of Larry Garfield from the Drupal community, for those who forgot) made it to LWN (Linux Weekly News):
“Turmoil for Drupal [LWN.net]”, by Jake Edge on April 25, 2017
https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/720655/99a7edbfdd594d76/
https://lwn.net/Articles/720655/
@Jakub this is precisely what worries me, Greg Wilson seems such a totally normal guy to me, I would not expect him to have such a bizarre view to think that if racial minorities tend to fail education or literacy tests then the problem is with the tests and not with the racial minorities. This is what worries me, you could associate and work with entirely normal, intelligent, productive people and not know that they belong to crazy cult who think anything that inconveniences protected groups in any way is evil.
Weirdest part is, I am sure he will get the facts the right. It is the values that are ultra bizarre.
I mean, for him, the fact that literacy tests were meant to prevent black people from voting means that literacy tests were evil. Normal people and that includes moderate liberals decide if they want to have illiterate voters or not, and base their view on that, while treating the racial aspect less important. Normal people tend to focus on practical effects. The crazy cult works like a religion, they focus on intent, like thinking anything ever done with a racist intent is inherently bad. This is the logic of religious sin.
And again my problem is that often you can’t identify these people. If I had a chance to work with Greg Wilson based on his bio, surely I would accept the job, seems like a great programmer: http://third-bit.com/greg-wilson.html absolutely does not seem crazy. Absolutely seems like a normal guy, me, you, the random dude down the street who thinks well if racism saved America from illiterate voters, then in that specific case racism wasn’t too bad.
This is what worries me. This insanity is not detectable and sometimes very normal looking people are part of the cult. And you cannot convince them with facts, they often have the right facts, it is their values that are insane.
> then the problem is with the tests and not with the racial minorities.
The problem was certainly with the tests in the past. This is not a matter for which there is any doubt: We can see the tests, see how convoluted and poorly written the questions were, see that they expected it to be completed in 10 minutes with no mistakes, and, most damning of all see the “grandfather clauses” that were used to prevent white people (who would, we must assume the people making the policies knew, also have failed the tests) from being required to take them.
It may or may not be reasonable to expect history to repeat itself, but that doesn’t mean it’s reasonable to deny what history was.
The problem is that they’re called literacy tests. A literacy test, in the literal sense, should consist of nothing more than reading some written sentence out loud, and writing down something that is said to you. These were logic puzzles. You or I could pass them, but the average person on the street, of any color, could not within the time given (and no way to ask for clarifications on whether, say, some comma really belongs there).
>You or I could pass them, but the average person on the street, of any color, could not within the time given (and no way to ask for clarifications on whether, say, some comma really belongs there).
It’s worse than that: on the ones I’ve seen were ambiguously worded so that each question had two radically different answers that were fairly easy to arrive at, so that whether you passed or failed depended on how the person administering the test chose to interpret the questions: he could fail anyone he didn’t like with plausible deniability.
Even assuming the tests were fairly administered (about which the last few posts have raised serious concerns), illiterate people get a say in how they want to be governed too. Rule by the educated elite and benevolent dictators for life are fine and dandy when they’re opt-in, but that definitely wasn’t the case of America’s black population upon the enactment of the 13th-15th amendments.
In point of fact, in many states it was illegal for a slave to learn to read and write, or for anybody to teach him. So now you have a newly-free population among whom only those who had broken the law were literate – sounds a bit like “If you outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns,” doesn’t it? That’s totally apart from the question of having held a man as a slave, and denied him an education on account of his status as a slave, whether it is ethical to disenfranchise him because he is uneducated.
Now it’s true that this also mean the educated population would have had to live under rule of representatives elected by the uneducated; but to the extent this results in them being misruled, it is in fact an incentive to provide access to education and actually fix the problem, rather than screw around with grandfather clauses and “separate-but-equal” schools, etc.
There’s a parallel between calls for requiring literacy tests for voters and other “reasonable voter registration measures” and calls for requiring safety tests for gun owners and other “reasonable gun-control measures.” Such measures *have* been abused in the past, in both cases, and as a result their advocates now have negative credibility.
I myself support certain anti-voter-fraud measures (although not literacy tests for voters), but I also recognize that I’ll have negative credibility when advocating for those measures, due to past abuses. I’ve seen it when the subject has come up in previous threads here. The opposition to anti-vote-fraud measures in those threads has been attributed to a desire for partisan political advantage, but I think it goes beyond that. What I saw was the same sort of visceral radicalized opposition to voter-registration proposals that I’ve seen before (and felt myself) in response to gun control proposals.
@ESR
“I trust the meta-theory is relatively obvious here.”
Yes. The Hippocratic Oath: avoiding doing harm has a higher priority than helping. Failing to help an innocent victim is less bad than punishing someone innocent. This is a Talebian philosophy of uncertainty: harming, punishing actions are more likely to succeed than helping actions because entropy. I can foresee avoiding doing harm better than I can foresee helping effectively. Therefore, I act very cautiously.
Right?
To multiple people:
yeah, I got the case of those tests factually wrong. I retract.
My problem with Greg is that his values are wrong, not facts, he seems to care more about racist intent than utilitarian outcome. Surely if you are a poor black dude in NY the bus not going to the beach is not exactly on the top of your priority list? Come on, I live in a European city without owning a car because fuck me the taxes here are crazy, and there is little public transport link to my favorite sporting event, do you see me crying for this? Nor did they, I bet. It is a mere inconvenience. For the utilitarian, it is a minor thing. For the type who treats racist intent as religious sin, it is very sinful.
Another thing. Not writing advertising software so that landlords can target their housing ads racially? That is security through obscurity, basically landlords racist intents non-exposed but they will still act on those somehow. I can’t Greg belives that can work in a utilitarian way, I believe he simply thinks about racism in a virtue ethic way and wants programmers to keep their souls clean. The utilitarian solution is obviously security through transparency, i.e. buld a RateMyLandlord and enable people to expose and boycott racists landlords. And again this is not a left v.s right thing, I think this is what as sane, pragmatic left-liberal does.
Utilitarian leftists are people you can reason with, at least try. The scary part is when an excellent programmer turns to be a non-utilitarian but quasi-religious thinking leftist. And then puts that into an important book series about software.
I also support Eric’s position, (mostly.) The sole instance in which I think a removal was appropriate was Brandon Eich. IMHO the possibility that a huge part of the Open Source community might get Steeplejacked was too great a risk to take. It’s important to remember that Eich was in charge of the whole Mozilla foundation; presumably with great influence over the selection of board members.
Steeplejacking, for those who’ve never heard the term, is the practice where a vulnerable church is “hijacked” by bringing in a very conservative pastor along with a group of new members who will support him. The pastor then turns the Church towards right-wing fundamentalism. There’s also a secular version, which is what worried me in the Eich case.
@TheDividualist
“My problem with Greg is that his values are wrong, not facts, he seems to care more about racist intent than utilitarian outcome.”
But discriminatory intend seems to be the legal principle of the USA courts, AFAIK.
It is different in the EU supreme court. There they only look at the outcome of a law. Any law that disproportionally affect some minorities/women/men is considered discriminatory. Unless there is an airtight case to support the absolute necessity of the rules making this distinction (never seen this happen), the law will have to change. No discussion about the intend of the law is needed for this.
This does not work against discrimination in public services etc. But for blatant racism in these areas, there is the human rights courts. But in all, there is only so much the law can do against social discrimination.
“The utilitarian solution is obviously security through transparency, i.e. buld a RateMyLandlord and enable people to expose and boycott racists landlords. And again this is not a left v.s right thing, I think this is what as sane, pragmatic left-liberal does.”
Really? What an arrogant, virtue signaling suggestion. As if there aren’t racist potential tenants who would flock to any rental property where they believed the landlord would try not to rent to anyone but those of their own race.
I hope making that suggestion gave you a frisson of self-perceived moral superiority, because that’s the only possible benefit to the universe.
Parallel:
But that would be good: racists would get to live among other racists and non-racists would get to live among other non-racists. Everybody wins.
The easy solution to “literacy tests” is to present voters with a ballot that looks like this https://img.clipartfest.com/6f0c76d046aed2b678669c04c4bee45f_loose-leaf-paper-loose-leaf-clipart_1774-2290.png and an instruction card that says:
Write the title of the office, followed by the full legal name of the person you wish to vote for. You must include the jurisdiction (city, county, parish, state, federal) with title of the office.
You must spell the name correctly.
Then they bring their ballot up to the ballot box and it gets serial numbered, and card with the serial number is handed to them. They can then later use that serial number to validate that their ballot was counted.
Solves a WHOLE LOT of problems, but doesn’t make Diebold much money, so it’ll never float.
@William O. B’Livion
Why should voting be limited to literate citizens? The central tennet of democrazy is that anyone who is legally responsible for his actions and is subject to the law should have a vote.
I do not see why an illiterate could not vote for someone who furthers his interests.
theDividualist
> > Here is a challenge. Figure out the ethical theory as well.
esr
> That’s not a challenge either. It’s called libertarianism.
Libertarianism is only workable in a high trust community. A high trust community is only workable if there is very little diversity – all male, all the same race, all the same religion, all the same ethnicity.
In the real world, individuals play rough, and cohesive groups play rough, and incohesive groups get their balls removed.
We want freedom of speech, freedom to peaceably assemble, and freedom of association for ourselves, not for those horrible nasty other guys, and if we get it, we will use our freedoms to take away their freedom of speech, their freedom to peaceably assemble, and their freedom of association. Because if we let them speak, assemble, and associate, they are going to take our freedom of speech, assembly, and association away from us.
It takes two to make peace, only one to make war. And so diversity leads to what the leftists call “intersectionality” which means the amount of peace you can afford is set by the least peaceful faction.
And the least peaceful faction is not very peaceful at all. We have to suppress their freedoms, or they will suppress ours.
If diversity, tribalism, if tribalism, the other tribe is going to use freedom of speech, freedom to peaceably assemble, and freedom of association to give your tribe a hard time.
> It’s worse than that: on the [literacy tests] I’ve seen were ambiguously worded so that each question had two radically different answers that were fairly easy to arrive at
I have seem alleged examples of this, and I am pretty sure that anyone who thinks there were two equally valid radically different answers is too stupid to allow to vote.
Possibly you saw better examples than I did, but poster girl principle applies. I would expect people to run with the best example, and the literacy tests I saw were well designed to eliminate stupid and ignorant people and pass competent people, and if ninety percent of Harvard students cannot pass them, there is something very wrong with Harvard.
This is the supposedly impossible literacy test: http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_vault/2013/06/28/voting_rights_and_the_supreme_court_the_impossible_literacy_test_louisiana.html
Question five had me bamboozled for a few seconds, but all the rest were one or two seconds each. Had a double take on question twenty, and would have had a double take on question twenty seven, except that question twenty had already used that trick.
Question twenty nine takes a little longer, not so much because it is hard, but because you have to carefully write down a lot of words.
For each question, one and only one correct answer, and that answer perfectly obvious as soon as you see it.
@JAD
“A high trust community is only workable if there is very little diversity – all male, all the same race, all the same religion, all the same ethnicity.”
An all male society? You have changed.
Winter on 2017-04-30 at 04:31:07 said:
> @William O. B’Livion
> Why should voting be limited to literate citizens?
The test I describe does not limit it to literate citizens. It limits it to citizens who care enough to pass a VERY minimal bar–that bar being the ability to associate a jurisdiction and office with the specific candidate they wish to be in that office. They don’t have to be able to do any more than write out “City Council Ward Seven (7 is also acceptable, we won’t enforce Strunk and White) Joseph Schmuckatelly”. They don’t have to read and interpret anything.
It’s not literally a literacy test, it’s a specific knowledge test. It is also a procedure to make it easier to verify that your ballot was counted, harder for bias election judges to assert (as was done in 2000) that you INTENDED to vote for the other party etc.
All at the cost of expecting you to sort out ahead of time what you want to do.
Also, nothing in the rules as presented prevents you from doing a little bit of work ahead of time. You can show up with a cheat sheet and all you have to do is transcribe it.
It also prevents things like one punch straight party voting.
> The central tennet of democrazy is that anyone who is legally responsible for his
> actions and is subject to the law should have a vote.
No, it’s not. The central tenet (not the power company) of “democrazy” (sic, but I agree) is that once you meet certain tests you get to vote. Sometimes those tests are fairly simple (as in the US where it’s age, residency and citizenship), sometimes they’re a little higher.
Every jurisdiction that I am aware of has at least three requirements that violate your standard:
* Citizenship
* Residency
* Age
Most also require one to be “mentally competent” as in not adjudicated mentally defective or insane.
There is *no* country in the world that I can travel to on a tourist visa and vote in their elections just because I’m subject to the laws of that country while I am there. Most places will not allow those with residence visas–even permanent–to vote.
No country on this planet allows children (who are subject to the laws) to vote.
Besides, the US isn’t a democracy at the federal level. It is, strictly speaking, a Republic, albeit one that adopts many democratic principles, and almost-universal franchise.
> I do not see why an illiterate could not vote for someone who furthers his interests.
Because a minimal (8th grade) education has been *free* for so long, that if one is illiterate in the dominant language of the culture one is voting in, it is VERY likely that you are so deficient intellectually that you can’t be trusted to know your own interests.
There may be a few people with VERY narrow learning disabilities who are otherwise mentally acute enough to understand the issues and make rational choices but cannot read or write, but that is an INCREDIBLY small percentage of the population.
I honestly have no problems with an otherwise intelligent and informed illiterate voting, I just don’t think there’s enough of them with an IQ over 83[1] who aren’t also felons to make it worth worrying about–you’re dealing with noise in *rounding* errors.
Historically “literacy tests” here in the US were used to prevent minorities from voting. In one joke (I don’t know if it’s apocryphal or not) a black man was given a chinese newspaper and asked to read the headline. He responded “It says ain’t no Negro voting in Alabama again this year”.
I knew a dame in Australia, where you are legally *required* to vote if you’re a citizen[2] who admitted up front that she didn’t know what was going on, and only voted for the better looking candidate.
I think we should set the bar a *little* higher than that.
[1] Allegedly the minimum to enlist in the US Military. But I suspect some Officers were lower.
[2] I lived there two years and was subject to their laws, and was not allowed to vote! They violated my CIVIL RIGHTS!
@JAD:
This is the supposedly impossible literacy test: > http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_vault/2013/06/28/voting_rights_and_the_supreme_court_the_impossible_literacy_test_louisiana.html
> Question five had me bamboozled for a few seconds, but all the rest were one or
> two seconds each. Had a double take on question twenty, and would have had a
> double take on question twenty seven, except that question twenty had already
> used that trick.
What you are missing is that:
1) The Registrar was the judge of whether you’d passed or not.
2) 10 minutes to solve ALL problems.
3) Your IQ AND education are much higher than the average voter today. much less in the 1950s or 60s.
There are people today with high school diplomas who would take 10 minutes to read and puzzle through that. Especially if you add “miss one and you fail”. I’ve seen people take that long to fill out an address card.
Throughout the document they words “write” and “print” are used. Wanna bet that for some people they meant the same thing, but for others “write” meant cursive and “print” meant print?
Number 23 could *easily* be argued by a judged that they didn’t mean “as if it were on a map” but rather “as you sit here at the table”. Especially if, as is not impossible in the rural south in 1964, that the registrar was himself barely educated. Also “broken line” could be interpreted several ways.
Number 27 could arguable be answered “it” by someone who wanted to be a dick. That is within the LITERAL meaning of the word. Obsessively literal, but the point was to keep undesirables from voting.
> Question twenty nine takes a little longer, not so much because it is hard, but because
> you have to carefully write down a lot of words.
That’s the one where the distinction between “write” and “print” can matter if you’re the wrong color, or from the wrong side of the tracks.
James A Donald on 2017-04-30 at 05:58:23 said:
> Libertarianism is only workable in a high trust community. A high trust
> community is only workable if there is very little diversity – all male, all
> the same race, all the same religion, all the same ethnicity.
Nonsense.
Libertarianism is perfectly workable in a community with lots of different races and ethnicities as long as they all want it to work.
The members of that community can also be of a wide variety of religions as long as they’re not interested in enforcing the tenets of that religion on others. Which does rule out some more aggressive religions, but they suck to live next to anyway.
The biggest problem with Libertarianism, like non-left Anarchy (well, left-anarchy as well, but it’s just ONE of the problems with that) is that of the charismatic sociopath. Of course, as Bill Clinton showed, that was a problem with anything that vaguely looked like Democracy anyway.
> he seems to care more about racist intent than utilitarian outcome.
The Left privileges (their alleged good) intent over all else. For all of their talk of being “pro-science”, they don’t go back and collect data about how their policies actually worked out.
So when they say they want to raise the minimum wage to $15, and we oppose it, it’s because we “hate poor people and want them to starve”, not because we recognize that minimum- and prevailing-wage laws (if they affect wages) increase unemployment. That link grew out of my “Five-minute economics lesson” that I gave my eldest brother’s wife decades ago, literally drawing the graphs on a napkin. When I finished, she turned to him and asked him to refute what I’d said, and he couldn’t. But they still vote for higher minimum wage laws, because they intend for the laws to raise unskilled workers’ wages, and consider people like me evil for wanting the laws abolished altogether (because we know they hurt the people they claim to help.
One of these days, I’m going to do a game-theory analysis of why privileging intent over actual results inevitably leads to sub-optimal decision-making. In doing so, I think I’ll have formalized The Law of Unintended Consequences (which I see a lot of people refer to, but never have seen a formal development).
And Monarchy, and Dictatorship, and Feudalism, and, and, and….
This isn’t a problem with [insert political system here], it is a problem with humans having easily tuggable puppet strings. Of course some systems distribute those strings differently than others.
William O. B’Livion:
That’s one of the predictions contained in Fahrenheit 451.
@William O’
“Every jurisdiction that I am aware of has at least three requirements that violate your standard:
* Citizenship
* Residency
* Age”
In several European countries, resident migrants can vote in local elections without citizenship. Citizenship is open to those who have lived in the country for x number of years. Residency is indeed a requirement as travelers have only partial obligations, e.g., no military service or certain taxes. Minors and the mentally insane are not responsible for their own actions, e.g., they cannot sign a contract, and do not fall under the law. Not being responsible for their actions, they also do not get to vote.
Democracy is the rule by the ruled. It is up for the voters to decide what they consider important, religious faith, honesty, wealth, marital faithfulness, hate, or looks. In most countries, it is also up to the voters to decide whether to vote.
I also make a distinction between the ideal and the imperfect realizations. Nothing is perfect, the way democracies pan out is no exception.
@William O. B’Livion
“Every jurisdiction that I am aware of has at least three requirements that violate your standard:
* Citizenship ”
Just to be complete:
Right of foreigners to vote
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_of_foreigners_to_vote
@Parallel
I would say the same about your post.
You could substitute just about any system you like in place of “Libertarianism” and that statement would still be true. [Communism|Triumvirate rule|Sharia law] is perfectly workable in a community with lots of different races and ethnicities as long as they all want it to work.
How well they work in the face of dissent is a better measure of real-world value – and American-style libertarian democracy actually isn’t bad at this, which is more than can be said of some of those other systems. We still run up against that limitation from time to time, though – a lot of modern political debates are fundamentally about how far we should deviate from libertarianism to increase our system’s acceptance and get more people to want it to work.
Ian Bruene on 2017-04-30 at 20:18:55 said:
> I said:
> > The biggest problem with Libertarianism, like non-left Anarchy (well, left-anarchy as well,
> > but it’s just ONE of the problems with that) is that of the charismatic sociopath. Of course,
> > as Bill Clinton showed, that was a problem with anything that vaguely looked like
> > Democracy anyway.
> And Monarchy, and Dictatorship, and Feudalism, and, and, and….
It’s not a “problem” under a dictatorship, it’s how you *get* a dictatorship.
But yes.
> This isn’t a problem with [insert political system here], it is a problem with humans having
> easily tuggable puppet strings. Of course some systems distribute those strings differently
> than others.
Most systems are stablish even with the presence of charismatic sociopaths in the the system. Libertarian/Anarchist systems would be wildly unstable as one would take, or start to take power, get his head blowed clean off (I’ll take “.416 Rigby at 2000 yards for 1000 Alex”) backlash ensues, and as the bottle says “rinse lather, repeat”.
Winter on 2017-05-01 at 09:05:05 said:
> @William O. B’Livion
> > “Every jurisdiction that I am aware of has at least three requirements that violate your standard:
> > * Citizenship ”
> Just to be complete:
> Right of foreigners to vote
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_of_foreigners_to_vote
You have no “right” to vote if you’re a foreigner. You have the privilege.
Then again for you Europeans there’s not a lot of difference.
@William O’B
“You have no “right” to vote if you’re a foreigner. You have the privilege.”
Is this a word game?
I’ve always understood rights to be inherent simply by being born, although they can be taken away in certain instances (prison, oppression, military…) whereas privelage must be granted by someone in power based on the individuals’ belonging to a group (which absolutely can be based on being born into a privileged family) and can be taken away as well, although usually in different circumstances than rights.
I’ve also always looked at voting being a privelage, not a right, but my view may have been skewed by life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
> 1) The Registrar was the judge of whether you’d passed or not.
> 2) 10 minutes to solve ALL problems.
There are perfectly clear right and wrong unambiguous answers to the literacy test. The registrar has no room to exercise discretion. Anyone who thinks the questions are ambiguous is too stupid to vote.
I solved all problems in two minutes. Anyone who needs ten minutes should not be allowed to vote.
> here are people today with high school diplomas who would take 10 minutes to read and puzzle through that.
That is because we are issuing high school diplomas, four year college degrees, and PhDs in advanced lesbian intersectional basket weaving to people who should not be allowed to vote, and who fifty years ago would not have received a high school diploma.
The average graduate of a four year college degree has IQ 100, which means there are plenty of people with worthless four year degrees who should not be allowed to vote.
> Libertarianism is perfectly workable in a community with lots of different races and ethnicities as long as they all want it to work.
But in practice only white males want it to work. And only because we are at the bottom of the heap. We would not be so keen on it if we actually had the privilege our enemies ascribe to us.
Look at the title of this post. Esr is saying “No, am not one of those horrible evil racist sexists who want freedom of association, or freedom to peaceably assembly, but please leave me freedom of speech.”
Sorry esr, you are no libertarian, indeed no libertarians remain. Everyone who actually wants freedom of speech, freedom to peaceably assembly, and freedom of association, wants it for themselves, for their own tribe, and it has become brutally obvious that the only way we can have it for our tribe is to ruthlessly crush freedom of speech, freedom to peaceably assembly, and freedom of association, for all other tribes, sexes, religions, ethnicities, sexual preferences, etc.
And when esr abandoned freedom of association, he implicitly admitted this.
@JAD
“Everyone who actually wants freedom of speech, freedom to peaceably assembly, and freedom of association, wants it for themselves, ”
What you describe is the ideology of classical Sparta. This is as far from Libertarianism as you can get.
@William O’Blivion
“You must spell the name correctly.”
Immediately advantaging anyone called Davis or Cruz over anyone called Schwarzenegger. Besides it becomes quickly an accepted norm to change your name for an election for these reasons, and then the next logical step is some candidate changing their first name to Higher, the middle name to Minimal and the surname to Wages.
Regarding the central tenets of democracy: Moldbug came up with a very interesting idea, current conditions reflect that there are apparently TWO, somewhat contradictory central ideas about democracy. One is that voting is a trusteeship from the nation, something you are entrusted to wield well for the welfare of the nation. The second is that it is your inherent right which is for your own protection, for your own interests, to ensure politics cannot ignore you.
The fact that most modern nations exclude non-citizens, prisoners, minors and the insane from voting suggests the trusteeship model, presumably, non-citizens and criminals are not motivated to wield it well and minors and the insane are unable to.
The fact that this circle of franchise is drawn fairly broadly, not excluding the illiterate, uneducated, poor etc. suggests something more of a inherent rights and personal interests / protection model.
I don’t really know how exactly it happened historically, clearly the trusteeship model was there earlier with minimum wealth requirements and suchlike, then extended to women, the poor, the illiterate with more of an inherent rights and personal protection argument, but then it somehow stopped at the other four excluded groups, probably because no one cares about the first two and the second two are barred from many other kinds of legal action as well and have a guardian who exercises some of their rights so that probably contributes why.
@TheDividualist
“The fact that most modern nations exclude non-citizens, prisoners, minors and the insane from voting suggests the trusteeship model,”
Another interpretation is that non-citizens are not participating in the community that is to be ruled. The outcome of the elections is not directly in their interest as they are not part of the community. Minors and the insane are considered unable to heed their own interests, they are not responsible.
Leaves us with disenfranchisement of prisoners. That is not universal and there is, e.g., a ruling of the European Court of Human rights that prohibits the blanket disenfranchisement of prisoners. The UK seems to renege on that ruling.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felony_disenfranchisement#In_Europe
http://www.echr.coe.int/Documents/FS_Prisoners_vote_ENG.pdf
The ruling of the court states that a criminal conviction is not enough reason to disenfranchise a person and that there have to be relevant other circumstances:
I think the point was locally resident non-citizens, who are participating, but they’re the equivalent of customers not stockholders.
@Erik
“I think the point was locally resident non-citizens, who are participating, but they’re the equivalent of customers not stockholders.”
And they do have voting rights in local elections in many countries. See link above. For national elections, this is a thorny question which I cannot oversee the pro’s and cons of.
>I’ve also always looked at voting being a privelage, not a right, but my view may have been skewed by life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Voting is not a right any more than serving on a jury is a right. Voting and serving on juries represent power over others, not personal liberties.
But a right is involved in both, which is the right to have the propriety of one’s actions judged by a broad cross-section of the people rather than an elite class of rulers. No individual has a right to wield the power of voter/juror, but we all have the right to have diverse juries and electorates.
Winter on 2017-05-01 at 19:54:32 said:
> @William O’B
> > “You have no “right” to vote if you’re a foreigner. You have the privilege.”
> Is this a word game?
No. It’s about the meaning of the word.
If a “simple” vote can change it with little or no recourse it’s not a right, it’s a privilege.
TheDividualist on 2017-05-02 at 06:42:07 said:
> @William O’Blivion
> > “You must spell the name correctly.”
> Immediately advantaging anyone called Davis or Cruz over anyone called Schwarzenegger.
If the people you’re appealing to can’t remember to bring in a crib sheet, you’re pretty crappy.
> Besides it becomes quickly an accepted norm to change your name for an election for
> these reasons,
Life isn’t an Eddie Murphy movie. Doing that is a pretty cheap move, and as little as I think of the electorate, I think more of them than that.
> and then the next logical step is some candidate changing their first name to Higher,
> the middle name to Minimal and the surname to Wages.
They already have that. It’s the (D) next to their name.
Winter:
Another interpretation is that non-citizens are not participating in the community that is to be ruled.
I think a closer statement would be “non-citizens have a lowered stake in the outcome, and likely a lower understanding of the history”.
In the US there is a relatively easy (if time consuming and lengthy) routes to citizenship for people who want to go there. If you want to vote, get your feet on that path. Put your skin in the game.
Leaves us with disenfranchisement of prisoners. That is not universal and there is, e.g., a ruling of the European Court of Human rights that prohibits the blanket disenfranchisement of prisoners.
In the US we don’t prohibit *prisoners*, we prohibit *felons*. And there are paths to get your rights restored.
@Winter I am not exactly surprised that things are moving away from the trusteeship model and towards the inherent right or personal interests model. I oppose it, but it is happening for centuries, so as long as we are on a “progressive” track this is probably going to go on and on. The likely result is more and more cacophony as it becomes impossible to create some kind of common vector and government strategy out of the different individual voices. This is already visible, how exactly would you draw a government strategy that would please Muslims, conservatives who dislike them, and progressives who theoretically like them but they dislike misogyny and homophobia and while they would never admit you know in reality Muslims contribute a lot to that? I don’t think anyone could create a government strategy appeasing all these, even if good governance was only a popularity contest, which isn’t, popular ideas can also have terrible consequences as there is such a thing as reality, but even if there wasn’t I think we are quickly approaching peak diversity where even popularity cannot exist.
And chaos always leads to autocracy, i.e. a return to the trusteeship model with a very, very limited number of trustees, if there one recurring rule of history is that in times of chaos people want law and order and quickly sacrifice liberty for it. I think Sparta used to have an institution like this, or that is a urban legend? As in, before a new king was crowned three days of lawlessness allowed, killing, robbing, murdering, by the end everybody was happy to have a law and order king no matter how repressive he is.
@TheDividualist
“I think Sparta used to have an institution like this, or that is a urban legend?”
I have no idea what to trust about these stories about Sparta. I do know most people under the rule of Sparta were Helots and they had no rights. Sparta was a lot like Apartheid in Rhodesia. The modern form of Sparta is fascism.
About your trustee model. That reeks a more like aristocracy to me. Democracy, in its name, is the rule of the people. That is more of a public interest case, the famous Res Publica. And it has been written the the absolute fundamental question in Democracy is not “Who shall rule?”, but “How can we get rid of him?” (written by Karl Popper).
Central to Democracy has been the power of the people to send the ruler home, peacefully.
I consider everything else as just instrumental to this power.
@TheDividualist
More about the perils of those under the rule of Sparta:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helots
James A Donald:
I don’t recall his doing that. URL, please?
…what the hell? no two nouns in this sentence seem to fit each other. Apartheid was in South Africa not Rhodesia, Apartheid was race-oriented nominal separation with de facto privileged class while Sparta had a conquest-derived class/caste system of subjugated helots with explicit underclass, and Rhodesia was in no way like Sparta.
Bleh, away with the argument from etymology. If trusteeship isn’t democracy, fine, but then the fundamental question hardly applies. (And the answer would seem to remain the same anyway: trustees vote the ruler out. And Popper does not convince me, a more fundamental question is “What power has the ruler?”) Engage with the trusteeship on the merits of limited voting, not by democratic pieties.
@Erik
“Apartheid was in South Africa not Rhodesia,”
What exactly made the situation for non-whites in Rhodesia different from SA? Apartheid is a noun indicating (racial) segregation. It is just that the demographic disbalance in Rhodesia was even greater in Rhodesia.
@Erik
“Apartheid was race-oriented nominal separation with de facto privileged class while Sparta had a conquest-derived class/caste system of subjugated helots with explicit underclass, ”
You were born in your caste one way or another. What you call it is irrelevant.
@Erik
” and Rhodesia was in no way like Sparta.”
Helots and blacks were humiliated, abused, and killed with the same ease and regularity in Sparta and Rhodesia. But if you prefer SA as the modern example, be my guest.
@Erik
““What power has the ruler?””
That answer is always the same: The power the people give him. Every ruler is a ruler because he is supported by enough of his people to keep the rest from overthrowing him. When the people stop listening, power is gone.
That principle was beautifully demonstrated during the fall of Communism. Gorbatchov, Honnecker, and Ceau?escu suddenly were leaders without followers. Nothing had changed, except people stopped listening to them.
@Erik
“Engage with the trusteeship on the merits of limited voting, not by democratic pieties.”
I do not believe in it. These systems existed everywhere in the past. They all changed into common interest democracies. That was for good reasons. Without engaging all, you cannot run a modern industrial country.
@Jorge Dujan “I don’t recall his doing that. URL, please?”
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=7516
I almost left my response at that, but it seems almost too flippant. But the point remains, and I am certainly not one to agree with James A. Donald on many things – I don’t even agree with his conclusion as to what this means. But it’s absolutely clear that this blog post is essentially a total rejection of freedom of association – that people running open-source projects should not [whether they have the technical right to or not, actually doing so is being presented as morally wrong] have the freedom to choose not to associate with someone on any basis other than the quality of the code they contribute.
>essentially a total rejection of freedom of association
What. The. Fuck?
That’s insane. Pointing out that judging people by their work is a Schelling point, the only agreement that doesn’t turn the culture into a snakepit, is neither a moral claim nor a denial of freedom of association. It’s a claim about consequences, and empirically a well supported one,
@Winter,
I’m not sure which of those “Rhodesia” mentions you fucked up, but I suppose it doesn’t matter. Apartheid denotes a specific series of laws and policies that were in place in SA and not in Rhodesia. If you try to water it down into generics like “racial segregation” or “demographic disbalance” then white flight is Apartheid and you’ve butchered the English language. Please don’t do that.
South Africa mandated white-only institutions, black-only institutions, and institutions with black-only-attendance days and white-only-attendance days, where the white ones were generally nicer. (And often more color classes such as Indians, but you get the idea.) Blacks were restricted to black provinces, black swimming pools, etc. Rhodesia didn’t have these things. Rhodesia mostly had the kind of policy that might be called “meritocratic” if one likes it and “disparate impact” if one doesn’t; such as “is taxpayer >X” and “is property owner >Y” qualifications to vote which a larger fraction of whites than blacks passed, but which blacks did pass and whites fail also. (Ian Smith notes in his biography that Rhodesia had more black millionaires than white millionaires. That really doesn’t sound like a helot class to me.)
Additionally, South African Apartheid was instituted with a plan to be a more or less indefinite system, while the Rhodesian whites saw themselves as engaged in near-uplift policy with the expectation that power would naturally pass to blacks over time as the blacks gradually became qualified to govern themselves.
(-Cut to shot of Robert Mugabe. Atrocity list rolls in the background. Sad laugh track.-)
I wasn’t calling it, I was describing it.
That’s bullshit. It is an extra special kind of bullshit in the context of the Rhodesia -> Zimbabwe transfer, whereupon blacks actually started to be humiliated, abused and killed with great ease, by other blacks.
I’m not really sure how it makes sense, to be honest. The people ejecting people (whether by the influence of “whatever happens to be politically on top this week” or not) are those who respectively own each project (more specifically, who own non-forkable resources like domain names, mailing lists, etc), not some nebulous political upper class. Saying that it’s a bad thing for them to exercise the right do so by whatever criteria they choose is just as much of a rejection of freedom of association whether you dress it up in consequentialism or deontology.
@esr
> That’s insane. Pointing out that judging people by their work is a Schelling point, the only agreement that doesn’t turn the culture into a snakepit, is neither a moral claim nor a denial of freedom of association.
I’d say that “this is the only way of doing things that doesn’t turn the culture into a snakepit” does in fact constitute a moral claim, but I agree that is poppycock to say that it’s a denial of freedom of association.
@Random:
> But it’s absolutely clear that this blog post is essentially a total rejection of freedom of association – that people running open-source projects should not [whether they have the technical right to or not, actually doing so is being presented as morally wrong] have the freedom to choose not to associate with someone on any basis other than the quality of the code they contribute.
Eric’s post is pretty much the opposite of a rejection of freedom of association: for an open source project to judge a contributor by code alone is for them to extend to their contributors various freedoms, including freedom of association (your association with groups with unpopular political views (Eich) or disgusting sexual kinks (Garfield) will not jeopardize the acceptance of your commits. Only bad code will do that). And yes, as someone running a project, to extend freedoms to your contributors requires foregoing certain freedoms yourself, but that goes for anyone in any kind of position of power: extending freedoms to those you have power over, and using your power justly in general, requires voluntarily giving up certain freedoms yourself: in the case of open source development, one of those freedoms is freedom of association.
This can be generalized even beyond people in positions of power: the smooth functioning of society depends on many instances of people having the right to do something and choosing, of their own free will, not to exercise that right. As my dad told me when I was learning to drive: “The right-of-way can only be given, not taken”.
>I’d say that “this is the only way of doing things that doesn’t turn the culture into a snakepit” does in fact constitute a moral claim
At most an ethical one. Ethical claims are consquentialist; moral claims are deontological. Look these terms up if you don’t know them.
Addendum to the above:
And to a great degree, in refusing to exercise their freedom of association, project leads are asserting it. People often refuse to associate with others out of a fear that some third party will refuse to associate with them if they continue to associate with some controversial figure. By continuing to associate with a controversial contributor, project leads are saying to said third party, “Screw you, I’ll associate with whom I wish to.”
When are we going to stop pretending that we’re talking about commits? Would you really be okay with the most onerous possible code of conduct as long as violations are only punished by putting someone in a “penalty box” where they are only allowed to submit patches and not allowed to participate in mailing lists, chats, have any leadership position, etc? Do you believe that Brendan Eich is unable to submit patches to Mozilla as a member of the general public?
At least in the US, serving on a jury isn’t exactly a right, but an obligation of citizenship (arguably a constitutionally-required one, in that the constitution requires an unbiased jury in many cases).
Ethical claims are consquentialist; moral claims are deontological. Look these terms up if you don’t know them.
Weirdly, every so often, I do this, and every damn time I swear I find a different answer.
For example, just now, I googled “difference between ethical and moral” and got that both are frames of right and wrong, ethical is external, and moral is internal. I can imagine an internal value hinging on its outcomes, and I can imagine an external value framework insisting on how things ought to be, so I remain confused.
If I squint, I can sorta see where Random832 is coming from. One difference is that no one here is saying programmers should be forced by law to accept commits from anyone, and were that to come up, nearly everyone here would likely oppose such a law.
That said, everyone here was also not exactly going out of their way to say “you shall judge by the intent to buy a wedding cake alone”, either. (Maybe we believe that, and just felt no need to say it since that point was being made abundantly clear elsewhere.)
The ethical-moral axis is pretty much orthogonal to the consequentialist-deontological one. Insofar as they are correlated, I’d suggest that it is in the direction opposite to your claim. Consider that most professions’ ethics are governed by a set of rules: for Canadian engineers the EC “Code of Ethics”/”le Code de déontologie”, for European lawyers the CCBE “Attorneys’ Code of Ethics”, for American doctors the AMA “Code of Medical Ethics”, etc. An ethical system based on following such lists of rules is every bit a deontological one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deontological_ethics
>The ethical-moral axis is pretty much orthogonal to the consequentialist-deontological one.
Not what they taught me when I minored in Philosophy. Yes. “ethical rules” are a thing, but when you chase ethical reasoning enough you get to some rationally consequential goal like “so the customers will trust us” or “so bridges won’t collapse”. Not so with moral rules – generally those ground out in theology or some kind of instinctive ick revulsion.
Perhaps usage has changed, then? I studied morality and ethics, separately, as required coursework, and the distinction between them as I learned it is essentially what Paul Brinkley described a few posts back – external v. internal. In both, consequentialist and deontological systems are recognised as being within scope.
Usually yes, but that doesn’t stop it from being deontological. One of the most noted deontological theories is Kantian ethics, and consequential goals are directly responsible for its hypothetical imperatives, and somewhat more obliquely so for the categorical imperative (Kingdom of Ends). And even moralities based on “what it says in my holy book” often have a consequentialist basis, even if that’s not the reason their adherents give for following them: don’t eat pigs because we are especially susceptible to the parasites they carry, don’t sleep with close family members because it compromises your offspring’s genetic diversity, etc.
To be deontological, it’s not necessary for a system to be devoid of teleological influences anywhere up the line; it’s enough that accurate prognostication of the consequences of one’s actions isn’t necessary to follow its rules. Consequentialist systems do require this ability – that is, you can’t make a decision that promotes the “greatest good” without an accurate idea of what “good” will come from each of your options. Which system gives better results is dependent on the relative accuracy of our predictive ability versus our historical wisdom: a deontological system whose rules are based on a perfect analysis of what actions have tended to produce which consequences will produce statistically optimal decisions even when the actor has no predictive ability at all; a consequentialist actor with perfect clairvoyance as to the effects of his action will make deterministically optimal decisions even with no knowledge of what has transpired previously. As with so much else, it’s a tradeoff; we are generally better at analysing cause and effect in the past than we are at predicting it in the future, but improving from statistically optimal to deterministically optimal decisions is very attractive.
I therefore see “judge by the code alone” as a deontological approach to community gatekeeping; I don’t need to predict whether it is a net positive (because I will get more good code from him) or a net negative (because his presence will antagonise other coders to the point they no longer volunteer their efforts) to follow your rule. What Random832 proposes is much more consequentialist, but admitting the contributor to my projects only if the positives of doing so outweigh the negatives requires me to estimate each.
>Perhaps usage has changed, then?
It’s possible. As Paul Brinkley has pointed out, the semantic fields of these terms may not be universally agreed on even now. No point in arguing about the terminology, it’s just map rather than territory.
esr on 2017-05-03 at 15:47:05 said:
> That’s insane. Pointing out that judging people by their work is a Schelling point, the only agreement that doesn’t turn the culture into a snakepit, is neither a moral claim nor a denial of freedom of association. It’s a claim about consequences, and empirically a well supported.
I should have the right to associate with whom I please, and a team works better if it is composed of people who get along. And people of the same tribe get along better.
The disruptive effect of women on male groups and within male groups is notorious, even though it is large part no fault of their own. Also very few women can contribute good code, and even the smartest women are as or more disruptive, and the smarter they are the more disruptive, not necessarily through any fault of their own. But often it is their fault: women aggressively intrude into male spaces and raise hell as a shit test, they are looking for the owner of that space, a man manly enough to give them a well deserved spanking, metaphorically or literally. Fake gamer girls are notorious for this.
Jews enter non Jewish spaces, contribute very good code of great value, and then proceed to do exactly what you are complaining about in this post, proceed to piously demonstrate that they are holier than thou by discovering that someone else is insufficiently holy, and persecuting him. (This is how they originally got expelled from the Roman province of Judea, it started the incident with the Greeks in the port of Ceasaria, where Jews were trespassing on a Greek’s land and got angry that he conducted a pagan sacrifice. This is the stuff that Jesus was complaining about in his rants against Pharisees. Social Justice Warriors are not all Jews, far from it, but all of them are Pharisees.)
I could go down the list, offending every sex, sexual preference, race, and religion, (Gays show up to work infrequently, erratically, late, and stoned, cross dressers … and so on and so forth)
The reason you want to deny me freedom of association is that you are eager to give up your freedoms if you will be permitted freedom of speech.
“Hey, if I am not allowed to exclude women and so forth, you social justice warriors should not be allowed to exclude me”
But that is not going to work: Their rules are for us to obey, not them. It is who whom all the way. Having yielded on freedom of association, you are going to have to yield on freedom of speech.
You are offering a deal that they cannot even comprehend. They don’t think in terms of uniform rules applied to all, but of crushing their enemies. The deal you are trying to make, yielding on freedom of association in return for freedom of speech, is not one they reject, it is one beyond their comprehension. They do not comprehend rules, only power and powerlessness. The higher status chicken pecks the lower status chicken. To them, Zimmerman should have let Trayvon kill him because Blacks are holier than Mestizos.
> Pointing out that judging people by their work is a Schelling point, the only agreement that doesn’t turn the culture into a snakepit,
You cannot have an agreement for uniform rules with people that outgroup you, because the proposition that they should obey the same rules as you just does not make emotional sense to them.
Your proposed agreement is emotionally incomprehensible to social justice warriors, because they outgroup you just as much as they outgroup me. We are all fascists now.
The reason that you cannot have an agreement with the wolf that raids your flocks or the deer that eat your corn is not because you fail to think of the wolf as human, but because the wolf fails to think of you as wolf, and the deer fails to think of you as deer. Domesticating a cat is raising a cat to think that people are cats.
Thinking of outgroups as “us” is not going to make them think of you and me as ingroups. Making them think like that is assimilation, not integration, and only an aggressive, dominant, and self confident culture can assimilate outgroups, and the methods it uses has to be as aggressive, domineering, and coercive as we used to make wolves into dogs.
Men had to domesticate women afresh every generation, as we have to domesticate each kitten anew. What we have now is wild feral women. Hence the need to exclude women from engineering teams.
It’s worth noting (as pointed out to me on G+) that Coraline Ada Ehmke has now posted a proposed change to the Covenant that supposedly protects people from being discriminated against because of their kinks. Wonder what Larry Garfield would have to say about that.
> posted a proposed change to the Covenant that supposedly protects people from being discriminated against because of their kinks.
Not going to work. These rules are for you, not them.
To back James up, I think it should be noted that the proposed change Jay mentions is dated to a month ago, and more recently, the changer* said to ESR ‘you should feel unsafe’ as part of an argument stridently opposed to the “code alone” approach: ‘Evaluating people as their whole selves is necessary for safety and the health of online and offline communities.’
*At least I think it’s a reasonable assumption that @CoralineAda on Twitter is the same person.
So I think Larry Garfield might say something like “this person intends to not protect me, and to interpret the change that way”.
>So I think Larry Garfield would say “this person intends to not protect me”.
It was always clear that “safety” would never be for those who disagree with the commissars.
“*At least I think it’s a reasonable assumption that @CoralineAda on Twitter is the same person.”
It is the same person. It’s also mildly amusing to me that she has now changed her Twitter nickname to Odious Ada, presumably in honor of my calling ehr “odious” in my Medium post about Penguicon.
A real-world example of judging by the code alone, from yesterday.
I maintain a Python library that allows various manipulations on PDF files. One of the popular uses of it seems to be concatenation of multiple files for printing.
I received a bug report about a Python StackOverflow exception. The bug report was complete, containing an example PDF that would provoke the error, and an example patch to modify the offending recursive code to use iteration.
I questioned the need for such a change; the example PDF was obviously contrived. A single PDF page tree ‘Pages’ node can have a practically infinite number of both ‘Page’ children and more ‘Pages’ child nodes; the most common case is a single ‘Pages’ node, and it is not usual to have more than a few levels of ‘Pages’ nodes in a document, so a document with over 900 ‘Pages’ nodes and one ‘Page’ node per ‘Pages’ node is a degenerate tree.
The submitter assured me that the example was merely a distillation of a real-world problem; that the bug had been provoked when processing actual multi-million page PDF files. So I cleaned up the patch, verified it didn’t slow down operation, and applied it.
Yes, I apparently support std presort bulk mailers. Next up, telemarketers.
But speaking of consequentialism, one of the consequences of the open source license definition is that, if you release an open source package, people you disagree with will use it, and if your package is popular enough, and you do not discourage such feedback, you will receive useful feedback from some of those.
Let us be clear that expelling people from a group for an actual or perceived reason not having anything to do with the code is effective notice to “talk to the hand”: it is signalling a lack of interest in any feedback such people might have to offer, and the expected (and apparently, desired) result of such signalling is that communication from such reprobates will diminish or cease.
The only people advocating for not making use of such feedback are the intellectually-challenged spiritual descendants of the ethical and moral midgets who claim that, even if Nazi hypothermia data might be useful, it is too tainted to use.
Similarly, an acquaintance of mine remarked some time ago that Nazi atrocity experiments are where his electrical engineering reference materials got most of their safety data for how much is deadly period, how much is deadly in minutes, how much is deadly for children but survivable for adults, etc.
This is truly fascinating. I’m trying to understand what Dries’ logic was in exiling Larry. Backing up to the circumstances before he made the decision:
1) Busybody has obtained information and evidence on a prominent member that implies the member is a misogynist or much worse. Busybody threatens to go public and doxx the member, and then pointing out that Dries was aware this person was in their midst and did nothing.
2) The entire industry is under pressure to be “inclusive” and to foster an environment where women will feel motivated to thrive in. The industry is under a guilty-until-proven-innocent cloud of suspicion that everyone is secretly a misogynist.
So what would be more damaging to Drupal: having all the women up in arms when they discover Dries protected a supposed heretic of the cult of diversity, or throw suspected heretic under the bus?
He clearly chose the latter. He probably thought Larry would quietly walk away in shame, mortified that the information would come out, and would never be heard from again. Unfortunately for Dries though Larry is a man who owns his lifestyle and cares about his dignity and reputation so it has all become public now, with Dries exposed as someone who capitulated to a blackmailer and to boot felt it necessary to offer his opinion on the lifestyle and supposed beliefs in question and managed to offend an entirely different group of people.
This was sort of an impossible situation for the guy. He loses either way, just a matter of how badly and to whom. From a personal self-interest point of view I think his math was correct though.
He comes out of this as this altruistic protector of inclusiveness at all cost but probably loses leadership clout. He gets to just demote himself to tech lead or something and appoint some lackey that believes all the right things and can appease everyone.
He could have avoided the situation by refusing to look at the information the blackmailer presented to him and by expelling the blackmailer for even attempting to present it to him as that itself was a violation of the CoC. If the blackmailer had information that Larry had broken the law then he should report what he has to law enforcement but leave Drupal out of it. That would have given him plausible deniability.
I have to admit, although I think Larry’s lifestyle should be totally irrelevant and the blackmailer should himself been expelled without an examination of his “evidence” of Larry’s guilt, I find some sympathy in how Dries must have felt here.
If I had been in Dries position here (again, the error was to even be exposed to the information), I might have reacted the same way. To me, this D/s stuff sounds a lot like domestic abuse disguised as a fetish. The victim has every incentive to buy into it as it gives them the illusion of control in the eyes of others, protecting their self-image just a little bit. But again, emotional abuse is not illegal and as such there’s nothing anyone could do anyway.
Fascinating situation, can’t wait to see how it plays out.
For once I agree with James A. Donald. And the first step to having communities that get along is to exclude people whose backgrounds suggest they will be toxic, and intimidate others from making contributions.
Look, programming — like anything else — is a social activity. It’s not just patches or lines of code — in open source, now more than ever, fellow contributors are forced to interact. If a good-faith contributor perceives a risk that they will be made to interact with a person who is hostile to their interests, they will feel unsafe and not want to contribute. The increasingly close collaboration and interaction make “judge by the code alone” impossible from a practical standpoint.
Furthermore, Coraline Ada Ehmke’s Contributor Covenant is one of the gold standards for open-source codes of conduct, adopted by many successful open-source projects. Their success does not seem to have been abated by the adoption of such a CoC; to the contrary, they represent the most vibrant and actively-developed projects within open source. It’s time to accept that the community has changed, and that these are the values espoused by most hackers, out of necessity to protect the health of our communities.
Finally, it is true that social-justice advocates have come out against kinkshaming; however, if a kink is perceived to come from a place of misogyny, then opposition to misogyny in all its forms trumps opposition to kinkshaming. Whether or not the Gorean lifestyle is truly misogynist, it is certainly believed to be. If Drupal contributors were employees of a corporation, Garfield could be expected to be fired for aspects of his personal life which do not align with company values or image (with an exception for legally protected aspects like religion or sexual orientation) with no legal or even ethical quibbles. Dismissing Garfield from the community may be the wrong thing, but it’s not the worst decision in all of open source. (On the other hand, if dismissing him means that more women will make valuable contributions, it could well be the right thing. It’s the old “kill one person to save many” dilemma.)
https://github.com/opal/opal/issues/941
There may be no legal or ethical quibbles, but depending on circumstances, the “expectation” to be fired is simply not there. Many, if not most, companies, don’t have the time, money, or inclination to stalk their employees.
… is a cudgel designed by a self-righteous moralizing bitch.
> Their success does not seem to have been abated by the adoption of such a CoC; to the contrary, they represent the most vibrant and actively-developed projects within open source.
Something like 99% of actual contributions to open source projects come from white males. All Trump supporters are Nazis according to progressives, and need to be punched on sight. Mainstream media backs the slogan “See a nazi, punch a nazi”. Approximately seventy five percent of white males are Trump supporters. (Just guessing the ballpark,have not looked at any polls, but in the run up to the election, my intuitions were substantially more accurate than the polls)
Therefore, if you have progressives on your team, they represent a real and present threat to your contributors, whereas I have not seen any actual actions against Jews by even by genuine unironic nazis. All recent antisemitic threats where the perpetrator has been caught turned out to be false flag operations by Jews, The epidemic of antisemitic threats has a striking resemblance to the epidemic of campus rape.
Thus to be safe, you should purge women and leftists on sight.
Notice the tendency of social justice warriors to seize control of businesses and then proceed to milk the business at the expense of shareholders and run it into the ground.
@Jeff
I will note that applying this rule with a minimum of good faith and intellectual consistency would necessitate mass removal of Communists in a manner that would do McCarthy proud.
There’s an old joke about a Texan talking up how big his state is, and then an Alaskan remarks “mind we don’t cut ours in two and make Texas the third biggest”. Something similar applies to Communism: Communism is so very, very horrible that you could split its toll in two and the halves would now be the worst and second worst things to have happened, driving down to third place anything else like the stock boogeyman of Nazism. (No, Pinkerites, the An Lushan revolt is not in the running. That’s a loss of recorded taxpaying subjects after years of civil war in the pre-printing era, hence lumping together deaths from war, migrants, loss of records, territorial shrinkage, and what have you.)
Communism is literally the worst. Any sort of policy of removing people for having bad opinions or supporting bad things is morally obliged to remove Communists first.
Kindly delete the hell out of this “perceived to be” and “believed to be” nonsense. First you can rewrite it not to be in the passive voice. Second you can rewrite it, and most of your comment, so it’s not a cudgel for the best whiner who acts out the most about feeling unsafe. It’s no better than trial by combat, with the irrelevant-to-coding ‘STR check’ turned into a still-irrelevant-to-coding ‘CHA check’.
>I will note that applying this rule with a minimum of good faith and intellectual consistency would necessitate mass removal of Communists in a manner that would do McCarthy proud.
Of course, this consistency will never even even be attempted, because the SJW belief system is rooted in Cold War memetic weapons intended to assist Communist takeovers.
Patrick Maupin:
> Yes, I apparently support std presort bulk mailers. Next up, telemarketers.
Mate, you *HAVE GOT TO* draw the line somewhere.
Please. I beg of you.
Think of the children.
@William O. B’Livion
>> Next up, telemarketers.
> Mate, you *HAVE GOT TO* draw the line somewhere.
Just because I merge their code doesn’t mean I won’t sue them when the opportunity presents itself.
That was satisfying, though not very remunerative.
Bravo man.
Bravo.
esr on 2017-05-07 at 11:02:46 said:
> > I will note that applying this rule with a minimum of good faith and intellectual consistency
> > would necessitate mass removal of Communists in a manner that would do McCarthy proud.
> Of course, this consistency will never even even be attempted, because the SJW
> belief system is rooted in Cold War memetic weapons intended to assist Communist takeovers.
That is largely because Republicans/Right wingers/Conservatives (a group of somewhat but not completely overlapping sets) hadn’t learned the rules for radicals, including ‘”Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.” If the rule is that every letter gets a reply, send 30,000 letters. You can kill them with this because no one can possibly obey all of their own rules.’
Many still haven’t or can’t be bothered.
It’s time to make complete f’k tards like the aforementioned bimbo live by her own rules.
Look, programming — like anything else — is a social activity
Off topic rant: Why is it that anytime someone says “XXX is a social activity”, I start going into fight or flight mode? “XXX is a social activity” sounds to me like the sort of thing the monkeys start chanting before they start throwing rocks at people like me. Somehow “society” is never me or any of the people I actually like and want to associate with. Somehow things never seem to be about the work (or the fun, or the anything else it’s supposed to be) when they start becoming a “social activity”.
Maybe I don’t want a “social” activity. Maybe I want an “anti-social” activity where myself and my friends do something and not invite the inquisition and witch-burners along for the fun. (Okay, the original topic (open source software development) is a little bit more public than that. But still…)
/rant
(Anti-social media (how to talk to your friends and keep everyone else *out*): It’s the wave of the future. :-P )
>Off topic rant: Why is it that anytime someone says “XXX is a social activity”, I start going into fight or flight mode?
Because you are wise.
@Jeff Read If a good-faith contributor perceives a risk that they will be made to interact with a person who is hostile to their interests, they will feel unsafe and not want to contribute.
ESR:. Jeff Read makes me feel unsafe! If you allow him to continue to post here I might be forced to interact with him. If you don’t purge him immediately then you’re a worse Puppy Killer than he is! You must purge him now!
I’m liking this new order. Soon everyone I dislike will be purged from the Internet.
Nothing feels as good as raw, unrestrained power.
@ams:
> Why is it that anytime someone says “XXX is a social activity…
It’s not just you and (IMO) it’s not off-topic.
Programming is not, in fact, inherently a social activity. It’s something that many people who like to quietly sit and cogitate can do quite well.
Yes, to build big things robustly and in a timely fashion — whether a building, a bridge, a car, or an OS — requires multiple skill sets and usually some sort of team, and, yes, a certain amount of teamwork.
But, believe it or not, even non-social men, or more to the point, men who are perceived as non-social or as assholes, are usually actually pretty good at teamwork, and some of them are good enough at teamwork to be great leaders. Torvalds is a great example here; anybody who claims he’s driven off people can almost certainly find enough anecdotes to support their confirmation bias, but anybody who claims he’s incapable of leadership is obviously full of shit.
Men don’t usually view the teamwork itself as a social activity, although it’s certainly a way to meet a group that one can be social with outside work, as well as to meet a few people who one can and does work with reasonably well, but with whom one would never be that friendly outside the workplace.
It’s not entirely clear to me why there seems to be some sort of social justice focus on programming; maybe it’s just more noticeable to some of us because that’s where we are.
There seems to be a certain element of feeling that these are cushy, high-paying jobs that don’t require manly men, so a lack of women must be on purpose, but I don’t think that’s the entire story. There are plenty of dicks around in any industry, and the reaction that most people would have to meeting such a dick vs. the reaction that a few women have to meeting such a dick may be the converse/corollary to xkcd 385, but I don’t think that’s the entire story, either.
The fact that there are a lot of socially awkward men in the field must certainly have something to do with it; the interaction that some programmers have with women practically invites what the red-pillers call “shit-testing” on a very visceral level. Failing a shit-test merely invites more shit-testing; at some point, the dynamic can get so screwed up that people will throw their co-workers (or other open source developers) under the bus to satisfy the test, and then it’s like chum in the water.
> (Anti-social media (how to talk to your friends and keep everyone else *out*): It’s the wave of the future. :-P )
This is actually a good idea, and the reaction has a lot of invite only secret clubs, (no girls allowed) but our tools are insecure, and are generally closed source controlled by bad guys that hate us and might well spy on us and shop us out to our enemies.
Alt tech is at present focused on free speech, but is developing equally closed source platforms – gab.ai and https://infogalactic.com/info/Main_Page – which will, however, be controlled by friends rather than enemies.
If you want to communicate secretly, it is important to have open source, or at least have the secret communication part of the tool supplied by an open source library.
So, developing anti social media (tools for maintaining secret boys clubs) is down the line a bit.
@JAD
“Something like 99% of actual contributions to open source projects come from white males.”
“[Anti-social media] is actually a good idea, and the reaction has a lot of invite only secret clubs, (no girls allowed) but our tools are insecure, and are generally closed source controlled by bad guys that hate us and might well spy on us and shop us out to our enemies.”
Just out of curiosity regarding the original subject of this post: If you were an OSS project leader, would you accept contributions from women or non-white coders?
That is, would you “judge by the code alone”?
Footnote to Winter’s question:
JAD, would you dig into the backgrounds of anonymous contributors?
Footnote 2:
JAD, would you dig into the backgrounds of every contributor on the premise that even some with obviously male names may be adopting an alias to hide their identity as women?
Programming isn’t a social activity. Programming is a “make the funny metal box solve my problem” activity.
@Patrick Maupin:
asdf
In my (not so humble) opinion:
1. Attacks on programming are indeed, due to proximity, more noticeable to the commenters here.
2. There is no focus on programming, but attacks against any “higher education” field [including, but not limited to: programming, the hard sciences, and law] which has not already fully bent knee to the social justice worldview.
For reason #1, and because I feel this ground has been adequately covered upthread, I’m not providing citations for programming. However, the many news stories regarding the conflict between due process and Title IX within college disciplinary hearings, or the ordeal faced by Laura Kipnis, shows the camel’s nose of “Social Justice” trying to dominate legal theory. Alternately, you can hear from the speakers at the recent March for Science or the latest Bill Nye series on Netflix [specifically episodes 9 and 13, as the mask slips furthest there] for similar offenses against scientific reasoning.
It seems to me that the justifications given for not judging by the code alone are bullshit, because the considerations they supposedly address can only come up when one is not judging by the code alone.
Let us say, for the sake of argument, a potential contributor to NTPSec is a Christian. He has accepted Jesus into his heart as his lord and savior and all that jazz. He also has a knack for timing algorithms, spelunking into ancient code, and likes solving those kinds of problems. He also likes putting his talents to use to help others.
So naturally, he’s likely to stumble across NTPSec eventually and realize this is a thing he can and should contribute to. But, uh oh — ESR doesn’t like Christianity, and considers Christians crazy. Even worse, ESR is an actual bona-fide pagan. Oh Noes.
Under the notion put forth by Miss Ehmke, of ‘evaluating people as their whole selves for the safety and of health of a community’, both NTPSec and our potential contributor lose. Our contributor has to decide if it’s worth the risk that ESR will reject his work (or worse, attack him personally) because he’s a Christian and ESR’s a Wiccan. ESR has to worry about whether this new contributor will start quoting verse about the sinfulness of witchcraft. It’s not unreasonable our hypothetical contributor will choose to go elsewhere. NTPSec loses out on his talent and our contributor wastes his talent elsewhere.
Now, I’ll admit that I haven’t read the full documentation for either GCC or Python cover to cover. But I not aware of any mandatory compiler flags or language keywords for reporting one’s religion to the computer. The code compiles and runs and works as intended, or it does not. Can anyone show me examples of where someone’s religion, gender, sexuality or other such things were factors in whether or not a computer worked correctly?
Under the notion of ‘judge by the code alone’, even if our contributor knows that ESR has doesn’t like Christians, he also knows it won’t be an issue unless he makes it one. He knows that when it comes to his contributions to NTPSec, those contributions will be judged by whether or not those contributions further the project’s goals, and how well they do so. Our contributor gets to put his talents to good use, helping others. ESR gets someone helping him get useful work done. Sounds to me like more people win in this latter scenario.
>But, uh oh — ESR doesn’t like Christianity, and considers Christians crazy.
Be fair. The relevant category is not not Christian but “faith-holder”, or perhaps more precisely someone on the fucked-up side of the orthodoxy/orthopraxy distinction, especially monotheists. I don’t think I hate Christianity disproportionately to its body count.
You can add to Alex K’s items the incident at Duke Divinity School. Wall of text at link, I’ll excerpt some highlights here:
Nonobvious item of relevance: March 5 is a Sunday. The attacks are indeed everywhere, and they are heavy when they can get away with demanding Sunday from a divinity school.
In response, a professor wrote in part:
Standard Socjus Lies were swiftly deployed to gin up outrage at the kulak who dared object:
“Racism”: disagreeing with socjus.
TL;DR the critical professor has since been pressured into resigning.
@Alex K., @Erik:
The academy was compromised long ago, as was the ABA. People inside the academy who don’t toe the party line are completely fucked — it’s only mop-up actions there, but the ABA isn’t really that relevant, and most lawyers (except those making money from it) aren’t really putting up with this bullshit too much.
Some other industries obviously have pockets where there are issues of real harrassment, but what industries have newsworthy blown-all-out-of-proportion non-issues?
Ignoring education, what are the non-technical industrial equivalents of Brendan Eich or Matt Taylor or donglegate?
> Be fair. The relevant category is not not Christian but “faith-holder”, or perhaps more precisely someone on the fucked-up side of the orthodoxy/orthopraxy distinction, especially monotheists. I don’t think I hate Christianity disproportionately to its body count.
I’ll concede that that phrasing isn’t accurate and probably weakens my example, but I don’t think that it invalidates my main point. The whole “focus on the person” thing creates the problem it supposedly exists to solve.
Winter:> Just out of curiosity regarding the original subject of this post: If you were an OSS project leader, would you accept contributions from women or non-white coders?
>
> That is, would you “judge by the code alone”?
Code, sure, I would judge her patches on the patch quality, but when women start interacting with men, trouble follows. So on the email list, if any woman came out as a woman, whether using an explicitly female name or explicitly announcing her femaleness, I would block her from emailing to the team, generating web pages, generating documentation, commenting on bug reports, etc, unless I was answerable to some higher authority that had a different policy.
Because the moment someone claims to be female, the dynamics of the email list changes.
Feral women fuck. Suddenly, there is an opportunity to nail a chick who is on the email list.
Jay Maynard:> JAD, would you dig into the backgrounds of every contributor on the premise that even some with obviously male names may be adopting an alias to hide their identity as women?
If they are hiding their identity as women, they are not being disruptive, so no problem. But because women want female privilege, they seldom hide their identities as women, and are disruptive, want to be disruptive, intend to be disruptive. Female disruption is a shit test that feral women are instinctively drawn to, instinctively carry out, and that engineers massively fail with great regularity.
My own reaction when I see a woman on a mailing list is “Oh wow, I could get laid” but I know that if I let the “Oh wow” show, I will not get laid.
@JAD
So, you would accept contributions from women if they keep in hiding? And is it allowed to know what contributions are from women?
And how about people with a dark skin, say, with “recent” ancestors from Africa? Can they contribute if they can hide their ancestry? (some have obvious names)
@JAD
“Oh wow, I could get laid”
Does not sound likely.
I request a temporary topic ban on the subject of whether any particular commenter can, can’t, will or won’t get laid, on the grounds that’s prime bait for monkey shitflinging and e-peen-waving with very little redeeming value.
> And how about people with a dark skin, say, with “recent” ancestors from Africa?
Recall Obama’s unsuccessful attempt to create an Obamacare website using a diverse software development team.
No matter how much money they threw at it, website did not work. Eventually they had to bring in a team of white and east Asian males run by white males.
So, lacking unlimited taxpayer funds, I would do immediately what Obama did in the end.
@JAD
I chalk that down as a NO? Or what?
Bets on time till one of JAD’s projects gets forked and the fork wins the survival war!
@Winter and Jeff Read
Ya’ know, if you two weren’t spineless panderers you would have called it an “Internet Burka”. Winter (living in Europe) at least has the excuse of not wanting a gang to show up at his door and burn his house out from under him. But Jeff doesn’t have even that.
(You see JAD, two can play this game)
@JAD
Pray tell, what happens if the woman carefully doesn’t reveal her identity in the project, but you find out that she is female in another context?
Others on here have called you a collectivist, the accusation is rather obviously true. But leaving aside for the moment the bottomless pit of evil that is collectivism, there is one interesting fact about them: 95% of their assessment of the world outside their head is projection. This is an Iron Law.
Unfortunately, trawling through all of your posts to figure out *exactly* what you are projecting carries with it the same SAN cost as trawling through the posts of tumblrina #583. Mostly because the only difference between them is a few insignificant details in the lace on the curtain fringes.
I’d rather keep those SAN points for something useful.
No it isn’t, unless perhaps you’re using very idiosyncratic personal definition. As I see it, collectivism would be JAD arguing that women should be banned from his project because they are women. He’s not arguing this; he’s arguing something more like the venerable “tits or GTFO” rule, that people who make a big deal of their woman-hood on the mailing list should be banned from the mailing list of his project because not doing so will derail the mailing list from being about the project.
Tell me, Ian Bruene, do you think banning trolls is “collectivist” too? Are trolls a collective? How widely are you waving that word?
@Ian
“at least has the excuse of not wanting a gang to show up at his door and burn his house out from under him. ”
I do not consider burning houses a valid means of debating.
Collectivist: Someone who believes that group identity trumps all other traits a person possesses, sometimes to the extent of steamrolling all other traits. Trolls are banned for their individual behavior, and the category of “Troll” is defined as someone who engages in that sort of bannable behavior.
Though not part of the definition, Collectivism is usually co-morbid with the belief that anyone who divides up the world in different ways is not merely wrong, but actively lying to themselves. For Marxists it is called “False Consciousness”, for JAD it is his insistence that ESR bows before the altar of political correctness.
I am well aware of “Tits or GTFO”, and pity anyone who hasn’t figured that one out yet. If a woman shows up in a project proclaiming her sex she needs to be told to shut up and show some code. But if a guy on the project is so hot and bothered by the mere knowledge that one of the other contributers is female then you have one of two problems:
1. The guy is so lonely / sex-starved / bad at social cues that he needs to go fix his own problems. I believe the usual prescription given on this blog is to learn game and bed lots of women.
2. He is too dammed stupid to be functional. In which case the project lead needs to start asking themselves some uncomfortable questions about how long it will be before the guy makes a commit that breaks the entire project. Worse: has he already made that commit and it hasn’t been detected yet?
If your social system is built on continuous lying it deserves to die. JAD’s system is. Political Correctness is.
@Winter
Neither do I.
> Collectivism is usually co-morbid with the belief that anyone who divides up the world in different ways is not merely wrong, but actively lying to themselves. For Marxists it is called “False Consciousness”, for JAD it is his insistence that ESR bows before the altar of political correctness.
Esr denies the right of free association. That is bowing before the altar of political correctness.
I could list numerous other ways in which esr bows before political correctness, but that is the big one.
Whether characteristics one is not allowed to notice are a better predictor of certain invisible traits than those characteristics we are allowed to notice is an empirical question. And the evidence is compelling that the characteristics we are not allowed to notice are more important for predicting invisible characteristics than anything we are allowed to notice.
For example, the financial crisis was in large part a reflection of the fact that race is a better predictor of propensity to repay mortgages than anything that people were allowed to take notice of. This resulted in large numbers of dud mortgages being made, and then unloaded onto the bigger idiot. The problem with the derivatives was that they were derived from mortgages made to blacks, mestizos, and indios, primarily mestizos and indios.
Similarly, Obama’s diverse Obamacare website team was presumably the best diversity that money could buy – best by those characteristics that one is allowed to notice, but ultimately it could not build the Obamacare website, which in the end had to be built by a striking undiverse team.
Propensity to repay one’s mortgage is an invisible characteristic. Race and credit rating are visible characteristics. Race is a better predictor of propensity to repay one’s mortgage than credit rating. This is an empirical fact as was spectacularly demonstrated in the financial crisis.
>Esr denies the right of free association. That is bowing before the altar of political correctness.
Wow. That’s crazy even by JAD standards.
>For example, the financial crisis was in large part a reflection of the fact that race is a better predictor of propensity to repay mortgages than anything that people were allowed to take notice of. This resulted in large numbers of dud mortgages being made, and then unloaded onto the bigger idiot.
Superficially true, but misleading. The problem wasn’t the race of the defaulters, not directly. It’s that the political apparat to compel banks to make loans to white people too poor to pay them back didn’t – and still doesn’t – exist. Thus, that huge mass of bad loans was bound to be to mostly blacks and hispanics, regardless of what how many probable deadbeats there were in the white population.
It is likely true that higher time preferences in black and hispanic populations pushed up their default rates some. But there’s no way the time preference disparity can be anywhere near large enough to drive the whole observed difference in default rates by itself. I’d have to crunch the numbers, but almost certainly the selective effect of privileging minorities among would-be borrowers was far more important.
I’ve replied to this in public because I think JAD’s argument is a prime example of the kind of sloppy thinking typical of emotionally fixated racists.
Esr denies the right of free association.
This simply isn’t true. Eric isn’t advocating guys with big sticks to force you to accept J. Rando’s commit just because the code is decent. All he’s saying is that rejecting a commit with good code simply because you hate J. Rando’s politics is a Bad Idea that’s likely to cause you a heap of problems without any big sticks being involved at all, in the same way that rejecting a customer at your cake store because they’re gay is a Bad Idea whether or not the law comes breathing down your neck. You still have the right to do both if you really, really want to.
(At least, that’s the impression I’m getting.)
>(At least, that’s the impression I’m getting.)
You’re not wrong.
Achievement Unlocked: Made the tumblr crowd look sane.
> But if a guy on the project is so hot and bothered by the mere knowledge that one of the other contributers is female then you have one of two problems:
>
> 1. The guy is so lonely / sex-starved / bad at social cues that he needs to go fix his own problems. I believe the usual prescription given on this blog is to learn game and bed lots of women.
>
> 2. He is too dammed stupid to be functional.
This depends on the empirical likelihood that that female is going to screw someone, which is higher than you seem to assume.
If you toss pizza crusts at a crowd of seagulls, pretty soon you will have a seagull riot.
Observed female behavior is that they do in fact have sex, and that females on mailing lists have sex at well above average rates. If someone gets hot and bothered by the mere fact that there is a female on the mailing list, this may well represent a realistic appraisal of the likelihood that she is going to be throwing pussy at the seagulls, a realistic appraisal of the likelihood he might score some pizza crust.
“Observed female behavior is that they do in fact have sex, and that females on mailing lists have sex at well above average rates.”
In the absence of teledildonics, this statement seems self-evidently false, at least in the sense of sex between members of the mailing list. In other words, [citation needed].
When woman socialize with males, they are looking to get nailed.
Women generally sleep with only one man at a time, while a male would like to possess as many women as possible at the same time, but women are always cruising for a trade up or a better deal, just as men are always cruising for fresh pussy.
When I toss pizza crust at a riot of seagulls, maybe there are thirty seagulls and only four crusts. Are the seagulls then acting irrationally in rioting in hope for a crust.
SJW: Sexism! Patriarchy! Rape Culture!
Sane person: But that contradicts [evidence], and I’ve never seen any of this!
SJW: STOP DENYING MY LIVED EXPERIENCE YOU SEXIST MISOGYNISTIC PRIVILEGED SCUMLORD!!
Sane person: Uh, why are you denying my lived experience?
====================================
JAD: Sluts! Race War! Black People!
Sane person: But that contradicts [evidence], and I’ve never seen any of this!
SJW: STOP BOWING TO THE POLITICAL CORRECTNESS GOD!!
Sane person: wat.
====================================
You see? They are the same. They even have the same feature of sometimes burying a thimblefull of truth or useful concepts inside an oil tanker of drek.
And I almost forgot: Both of them get a tingle up their leg at the thought of using government power to enforce their will on everyone else. Because of course they are Right! And no bad results could ever come from someone who is Right!
@JAD
Your post slipped in behind mine….
By this logic no Queen or Concubine ever attended a social function while the King was alive. By your insistence on attaching a universal to everything with no exceptions whatsoever you come off not as a Champion Of Hard Truths, but as a 95 IQ 12-year-old who just hit puberty and is desperately trying to seem deep.
Such behavior is….. expected… of the 12 year old, he has to learn somehow. It is not becoming of a Man.
JAD is doing the SJWs a great favor, by giving them evidence that ESR’s blog is actually full of vicious sexism, racism, and so on. (And how many TLAs can I get into this comment? LBJ took the IRT…)
@JAD
“but women are always cruising for a trade up or a better deal,”
One wonders what kind of woman you are living with? Or, more likely, what kind women you frequent? If any?
@Dan
“JAD is doing the SJWs a great favor, by ”
I think JAD is making us all look sage and benevolent. He plays the fool at the court.
@Patrick Maupin: “Yes, I apparently support std presort bulk mailers. Next up, telemarketers.”
Welcome to grown up, Machiavellian political alliances.
Consider the Preparatory Commission for the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (https://infogalactic.com/info/Preparatory_Commission_for_the_Comprehensive_Nuclear-Test-Ban_Treaty_Organization). United States participation enjoys wide support from both the rabid anti-nuclear activists and the hard core national security America First types.
Why would the latter group support it? Because under the terms of the treaty, all the data collected by the International Monitoring System is available in real time to any signatory. How better for the United States to get access to seismic, hydroacoustic, infrasound, and radionuclide data from sensors in otherwise-less-than-cooperative places like Iran?
I have reason to believe that my description of women is accurate, while yours is based on worship from afar.
Or more likely the both of you are busy examining the 3 square inches of elephant hide that is right in front of your faces.
@Ian&JAD
“I have reason to believe that my description of women is accurate, while yours is based on worship from afar.”
That was my question: What kind of women do you share your life with, James? If any.
I have shared my house with enough women not have to ask anyone about the nature of women. None of them came within the same ballpark as anything James describes. But I was also fortunate to have never met a man that came close to James in character.
Maybe a man like James will associate with women that match his descriptions? Birds of a feather stuff?