I think it is not logical to take a single argument and ascribe it to a greater movement. I once knew someone who claimed to be a feminist who told me there is no such thing as consenting to penetrative sex (that all penetrative sex is rape). But it would be unreasonable to assume this ascribes to all feminism, or more obviously that all women felt this way because I saw it in one woman.

I do feel a lot of the fear around PC is based on taking extreme examples and thinking everyone is trying to destroy things. For instance the Rubocop - someone suggested it, some people agreed, some people disagreed, and ultimately they did not rename it.

The React props and mount thing is just ludicrous...unfortunately the people with the most extreme viewpoints often shout the loudest.

Yes I agree that the props/mount thing is silly, which is probably why it's only seen in one discussion years ago and hasn't gained any traction since. It's far different than the issues that garnered the rise of community guidelines, which were broad, systemic, and repeated in several communities.

It didn't gain traction because the woman who brought it up was told to fuck off. It almost would have gained traction if just a few more people decided to agree with her, but the resistance was instantly discouraging.

There are plenty of folks who are more worried about looking for the latest crusade to join than who are worried about a well developed view of any topic (feminism, transgender rights, etc). These folks will use any and all excuses to jump on the attack bandwagon, and that they happen to be self-labeled progressives is itself almost incidental at best.

Rage mobs aren't new, they still can cause plenty of damage and ruin careers.

And I think it is unreasonable to assume that a single bad take on a subject made by an anonymous user years ago should be held as an example that there is an overwhelming movement of harming the OS community. It is simultaneously possible that plenty of individuals have uninformed, clumsy approaches to a topic and that it is not an overwhelming movement or agenda.

> an overwhelming movement of harming the OS community

I think there's no global intent. There's no formalized group that has a weekly agenda of "Destroy Opensource!"

> It is simultaneously possible that plenty of individuals have uninformed, clumsy approaches to a topic

Right and this is what I mean by the crusade/rage mob analogies. Somebody gets upset about something, and they may be genuinely offended (and still wrong), so they go to Reddit/Twitter/etc and create a post "I can't believe X is doing Y! They're evil and we should stop them!"

Now, there's a whole bunch of people who don't have nuanced well researched opinions on X or Y. They just want to be upset and have a good fight, and this is a nice convenient thing that feels just to fight about. So they hop on and start jumping in on a side. This is why I use the crusade analogy - you don't care about the pretense, you're just in it for the battle.

The issue with rage mobs, whether it's in regards to the open source community or what broadcasters can air on television, are purely destructive. They don't care about fixing problems, they have no interest in improving the community or advancing things, they simply want to join in a fight and express anger. If a rage mob gets it's demands (you cancel that sitcom that portrays a gay family positively) then the mob doesn't go away - it just finds something else to attack and eventually it attacks itself.

I find crusade a very poor analogy because it implies there is an organized force (the crusades are a well-known religiously motivated militarization). I also struggle with this idea of rage mobs, because like I've brought up before, it's difficult to assume a mob exists right now because of a bad take someone made years ago. That seems, on its face, dissociated from how reality functions.