You are not allowed to have a moderate opinion on gender representation in tech, and you are not allowed to have photos of steak on your NixOS discussion forum profile:
> Srid states his opinion on the gender survey question under a topic titled “Nix Community Survey 2023 Results”. This response, a week later (see next point below), gets moved to a separate thread and gets unlisted (meaning, nobody can reach it without a direct link) by a moderator.
The problem is that communities want to have (or at least tolerate having) these demographic surveys in the first place. The easiest way to avoid identity politics drama is to avoid identity politics, and the easiest way to avoid identity politics is to minimize and discourage mention of identity. pg was right (https://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html).
Open source is for everyone. The OSI is abundantly clear about this. For any given project this means everyone in principle; there is no obligation to check whether you have collected all the identity Pokemon. If your group is small this is impossible and if it is large then it is either inevitable or a failure is not your fault (and trying to force the issue is in fact the discriminatory thing). Besides which, the identity Pokedex doesn't exist in the first place. Why even invite the argument about the categories that need to be considered?
You don't draw a circle by adding more sides. You draw it by using a damn compass.
i mean, this is a set of opinions and positions that are far beyond anything that could be called "moderate opinion[s] on gender representation" and are pretty uncontroversially terrible, particularly in the context of any non-homogeneous community of people
if you post something like this to the public internet and stand behind it, then man i'm not sure what you expect, you're self-identifying as an asshole, and it can't be surprising when you're banned from places as a consequence
edit: good lord, i clicked around a bit more on that website, dude is obviously a psychopath, and i feel duped even responding to this kind of nonsense
Could you state, for the record, your understanding of what "opinions and positions" are concretely expressed there, and your estimate of what proportion of the general population you'd expect to agree with them? I'm having a hard time understanding what you find objectionable there, aside perhaps from the fact that a political ideology is being criticized in arguably disparaging terms.
> The first step to resist or undo Woke Invasion in your organization (or your psyche) is to thoroughly understand its creed Critical Race Theory, so as to uncover the fact that generally speaking woke disciples care less about the problems in the world than assuaging their self-centered ideological feelings. 1 The next step, obviously, is then to effectuate an elimination of the wannabe woke invaders from your organization by instituting a culture based on common sense values stripped of identity politics.
this wildly pejorative definition of the central concept at play in the discussion, probably, is a good start to what i find objectionable, yeah?
or maybe the author's own definition of "wokeism"
> Wokeism is a secular religion that originated in the United States of America, based on the pseudoscienfic field Critical Race Theory. It presumably took roots around 2016 (see Woke Invasion) and has been withering away since around 2024. Bigoted ideologies like neoracism fall under wokeism.
which is about on the same level as vaccines cause autism
i'm sure there are lots of people who think otherwise and maybe you're one of them but frankly there is nothing useful to be gained by arguing the merits of this kind of stupidity
> which is about on the same level as vaccines cause autism... but frankly there is nothing useful to be gained by arguing the merits of this kind of stupidity
I prefer to follow the HN guidelines and not use language like that, but the feeling is mutual. (And I can assure you that the ideas you're trying to dismiss as fringe are in fact quite widely supported.)
Regardless, I'll try:
Certainly srid's rhetoric there would not be appropriate in the HN comment section (and you can see a clear difference in style between that rhetoric and srid's actual HN comments). But it frankly comes across that you primarily object to the fact that someone else doesn't like your politics and seeks to prevent such politics from taking root in more places.
And srid very clearly refers to documented and evidenced phenomena: many academics are quite open about their use of CRT, and there are clear connections between that theory and observable real-world policy (in particular, policies that attempt to effectively implement racial quotas while pretending they are not racial quotas), and abundant critiques of the pseudoscience involved. What is here called "neoracism" (not a term I've heard anywhere else) seems to simply mean racism that targets white people (and sometimes Asians; and where this happens, pointing out Asian victims often seems required in order to get anyone to care). This demonstrably exists (the people claiming it not to exist will commonly engage in it, and commonly seek to redefine terms to excuse themselves), is obviously bigoted (on basic principles of morality that children understand), and has clear real-world impact (see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Students_for_Fair_Admissions_v...).
Your shallow dismissal of all of this, aside from not being how we do things here, is ignorant of the available evidence. Taking the so-called "Diversity, Equity and Inclusion" efforts at face value is a mistake. We are talking here about people who believe that racism is inherent to being white (https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22all+white+people+are+racist%22), and invent terms like "whiteness" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whiteness_theory) in order to perpetuate harmful stereotypes (leading to additional concepts like "white fragility", "white defensiveness", "white degeneracy", "white space" etc.). It is pseudoscientific because many of those terms are aimed at not only dismissing criticism without addressing it, but holding up the act of criticism itself as evidence.
> There is nothing "anachronistic" about pointing out the clear, well-evidenced facts about the racism that is demonstrably being perpetuated today.
You were cherry picking
I am a long way from the Americas (New Zealand), so I know little of the racism in the USA
But here the realisation that our dominant paradigms were based on racist and sexist assumptions has lead to an enormous flowering of culture. Don't knock it, it has made social conditions much better especially for young people (as economic conditions got much worse)
From this distance it looks to me that racism in particular and bigotry and prejudice in general in the USA are deeply entrenched and backed by violent fanatics on all sides. The reactionary bigots appear to have the upper hand for now, but it looks like it will not hold
I hope the USA can avoid the sort of violent conflicts of the 1860s, not looking good
>> our dominant paradigms were based on racist and sexist assumptions
> I don't think they actually were.
Open a book!
The dscovery doctrine
In the USA there is westward expansion, both genocidal and racist
Women have only been entitled to equal pay since the 1970s in most places
Indigenous Australians were only considered fully people in the 1960s
Most European countries restricted the rights of Jews until mid nineteenth century (or worse)
The Tasmainian genocide
In New Zealand the invasion of the Waikato
Canadian Christian schools
In New Zealand Māori were denied university education from about 1880 until the 1970s (a very few snuck through, some pretending they were foreign)
It was legal to rape your wife until very recently
When a woman married she had to resign her job (my grandmother)
Until the 1960s in NZ a married woman needed her husband's permission for a bank loan
On and on, from my memory banks. I am no historian nor sociologist so I may have buzzed some details, but you should get the point. The West's dominant paradigms are historically deeply racist and sexist.
More generally it is prejudice and bigotry
Whatever, you should see why DEI, even if it has become a box ticking farce, it has deep roots in desperate need
private communities (which in this context would include any website that doesnt end in .gov) banning assholes, has no impact on the human rights of those banned assholes, it is not a human right that you get to have an account on a private website
in the same way that getting trespassed from chipotle for not wearing pants when ordering your burrito bowl, doesn't mean your rights have been violated
Surely there is some implied right, as a user and developer on Nix to take part in the forums?
Should the quality of your opinions, outside the forum, be considered?
It is a difficult problem when dealing with notorious assholes. If they are playing a constructive part inside the organisation, at what level of notoriety and assholeness should the moderators pull the pin?
Lots of talk about them, but nobody will just say what they are?