[lillian-lemmer]

He should have been expelled the second he was harshly transphobic to me, e.g., calling me a "tranny." I'm the trans woman Randi talks about in that article. There were many times he should have been kicked out, but in the end nobody cared enough about women's issues, or there was no real recourse for such.

But since that didn't happen, Randi is trying to bring attention to the fact that the above isn't how things work.

EDIT TO CLARIFY: the man I'm referring to is the FreeBSD contributor Randi Harper speaks of in the article, not the voosh guy.

[engi_nerd]

I have no feelings of transphobia whatsoever and it's only within the past year or so that I learned that "tranny" is offensive. This is not me saying that his comment wasn't transphobic (because how would I know? but you certainly would)

I'm merely lamenting my past ignorance.

[meesterdude]

I don't understand how that could ever come up. How you being trans has any bearing whatsoever at all in your involvement with the community.

You don't have to like it(trans), or understand it; but you do have to accept it, and be accepting. And there's just no excuse or room for that kind of thing in a project. Maybe on 4chan and maybe on reddit, but not in an OSS project. Who the fuck acts like that? I just don't get it.

[dogma1138]

I would bet you that I've been called "jew" more times than you been called a "tranny" over the internet usually followed by about 20min of heil hitler spam and other funny jokes from various IRC bots, I just shrugged it off....

[awesomerobot]

It seems weird to say "this shitty thing happens to me too" and instead of commiserating and saying "this shitty thing shouldn't happen to anyone" you essentially say "stop complaining."

[dogma1138]

"this shitty thing shouldn't happen to anyone" you are not going to abolish "harassment" (I intentionally used quotation marks I don't some one who uses slur or thinks you shouldn't exist as harassment just another idiot with an opinion...) from human cloture it's included in the price you pay for living in a free society where free speech is an actuality and not a slogan. You won't cure the world of idiots, troll, or even simply cruel people and the price you'll pay in trying is way too high for my taste.

[geofft]

I'm not entirely sure that it's to the advantage of an operating system development project to have free speech as an ideal.

At the very least, there's the empirical argument that the major operating systems are overwhelmingly developed by private corporations, and you can be sure that if a developer said "hey, this new hire is getting his white supremacist followers on Twitter to attack me," the new hire wouldn't be working on that project very much more. And we generally don't find the price of this less-than-free speech too much to pay.

Can you explain why it helps develop a better net installer or Linux emulation layer to be able to use slurs against fellow developers?

[dogma1138]

What this has to do with software development? A COC has nothing to do with software development it's not enforcing anything related to actually committing code and collaborating.

A COC forces you to be compliant to it every where on social media, on regular media, in person, on private forums... everywhere - this is thought police.

A COC forces you to "hide" your personal beliefs, ideas, who you vote for who you donate money to etc. on the off chance they might be considered offensive to some one.

We already had a CEO who had to resign due to a political donation, COC's will have the same effect you post something offensive on facebook? you're out, you go to a political rally that some one finds offensive? well though luck.

If COC's only covered official project channels no one would care about them, and the people that want them would not push with such vigor because they could not be used for thought policing.

On a side note I find it ironic that people who had to hide who they are for most of history and maybe for most of their lives want to force the same thing on other people just because of their personal beliefs.

And on another side note the wworse of the humanity tends to fester in dark rooms when things are out in the open you know here everyone stands and you can ridicule them for that if you want.

[lillian-lemmer]

> On a side note I find it ironic that people who had to hide who they are for most of history and maybe for most of their lives want to force the same thing on other people just because of their personal beliefs.

I love how you're comparing the choice of being a person who dehumanizes and threatens vulnerable people as like... a demographic to compare to being a woman, or being trans, etc.

[rewqfdsa]

This thread is the most depressing thing I've read on Hacker News in months. I completely agree with you, dogma1138. You and I appear to be only ones who don't view the world through justice-colored glasses and who understand that attempting to enforce strict ideological conformity is self-defeating.

[awesomerobot]

If someone mourns for a death do you just say "well everyone dies, suck it up?" — no, because that's ridiculous. So when someone is being harassed why say "it happens to everyone so get over it"? Why go out of your way to invalidate how someone feels about something?

where free speech is an actuality and not a slogan.

Harassment isn't protected speech, and that's beyond the point because this isn't an issue of free speech at all.

the price you'll pay in trying is way too high for my taste

Someone in an organized community was being harassed, and they're upset that leadership of that community didn't seem to think it was a problem. The price being paid is that someone harassing a community member isn't part of the community anymore. That's a high price?

[fche]

"Someone in an organized community was being harassed"

Note that one of the twists & turns in this sorry saga was that the same freebsd developer submitted a documented harassment complaint against Randi. The freebsd CoC was in effect by this time, but it doesn't seem like it was helpful.

[dogma1138]

>Protected speech

That's an american definition, all forms of speech should be protected even hate speech, when hate is being pushed to the sidelines it only festers and becomes worse, let it be in the open and let it be ridiculed.

>Someone in an organized community was being harassed

Some one claimed to be harassed (there's a very thick and really not one sided story behind all this), considering the authors day to day activities allot of the things she does are also harassment or is calling out some one all the time for their beliefs is only harassment if those beliefs are currently socially progressive?

>The price being paid is that someone harassing a community member isn't part of the community anymore. That's a high price?

Well the price in this case was that she wasn't in the community any more, mostly because of her doing I would guess but I really don't want to get into that.

Communities tend to cast out the ones that cause the most disturbance and disturbance is often not a person who aggravates some one but a person who gets aggravated allot, usually by many people and about many issues.

Most communities are self managing (and do it quite well) if you find your self out of place all the time and being constantly cast out and "harassed" even if you are in the right it might be worth the time to take a deep look at one self and understand how you can adapt better and what different actions you might be able to take to avoid that because clearly; dichotomy and my way or the high way doesn't work and even in cases when it does it won't work for long and at the end will might be your own undoing because there always will be a more progressive agenda that will just as easily hijack the current one as yours did before it.

I really miss the days when progressiveness was about open dialog, accepting others and most importantly being open to your own ideas being challenged as much as you challenge the ideas of others, today progressiveness especially in online communities boils down to some unholy checklist which gets updated every so often with the latest social fab being mandatory for maintaining membership privileges.

[lillian-lemmer]

Every time you step out the door do you wonder if you'll be killed for who you are? Do you worry that you can't go to the police for who you are? Do you ever worry about fighting an entire legal and medical system to be who you are?

Etc.

[dogma1138]

>When (Every time) you step out the door do you wonder if you'll be killed for who you are

Yes.

>Did (do) you worry that you can't go to the police for who you are

Yes.

Most recently in Malmo.