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"Natural tendency" does not mean intention. Few people intend to make minorities feel less welcome, but many more adhere to habits and cultural norms which have that effect. Here's an example from right here a couple of days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18061725 Another example: where I work, I recently took someone to task for saying "your shit is broken" in a very public thread. It's a phrase I've seen too many times at this company. Sure, it might just seem casual to a California millennial, no big deal, but it can come across very differently to someone from a higher-context and more status-conscious culture - e.g. most of Asia, and therefore a significant portion of our workforce. It can have strong and lasting effects on their willingness to engage with you personally, or with the broader community. Am I saying that we should all dumb down our language to the blandest common denominator? F* no. The important thing is to calibrate your behavior to the environment. If you know the people you're talking to, and the subject of the comment is not personal, let fly. Knock yourself out. If you're talking to someone you don't know, in front of many others you don't know, and the comment could be interpreted as personal (hint: if "you" or "your" is in it), then maybe you should apply a measure of decorum and cultural sensitivity. |
In fact, your attitude is highly patronizing and condescending, the fact that you don't see it, is problematic.
Linux Kernel was being run ok so far. Sure there were rants from Torvalds which went overboard sometimes but accept it as a quirk of the maintainer and move on. Including this COC is a huge can of worms though. Now you can be Brendan Eiche'd out of any open source project. When that happens, perhaps you'll be celebrating a win for your progressive values but a more real happening at that point would've been loss of good open source software which some of your pet minorities could have used.