[scarmig]

I want to push against this silence is complicity mindset.

Looking at your profile, I can point out countless atrocities that you don't explicitly denounce. Do I see you upset about how Israel has amped up its program of settler colonialism in Palestine in the past few weeks? How the PRC is running literal concentration camps in Xinjiang? Or, moving along to the USA, how men have extraordinarily high suicide rates? Or how the elderly are being sacrificed at the altar of economic growth in the midst of COVID-19? Or, thinking long term, the tens of millions of people who will die because of climate change?

I don't. And, for what it's worth, I wouldn't be surprised if you have "correct" points of view on all of those. But you're still being complicit in deprioritizing those things and prioritizing your own set of causes, at the expense of human lives. And if you're indeed complicit in a conspiracy of silence on them, you've got blood on your hands.

Brandon Dail was demanding someone add some kind of explicit support for BLM to a Github repo. Where does that stop? I can think of hundreds of very worthy causes that need more publicizing. Is what we ultimately need some long list of evils that every open source project needs to denounce before right-thinking people can choose to use them? And, if you choose to use e.g. Linux, can I denounce you for choosing to use software that is complicit in a conspiracy to terminate black men's lives?

People can prioritize and take action on different causes in whatever way they want to. It's fine to ask individuals to reprioritize, but you're not entitled to anything. And, tactically speaking, ever-increasing stridency of tone and denunciation of imagined enemies is not an effective way to gather support for a cause.

[achiang]

I don't have a platform the size that the recoil author has.

That's the difference.

[fastball]

So where it does it start and where does it end?

What threshold must you cross (in terms of platform size) for silence to equal complicity? Since it apparently doesn't apply to you, but it does apply to a GitHub repo.

Once you've made up your imaginary platform size threshold, which movements must people not be silent on, lest they find themselves complicit through silence? Is it ALL political movements? Those READMEs are gonna get pretty long if so. Is it only the "most important political issue at the moment" that needs to be voiced? Who decides what the most pressing issue is? Is there some sort of vote going on that I don't know about? When is it OK to start being silent again? If he puts up a BLM message in his repo and then takes it down the next day, is that OK? Or does he need to keep it in there forever (because presumably Black Lives always Matter, so he should keep it in there indefinitely, right?)

There are way, way too many things going on for silence to mean complicity.

Take any other humanitarian crisis, and ask yourself if anyone silent must be complicit. Think about it for a second. It's just not true. If someone in Germany were to not speak out against the Nazis rounding up Jews, but at the same time was hiding Jews in their basement, would that person be "complicit" in the Nazis crimes?