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by giantandroids 1832 days ago
Had first hand experience of this. I maintain an opensource project which is popular on NPM. An issue was raised in our github about we should have a statement of support for BLM in our readme. I said no as politely and diplomatically as possible. I would rather the project remains non-political, they said that made me complicit.

The thing is I am from Europe. I think BLM is a very worthy policial movement, as do I also think there are injustices in palestine and the with Uyghurs etc, but we are going to end up with most of our Readme filed with political statements at that rate. What to me as a Euro gives extra merit to US politics than that of the rest of the world?

4 comments

This behavior looks like proselytizing. They want you to show that you accept and endorse their ideology. And if you don’t, then they have a reason to follow up and apply pressure. In a different time these people would have been missionaries and inquisitors.
While I hate to sound like a conspiracy theorist, there have been demonstrated instances where that behavior comes from trolls trying to stir up trouble and cast doubts on the merits of social movements. BLM even has a web site where you can report it:

https://blacklivesmatter.com/help-us-fight-disinformation/

I have no idea if that's the case here. I've also known over-zealous supporters of movements to do the same thing.

I'd just caution you to be skeptical about apparent misbehavior. Our existing animosities are being amplified, sometimes for lulz and sometimes for political gain. This person was, undoubtedly, a jerk, but exactly what kind of jerk may not be quite so clear as it might seem.

You're not the only one. I've seen this behavior in other projects. The patter was also similar as you described.

In my company we had some people trying to get this stuff into our corporate mail, thankfully there was enough pushback to keep the corporate mail corporate.

Also, I'd rather worry about stuff in my country than american internal affairs.

> I also think there are injustices in palestine and the with Uyghurs etc, but we are going to end up with most of our Readme filed with political statements at that rate.

I brought this same point up in a discussion once, but the response was that BLM is the number-one pressing sociopolitical issue in the world today, and it was offensive that I would even suggest that other examples of oppression in the world are comparable to the greater oppression that African-Americans face.