[alkonaut]

Politics is everywhere and everything. There is no chance of "keeping politics out of" anything. Making such a decision or rule is highly political too. This goes for sports, entertainment, culture, tech, open source.. The fact that there are "counterexamples" of successful projects that "thrive without involving politics and never had a CoC" isn't an argument to the contrary.

[commitpizza]

I get that there will be politics enough to go around and honestly I only think it strenghten my point. There is no need to bring in external politics since there is enough in the technical space alone.

[alkonaut]

I mean external politics, not "office politics". There is no meaningful way of separating any group of people working together (a company, an OSS project, whatever) and politics.

[commitpizza]

I understood that, I just think your arguments are bad.

> There is no chance of "keeping politics out of" anything. Making such a decision or rule is highly political too.

Of course there is and such a decision is not about general politics or highly political. It's a bit like saying forbidding smoking on school grounds will never make it go away so we should just let the kids smoke. In fact, I would argue that Rust already has a lot of political rules in the code of conduct.

Even if people will break the rules there is still value in creating such rules but that will obviously only work as long as the people making the rules also abide by them which is not the case in the Rust community (among many others). It's obvious that certain political views are prohibited while others are welcome.

I guess what I am disappointed in is the constant double standards. They can have "black lives matters" on their webpage but if I were to link to a anti-trans movement (just making an example) on their discord it wouldn't take long until I'm banned. Anti trans movements and black lives matter has nothing to do with most development projects, thus none should be pushed on their websites.

[lelanthran]

> Politics is everywhere and everything.

Sure, but just because the $FOO software project is happy to incorporate political views on User Freedoms vs Developer Freedoms, it doesn't mean that proselytsing some particular political candidate is welcome.

IOW, when people reject a particular political topic, you can't very well turn around and say "How dare you; you talk about free software, and that's political too!"

A community willing to engage in one political activity doesn't automagically open the door for every vocal minotiry to spam them until they cave.

[loopdoend]

I wonder why we don't see the same thing on academic papers. Surely the people writing those papers are also affected by politics.

But somehow it is acceptable for programming languages.

[alkonaut]

Academic papers are usually written by a small group. But I imagine for large collaborations like papers from LHC and similar you'd have to deal with some of the same issues any major org. It comes at you very quickly. Can you hold an important meeting on the day 2 people of 100 are away because it's a religious holiday? What do you do about the fact that the Ukrainian guy refuses to work until the Russian guy is kicked out of the team? And the research itself is of course interfacing with politics all the time whether they like it or not. Of course more in climate research or economics than in theoretical physics but it's still there.

[H12]

I also find myself frequently questioning the labeling of things one doesn't like as "political".

Having a code of conduct that focuses on treating people w/ respect and discouraging personal attacks is not political, and it's strange to me that someone would label it as such.

[Veen]

That's an interesting way of framing a position: "I think X and all the obvious counter-examples that might prove me wrong are irrelevant.", "Why are they irrelevant?", "Because I just said they are!".

Anyway, you're equivocating around the meaning of "politics". Yes, everything involving people is political in some sense. But that isn't the sense people here are talking about.

[alkonaut]

I just preempted the usual answer "look at X, they don't have a lot of politics and they seem to be doing OK" because it's such an obvious non-argument that it shouldn't even need explaining.