First one I can recall was the meritocracy scandal, where they tried to put a rug promoting meritocracy, and their in-house feminist Julie-Ann Horvath (nudged by her friends) complained in the general sense of "meritocracy is bad since it's racist and sexist". The caved in and removed the rug.
Said Julie-Ann Horvath later got in a fight with a (CEO&founder)'s wife, left the company and made another huge scandal. She accused the company of sexism and sexual harassment (independent investigator found none, and other female Github engineers said there was nothing wrong), accused a co-worker of systematically removing her code from repos since, I quote, "I wouldn't let him fuck me" (independent investigator found that he was actually fixing her errors), and that CEO's wife overstepped her boundaries and used company resources for her own projects [1] (independent investigator found that to be true, and CEO stepped down).
JAH also complained of terrible sexual harassment - that is, men looking at women spinning hula hoops. Women did not complain, but JAH got offended on their behalf anyway.
In the end, she left with a loud door slam, smeared a bunch of Github people, and in general had a huge meltdown on Twitter, as you do.
Then, as mentioned, there was a bunch of scandals where people had their repos removed (like C+=, a language satirizing the more, uh, out-there ideas expressed by the feminists; or a few repos related to GamerGate).
The latest in a series was a repo threatened with removal (or removed?) for using the word 'retarded'.
Then they added a CoC endorsing anti-white racism and anti-male sexism: "Github's new Code of Conduct says "Our open source community prioritizes marginalized people’s safety over privileged people’s comfort." and will not act on "reverse" racism, sexism, etc." [2]
Well, at least we have BitBucket, GitLab et al.
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[1] That's one empowered woman! What's not to like here? - TA
>that CEO's wife overstepped her boundaries and used company resources for her own projects [1] (independent investigator found that to be true, and CEO stepped down).
This is particularly fun to note, because it shows that these investigators were not being easy/taking the side of the CEO. In short, it gives strong evidence they really were independent investigators.
Sigh... there is so much wrong with what you've posted here, but I don't want to get into a screaming match with you about it. I just wish you didn't consider enemies the women who are trying to make things better for women, and that you would not consider the majority opinion of Reddit to be correct.
I wonder how big this cultural divide really is, or if it just seems this big online. In my usual workplaces, nobody would be as systematically angry as you seem to be about a woman and a company asking other people to be nice.
It doesn't seem to me that the user you're replying to is "systematically angry." Furthermore, the independent contractors were truly independent, and the Twitter meltdown and smearing were real. Those are real, harmful actions which should not be ignored.
Furthermore, people are attempting to hold on to their ability to speak freely, to not have to monitor their own speech. There is no way to stop other people from being offended. No matter what you do, it will be offensive to someone. So should that person have the right to police you and to take down something that's yours? And what if you disagree with that person?
I'm not exactly sure what you mean by people having to "monitor their own speech." You should think about what you're saying before you say it, right? You should consider if what you're saying is offensive to other people, right? That's just part of being a decent, responsible, adult human being – in my opinion.
Honestly, saying that anything you do will be offensive is a weak evasion of personal responsibility. It's like saying that you might as well eat Big Macs for every meal since all food can be unhealthy, under certain circumstances. While the premise is technically true, the conclusion is flawed. It's a spectrum, with behavior on one end being better than behavior on the other end.
To your last point, of course some rando who's offended by my statement should haven't the right to police me or take down something I wrote. But they do have the right to respond to what I wrote, point it out to others, argue with me, criticize me for it, etc. And I have the right to argue back, ignore them, or even – as crazy as it sounds – consider if their feelings might be sincere and worth me reevaluating my statement.
Anyway, this became longer than I intended. I'm just trying to say that, to paraphrase Carl Sagan, as fellow creatures inhabiting this pale blue dot, we have an obligation to deal kindly with one another. The fact that some people are jerks doesn't obviate that.
The repositories mentioned in the post three levels above yours were taken down. There was no arguing back or ignoring.
I am not advocating of getting rid of kindness, and I think that preventing racism is a noble idea. And I'm not obviating a responsibility to avoid offending people by commenters who want to be taken seriously. But in the end, it is nearly impossible to entirely rid yourself of offense. Freedom of speech is necessary for productive environments, and it's been proven that people behave differently and speak differently when they know they're being watched.
There's a difference between attempting to be taken seriously and being disingenuous about who you are and they way you think. I believe in freedom of speech above all.
If I call you a retard it's probably not that insulting to you. But it does cause offence in a large group of other people. And those people were not my target. So the word retard is a suboptimal choice for those two reasons.
The other way to use retard as an insult is to use it against people with a learning disability. I don't think that's what you're defending -- verbal aggression by mostly rich programmers of mostly poor vulnerable people.
I'm not exactly sure what you mean by people having to "monitor their own speech." You should think about what you're saying before you say it, right? You should consider if what you're saying is offensive to other people, right? That's just part of being a decent, responsible, adult human being – in my opinion.
My go-to example is generally something along the lines of, religious people might be offended by atheist philosophies. Does that mean atheists should refrain from speaking about their beliefs to avoid potentially offending someone? What about the reverse, should religious people refrain from speaking about religion to avoid offending people of a different (or no) religion?
Or for an example closer to the context of the discussion, is it rude or offensive to argue that a wage gap between men and women doesn't actually exist? Or that employers shouldn't hire women purely based on a need to balance out a gender disparity in their employees?
I'm sure there are plenty of people would be offended by those arguments. Does that mean people should refrain from using them?
Or a simpler example: people who believe vaccines cause autism are extremely stupid and responsible for the death of extremely high numbers of children. To the extent that is legally possible, they should be shamed and ostracized for their dangerous behavior in an attempt to save the lives of vulnerable children.
Actually, the above is two examples. One where I stop after the first sentence, one where I include both. It is extremely offensive to some people, and the second (extended) version even includes a call to action that can be considered outright harmful (but done to reduce what is viewed by those who take the call as a greater harm).
Now in some cases, such as talking to someone who holds an anti-vaxxer view point, being offensive is counter productive. But when calling those already on your side to action, using such wording can motivate and mobilize others in ways that more sanitized language cannot.
> But when calling those already on your side to action, using such wording can motivate and mobilize others in ways that more sanitized language cannot.
Well said, it's hard to convey severity without using severe language.
Well, it does say they "won't act on reverse-racism or reverse-sexism", so, depending on how you interpret that I can see what he's trying to say at least. "Endorses" is strong, but "ignores" would be correct. And one could imply something about the authors of this CoC from that.
If you take action to ban all things in some group A, and then make an explicit exception to not ban some subgroup B, it seems pretty close to endorsing subgroup B. If they had not called the exception, but instead just ignored reports about it, that would seem more like ignoring.
For a comparison, say you have a party at your house that gets out of hand. Too many strangers show up. So you explicitly state that all guests are required to leave. There is a difference between telling some people they can stay (or saying I won't call the cops if you stay, but I'll call the cops on anyone else who stays) and just ignoring the few people who don't leave.
That is generally what reverse racism and reverse sexism is understood to mean. People on either side of the argument, when asked to define those two terms, would give similar definitions.
If anything betrays their political bent, it is that they view this as a negative thing. But the same could be said of those who do not view this as a negative thing.
Honestly I assumed it because his comments just read like a bitter MRA. But if you want, you can click his profile and confirm it for yourself like I did.
"Why do you assume a member who spouts KKK rhetoric is a white person?!?" -okasaki
Sigh... there is so much wrong with what you've posted here, but I don't want to get into a screaming match with you about it.
Seems strange to feign ambivalence while still responding to the post in question. If you really "didn't want to get into a shouting match", shouldn't you have just not responded at all?
I just didn't want to get into a point-by-point rebuttal with the original author. I'd rather talk about other things, like why "meritocracy" is a problem. A lot of people are surprised by it, since it seems like a good idea on the face of it.
Regardless of its origin (cf. the etymological fallacy), the term has come not to mean "rule by the adept", but rather rewarding accomplishment and efficiently using people's talents. It is a worthwhile ideal to strive towards regardless of how 'fair' things are in the real world. The complaints about the term are very far fetched, and require a huge number of ideological assumptions to even make sense.
I was tempted to give a perhaps too glib response that it allows them to live in a world where they might possibly be able to benefit from the advances wrought by the more talented, but that doesn't seem to get at your underlying concern.
My personal belief is that those who lacked the opportunities to develop themselves still deserve to live with dignity and full moral consideration, but that doesn't mean we should give them awards or accept their pull requests necessarily. Furthermore, if one apportions them a scarce resource at someone else's expense, I would consider that to be unjust.
I still don't quite get it - meritocracy should invite all to participate and have their contributions considered equally, that's what open source development in this style is about. To say it's not something we should strive for seems ridiculous.
It's a long article, and judging by the timestamps, you had less than five minutes to read it. Did you really read it in less than five minutes?
I suppose I need to give my slightly inaccurate summary: trying to judge people just based upon their contributions ends up only benefiting the elite who had unfair advantages to begin with, and intentionally silences any effort to compensate people who have inherent social disadvantages.
But the actual article, which I have my doubts you've read, explains this better.
> It's a long article, and by the timestamps, you had less than five minutes to read it. Did you really read it in less than five minutes?
Sorry, I had read it before. I just didn't really get an opportunity to discuss it.
> I suppose I need to give my slightly inaccurate summary: trying to judge people just based upon their contributions ends up only benefiting the elite who had unfair advantages to get those advantages, and intentionally silences any effort to compensate people who have inherent social disadvantages.
I'm not saying perfect meritocracy is something we have, but it's something we should strive for and act under at least. We shouldn't over or undervalue contributions just because someone is a certain race/gender/etc in my opinion. It's patronizing and to do so seems only to contribute to the problem further.
I think meritocracy is one of those things that seems well-intentioned like "separate but equal" or "don't ask don't tell" which sound like a good thing but in fact make things worse. It tries to fix a problem by ignoring it. You can't fix social disadvantages by pretending they don't exist. They exist for everything we do, including writing code.
> You can't fix social disadvantages by pretending they don't exist.
The goal of an open source project should not be to fix social disadvantages but to produce the best possible product. They do this best via meritocracy, accepting contributions happily from anyone and choosing the best of them, not by rewarding or punishing people for things which they cannot change. Doing so makes the resulting product worse as you're not getting the best code from the best people, but instead discriminating on other factors unrelated to your end goal.
Is it really "racist" or "sexist" to say this? Is it not the truth?
The goal of an open source project should not be to fix social disadvantages but to produce the best possible product.
Why? Lots of open source projects have social goals; for example, there's the Debian Social Contract, the Mozilla Manifesto, and Ubuntu is itself named after an humanitarian philosophy. These goals often override technical quality: Debian will rather ship a more buggy and incomplete FOSS software than one which doesn't comply with the Social Contract.
These are some hilariously bad examples. Every Debian user I know adds repositories which violate the social contract, for proprietary drivers, codecs, etc. Ubuntu, while it's named after a humanitarian concept removed this for this very reason: it goes against making the best product possible. I'd argue that most people prefer an OS without said social restrictions and I think Ubuntu is evidence of it rather than evidence against it. That said, most of the restrictions in the things you've listed are technical or legal in nature and _do_ actually have to do with the resulting product rather than unrelated social disadvantages. The Debian social contract simply states "no discrimination" which is certainly in line with meritocracy in my view of it at least.
To answer why: because people want quality software and political agendas are a niche at best. There are much better places to address such things.
Well, now you know one Debian user that doesn't have repositories in his machine that violate the social contract, and while I'm not a purist, the Social Contract is actually a significant part of why I like and support Debian.
I don't agree with the notion that you can neatly separate "politics" from the rest of your life. Every action that you do which affects others is inherently political, and publicly distributing software is no different. By just following along, one is simply weakly supporting the status quo - which might be fine, but should be consciously chosen nevertheless.
Regarding whether I want worse software because of my political opinions, it's not really relevant what I want; I do consider having social goals as a valid position for an open source / free software project.
> By just following along, one is simply weakly supporting the status quo - which might be fine, but should be consciously chosen nevertheless.
I am not supporting the status quo, I am simply supporting the best possible software we can produce. And I don't believe we produce that by rewarding or punishing people based on factors they can't change. This is not a matter of "following along", this is a matter of using the best people to the best of their abilities, regardless of these factors.
Well, yes and no. Imagine the opposite situation, where ImaginaryDB is revealed to have made a sweeping genocide possible. I doubt there would be an instant rush to switch DBs, but over time, I would bet many people would use something else. I would like to think that ethics are a part of every human endeavor (we're not quite there yet, unfortunately).
> where ImaginaryDB is revealed to have made a sweeping genocide possible.
Freedom 0 according to the FSF is the freedom to use the software for any purpose (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html). Genocide included. I don't see why that would make anyone switch unless the authors publicly said "yes, we support this genocide".
Software is a tool, plain and simple. A better example right now would be Tor or Bitcoin. People aren't flocking away from those for their use in crimes...
But not overtly so. It seems ill-intentioned to some of us today, but consider the people who were in favour of it:
"We are not mistreating them! We are treating them equally. We are keeping the races separate because [whatever reason], but nobody is being mistreated. We are being well-intentioned and everyone can still have equality."
The people who believed and supported separate-but-equal were genuinely thinking they were well-intentioned. They thought it was a good and necessary thing.
She obviously was not socially disadvantaged (as many people in inner cities, etc are), since she had a decent paying developer position at GitHub.
Perhaps, just perhaps...instead of spending time dealing with the rug, she could have brushed up on her coding skills (since someone else had to fix her coding defects for her)?
Overcoming social disadvantage requires some work, you know.
> She obviously was not socially disadvantaged (as many people in inner cities, etc are), since she had a decent paying developer position at GitHub.
She might not be socially disadvantaged with respect to inner city dwellers, but she's still socially disadvantaged with respect to men.
Please don't make me reiterate all of the things that women have to put up with and men don't, especially in tech. Just because she got a job does not mean that we've solved patriarchy.
She's not evidently incompetent. She apparently wrote some bugs. We all write bugs.
You are a bit too antagonistic and you sound too emotional in your responses. Please be more charitable. I am not able to respond well to such an unfriendly tone.
I think a lot of people are opposed to sexism or racism precisely because they undermine meritocracy. If you take away fairness or meritocracy as a goal, you are left with chauvinism, supremacy, and tribalism masquerading as their opposites.
Remember that the symbol for gay pride, the Pink Triangle, was branding used by Nazi Germany to denote rapists, sex offenders, and gays for gas chambers and labor camps. It was not meant to have positive connotations.
What I meant here is that we should not lose sight of the original idea behind meritocracy. The author of The Rise of the Meritocracy was arguing that a meritocracy becomes a clique who defines what "merit" means. If you do not think there is any merit in being nice to others, you end up defending toxic behaviours under the guise of justice and equality.
This list is weak. There really isn't anything there. None of these were actually major fiascos and most of them have nothing to do with hosting code.
I'm actually glad that they removed the satirical language repo and the one that used the word `retarded` and I don't believe that anybody actually endorses anti-white racism or anti-male sexism. You should feel bad for spreading that around.
I'm sorry, but anti-white racism and anti-male sexism aren't real things. Sexism is clearly a thing, as shown by your very sexist comment. Stop making HN an unsafe place for women.
The same "facts" could have been stated in a very different way. For example, I could tell the story like this:
"An employee complained about sexual harassment at Github. The confirmation of some of her accusations by an independent investigator led the CEO to step down."
The only references to sexual harrasment I found in OPs post was:
> She accused the company of sexism and sexual harassment (independent investigator found none, and other female Github engineers said there was nothing wrong)
> JAH also complained of terrible sexual harassment - that is, men looking at women spinning hula hoops. Women did not complain, but JAH got offended on their behalf anyway.
Are these not facts? Were "men looking at women spinning hula hoops" and this other individual brought it to someone's attention as sexual harassment?
> I'm sorry, but anti-white racism and anti-male sexism aren't real things.
Even by the narrow "power plus prejudice" definition this is false; this is pretty readily observable, in the first instance, in lots of contexts where whites are not in a position of power (even in localized contexts embedded in broader societies where whites are in a position of power.)
They may be less significant in modern American society because of the general power distribution in the overall society and therefore the most common power distribution in particular contexts embedded within that society, but that's very different than not being real things.
There's no anti-white racial oppression going on (in the US; may differ by region). There may be instances of anti-white racial discrimination.
There's no anti-male sexist oppression going. There may be instances of anti-male sexist discrimination (eg. assuming that male kindergarten teachers are child molesters).
Two different definitions of sexism and racism.
Depending on the definition of racism and sexism, the "anti-white" and "anti-male" variants may exist or not. Please don't assume that your definition (which seems to be of the "oppression" kind) is universal.
Not just that, GitHub's new Code of Conduct is pretty sketchy (e.g. racism is against the CoC but "reverse" racism isn't). The exact quote is:
"We will not act on complaints regarding ‘Reverse’ -isms, including ‘reverse racism,’ ‘reverse sexism,’ and ‘cisphobia’" which is stupid and not really a thing. It's not reverse racism, its just racism.
Also, GitHub has been removing other projects, like some Gamergate ones (like this markdown only repo: http://imgur.com/a/CMRVq). Regardless of your opinion on Gamergate, the repos weren't violating the ToS and shouldn't have been removed.
Phrases like "there's no such thing as reverse racism" seem inherently ambiguous and prone to causing argument, mainly because two very opposed sides can both say the same statement:
- "There's no such thing as reverse racism (because any kind of discrimination based on race is racism and we shouldn't be diminishing some kinds of discrimination)"
- "There's no such thing as reverse racism (because it's impossible to be racist against people who are in the Oppressive Group category)"
It's a namespace collision that can inadvertently give "support to the other side."
Though, it's the same thing with words like "racist." There's a generally universal desire in our society to not want to be "racist" in the sense of "common-usage-racism," discriminating against others based on group identities. Thrown into this mix is a new "academic-racism" definition of "racist," which requires "privilege+power" and demotes anything that doesn't fit into mere "discrimination" (which apparently isn't a bad thing anymore by itself?).
The reason why this new concept (which, let's be honest, is different than the common-usage meaning of racism) has the same name is because there is an ideological/political strength in namespace collisions or identifier overloading. By using the same taboo word for two different concepts, the new meaning can insert itself as the dominant meaning.
This is a little off-topic, but discrimination has never been a bad thing by itself. Discrimination means using judgment to differentiate two things or people. There are many ways in which we can discriminate that are useful and entirely valid (e.g. "this guy has a long history of scamming people and no sign he's really changed, so I'm not going to invest my money with him").
> Thrown into this mix is a new "academic-racism" definition of "racist," which requires "privilege+power" and demotes anything that doesn't fit into mere "discrimination"
Is this "academic-racism" an American thing or is it universally accepted in academia?
Seems clear to me. "Reverse racism" isn't a thing. It's simply racism to view a person as inferior or superior based on their race. Reverse racism would be, I guess, saying your own race is inferior?
Except "Reverse Racism" has a specific meaning, which is racism against a majority group (e.g. white people). There are people who believe that you can't be racist against a majority group, that it's called "reverse racism", and isn't a legitimate issue.
Racism is racism, whether the group being stereotyped is a minority or a majority. It minimizes the detrimental effect of a racist behavior to say it's "reverse racism". It's euphemistic language that serves no purpose in its colloquial usage other than for a member of a majority group to claim victimization, usually when they themselves have exhibited a prejudice against the "reverse racist".
EDIT: to be clear, people who believe that reverse racism isn't a thing are semantically correct, it's just racism. And whether it's against a minority or majority group - terms which, themselves, are prime to define a disparity between two groups - it's unjustifiable.
What you just described is still called racism, no need to prepend the word 'reverse'. But, I doubt many people are going to take fears/claims of discrimination against white people in western countries seriously, because it's either a cover for actual racism or paranoia.
Presumably, since up further in the CoC you're expected to be welcoming to people of all races/sexes, you can't treat white people like crap. This technically wouldn't be "reverse racism", but should still be prohibited. I have very low expectation that this framing would be recognized though, based on how these things have played out before.
It is also not clear to me if the CoC applies to behavior outside the community, or re. nonmembers.
"You cannot do / say X because you're skin color / gender / sexual orientation Y" is racism / sexism, end of. "Affirmative Action" (which is doublespeak for "we prefer minorities") is racist/sexist too (and often referred to as being reverse racism).
Reverse racism is used (in my experience) to define racist behaviors taken as a response to "original" racism. Examples include quota systems at universities, or otherwise discriminating against whites/majorities in the name of social justice.
It's racism, but with a modifier to make it clear what's being talked about. I don't know why you're trying so hard to make it "not a thing".
Racism according to its academic description has to be systematic. i.e. A white person can be discriminated against because they are white but because its not systematic, i.e. within our social system infectiosly, its not racism.
I think it's a good thing that safe spaces at reddit and Github are evaporating for toxic angry people forcing them into seedier, more isolated silos. Having said that GitHub has been turning into a bit of a joke with extremes from both ends of the spectrum turning GitHub into a personal soap box.
I consider GitHub to be a an employment related website and treat it as such. It's like my resume. I'm not going to write my opinions about politics and social issues across my resume so I don't comment on this stuff there or get involved in any shape or form and you shouldn't either. It's not the place.
Oddly enough the people who advocate for "safe spaces" often seem to be the "toxic angry people" themselves. That's at least what I've seen when these fallouts happen.
Indeed. Who you consider "toxic" and "angry" depends mostly on what side you take. It's best to keep all politics out of work-related places like Github. Unfortunately, their new Code of Conduct seems to encourage such stances.
So, first of all, I'm 100% against harassment and discrimination like racism/sexism.
But "safe spaces" are taking things way too far. If you have to constantly self censor yourself because the person on the other side may get upset and get you or your project banned, it hinders discussion, critique, feedback, reviews, etc.
It's not just "toxic angry people" who are being forced out. With policies like this, we see time and time again that people holding certain viewpoints or disagreeing with other people are affected too. Even if they are politely doing so.
For someone who lives outside the USA, what's the standard meaning of 'reverse racism'?
I think I understand, as in: if the standard meaning of racism is a majority (Caucasian in this case) oppressing a minority (black, Mexican, asian, etc) then is reverse racism when said minority oppresses or acts against said majority?
I hope not, that seems wrong.
Prejudice (against a ethnicity, culture, class, gender, sexual orientation, religion, etc) is wrong no matter the percentage of the majority/minority doing it involved
Let's not forget the whole "I'm going to build a business around and name my company after a GPL project, and then proceed to trash the GPL at OSCON" fiasco.
We are, after all, talking about a GNU project here.
Software industry is becoming so dependant of github hosted open source project that is if github is down for a long time, it could hurt software industry seriously.
