alt Hacker News> "Non-political community" is an oxymoron
No it's not.
I'm an LGBT person with a trans partner and I find many codes of conduct to be chastising and purposefully finger pointing to conservative people.
A lot of them are basically, "your religious teachings or cultural upbringing aren't welcome here"
I don't agree with religious texts, but that's what you're wagging in their face with some of the CoCs.
Leave it at "don't be an asshole". It's that simple.
The current political climate, I feel, is a direct reaction to this.
A politically neutral space wouldn't permit religious people to harass trans or LGBT people, but it also wouldn't give anyone latitude to throw stones the other way either.
CoCs are "you're not welcome here at all".
Another thing: you always see language and project logos modified to bear the rainbow, trans, and BLM colors. You never see anything supporting Asians, white people, men, or Christians. If you did this, you would be called out as a racist. Which is so ironic.
Let's just get along and work together. Maybe we'll find more agreements amongst ourselves that way instead of trying to divide everyone into camps.
Some progressives are going to get very pissed off at this comment, but I grew up and live in the South. You can (and often must) work with people you don't agree with. It's not impossible to be friends either. You might wind up changing their mind, and they might wind up making you more tolerant as well.
Replies
Just want to say I appreciate you publicly taking this stance (on what appears to be a non-throwaway account, no less). As a fellow LGBT person I feel so alienated from other progressive-leaning people and communities because of my belief in how those who don't share my beliefs should be treated.
When saying these things out loud can be social suicide, well, it means a lot to see someone else say it first. So thanks. I hope tolerance can come back into fashion.
> that's what you're wagging in their face with some of the CoCs.
I never mentioned codes of conduct in my comment.
Those are orthogonal to the observation that communities are fundamentally political.
> Leave it at "don't be an asshole". It's that simple.
Sure, and "don't be an asshole" is a political statement. The subjects and objects of that sentence are people and the intent is to affect how they interact.
If you feel that that's the kind of thing that community members should write down and say to each other, then you're implicitly agreeing with my claim that politics is what communities do.
I suspect you think you and I would disagree with what politics a community should espouse, but that's not my point at all. All I'm saying is that every community, every group of people coordinating together, is a political beast. It's true of an anarcho-syndalistic art collective from Portland who only communicate through crypto-signed commits on their self-hosted fork of Fossil, it's true of a gang of skinhead bikers meeting regularly at a dive bar, and it's true of the Rust community.
When people regularly interact with each other and communicate about how they should interact... they are politicking. "Politics" has become a bad word for some people, but it's the less bad word we have available to describe what it is people are doing when they are establishing the norms and practices of their regular repeated interactions.
> A lot of them are basically, "your religious teachings or cultural upbringing aren't welcome here"
Could you point out a code of conduct -- preferably from a large, well known project -- that reads this way in your opinion?
> You can (and often must) work with people you don't agree with.
Life's for too short to force people to do this, and ideally we should make it as feasible as possible for as many people as possible to never have to do this.
I agree with you, although of course "don't be an asshole" is only simple to enforce in practice. In the current climate, I expect that people considered "conservative" will still be highly hostile to good faith (let alone not) enforcements.
No matter the person, it's really disappointing that we're still entrenched in the mentalities of tribalism, anti-intellectualism, "if you're not with us, you're against us", "an eye for an eye", "someone hurt me, so I'm going to hurt someone", and so on. And by "person", that includes me.
The Earth politics patch really can't come soon enough. How much do we pay the devs, again?