I am genuinely bordering on being uncomfortable.
I’ve written a bunch of comments here Add CoC and deescalation docs for Zulip by infinisil · Pull Request #144 · NixOS/foundation · GitHub (I’m colonelpanic8), but doing so honestly felt very difficult to me to the point where I am shaking right now. I am admittedly a somewhat neurotic person in this respect, but it would make me really sad if I felt that most people in the nix community saw me as unethical or a troll or someone who argues in bad faith.
I genuinely feel that this community has a major blindspot for the reality that:
- its political beliefs are probably not all that consistent with where the rest of the world is at.
- The discourse community is probably a step more radical than where the wider community of nix contributors and users are
- Mistakes have been made on both sides of the debate,
- the way the save-nix-together contingent has acted is objectively causing a significant set (but likely a minority) of people to not feel comfortable.
- Many of these people are not nearly as bad or evil as they seem to think they are
I read @IvanMalison’s claim about trans rights
@rhendric it might help you understand if you interpret what I say a little bit more literally:
I said:
“I DO NOT believe that something like respecting the humanity of trans people (and more generally all people) is something I would regard as political”
so to be even more specific here, what I’m talking about is questions of basic humanity; things like:
- Do trans people deserve to exist
- is discrimination/bigotry against them immoral
- Do trans people deserve to be called by their preferred pronouns
- Is gender dysphoria real
In my mind, these are largely settled questions (citation: 64% of people are strongly in favor of protecting trans people from discrimination while only 10% oppose Americans’ Complex Views on Gender Identity and Transgender Issues | Pew Research Center), ESPECIALLY within communities that lean to the left of the political spectrum (the nix community clearly falls in to this group).
Can you agree that issues that were once political can cease to be so? For example, I would argue that slavery is no longer a political issue, but it clearly was during the civil war. I understand that in some technical sense, you maybe could still regard it as so, but we’re just dealing with the messiness of language there, and I don’t think that’s a charitable understanding of what people mean when they say that they want the community to remain apolitical.
Now you wrote that I said that “trans rights issues” are not political, but I would certainly concede that certain “trans rights issues” are political e.g.:
- trans participation in competitive sports
- age at which to allow hrt
and these are PRECISELY the sorts of issues that I feel the nix community should really avoid weighing in on in any meaningful way.
The “everything is political” perspective reminds me a lot of things like:
- Hume’s problem of induction
- There is no objective ethics
in that its maybe an interesting philosophical point, but its not very pertinent in practice.
Do you really think this is a reasonable steelman of what I was saying?
I wrote:
For the record, I DO NOT believe that something like respecting the humanity of trans people (and more generally all people) is something I would regard as political, and I really am totally onboard with including language in CoC’s etc. to that effect.
sure
Could be, but my main point is that any community of humans anywhere will have to contend with political, economic, social and other components to their shared interactions around shared resources.
Okay, and my counter point would be that we should still strive to be as apolitical as we REALISTICALLY CAN BE within the constraints of having to deal with those things. Maybe other people are asking for other things, but that is all that I would ask for, and I do think that something like that principle is a good one to abide where possible.