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posted by martyb on Wednesday June 10 2020, @01:46PM   Printer-friendly
from the setting-a-breakpoint-so-humans-can-try-to-debug-a-code-(of-conduct) dept.

FreeBSD has announced a new LLVM-derived code of conduct.

According to a 2018 survey "35% were dissatisfied with the code of conduct adopted in 2018, 34% were neutral, and 30% were satisfied." So, they held another survey at the start start of June:

Which code of conduct should FreeBSD adopt?

Retain the current code of conduct:
https://web.archive.org/web/20200108075747/https://www.freebsd.org/internal/code-of-conduct.html

RESULTS

  • 4% favoured keeping the current code of conduct
  • 33% favoured the Go-derived code of conduct
  • 63% favoured the LLVM-derived code of conduct.

Thus, the Core Team, following the preference of a majority of active
FreeBSD developers, adopted the LLVM-derived code of conduct.


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 2) by meustrus on Wednesday June 10 2020, @03:01PM (3 children)

    by meustrus (4961) on Wednesday June 10 2020, @03:01PM (#1005823)

    Having just read the old CoC and the new LLVM-based CoC, I'd like some clarification. What are the controversial parts? The old document seems to specifically ban a bunch of politically-motivated speech and actions that would definitely derail any engineering conversation. I can't imagine anything that runs afoul of that CoC being helpful to engineering.

    Then again, I can see how the old CoC had a loophole for not-systematically-oppressed people, i.e. "white heterosexual males". So it probably depends a lot on context. I've never had the misfortune of being attacked for my privilege, and I can see how the kind of person likely to be attacked as such is not likely to want a stronger CoC to protect them, too.

    If that's the problem, the new CoC should fix it. It has no references to specific kinds of disrespectful behavior or protected groups. Its prohibition on racist speech, for example, is about "any race", so it is much more fair and equal than the old "systemic oppression" language.

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    If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 10 2020, @08:57PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 10 2020, @08:57PM (#1005991)

    Using their language gives these idiots more power.

    Their concept of privilege is can be summarized as "demographic reputation." So everywhere you read "privilege" in their text, substitute it with "demographic reputation" in your thoughts and in your replies. Doing this will reverse their obfuscatory rhetoric. The main problem is that it dehumanizes individuals in favor of humanizing an arbitrary aggregation of people. People who influence the how the aggregation is preformed hold the power.

    You can solve the problems of individuals, and you can hold individuals accountable, but you cannot solve problems by thinking in groups and you cannot hold groups accountable. Groups are a concept. Individuals are real. By legitimizing groups as being more real than individuals, mass human rights violations can be justified. People engaging in discussions about problems assigned to a demographic are not going to solve any social problems. They are going to misdiagnose the problem, apply the wrong treatment, and make the problem worse.

    This kind of intellectual malpractice is not an accident. This, along with "political correctness" was engineered to create useful idiots in order to transfer political power to corrupt people, while demonizing problem solvers in order to protect the rhetoric used to control the useful idiots.

    • (Score: 2) by meustrus on Thursday June 11 2020, @09:58PM (1 child)

      by meustrus (4961) on Thursday June 11 2020, @09:58PM (#1006613)

      How should I de-obfuscate "useful idiots", "corrupt people", and "problem solvers"? I could easily pick "poor whites", "wealthy whites", and "anti-racism activists". Doing this will reverse your obfuscatory rhetoric.

      You're right, though. Trying to solve the "Jewish problem" didn't solve any social problems for Germany, either. It ended up making a lot of white people's lives worse, actually. It turns out that suffering isn't a zero sum game.

      Similarly, trying to solve the "black problem" isn't going to fix things for poor whites. It's the wrong treatment. But it's been going on for so long that we can't escape the problems it made worse. We're stuck now with cultural ideas that legitimize racial groups, stereotypes about those groups, and discrimination against them.

      CoCs, though, are not applied to groups. They are applied to individuals. When somebody is being an asshole, you can hold that individual accountable. Often, the asshole is targeting a specific group. The asshole didn't need the CoC to "legitimize" the group they were attacking. Legitimized by cultural ideas that were engineered to create useful idiots in order to transfer political power to corrupt people.

      And by the way, your find-and-replace strategy for the word "privilege" doesn't work. The word shows up exactly once in the old CoC:

      Systemic oppression:

      The ways in which history, culture, ideology, public policies, institutional practices, and personal behaviors and beliefs interact to maintain a hierarchy — based on race, class, gender, sexuality, and/or other group identities — that allows the privileges associated with the dominant group and the disadvantages associated with the oppressed, targeted, or marginalized group to endure and adapt over time. (Derived from Aspen Institute, via Open Source Leadership)

      Replacing "privilege" with "demographic reputation" here turns the whole thing into a tautology. You've got a nice, elegant phrase, there, but it doesn't really capture the practical effects. I'd guess that's why the old CoC used the term "systemic oppression" and gave it a proper definition.

      --
      If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 13 2020, @05:13AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 13 2020, @05:13AM (#1007314)

        The obfuscation is trapping thinkers into solving problems within a concept that has been rigged to be unsolvable.

        For a Code of Conduct to be enforceable, it needs a Chain of Command. A CoC requires a CoC. Hopefully, this is just a coincidence, and not the humor of insurrectionist planners. When you create the CoC, you create or document a chain of command if it does not already exist. This gives activists a target to exploit in the culture war. Assholes existed before CoCs were widely used, and most projects got along just fine without them. CoCs were needed because activists do not have anything of value to bring to a project (no merit, no concern for quality, no concern for the project's success). So their ability to influence projects were limited before CoCs existed.

        What does a child think if you tell them at a young age that because of their skin color, they are going to be unsuccessful in life no matter what they do? They do not take school seriously, and they bully other kids of the same skin color that try to take school seriously. So fewer blacks apply for college, and enter the work force. But social justice requires that the tail wags the dog, so colleges are blamed for not enough blacks being admitted, and companies are blamed for not hiring enough blacks. You will find that black business owners are disproportionately recent immigrants. This is because they grew up in a culture that correctly understands America to be the land of opportunity, and they did not have the self fulfilling prophecy of systemic racism (see above) beat into them during their impressionable years.

        Also, the far left undermines the success of blacks by undermining or undervaluing intact families. They attribute coming from an intact family as a privilege. If you want to be pro black, then you need to be pro family. Everyone else pretending to help blacks are frauds.

        Sociologists understand that first generation immigrants have the most difficult time integrating into a new culture, but the privilege concept somehow makes it the fault of the dominant group that they are not as successful as people who have been in the culture for many generations on day 1. Now consider that the immigration act of 1965 recently changed America's demographics, and we should expect that it will take a few generations after demographics have stabilized for these demographics to have roughly equal outcomes. We have not yet stabilized, so expecting equal outcomes among demographics heavy in recent immigration is foolish at best and dishonest at worst.

        The Democratic party never switched with the Republicans. The majority rules platform is inherently oppressive to minorities and a constitutional republic is superior in protecting minorities. The Democratic Party simply changed from overt exploitation of minorities to covert exploitation of minorities. This is why they need to knock down statues of democrats. This "the parties switched" theory cannot name more than a handful of politicians switching sides, so history must be erased. If you need a clearer example than the propaganda documented above, donating via the BLM website redirects you to ActBlue, where most of the money goes to white democrat politicians.