On 09/17/2016 11:52 AM, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
On Sat, Sep 17, 2016 at 10:06 AM, pelzflorian (Florian Pelz) pelzflorian@pelzflorian.de wrote:
It directly references skin color, religion etc. and the term SJW clearly is about these -isms. Sexism etc. are selective harm. The bill of rights is against harm.
not quite: it's specifically against "reductions of truth, creativity, love and awareness" (those all being synonyms for the same underlying concept). that's *not* quite the same thing as "harm".
to illustrate the difference clearly: if you tell someone the truth when they don't want to hear it, do they get really upset? can that be called "harm"? (it can). thus, telling someone the truth may actually cause them "harm"!
Well, yes. I oversimplified.
My point is, it seems to me the first esr link does not address the real arguments made by “SJWs” but strawmen, perhaps deliberately, perhaps not.
you can see hints that his (esr's) mind knows that something's wrong with SJWs, and that he's trying to make sense of it.
It is quite possible that esr’s comment was an honest comment meant to be constructive instead of a deliberate misunderstanding. However, esr’s arguments may be an appropriate response to a call for affirmative action / positive discrimination, but no such call was made by the “Social Justice Warriors”.
anyway, my point is: i see absolutely no need for a "code of conduct", *especially* not one that even *identifies* -isms as being something that's necessary to acknowledge or even remotely consider as part of achieving the goal of ensuring the success of the EOMA initiative. if the EOMA initiative *itself* were *defined* as being "the promotion of -isms" then and *only* then would "-isms" be absolutely critical.
however, as it is not, my feeling is that to remain *entirely -ism neutral* and i do mean utterly -ism independent, it is much better to not even *acknowledge the existence* of -isms than it is to try and become bogged down in defining them. in quantum mechanics tunneling terms, if the particle "looks backwards" it cannot escape the quantum well. only if it ignores the impossibly-high cliff wall entirely can it escape the trap.
When there are many administrators/moderators/employees/… who can make decisions, having a clear policy protects decision makers from accusations of not being impartial and makes it easier to complain about bad decisions.
Yes, defining -isms is hard, therefore the best practice appears to be to adopt a code of conduct written and tested by others with more experience, see [2].
As I said, I don’t think adopting a CoC is useful if there is a single decision maker though.
Regards, Florian Pelz
[2] http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Code_of_conduct_evaluations