6:18 p.m.
On Fri, Jul 07, 2017 at 22:39:59 +0100, Richard Ipsum wrote:
> To me, the clause is there to indicate that we have essentially
pre-judged a
> man saying "This person is saying I can't attend the 'Gitano for
women'
> conference because I am a man, this is sexist and I'm not happy" as
essentially
> a complaint not worth our time dealing with. The clause is therefore, to my
I have returned from A&E and my foot is not broken, hurrah!
Excellent news. Sorry to hear about your scare.
It's closer to a man going to the police to report that he's
being beaten by
his wife and them showing him the door because "only women get beaten
by their husbands so we don't need to take your accusation seriously"!
I think this is up to the community managers to interpret, but I see, to some
extent, your line of thinking here.
I hope to persuade you that pre-judging anything of this nature is a
very dangerous position to adopt, we are safer in not doing so.
I accept that pre-judgement can indeed be a bad thing, however I feel like
this clause (especially if we adjust it to be a reservation of the right
to not deal with; rather than an outright statement of disinterest.
It also happens to be simpler for us to simply treat all people
equally,
adding in these "reverseisms" is somewhat like
writing a compiler that doesn't allow recursion:
it's actually more effort to screw it up!
Better to simply allow functions to recurse the way god intended. :p
Sadly human nature as a whole doesn't think that way. We are very privileged
in the Gitano community to, thus-far, not have anyone for whom the covenant is
pretty much anything other than a list of behaviours we'd think natural and
sensible. However as I have said before, though perhaps not in this thread,
I believe the covenant is also a statement about how people can expect us to
behave, and also how we expect newcomers to behave.
If we take your suggestion to the logical extreme, then why bother having laws
at all? If everyone just behaves properly then we don't need laws and they're
just a waste of time and effort.
Also, as a little thought experiment, try to think about how
acceptable
people would find it if we were to create a "Gitano for men" conference!
Interesting isn't it! :D
It'd be a little sad to see that kind of thing be created, simply because of
the dynamics of predominance vs. minority; but in and of itself it wouldn't be
a specific issue for me. I'd likely not attend since I'd, personally, find
that behaviour to be petty; but if there're honestly men in the Gitano
community for whom mixing with otherwise unknown women is scary enough that
they'd rather not attend; it's reasonable for it to exist.
I fear this is going to end up as a direct clash of opinion over the value of
'positive discrimination' and/or a technical argument over the meaning of
'dominant' in the terms of the definitions of the reverse-isms which you
brought up from Wikipedia. Such a discussion, while potentially interesting,
will likely be stuck on the issue that we're both likely reasonable entrenched
in our beliefs and opinions on those matters, and as such unlikely to reach a
direct agreement :(
My only hope is to ask you to consider whether the following things are directly
bad:
* Diversity requirements on publically traded company boards.
* Efforts to specifically increase the number of women in male-dominated roles.
* Laws existing to specifically prevent discrimination against minorities, be
they skin-colour, racial, religious, gender, sexuality, etc.
If it weren't for inherent biases in our society, we wouldn't need any of those
things, and yet we have all of them? Why? Because the *dominant* group in
each case is self-fulfilling and without rules and laws and efforts by others,
the minority groups would continue to be excluded.
Anyway, enough of that one point, there are three more which you chose to
remove along with it which need consideration; and I'd like you to consider
them under an assumption that we'll be changing the wording of the introductory
statement from ...will not act... to ...reserve the right not to act...
Why should we not make a statement that we have no desire to be dealing with
complaints which boil down to "Person X has perfectly reasonably asked me to
leave them alone, I just won't accept it" ? Or "Person X said something in
a
way (tone) which I don't agree with (or wouldn't have used)" ?
Also, I have no desire to be dealing with a complaint from person A whose only
content is taking umbridge with person B calling them out for being racist,
sexist, etc. Should the rest of the community managers?
I, certainly, and perhaps others, see value in discouraging at least those
kinds of spurious (in my eye, and perhaps in others') complaints from even
taking place, and certainly discouraging any expectation that they will be
considered as anything other than spurious without strong argument or evidence.
Once again, glad your foot will be okay,
D.
--
Daniel Silverstone http://www.digital-scurf.org/
PGP mail accepted and encouraged. Key Id: 3CCE BABE 206C 3B69