Re: [Ghm-discuss] The posh talk does not complain with the policy

[Garreau\, Alexandre]

On 2014-08-12 at 12:21, Luca Saiu wrote:
> I'm surprised by all these attempts of avoiding offense at all costs.

Well, “offense” is not the right word. The correct words would be
“harassment”, “aggression”, “oppression”, “discrimination”,
“sexism/racism/lgbt-phobia/agism/cashism/class shaming”, etc. Because
the real importance of it depends of it ability to oppress people, to
really reduce their daily freedom. And it is particularly true when these
typology of “offense” is already anchored and widespread in culture and
frequently repeated over and over, even if it’s not by the same person,
and each one do almost nothing: all the little things summed up can do
something that no sensible human being could support without becoming
crazy. And this harassment thing is part of our culture and do a lot in
the oppression of the “underrepresented ‘minorities’”.

> I've always thought that what counts is the *intent* of the speaker;
> usually it's obvious whether somebody wants to attack somebody else, or
> if something she chooses just touches a raw nerve.

Intent changes nothing to the result, just to the potential reaction if
the offender becomes aware of it, but most of the time, in such
situation, she didn’t, so…

We can also recall the “intent” “moral value” is something like really
nearly linked to some the religious concepts of “free will”, and “fault”
(though they’re not only used in religion, but in other authoritarian
systems, such as nationalists, etc.).

> The thing doesn't need to be sexual in any way.  Here's an example.
> These days when criticizing people for being closed-minded about any
> topic I often use the word "Pythonic", as the designers of the Python
> language feel they know what good programming practices are, and so they
> don't have a problem constraining users with limited choices; I very
> strongly disapprove of that stance.
>
>   Please use the word "Pythonic" as well, and help me to get it accepted
>   into dictionaries.
>
> Am I being rude by saying this?  Probably not.  But if I repeatedly,
> callously attacked some dearly held idea by calling it Pythonic, then I
> would be -- to one or even two groups.  My point is that the difference
> would be obvious to everybody.  A reasonable policy can be "don't be
> intentionally obnoxious".

But there isn’t any “python programmers
oppression/repression/discrimination” anchored in our culture for
decades and even centuries or millenniums. Although a preference for a
programming language is (except some purely syntaxic flavors that could
still be configured trough some frontend interface) a purely rational
choice depending of a lot of factors like the usage, your habits,
etc. while “being as gender a women” or “being gay”, or “black” is not.

> If somebody is offended by a remark which was not meant as an attack,
> too bad: she's wrong.  And probably Pythonic as well.

You can’t be wrong if something affects anything else than your
intellect, because it’s not the rational part of your mind and so you
can’t choose of how you receive and react to it. You can’t say “you’re
wrong to fear this” to someone having some irrational fear, because she
didn’t chose it.

You could say that people shouldn’t rely on innate, emotions and
irrational things, but only on constructed, rationality and
reflexion. It could be great if people could think only rationally, so
they would make less errors, and taking conscience of more things more
quickly, and that’d fix a lot of issues instantaneously (fascism,
authority, hierarchy, etc.), so at the end we would be more
free. Unfortunately they aren’t. First because at the evolutionist
level, we need innate, emotional and irrational reactions because they
involve less biochemical/electrical complexity and they’re quicker, but
also because emotion is itself is the principle of will and without will
you can’t define what is freedom (“to do what you want to do […]”, see
the etymology of emotion: ex motio, what makes you move out) so you need
an irrational principle (who has a cause (evolution theory) but no
objective) to then derive rational things from that.

You could still says that for really little jokes, we couldn’t take care
of over-sensible people because otherwise we couldn’t make jokes at all,
but we’re not arguing about people being unfortunately over-sensible,
we’re speaking about *psychologically normal people*, who just live
everyday a constant and continuous
shaming/aggression/attack/discrimination/oppression by an oppressive
culture who put them down in the social hierarchy. When you do once a
little joke to someone wrongly it’s ok, but if you do this joke to
someone while she gets a thousand similar
insulting/shaming/aggressive/objectifying/discriminative joke by a
thousand other people, you just can’t do anything else to make this
persone able to live in society correctly than just stopping doing these
stupid and oppressive jokes from our oppressive culture that serve our
oppressive society. Because when each one have like 0,01% of
responsability of this, you can’t stop it without convincing each of
those 1000 people that this 0,01% *is* important, because it *is*
participating in this so big aggression that nobody could survive it
without drastically changing.

It’s like the ecological things media talk about: even if *you* don’t
pollute so much, it’s because there are billions of people like you
polluting a bit that we get a so much great pollution, so if you want it
to stop, you have first to stop polluting yourself, even if it’s a
bit. (Actually it’s more complicated with ecology because most of
pollution is made by big companies who are trying to make you think
they’re ecological while they aren’t.)

So the same apply to sexism: to live in an egalitarian and free society,
you need too deconstruct each little sexist behavior. It’ll take long
and it’ll be hard, but at the end, everybody will benefit of it.

> By the way: if something is illegal then it's already prohibited and you
> don't need any policy for that.  Call the cops.

I don’t like to just refuge behind the law and cops for everything, like
if we weren’t able to be conscious of what’s good or not for our
community, like if all social problems and issues needed to be solved in
a centralized manner by the State arm. It’s not because your country
said something is good or bad that you should always use it to defend
yourself, since daily a lot of nations are doing shitty things with
stupid rules to their people. The cops actually do more harm to society
than useful help. They sometimes try to fix problems they just created
because otherwise the system couldn’t sustain itself (like preventing a
significant portion of population to access to first-need resources, and
then punishing them for having stolen or committed some crime because of
their miserable situation). The same applies for most of
discrimination/shaming/oppression, like for instance, usually cops don’t
care or take in derision reports of rape or sexual harassment, often
even blaming victims, saying its their “fault”, etc.

So actually trying to base our freedom on the work of cops seems to me
quite a bad idea, as well for ethical, political, social as pragmatical
reasons.

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