Re: State of the GNUnion 2020

[Alexandre François Garreau]

Le jeudi 20 février 2020, 14:45:02 CET Samuel Thibault a écrit :
> Dmitry Gutov, le jeu. 20 févr. 2020 15:31:17 +0200, a ecrit:
> > On the flip side, an argument is made that your initiative might make
> > GNU more exclusionary because of the extra conditions on what it
> > takes to be a part of it.
> 
> At some point you have to exclude some people in order to include other
> people, yes.  We can see that in various communities: when somebody is
> having a toxic behavior and does not changes behavior even after strong
> warnings, one has to exclude that person, because otherwise that person
> will make a lot other people fly away.  Not taking the steps to exclude
> the toxic person does mean excluding people that can not stand the toxic
> behavior, even if that latter exclusion is not explicit.
> 
> That seems to be the ground of what some people do not understand here:
> full inclusiveness can not work, there will always be some people you
> will be excluding one way or the other, voluntarily or not.  Making sure
> that the choice of who you exclude gets written down seems important to
> me.

This is interesting but too familiar to me.  I’ve already seen this 
discourse, and the last paragraph about “gets written down” seems to be 
really right and really convincing to me, as I already seen it as well, 
and each time it is time to support a similar thing the only point I judge 
valid.

But there are three issues with this reasoning: it is defeatist, it is 
paternalist, and it is apolitical (in the “right-wing” meaning)

It is defeatist because it departs from the basic idea you’ll *have* to 
exclude someone at some point.  No solution will ever be found.  And 
rather than taking the risk of not reacting immediately (“tolerance zero”, 
another right wing thing), you prefer to “aknowledge” this “will have to 
be done at some point”.  Is if there wasn’t any middle ground for 
compromision there.

The idea of shared kill/blacklist or /ignore have been already proposed.  
That solves it.  Just as two places whose one is moderated and the other 
not (actually you have private GNU list for better moderation, this is the 
“free” one, you chose that).

The fact trolling could happen even once moderation is there also was told 
about.  It could still go on privately, or as spam.  But for some reasons 
this isn’t taked as a “failure” of it.

Like prisons and repression happens and grows to solve issues that still 
exist anyway, as if the only issue wasn’t to fix the problem, to find and/or 
develop The Right Thing, but to be able to claim you’re not responsible of 
it because you’ve done everything possible (even the wrong).

It is paternalist because it assumes *the chiefs* have to take care for 
“uncomfort” and “stuff people couldn’t stand”.  “Standing” something is 
always physically possible.  The issue is psychological.  But thankfully 
psychological diversity exists (something that is all too often forgotten 
(and advertised as if it should be!)), as well as psychological evolution.  
To me, and by experience, from any possible social group, there will be 
people who can stand anything.  Even more so: people from marginalized 
groups can sometimes have some people who can stand *more* (not of 
everything necessarily, but of some kinds), on average, because they’re 
used to.  This is, unfortunately, an useful ability in nowadays world.  An 
ability that are also lacking some snowflakes who are because of the luxury 
of a comfortable lifestyle all along (which is a privilege), more than any 
dispriviledge (but is that worth defending? is it *possible* defending, as 
some people will be oversensitive to anything?)

It always will be, because “excluding” these “toxic” people won’t make 
them disappear away, they always will be somewhere.  So either you exclude 
progressively more until you’ve made ghettos, prisons, or killed them, 
either you only divide the world into the places for you, and the places 
for them (so now you restrict yourself to only a part of the world: 
limited).

Now, in the previous case, with no exclusions, these people who learnt to 
stand anything could, as soon as there is no official exclusion, participate 
in anything, that is good.  While otherwise now there are always places 
where you couldn’t if people disagree with you… and that leds to the next 
part:

It is apolitical because it denies the inherent issue of political 
disagreement.  I’ve already seen the “broken window” argument out there.  
This is the same kind of right-wing points that come from those who denie 
that.  Like there are no diverse social groups with diverging interests, 
to be arbitrated, but a big block “society” that needs order, and the 
dissidents, the “gangsters” that allegedly would like to create chaos, 
against society (as if they could be outside of it).  There are the “good” 
the “common” people, and the “bad” ones.

This is the very mindset behind the idea that, to keep society clean and 
in order, we *need* prisons so that to keep (essentialised) “criminals” 
out of it (“otherwise it would be chaos”, and society would suffer from it, 
people would leave, other wouldn’t come, stuff or people wouldn’t even 
possibly come to existence anymore).

Except then some people include LGBT people into it.  I mean I’ve already 
seen people to say if we don’t reject these out of society, society come 
to chaos and doesn’t work anymore (and actually it is true many rules 
becomes meaningless once you consider bisexuals or intersexuated people).  
There are also people unwilling to participate stuff where there are some 
(usually marginalized) minorities (I’ve even heard recently about state-
sponsored “LGBT-free” public places in Poland… and about the fact it 
afterwards became a meme for LGBT people to take selfies before the “LGBT-
free” panels).

How do you make the difference? how do you decide what is chaos and what is 
order? who does that? when?

I’ve also seen that about some handicaped people, whose presence would 
make a lot of people uncomfortable.

You could find the issue simple until you start analyzing ideologically 
some sets on handicaped people and find strong overrepresentation of 
extreme-left-wing and extreme-right-wing ideas, that eventually comes to 
the fact these people ends, on average, being more excluded than “normal” 
people, for something that should sound illegitimate for all: ideas.