
Why Hackers Must Welcome Social Justice Advocates - davidgerard
https://medium.com/@coralineada/why-hackers-must-welcome-social-justice-advocates-1f8d7e216b00
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duncan_bayne
My reply to Coraline:

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Coraline,

Many of the stated goals of the social justice movement are noble. I hope that
everyone involved in open source projects would support the idea that we need
to eliminate barriers that have, for no good reason, historically prevented
people from participation.

What those opposed to the SJ movement in general take issue with is that the
SJ movement isn’t just about those goals. It is becoming a means to silence
people, a means to create the very sort of oppression of dissent that has so
frequently been targeted at the minorities the SJ movement claims to
represent.

To take a concrete example, you wrote:

“They are working to improve the state of open source from the inside.”

In what way would you say your actions during the OpalGate saga were working
towards improving the state of open source?

A contributor to the project made a statement in public with which you
disagreed. You then directly petitioned the project maintainers to eject him
from the project[1].

I then raised a pull request[2] on your covenant, in an attempt to spell out
that this sort of thing (penalising a contributor for speech outside the
context of a project) was an unintended consequence of the system. It clearly
wasn’t; the PR was rejected. Effectively “wontfix: by design”.

To be blunt: based on observations of outspoken SJWs like yourself, hackers
like myself think that there is an unspoken delta between your stated aims
(which as I’ve said are often noble), and your practice, which is to use open
source projects as a weapon against their contributors when they behave in
politically unacceptable ways (e.g. OpalGate and Brendan Eich).

[1]
[https://github.com/opal/opal/issues/941](https://github.com/opal/opal/issues/941)

[2]
[https://github.com/CoralineAda/contributor_covenant/pull/74](https://github.com/CoralineAda/contributor_covenant/pull/74)

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