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"Not engaging at all" allows the engaging group to completely take over and expunge their opposition. The Python Software Foundation is an example. They have m

"Not engaging at all" allows the engaging group to completely take over and expunge their opposition. The Python Software Foundation is an example. They have multiple former directors banned or resigning. They've defunded African Pycons that won't embrace certain ideologies. PSF employees and work group members are being purged of anyone not fully on board with the new ruling party. The discussion forums are censored and long-term contributors are afraid to post. In general, in democratic organizations it is a failing strategy to not engage in arguments or to boycott elections. It is a recipe for an imbalance that is almost impossible to correct later. So, I respectfully disagree with your suggestion to not engage at all.

lifty 2y ago
Really curious, what ideology did the defunded African Pycons fail to embrace?
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
  It's often queer stuff that gets called "ideology" by it's opponents so I'm guessing it's this https://pythonafrica.blogspot.com/2023/12/an-open-letter-to-python-software_5.html?m=1 https://pythonafrica.blogspot.com/2023/12/an-open-letter-to-... > We understand that the argument against support for DjangoCon Africa was that the host country, Tanzania, is not a safe place for the LGBTQIA+ community. That's not as simple as "woke ideology" though. If you don't find the convention, Africa doesn't get a pycon. If you do fund it, you're funding something that excludes queer people. Without knowing any details, I guess they should have been more eager to fund it. then at least some people would benefit
  - AnonCoward42 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - OKRainbowKid 2y ago
      If you consider the promotion of human rights and boycott of countries violating them an ideology, then this is an ideology I can get behind. Sure, you might not care about discrimination against queer people because you're not one of them, just like you might not care about racism against people of color because you're white - but just because it doesn't concern you directly doesn't mean discrimination isn't an issue.
      - zarathustreal 2y ago
        All things in moderation, even, and especially, good things. Righteous fervor has killed more than disease and famine combined.
      - ImJamal 2y ago
        According to Merriam Webster the definition of an ideology is one of the following > a manner or the content of thinking characteristic of an individual, group, or culture > the integrated assertions, theories and aims that constitute a sociopolitical program > a systematic body of concepts especially about human life or culture I am not sure how it could not be an ideology. Being against racism is an ideological idea as well.
      - KronisLV 2y ago
        The writing in that blog post also posits some questions in a manner that doesn’t seem all that good: > What counts as “safety”? Which places in the world are truly safe for LGBTQIA+ community? How much of a city, or state, or country needs to be LGBTQIA+ hostile for the whole of it to be declared unworthy of PSF support? Meanwhile: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_Tanzania https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_Tanzania > Homosexuality in Tanzania is a socially taboo topic, and same-sex sexual acts (even in private and consensual) are criminal offences, punishable with life imprisonment. While I have no idea what counts as “truly safe”, that’s definitely not it! I wouldn’t want any of my friends who happen to be queer to go to a place where they might face life imprisonment for the crime of… existing? As far as exclusion goes, that’s a pretty clear case of that, a different venue would be better. Some people might say that if a change of venue isn’t possible (for some reason?) then that means that everyone would miss out on the event if it couldn’t happen, at which point people will probably have different opinions about whether taking a stance on inclusion is worth it or not, depending on their views. Calling it an “ideology” might be unconventional, but maybe not entirely wrong as far as the semantics go (beliefs shared by a group of people) - the same way my “ideology” would be that women also deserve to vote, don’t need to cover their faces with garments if they don’t feel like it etc. The ideology of human rights, I guess. >> "Not engaging at all" allows the engaging group to completely take over and expunge their opposition. I agree with this point, though. Except that in any conflict you should choose yourself on which side you are on, sometimes the engaging group might be right. Can’t comment more on this particular case, just on the linked article and what I read.
  - exe34 2y ago
    that's how you alienate these people on your own side. at the same time, helping out an oppressing side simply means that their position and ability to oppress grows.
  - naming_the_user 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - strken 2y ago
      Africa's made up of a lot of countries and some of them have kept homosexuality legal, so the plan was presumably to move the conference somewhere else. There's even a Wikipedia page for it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_Africa https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_Africa. Just pick somewhere that's not yellow or orange and has a sizeable tech industry.
    - infamouscow 2y ago
      [flagged]
      - philistine 2y ago
        Oh no! Some people find it inappropriate to hold a conference where the state apparatus has the legal framing to arrest all the non-cis attendees! This must mean they are cowards, and waging warfare, and hiding behind ... something? Get a grip, sometimes holding a conference somewhere just doesn't make sense.
        naming_the_user 2y ago
        At the end of the day you're either excluding people who feel uncomfortable attending due to legal risk, or locals who maybe can't easily travel long distances. I don't think it's obvious to be honest, but then I freely admit to not understanding queer culture. Qatar hosted the World Cup a few years ago and the sky didn't fall in.
        philistine 2y ago
        The sky didn't fall for you, but some people genuinely did not go to the World Cup as they were fearful of legal repercussions. Ultimately nothing of note happened in terms of arrest, but that's mostly due to Qatar being shamed by other countries into not arresting anyone for morals during the World Cup. Can a tiny programming language convention get a State to informally stop enforcing its own laws?
  - TinkersW 2y ago
    Yah I'm sure the African pycon was planning to ask every attendee if they are LGBT... You do know this kind of thing has zero to do with Python? Nobody is having sex at pycon? They can just do what everyone else does, and not make that the most important thing in the world while at the stupid convention. Like personally I think logging should end, so can I just make this position a requirement that everyone else has to agree with to attend Pycon? It makes no sense, as it isn't related to the topic of the convention. I think that is why it gets labeled as an ideology.
    - daedrdev 2y ago
      Yeah the punishment in Tanzania for homosexuality is only life imprisonment, while only 10% of the population reports being tolerant of someone with a different orientation -one of the lowest in Africa- while the countries largest city tortured gay people in 2019 as part of its persecution of them, no big deal (sarcasm) At some point we should say they are deeply hostile to the large and well respected portion of the python community who are queer, if they want to exclude them for who they are then we can also decide not to run a pycon there.
    - kmeisthax 2y ago
      The problem is that this stops being "ideology" when it starts interfering with the operation of Pycon. For example, if other people have to travel to the country the PyCon is in, and they are in any way gay (and yes, there are bound to be gay people in Python's development community), they're risking arrest just to go. Strip away the moralizing and it's still extremely problematic to put an African PyCon in a country with such authoritarian[0] laws. Going back to Rust for Linux (the actual thing we were talking about), you cannot cleanly separate the "religious" and "technical" sides of the argument. Rust doesn't provide safety advantages when calling into C code unless you inform the type system of what the memory safety requirements of that C code are. Otherwise you have to litter your code with unsafe blocks everywhere to manually call into C, which makes it a lot closer to C code. Safe Rust requires you to know and understand what the C code is doing, or have good documentation related to that code, and keep your bindings up to date when the C code changes. That's both technical and religious - insamuch as Rust demands good docs and some subset of the C people don't want to provide them. [0] Yes, banning homosexuality is inherently authoritarian. It's literally the first thing any authoritarian does, to check if society's liberal reflexes still work or not.
  - TeeMassive 2y ago
    > Africa doesn't get a pycon. If you do fund it, you're funding something that excludes queer people. Defund all pycons from 80% of the world then. Because that's the vast majority of Asia, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Latin America and a lot of the rest of the world. This will just result in forks and fragmentation in the long term, as opposed to having to work with and being more accepting of "queers".
  - Vegenoid 2y ago
    More discussion and details can be found in the HN post for that open letter: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38542330 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38542330
- mont_tag 2y ago
  It's not just Africa. There were discussions about withholding community support from China and Pakistan as well. It's really just a question about what part of the mission statement is the most important. Do you promote the Python language in places that don't meet your diversity objectives? That is a reasonable question. However, one side's failure to engage means that the other viewpoint has won and is now driving everyone else out. Nothing new, just a classic purge of heretics. Back to my original point: It is bad advice to not engage in the discussions. Unbalanced outcomes end up tearing a community apart. ----- "The mission of the Python Software Foundation is to promote, protect, and advance the Python programming language, and to support and facilitate the growth of a diverse and international community of Python programmers."
01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
Agreed. And since I agree, I wonder what those "ideologies" were
- mont_tag 2y ago
  It doesn't really matter. It could have been any contentious difference in strategic direction. The outcome would have been the same. People need to engage or face inevitable takeover and exclusion.
- daedrdev 2y ago
  Tanzania has life imprisonment for homosexuality, surveys show it has 10% of its population tolerate queer people, and has been committing human rights abuses against the queer community for years as part of its authoritarianism. I think its fair to not run a pycon in a country that is explicitly extremely hostile and dangerous for a wide and respected portion of the python community.
llm_trw 2y ago
[flagged]
- inquirerGeneral 2y ago
  [dead]
roenxi 2y ago
I think the original comment probably had an implicit [ignore isolated actors] as part of the context. Any organisation has to be wary of alternative mission statements overriding their actual mission statement and a failure to engage when that happens generally presages trouble.
- coldpie 2y ago
  Indeed, and additionally, I was specifically talking about technical issues, not organizational issues. "Should we adopt this tech or not?" kind of stuff. Examples I'm sure we can all relate to: desktop environments, systemd, pulseaudio, programming languages, github/lab vs mailing lists. Lots of religious debates come up to separate out from legitimate technical concerns. Organizational issues are a whole other ballgame. I can see how my original comment was not specific enough about this.
giraffe_lady 2y ago
"Certain idealogies" like communism or what? It's hard to understand what's at stake here if you're using euphemism like this. It sounds like there is conflict over a specific action or policy, what is it?
- mont_tag 2y ago
  It's a broad conflict, not just a specific action. These blog posts give a flavor of what is going on: * https://ntoll.org/article/psf-woe/ https://ntoll.org/article/psf-woe/ * https://ntoll.org/article/victorian-python-allegory/ https://ntoll.org/article/victorian-python-allegory/ Sorry for using vague terminology. I don't personally keep up with PSF dramas. My point was about communities in general, not just the PSF in particular. To be fair, the dominant group itself also uses vague terminology. The PSF director's linked-in account says, "I'm motivated by the intersection of technology and social justice." Their social media accounts are more specific though: https://x.com/baconandcoconut?lang=en https://x.com/baconandcoconut?lang=en
  - jazzypants 2y ago
    It's hard to look at a situation from the outside, and I genuinely have no clue about the real situation in the Python community. All I know from those blog posts is that this guy has been bitterly claiming that he is going to leave the Python community for six years straight. If he doesn't like it so much, he should stop writing about it. I'm sorry, but I went into those blog posts with an open mind, and all I found was a long list of personal complaints with relatively few details about the actual situation.

lifty 2y ago

Really curious, what ideology did the defunded African Pycons fail to embrace?

01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
It's often queer stuff that gets called "ideology" by it's opponents so I'm guessing it's this https://pythonafrica.blogspot.com/2023/12/an-open-letter-to-python-software_5.html?m=1 https://pythonafrica.blogspot.com/2023/12/an-open-letter-to-... > We understand that the argument against support for DjangoCon Africa was that the host country, Tanzania, is not a safe place for the LGBTQIA+ community. That's not as simple as "woke ideology" though. If you don't find the convention, Africa doesn't get a pycon. If you do fund it, you're funding something that excludes queer people. Without knowing any details, I guess they should have been more eager to fund it. then at least some people would benefit
- AnonCoward42 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - OKRainbowKid 2y ago
    If you consider the promotion of human rights and boycott of countries violating them an ideology, then this is an ideology I can get behind. Sure, you might not care about discrimination against queer people because you're not one of them, just like you might not care about racism against people of color because you're white - but just because it doesn't concern you directly doesn't mean discrimination isn't an issue.
    - zarathustreal 2y ago
      All things in moderation, even, and especially, good things. Righteous fervor has killed more than disease and famine combined.
    - ImJamal 2y ago
      According to Merriam Webster the definition of an ideology is one of the following > a manner or the content of thinking characteristic of an individual, group, or culture > the integrated assertions, theories and aims that constitute a sociopolitical program > a systematic body of concepts especially about human life or culture I am not sure how it could not be an ideology. Being against racism is an ideological idea as well.
    - KronisLV 2y ago
      The writing in that blog post also posits some questions in a manner that doesn’t seem all that good: > What counts as “safety”? Which places in the world are truly safe for LGBTQIA+ community? How much of a city, or state, or country needs to be LGBTQIA+ hostile for the whole of it to be declared unworthy of PSF support? Meanwhile: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_Tanzania https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_Tanzania > Homosexuality in Tanzania is a socially taboo topic, and same-sex sexual acts (even in private and consensual) are criminal offences, punishable with life imprisonment. While I have no idea what counts as “truly safe”, that’s definitely not it! I wouldn’t want any of my friends who happen to be queer to go to a place where they might face life imprisonment for the crime of… existing? As far as exclusion goes, that’s a pretty clear case of that, a different venue would be better. Some people might say that if a change of venue isn’t possible (for some reason?) then that means that everyone would miss out on the event if it couldn’t happen, at which point people will probably have different opinions about whether taking a stance on inclusion is worth it or not, depending on their views. Calling it an “ideology” might be unconventional, but maybe not entirely wrong as far as the semantics go (beliefs shared by a group of people) - the same way my “ideology” would be that women also deserve to vote, don’t need to cover their faces with garments if they don’t feel like it etc. The ideology of human rights, I guess. >> "Not engaging at all" allows the engaging group to completely take over and expunge their opposition. I agree with this point, though. Except that in any conflict you should choose yourself on which side you are on, sometimes the engaging group might be right. Can’t comment more on this particular case, just on the linked article and what I read.
- exe34 2y ago
  that's how you alienate these people on your own side. at the same time, helping out an oppressing side simply means that their position and ability to oppress grows.
- naming_the_user 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - strken 2y ago
    Africa's made up of a lot of countries and some of them have kept homosexuality legal, so the plan was presumably to move the conference somewhere else. There's even a Wikipedia page for it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_Africa https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_Africa. Just pick somewhere that's not yellow or orange and has a sizeable tech industry.
  - infamouscow 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - philistine 2y ago
      Oh no! Some people find it inappropriate to hold a conference where the state apparatus has the legal framing to arrest all the non-cis attendees! This must mean they are cowards, and waging warfare, and hiding behind ... something? Get a grip, sometimes holding a conference somewhere just doesn't make sense.
      - naming_the_user 2y ago
        At the end of the day you're either excluding people who feel uncomfortable attending due to legal risk, or locals who maybe can't easily travel long distances. I don't think it's obvious to be honest, but then I freely admit to not understanding queer culture. Qatar hosted the World Cup a few years ago and the sky didn't fall in.
        philistine 2y ago
        The sky didn't fall for you, but some people genuinely did not go to the World Cup as they were fearful of legal repercussions. Ultimately nothing of note happened in terms of arrest, but that's mostly due to Qatar being shamed by other countries into not arresting anyone for morals during the World Cup. Can a tiny programming language convention get a State to informally stop enforcing its own laws?
- TinkersW 2y ago
  Yah I'm sure the African pycon was planning to ask every attendee if they are LGBT... You do know this kind of thing has zero to do with Python? Nobody is having sex at pycon? They can just do what everyone else does, and not make that the most important thing in the world while at the stupid convention. Like personally I think logging should end, so can I just make this position a requirement that everyone else has to agree with to attend Pycon? It makes no sense, as it isn't related to the topic of the convention. I think that is why it gets labeled as an ideology.
  - daedrdev 2y ago
    Yeah the punishment in Tanzania for homosexuality is only life imprisonment, while only 10% of the population reports being tolerant of someone with a different orientation -one of the lowest in Africa- while the countries largest city tortured gay people in 2019 as part of its persecution of them, no big deal (sarcasm) At some point we should say they are deeply hostile to the large and well respected portion of the python community who are queer, if they want to exclude them for who they are then we can also decide not to run a pycon there.
  - kmeisthax 2y ago
    The problem is that this stops being "ideology" when it starts interfering with the operation of Pycon. For example, if other people have to travel to the country the PyCon is in, and they are in any way gay (and yes, there are bound to be gay people in Python's development community), they're risking arrest just to go. Strip away the moralizing and it's still extremely problematic to put an African PyCon in a country with such authoritarian[0] laws. Going back to Rust for Linux (the actual thing we were talking about), you cannot cleanly separate the "religious" and "technical" sides of the argument. Rust doesn't provide safety advantages when calling into C code unless you inform the type system of what the memory safety requirements of that C code are. Otherwise you have to litter your code with unsafe blocks everywhere to manually call into C, which makes it a lot closer to C code. Safe Rust requires you to know and understand what the C code is doing, or have good documentation related to that code, and keep your bindings up to date when the C code changes. That's both technical and religious - insamuch as Rust demands good docs and some subset of the C people don't want to provide them. [0] Yes, banning homosexuality is inherently authoritarian. It's literally the first thing any authoritarian does, to check if society's liberal reflexes still work or not.
- TeeMassive 2y ago
  > Africa doesn't get a pycon. If you do fund it, you're funding something that excludes queer people. Defund all pycons from 80% of the world then. Because that's the vast majority of Asia, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Latin America and a lot of the rest of the world. This will just result in forks and fragmentation in the long term, as opposed to having to work with and being more accepting of "queers".
- Vegenoid 2y ago
  More discussion and details can be found in the HN post for that open letter: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38542330 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38542330
mont_tag 2y ago
It's not just Africa. There were discussions about withholding community support from China and Pakistan as well. It's really just a question about what part of the mission statement is the most important. Do you promote the Python language in places that don't meet your diversity objectives? That is a reasonable question. However, one side's failure to engage means that the other viewpoint has won and is now driving everyone else out. Nothing new, just a classic purge of heretics. Back to my original point: It is bad advice to not engage in the discussions. Unbalanced outcomes end up tearing a community apart. ----- "The mission of the Python Software Foundation is to promote, protect, and advance the Python programming language, and to support and facilitate the growth of a diverse and international community of Python programmers."

01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago

Agreed. And since I agree, I wonder what those "ideologies" were

mont_tag 2y ago
It doesn't really matter. It could have been any contentious difference in strategic direction. The outcome would have been the same. People need to engage or face inevitable takeover and exclusion.
daedrdev 2y ago
Tanzania has life imprisonment for homosexuality, surveys show it has 10% of its population tolerate queer people, and has been committing human rights abuses against the queer community for years as part of its authoritarianism. I think its fair to not run a pycon in a country that is explicitly extremely hostile and dangerous for a wide and respected portion of the python community.

llm_trw 2y ago

[flagged]

inquirerGeneral 2y ago
[dead]

roenxi 2y ago

I think the original comment probably had an implicit [ignore isolated actors] as part of the context. Any organisation has to be wary of alternative mission statements overriding their actual mission statement and a failure to engage when that happens generally presages trouble.

coldpie 2y ago
Indeed, and additionally, I was specifically talking about technical issues, not organizational issues. "Should we adopt this tech or not?" kind of stuff. Examples I'm sure we can all relate to: desktop environments, systemd, pulseaudio, programming languages, github/lab vs mailing lists. Lots of religious debates come up to separate out from legitimate technical concerns. Organizational issues are a whole other ballgame. I can see how my original comment was not specific enough about this.

giraffe_lady 2y ago

"Certain idealogies" like communism or what? It's hard to understand what's at stake here if you're using euphemism like this. It sounds like there is conflict over a specific action or policy, what is it?

mont_tag 2y ago
It's a broad conflict, not just a specific action. These blog posts give a flavor of what is going on: * https://ntoll.org/article/psf-woe/ https://ntoll.org/article/psf-woe/ * https://ntoll.org/article/victorian-python-allegory/ https://ntoll.org/article/victorian-python-allegory/ Sorry for using vague terminology. I don't personally keep up with PSF dramas. My point was about communities in general, not just the PSF in particular. To be fair, the dominant group itself also uses vague terminology. The PSF director's linked-in account says, "I'm motivated by the intersection of technology and social justice." Their social media accounts are more specific though: https://x.com/baconandcoconut?lang=en https://x.com/baconandcoconut?lang=en
- jazzypants 2y ago
  It's hard to look at a situation from the outside, and I genuinely have no clue about the real situation in the Python community. All I know from those blog posts is that this guy has been bitterly claiming that he is going to leave the Python community for six years straight. If he doesn't like it so much, he should stop writing about it. I'm sorry, but I went into those blog posts with an open mind, and all I found was a long list of personal complaints with relatively few details about the actual situation.