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I guess I just don't understand how you want to draw the line from the need for tolerance in itself to the necessary prescription that quiescence is the only wa

I guess I just don't understand how you want to draw the line from the need for tolerance in itself to the necessary prescription that quiescence is the only way to be if you want to get things done. Is not taking some kind of stand precisely integrating and accepting conflict? Like is anything purely technical? I dont think so, and the most insidious politics are the ones that are left unspoken but allowed to direct the endeavor at hand. To dream of or push for something purely "technical" or "apolitical" is simply to be guilty of the same thing your quote is getting at, but from the other direction. Instead of squashing dissent, you simply poof it out existence, you make it taboo to even talk about. How does that then become tolerance? How does it operate necessarily to help us? It is in fact no less an imposition, and is no less a political operation in the communities where this kind of view operates.

lolinder 2y ago
> to draw the line from the need for tolerance in itself to the necessary prescription that quiescence is the only way to be if you want to get things done I'm not talking about tolerance, I'm talking about the lead dev actively shutting down negative reactions to their comments and justifying it under the banner of "good vibes". If the lead dev can't deal gracefully with criticism, that's going to be a problem. Too many people in this thread are treating criticism of this pattern of silencing dissent for not "vibing" right as though the critic is implicitly endorsing letting Nazis roam free. There's a middle ground between "good vibes only" and "fascists welcome" that lpil has explicitly said he's not interested in pursuing.
- beepbooptheory 2y ago
  Its totally fine and reasonable if this is just about how this particular person carries themselves, about them being a bad admin or whatever! It just then feels a little at odds with sweeping, principled profundity of the initial comment. Like why invoke the quote and all that at first if you're not actually standing by it now?
  - lolinder 2y ago
    I don't know where you get that I'm not standing by it—the quote isn't about tolerance, it's about engaging with difficult concepts and conflicts rather than dodging them. I didn't even realize your talking about tolerance was supposed to be engaging with the quote until this follow up. I guess "toleration" and "tolerance" do share a root, but the latter is so watered down at this point that I honestly didn't even connect them, so I misunderstood your comment to be about something very different than it was. I'm going back now to reread it to see if I can understand your point better. Edit: rather than deepening this subthread further, I posted a separate reply to your original comment based on my new understanding of your point.
lolinder 2y ago
Okay, replying now to what you actually meant (my other comment assumed that you were saying that Gleam advocates for tolerance, I didn't realize it was a reference to the quote): I said nothing about quiescence. I said nothing against taking a stand. My opposition is to the idea that the way forward for conflict management is to purge it and pretend it isn't happening. That's what happened in the case I linked to—a member of the community expressed disapproval of admin actions and had their disapproval removed by the moderator and received a rather passive aggressive response in a DM. That's an inappropriate way to moderate that does not lead to healthy conflict management. Taking a stand would be publicly engaging with the criticism, not purging it and engaging with the critic in a private message. I'm much less concerned about the US-politics-centric commentary on the main page (though there are problems with that, like making people not in the US feel excluded) than I am with a broader trend in many open source projects (this one being one of several I've seen) of "protecting" their community from anything that remotely resembles toxicity, even when those things are well meaning criticism of the way that things are being run. And no, I wouldn't say that anything is purely technical—but some things are political in service to the technical, and other things are political first. Gleam strikes me as a project that is firmly political first, based on the lead dev's actions and the community's discussion (this article literally places the project's political stance as "first and foremost"!). As I say, that's not a bad thing, but I'm skeptical that it will work out in the long run on a technical level to prioritize the politics over all else, especially when the approach to politics is one that shuts down conflict rather than cultivating and curating it.

lolinder 2y ago

> to draw the line from the need for tolerance in itself to the necessary prescription that quiescence is the only way to be if you want to get things done I'm not talking about tolerance, I'm talking about the lead dev actively shutting down negative reactions to their comments and justifying it under the banner of "good vibes". If the lead dev can't deal gracefully with criticism, that's going to be a problem. Too many people in this thread are treating criticism of this pattern of silencing dissent for not "vibing" right as though the critic is implicitly endorsing letting Nazis roam free. There's a middle ground between "good vibes only" and "fascists welcome" that lpil has explicitly said he's not interested in pursuing.

beepbooptheory 2y ago
Its totally fine and reasonable if this is just about how this particular person carries themselves, about them being a bad admin or whatever! It just then feels a little at odds with sweeping, principled profundity of the initial comment. Like why invoke the quote and all that at first if you're not actually standing by it now?
- lolinder 2y ago
  I don't know where you get that I'm not standing by it—the quote isn't about tolerance, it's about engaging with difficult concepts and conflicts rather than dodging them. I didn't even realize your talking about tolerance was supposed to be engaging with the quote until this follow up. I guess "toleration" and "tolerance" do share a root, but the latter is so watered down at this point that I honestly didn't even connect them, so I misunderstood your comment to be about something very different than it was. I'm going back now to reread it to see if I can understand your point better. Edit: rather than deepening this subthread further, I posted a separate reply to your original comment based on my new understanding of your point.

lolinder 2y ago

Okay, replying now to what you actually meant (my other comment assumed that you were saying that Gleam advocates for tolerance, I didn't realize it was a reference to the quote): I said nothing about quiescence. I said nothing against taking a stand. My opposition is to the idea that the way forward for conflict management is to purge it and pretend it isn't happening. That's what happened in the case I linked to—a member of the community expressed disapproval of admin actions and had their disapproval removed by the moderator and received a rather passive aggressive response in a DM. That's an inappropriate way to moderate that does not lead to healthy conflict management. Taking a stand would be publicly engaging with the criticism, not purging it and engaging with the critic in a private message. I'm much less concerned about the US-politics-centric commentary on the main page (though there are problems with that, like making people not in the US feel excluded) than I am with a broader trend in many open source projects (this one being one of several I've seen) of "protecting" their community from anything that remotely resembles toxicity, even when those things are well meaning criticism of the way that things are being run. And no, I wouldn't say that anything is purely technical—but some things are political in service to the technical, and other things are political first. Gleam strikes me as a project that is firmly political first, based on the lead dev's actions and the community's discussion (this article literally places the project's political stance as "first and foremost"!). As I say, that's not a bad thing, but I'm skeptical that it will work out in the long run on a technical level to prioritize the politics over all else, especially when the approach to politics is one that shuts down conflict rather than cultivating and curating it.