On Fri, Aug 3, 2018 at 2:04 AM, Matthew Brett <matthew.brett@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi,

On Fri, Aug 3, 2018 at 9:35 AM, Stefan van der Walt
<stefanv@berkeley.edu> wrote:
> On August 3, 2018 09:50:38 Robert Kern <robert.kern@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> On Thu, Aug 2, 2018 at 11:01 PM Robert Kern <robert.kern@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> <looks back> Nope, concision is definitely not my strength. But I hope I
>>> made the argument clear, at least.
>>
>>
>> No, wait. I got it:
>>
>> Bad actors use "diversity of political beliefs" in bad faith as cover for
>> undermining the goals of the diversity statement. Marginalized groups want
>> more assurance that our community (1) isn't one of those bad actors and (2)
>> is willing and capable of resisting those bad actors when they come.
>
>
> That's a very useful summary; thank you.
>
> I think we can fairly easily add a sentence that encourages participation
> from a wide diversity of people, while making it clear that including
> someone in the conversation does not give them free reigns in contradiction
> with the rest of the guidelines.
>
> Ralf, if you agree, shall we do this for SciPy, and use the new version for
> NumPy too?

If someone with good wordsmithing skills could draft 1-2 sentences and send a PR to the SciPy repo, so we have something concrete to discuss/approve, that would be great. If not, I can take a stab at it early next week.

I must say, I disagree. I think we're already treading close to the
edge with the current document, and it's more likely we'd get closer
still with virtually any addition on this line. I'm in favor of
keeping the political beliefs in there, on the basis

There's a much more straightforward basis one can think of. There are many countries in the world that have dictatorships or one-party rule. This includes countries that we get regular contributions from. Expressing support for, e.g., democratic elections, can land you in all sorts of trouble there.

For a US conference it may be okay to take a purely US perspective, and even then the inclusion/removal of "political beliefs" can be argued (as evidenced by this thread). For a project with a global reach like NumPy it's really not very good to take into account only US/Western voices.

it's really not
too hard to distinguish good-faith political beliefs, and the current
atmosphere is so repellent to people who would not identify as
progressive, that I would like them to feel they have some protection.
If you will not allow me "no change"

I think "not allow" is too strong. Your opinion matters as well, so I'm happy to have/facilitate a higher bandwidth discussion on this if you want (after Monday).

and you offered me a) paragraph
by group of the not-discriminated trying to imagine something
comforting to imagined extremely sensitive and progressive (name your
other group here) or b) no stated defense for not-progressive persons,
I'd take b).

Imho Robert made a very compelling argument here, so I don't completely understand the choice.

Cheers,

Ralf