On Wed, Aug 1, 2018 at 8:35 PM Ryan May <rmay31@gmail.com> wrote:

When experts say that something is a bad idea, and when the people who
a CoC is supposed to protect says it makes them feel unsafe, I feel
like we should listen to that.

I also thought that the points made in the Jupyter discussion thread
made a lot of sense: of course it's possible for people to start
harassing each other over any excuse, and a CoC can, should, and does
make clear that that's not OK. But if you specifically *call out*
political affiliation as a protected class, at a time when lots of the
people who the CoC is trying to protect are facing governmental
harassment justified as "mere political disagreement", then it really
sends the wrong message.

Besides, uh... isn't the whole definition of politics that it's topics
where there is active debate? Not really sure why it's even in that
list to start with.

So I hear all the arguments about people feeling unsafe due to some truly despicable, discriminatory behavior, and I want absolutely no parts of protecting that. However, I also recognize that we in the U.S. are in a particularly divisive atmosphere, and people of varied political persuasions want absolutely nothing to do with those who share differing views. So, as a concrete example, if someone were to show up at a NumPy developer summit with a MAGA ("Make America Great Again") hat, or talks about their support for the president in non-numpy channels, WITHOUT expressing anything discriminatory or support for such views, if "political beliefs" is not in the CoC, is this person welcome? I'm not worried about my own views, but I have friends of widely varying views, and I truly wonder if they would be welcome. With differing "political beliefs" listed as something welcomed, I feel ok for them; if this language is removed, I'm much less certain.

IMO, "political beliefs" encompasses so much more things than a handful of very specific, hateful views. People can disagree about a wide array of "political beliefs" and it is important that we as a community welcome a wide array of such views. If the CoC needs to protect against the wide array of discriminatory views and behavior that make up U.S. politics right now, how about specifically calling those behaviors out as not-welcome, rather than completely ignoring the fact that 99% of "political beliefs" are perfectly welcome within the community?

The CoC is about spelling out the community norms--how about just spelling out that we welcome everyone, but, in the words of Will Wheaton, "Don't be a dick"?

I agree that it's worth clarifying in the text what this clause is intended to do. I think it has been misinterpreted as defining a legalistic set of protected classes along the lines of anti-discrimination laws and can be interpreted by itself outside of the context of the CoC as a whole. But it's not that. It's an aspirational statement, and a high one, at that, if we interpret it at its broadest. We will fail to meet it, in its entirety, and that's *okay* if the spirit of the CoC is being defended. I am perfectly happy to keep "political beliefs" explicit in the CoC and still boot the neo-feudalist for making the project's/conference's environment unwelcoming for a more vulnerable group of people, even if just by their presence. I *am* sensitive to how nominally well-intentioned "viewpoint diversity" efforts get hijacked by regressives looking to (re)assert their traditional power. But that problem is mostly confined to conferences who need to seek speakers and has less relevance to numpy, which largely doesn't run much except sprints. I think we can resolve that elsewhere, if not another document, then at least another clause. A CoC has to pull a kind of double duty: be friendly enough to digest for a newcomer and also be helpful to project organizers to make tough balancing decisions. We don't have to expect each sentence to pull that double duty on its own. I don't quite know what the phrasing would be (because, again, we don't run conferences), but I think we could make a statement that explicitly disclaims that we will be using "viewpoint diversity" to provide a platform for viewpoints antithetical to the CoC.

None of these categorizations listed should be interpreted as get-out-of-jail-free cards for otherwise unwelcoming behavior, and I think maybe we should be explicit about that. Our diversity statement is an aspiration, not a suicide pact. Religion, neurotype, national origin, and subculture (4chan is a subculture, God help us), at minimum, are all items on that list that I have personally seen used to justify shitty behavior. Political belief is far from unique (nor the most common excuse, in my experience) in that list. But they all deserve to be on that list. I want the somewhat fringy progressive hacktivist to feel comfortable here as well as people more mainstream.

Robert Kern