Remember, if a harmful asshole understood that he did something wrong, he would have exiled himself already.
A harmful asshole who wants to attend events with victims is ready and willing to do more harm.
Accountability for past harms is the prevention of more harm.
Refusal to embrace accountability is often buried in lots of flowery language, but it’s simple:
It’s the assertion that putting an abusive person through anything close to what the victims experienced is a bridge too far.
It’s the assertion what victims go through is acceptable, and not only that, they haven’t suffered enough. Meanwhile, the perpetrators get handled with soft gloves, even if this keeps the harm to victims going.
It’s the acceptance of a world in which the characteristics you were born with, not your actions, determine whether everyone looks away when someone hurts you.
Banning a serial abuser from a specific gathering is not revenge. It is not exclusion from society as a whole.
Refusal to ban a serial
abuser from a specific gathering excludes people who did nothing wrong, and makes the whole event more sexist, more racist, more exclusionary.
Ways to stop violent assholes that are embraced by communities may not be suitable for governments.
I oppose the death penalty. I don’t mourn someone killed by a person they tried to harm.
Restorative justice and changes in behaviour are of course the best outcome. If that doesn’t work, I fully support threats of proportional violence to dissuade a serial
abuser from bringing his nonsense to a given place.
For assholes, cutting off access to victims feels like revenge.
Ignore the whining of assholes.
Accountability isn’t revenge.
Accountability feels bad to someone who did bad things.
Don’t get it twisted.
It turns out, like we told you, that “but he does good work” is wrong.
The work eventually stops, too.
The people with the moral fortitude of overcooked pasta when presented with multiple credible allegations or even a conviction of the most heinous violence? Those guys? You expect them to defend anyone? They didn’t even defend themselves.
They are still blaming the whistleblowers for the fact that they faced the mildest of temporary consequences.
Leaders, my ass.
“Where did all the principled people who would hold the line against slop code in open source go?”
Maybe they left or were pushed out because they objected to Nazi tattoos, allegiance to Gamergate with threats of doxxing and SWATting, gendered violence at developer meetings and conferences, convicted child abusers at conferences, transphobia, ableism, and platforming racism because “he can code” or “he wrote a book.”
Did we really expect action against bad things from the so-called leaders who let WILDLY BLOODY OBVIOUS asshole behaviour happen without consequences?
to really blow some minds bring up the fact that software needs to be hosted somewhere.
For years, it’s been common knowledge among grant writers for open source tech that putting maintenance of existing code in a proposal can tank the whole thing.
Funders, do you hear us now? Are you going to remember this week and let go of the new shiny object fixation?
Fascism takes a complex issue and offers a solution so devoid of context that it addresses nothing and only creates suffering.
However, sometimes the good things are also simple. The complexity is in knowing the difference. Sometimes it really does take a bunch of researchers to figure something out. For many issues, a knee-jerk reaction based on which policy sounds like it was dreamed up by assholes will be backed up by lots of research.
People are homeless. Give them homes.
Children are hungry. Give them food.
Lots of evidence to support housing and school meals.
People are jobless, deport refugees? Fuck off.
Lots of evidence showing xenophobia and racism is evil and nonsensical.
Absolutely last on my list of grievances is the fact that rich people are dull and boring and they can't even be bothered to build supervillain lairs. I bet their bunkers are beige inside, with not a piranha tank to be seen.
Being an asshole to most people is more expensive than trying to build fully automated luxury gay space communism and I'm tired of bawbags in suits saying otherwise.
What has been studied, and with relatively simple maths involved, shows consistent humanitarian and economic benefits:
Investments in education and housing return between 5-12 times the initial budget back to the economy (GI Bill).
Universal basic income works. People still work. They start businesses. Or they engage in hobbies that build community (multiple pilot studies).
The solution for a lack of housing is giving people homes. This is less expensive than all the ER visits and policing involved in having people without housing around (one notable study, among others, in Finland).
Most medical research is publicly funded. Getting rid of pharmaceutical company profits does not harm medical research, it just returns benefits to the people who actually paid for it.
People who get welfare payments spend that money locally, providing more economic benefit to the community than a billionaire stashing profits in the Cayman Islands.
Most any graph about human well-being and capitalism well and truly goes to hell about the time Reagan and Thatcher get their grubby hands on power, but while you're looking at it, an economist will be right along to tell you that if we really have a go at trickle-down economics this time it'll be wine and roses forever for everyone.
Right-wing economists are just creepy, gaslighting weirdos who can do algebra.
"According to three pages of equations that you are too dense to understand, people who grow food and study pandemics are less important than some guy making an app that burns electricity and creates e-waste so I can buy cartoon cats" - people who tell you they are very smart
When stated as plainly as possible, all the economic systems run by people who do not participate in making useful things begin to sound not just evil but silly too.
Capitalism is a system that asserts that recycling electronics where they are used is too expensive and time-consuming, but enslaved children mining rare materials that pay for war on civilians is peak efficiency.
Conflict minerals need to be banned outright.
Software licensing won’t save the people harmed at each stage of the supply chain.
Software licensing doesn’t address how hazardous the human labour involved in recycling old electronics can be.