Re: [RFC] [Draft] Adopt Code of Conduct

Kevin Smith wrote on 06/01/2016 11:58:

On Jan 6, 2016, at 3:28 AM, Rowan Collins <rowan.collins@gmail.com> wrote: On 6 January 2016 02:13:53 GMT, "Paul M. Jones" <pmjones88@gmail.com> wrote:

When speech-policing is proposed without irony, and welcomed with applause, I respond correctly: with scorn and contempt, as is deserved.

You state this like some kind of self-evident truth. Understand that not everybody agrees with you, and scorn is not generally something that wins people round to your argument.

If a code of conduct so broad and invasive that it seeks deal with such crimes as the “thoughtless use of pronouns” and “culturally insensitive names” isn’t speech-policing, what is?

That is not the point I was making. I've never heard the term "speech-policing" before, and "scorn and contempt" is not a helpful way of teaching me what it is.

the sort of person who [...] deems any opinion they don’t like “dangerous"

Paul does not like the proposed wording, so he brands it "fascist", "horrific", and other pejorative and subjective terms; this feels very much like branding "any opinion they don't like" to me.

When the creation of such a machine for injustice is formally recommended and begins to receive rubber-stamp approval, I’d hope someone would stand up and speak against it. Leaders in the civil rights movement in the United States could have been accused of using extreme or hyperbolic language too, but that is no argument against the rightness of their position.

This proposal is definitely not getting rubber-stamp approval. Concerns have been raised and are being discussed. We're beyond the "make some noise to make sure people sit up" stage now, and need to start looking at what we *do* want to happen. Shouting across the room gets people's attention; shouting in their face after they ask you for more details just makes them want to shout back.

and observably less fascist

And, we're immediately back to the unnecessarily combative language. Calling the proposal "fascist" and "horrific" is really unnecessary, and just undermines your position by making you seem like an extremist rather than a concerned party with a contribution to make.

Who gets to determine that the manner of expressing an opinion is unnecessary? While “fascism” has certainly become a general pejorative, it does have an actual meaning.

If you brand a proposal as fascist, there is the strong implication that it is deliberately so; read that way, you are accusing anyone who supports it of having fascist views; it's not rocket science to realise that some people will object to that accusation. If you don't think it's deliberately so, then avoiding such emotionally loaded language is just going to make everyone's life easier, by making it clear that you don't intend such an accusation. Sure, you have a right to say it however you want, but if you want to persuade people round to your point of view, then surely it's pragmatically sensible to say it in a way likely to make people agree with you, rather than a way likely to make them feel attacked. Regards, -- Rowan Collins [IMSoP]