Politics of Gnome and Perceptions of rudeness (Random things from Daveshah's thread)


Whenever people work together there is politics. At it's most basic just simple ways of conduct are politics. In making software with more than one person. To make a politics free program, you make yourself and never release it, then it might be politics free. :D As soon as you show it to someone else you loose :D
 
What's the politics of the game TIS100? It's a game about programming a fictional computer. Or even better - Pong - It's two bats and a ball...
I do not know much about those games specifically but games often have politics. What about deciding on copyright, license, or closedness? And games are often censored.

Nintendo often regio locks their games, or encrypts their consoles and handhelds against the user. The better their methods technically are, the worse they are for the user, because it's the politics of the decision which is bad.

but I've seen people (myself included) attempt to write an OS for no reason other than to learn and/or fun.
If your OS mattered then you would probably have to decide on license later on, which is also a political decision. And if your OS got a lot of users then they probably would make feature requests and patches and then you would have to decide a policy on which patches and features to allow. That's also politics. The only software that can escape being political is software that has no relevance to people besides it's creator.

Um...Accomplish an objective.
…That's often often decided by politics or influenced by politics.

Yep. Cause software is about function not politics.
Sounds like you want a meritocracy. That's also my favourite policy, but it's a policy nonetheless.
 
Maybe something can impose politics onto you without it itself being about politics. Or, for most software politics are metastuff.
 
A social justice warrior, or SJW, does not necessarily strongly believe all that they say, or even care about the groups they are fighting on behalf of. They typically repeat points from whoever is the most popular blogger or commenter of the moment, hoping that they will “get SJ points” and become popular in return.

Sounds like the “me too” brigade.
 
Maybe something can impose politics onto you without it itself being about politics. Or, for most software politics are metastuff.


Politics the game... now you can be a politician in a big virtual world, You decide the rules! in this world*. Time to get your thumbs wet flipping through hundereds of pages of legeslation, make that difficult descision all whilst trying not to burn out and keeping everybody happy.


* together with all other payers
 
A social justice warrior, or SJW, does not necessarily strongly believe all that they say, or even care about the groups they are fighting on behalf of. They typically repeat points from whoever is the most popular blogger or commenter of the moment, hoping that they will “get SJ points” and become popular in return.

Sounds like the “me too” brigade.
Wasn’t aware of this aspect of “SJW”, nor had I considered another source of “SJW” being what Letalis Sonus describes in their post at #11, but knowing several #metoo victims amongst friends and family, there’s no way I will ever agree with such a statement.
 
Politics the game... now you can be a politician in a big virtual world, You decide the rules! in this world*. Time to get your thumbs wet flipping through hundereds of pages of legeslation, make that difficult descision all whilst trying not to burn out and keeping everybody** happy.


* together with all other payers
**where everybody = the key party donors
 
But then how do you determine merit? And how do you keep this determination of merit free of politics? (if that would be a goal)

By an implicit or explicit process that you implicitly or explicitly politically agree with all participants (or in case of disagreements, the community diminishes or splits).
What counts as merit for you is a political decision. Everything is, as @λ the β-Redex Reducer and you say, as long as it affects more than one person.

What happens is that I'm becoming more suspicious of people that mark any political discussion as avoidable, unnecessary or troublesome. I always suspect they simply
want to take the advantage that their political opinion is mainstream enough and prevent it to be challenged by political debate. I can't know. because I can't read minds,
but it is like the path of least resistance, so I suspect people to follow that consciously or not. As I grew older I may be turning into a Occam sword fighter...

I'm not a fan of CoC, but I'm also not against them. CoCs shouldn't be necessary, but they try to address real and important issues. Then they fail to address other real and important issues.
For example every CoC finds it terrible to discriminate on race, sexuallity, nationality or gender, but most free software communities discriminate on language. I know it's not the same because
one can learn languages, but most people on the world don't speak English. Most projects will do their best so that their end product UIs are translated into as many languages as possible, but many
will not let you participate in languages different than English or at most will create specific "ghetos" for other languages. And I don't see SJWs against that. Possibly because translation,
multiplication of communication channels, and multicultural awareness do take more work than just writing a CoC and feeling good about it.

My problem with CoCs is that they probably don't address all problems and they understimate the problems they want to solve. An unenforced CoC has little value. And an enforced CoC may run contrary to
other human rights like due process and so on because it is essentially setting up an adhoc judiciary without real force, oversight or checks and balances (and without properly written law, to start with, for which you don't even have a
census to vote it). And there're enough problems with more "professional" judiciaries out there to try it amateurishly. Amateur courts bring me some kind of vigilante smell that I dislike. Did people really never
kick off nasty members before CoCs, just because they got fed up of their abuses ?

But I also think that in the most part they honestly try to fix a problem bigger than they can. It's the anarchist dream to build a world better than you have, not really stopping to think if you really can.
If people are stalking others there should be a real court you can bring them to. That does not work internationally, so people hack together what they can. But does it really work ?

But I kind of dislike both SJWs and anti-SJWs. So I tend to never push for CoCs, never avoid communities with CoCs (although I tend to read them because exceptionally they are indeed
unreasonable for me, and even if they're normally not, you still learn something about the community).
 
So in order to fix a problem you have to fix all problems, fixing a part of problem is invalid because it does not fix other parts?

I think most major problems are of the "unfixable" type, however we can increment to a little bit beter version than current. You don't need to solve all bugs at once.
 
So in order to fix a problem you have to fix all problems, fixing a part of problem is invalid because it does not fix other parts?

I think most major problems are of the "unfixable" type, however we can increment to a little bit beter version than current. You don't need to solve all bugs at once.

I didn't mean that. I mean only that whenever you try to fix something you must keep in mind whether the solution is worse than the problem or not. Fix what you can, you don't have to fix it all. But try not to break more than you fix. And keep the rest of problems yet to fix in mind too.
 
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