Not relevant

Posted Nov 16, 2024 17:48 UTC (Sat) by mgb (guest, #3226)
In reply to: Not relevant by jake
Parent article: Truly portable C applications

Punishing criticism of racism is never a good thing.

Not relevant

Posted Nov 16, 2024 18:06 UTC (Sat) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] (4 responses)

This is not a site for people to snipe at what others have posted on reddit. It is not a site for personal attacks in general.

There is a lot to criticize in the world right now. Trust me, I live in the US, I'm well aware of it. But if we let that discussion take over LWN, we won't have LWN anymore. There are plenty of other places where these discussions can be had.

As a postscript...

Posted Nov 16, 2024 18:11 UTC (Sat) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] (3 responses)

We get it: people wish that we had not highlighted work by this particular author. Had we known more about the person in question, we might have shied away from the topic. But the article is out now, it describes a bit of interesting technology, people have had their say, please let's leave it at that.

As a postscript...

Posted Nov 16, 2024 22:07 UTC (Sat) by mgb (guest, #3226) [Link]

LWN is one of the least crazy forums on the Intertubes. Thank you.

But off-topic stuff has been posted here occasionally. And it was rightly criticized by your moderators.

What I have never seen before is two people punished in this way. It is not a good look for LWN that in both cases the people were punished for criticizing racism.

My personal preference would be for the article, the punishments, and all associated comments to be expunged.

As a postscript...

Posted Nov 17, 2024 14:32 UTC (Sun) by jart (guest, #171513) [Link] (1 responses)

I'm also an LWN subscriber. I was so happy when I saw that Daroc took the time to put together a second, very well researched article that covered many subtle facets of Cosmopolitan Libc that typically go unnoticed. In the four years I've been working on this project in public, more effort went into this piece than any I've seen so far. However this comment section is is not the kind of attention I want. While I can't thank you enough for the support you've provided, not moderating these kinds of comments probably does more to hurt my career, since this will likely be the part that folks remember.

I understand there are concerns here about the name of my project. For what it's worth, I named it "cosmopolitan" in the sense of cosmopolitan liberalism, which I define as wanting to feel at home in every nation, and the reason why I did that is because my project builds executables that aim to feel at home on (almost) every operating system. I created tools that help you build programs that overcome artificial barriers so you can have impact helping more communities, while respecting the rules each platform put in place. If anyone has actionable feedback on how I can do that better, then I'm more than happy to listen.

Note:

Posted Nov 17, 2024 14:34 UTC (Sun) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link]

I approved the above comment because, given that the poster has been targeted for extensive criticism here, to do otherwise seemed unfair. This is not an invitation to restart the discussion, though; it needs to stop here.

Not relevant

Posted Nov 16, 2024 22:06 UTC (Sat) by atnot (guest, #124910) [Link] (1 responses)

Yeah so, for the record, I do fully accept I overstepped my bounds here and I'm sorry about that.

The point I meant to illustrate was that a large contingent of the people who claim to support Justine for her technical achievements are in fact just racists and antisemites and are generally very bad at hiding it. But I could and should have just made that point directly instead of launching a barrage of personal attacks at some random person who just happened to make a tantalizingly good case in point. I also did not mean to make such insinuations about any LWN staff, to be clear.

I do agree with you in the general case that this website tends to punish e.g. calling out racism far harder proclaiming your support for racists or making racist statements. And I would still encourage anyone to ponder the the long-term implications of such a policy. But in this case I accept that the moderator action against me specifically was warranted.

I also consider Corbet's position ("we didn't know and might have handled things differently") much more satisfactory than the previous one ("we don't care please shut up"). It is perhaps the latter that led me to put a finer point on it than I should have, and with the further clarification I do consider that resolved, not that that excuses it.

Not relevant

Posted Nov 16, 2024 22:16 UTC (Sat) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link]

The reason you don't see people called out for making racist statements here is ... because that doesn't really happen much here. For something that overtly discriminatory, you may never see it at all; that is exceedingly rare, but there was one episode recently.

The people we addressed did not get that attention for "calling out" or "criticizing" racism. It was because they pointedly ignored our "no personal attacks" policy. In your case after multiple requests to stop. We have been consistent about that policy for many years; please do not try to make it into something that it is not.

It is time for this discussion to end, let's do that here, please. If you wish to discuss our moderation policy with us, send us a note at lwn@lwn.net and we can talk further that way.