On 11/4/21 12:13 AM, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
but Keith comes from a locale where that particular tactic and in particular the term 'unprofessional' is frequently employed as pretext for preventing dismantling of things most people thought were dismantled in the 1960s.
Offhand, I don't recall the word "unprofessional" being used this way in my "locale".
But I was raised in an area (Nashville, Tennessee) that was very appearance-conscious, and I attended a religious school that was very appearance-conscious, staffed by people who were very appearance-conscious. By the time I was 12 or so it was obvious to me that those people cared much more about appearance than reality. They were viciously critical of anyone who did not walk the walk and talk the talk and dress in the very conservative manner common to their religious sect, often labeling them "sinners" and implying that they were damned for eternity. The verse most quoted by them was "Abstain from all appearance of evil". At the same time, they would overlook the actual behavior of anyone who did keep up appearances, giving them the benefit of the doubt unless and until the evidence against them was overwhelming.
So yes, that had a profound effect on me, so much that I gave up a scholarship at Vanderbilt University and attended a state-supported school instead, at least partially because I didn't want anything to do with Nashville or Nashville culture anymore.
One of the things that I used to really like about IETF when I got involved circa 1990, was that it mostly eschewed the trappings of professionalism. People didn't care much who you were or who you worked for or where you were from, they cared about whether you knew what you were talking about and made useful contributions. Which seemed to me then, and now, to be exactly how they should be.
Another positive aspect about IETF of that time that stood out was the community's tolerance of different points-of-view and different kinds of personalities.
By contrast, today, we have people advocating intolerance, and insisting that IETF must become intolerant of certain people in order to make IETF seem more attractive to intolerant people. I do not hold with that view, and it unpleasantly reminds me of the hypocrisy of the environment in which I was raised and schooled. From recent private mail I understand that some would not only call such language "uncivil behavior", they would advocate censorship of individuals using it.
To me that advocation of censorship, and the efforts to marginalize certain people, are uncivil in the extreme, and I wish people would stop it.
For IETF to function properly, its participants need to be able to speak their minds. People are only free to speak their minds on any subject in an environment that is radically open to speech. I agree that there's some need for comity, and I'm fine with rules that prohibit insulting of other participants. But censorship needs to be extremely rare, not used as a mechanism to make less tolerant people feel more comfortable.
I will not defend descriptions like "stupid" and "garbage" when describing a protocol, because I think criticism of a protocol is pretty much unhelpful unless a reader can use it to evaluate whether some change or other protocol would suit the critic better. But I don't believe that such descriptions are insulting or uncivil. To the contrary, I think it's necessary that we be able to criticize protocols, even in extreme terms sometimes.
I also think it's necessary that we be able to criticize companies, even in extreme terms sometimes, though again it's more helpful if the critics say specifically why the company is being criticized. But predatory companies are unfortunately part of the landscape that we inhabit, and we do the Internet community a disservice if we refuse to recognize the elephants in the room out of some misguided sense of "civility" or "professionalism". IETF cannot do its job properly if it acts as if it owes fealty to these companies.
What would not be acceptable to me would be using a participant's employer as a means of disparaging that participant. Everyone has to decide for themselves what compromises between doing what's ideal or right, and doing what puts food on the table, they're willing to accept. We need to respect others' decisions, and realize that there are good people who are are still trying to do what's right as best they can, even when their employers may be doing tremendous harm.
And that's another reason why we need to expect individual participants to use their own best technical judgment, and treat them as if they are doing so (even though we know that's not always the case) unless there's very good reason to believe otherwise.
Keith
