On 08/06/18 14:21, Christophe Pettus wrote:
On Jun 7, 2018, at 02:55, Gavin Flower <GavinFlower@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
The Americans often seem to act as though most people lived in the USA, therefore we should all be bound by what they think is correct!
I have to say that this seems like a red herring to me.
Not entirely. American web sites tend to insist on weird date format,
and insist on the archaic imperial units rather than the metric system
that most people in the world use. There were also more cultural
clashes, long before Trump got elected. I'm English, and I'm very aware
of the arrogance we showed when we had an Empire. The Americans don't
seem to have learnt from the mistakes the British made.
If you selected 3 teams of 4, for each of the countries USA, France, and
Japan -- isolated each team and asked them to draw of a Code-of-Conduct,
they would clash. Mind you, they'd probably clash if you selected 3
teams from different parts of the USA!
1. The CoC committee handles actual incidents involving real people. It's not their job to boil the ocean and create a new world; they deal with the matters brought before them. I have no reason to believe that they will not apply good sense and judgement to the handling of the specific cases.
2. I don't think that there is a country where someone being driven out of a technical community by harassment is an acceptable local value.
True, but defining acceptable values is way more difficult than it
looks, as are definitions in general.
For example try defining something simple, like what is a car! EVERYBODY
knows what a car is right? It is not something controversial that
affects people's religious beliefs (car nuts excepted!). You will find
it incredible difficult to have a definition that includes everything
that you consider a car, and exclude everything that you don't think is
a car. A colleague once had a car that only had 3 road wheels, ever
come across that before???
Try defining success at university, it is downright impossible if you
consider it with sufficient care -- yet people often act like there is a
clear cut definition, they think it is so obvious they usually don't
bother attempting to define it. If a girl enrols in 3 courses at a
university and completes them, but lives for 70 years without further
study -- has she failed because she never got a degree?
3. The only actual real-life example of a culture clash that I've seen offered up here is the ability to say "c*nt" on a technical mailing list about databases. That seems a very strange and specific hill to choose to die on in this discussion.
I agree that such words have no place in a discussion of databases,
except when they do!
There was once a company that wrote an adventure game that refused to
accept rude words, so people went out of their way to look for ones it
didn't know about. So their action had consequences opposite to their
intentions.
Saying people should never denigrate others seems straightforward and
noble until you look at things in detail. I've called a friend of mine
a bastard, but he took it as a mark of respect in the context of our
discussion.
--
-- Christophe Pettus
xof@xxxxxxxxxxxx
I think a written code of conduct is laudable, but impracticable in
reality, even if "Politically Correct".
Cheers,
Gavin
