The last few times I've seen technical groups kick someone out over racism, including anti-semitism, they picked one point where the person kept doubling down after a very long history of borderline rule following behavior that was clearly malicious. I would be very surprised to see if this was different.
While I agree in principle that we can't allow the word question to be destroyed by hate speech, there are always assholes who ride up to some line to be dicks to someone using whatever the boundaries of the rules are. I want to know what happened here and if that was the case.
So this person is infamous for submitting ChatGPT generated WG papers.
Then he was blamed for "question" title, he refuse to change the title, his sponsor cut the tie.
I don't know. I'm deeply worrying about brain drain on C++ standard committee.
I was a C++ committee member once. They failed to understand the importance of char8_t, thinking char is enough. Then, they depends on locale on std::format. I quit for I lost hope on C++.
You can't expel members from SC/WG but this is... what are they doing?
There has to be extra context here. There is no way we’re getting the full picture. If it really is just as simple as including “question” in the title of a paper then there is some serious mismanagement occurring.
The article clearly has gaps simply by not being an hour long read on the Atlantic, one obvious gap is that it doesn't seem to have a statement from the person removed after they were removed.
> one obvious gap is that it doesn't seem to have a statement from the person removed after they were removed.
I think the article is written by the person that was removed. It is lacking any statement of the standard foundation who removed him. No such statement exists, even on the internal committee mailing list it is just an "fyi, that person is no longer on the committee" without any reasons.
I can piece something together from his previous behavior on the committee mailing list, but that information is not public and I'm not at liberty to share.
The author of the paper is not competent in the subject matter.
A compiler can make assumptions that behavior is well defined, and it can also identify situations where it is confirmed undefined.
All of that reasoning happens before runtime.
For instance, and unreachable assertion works by invoking undefined behavior. What identified by the function-call-like syntax unreachable().
If we have:
S; unreachable();
then, ostensibly, it looks as if statement S is something that happens at run time before the unreachable construct is executed. (S is a simple statement which passes control to whatever follows; it does not hide a go to).
And so we could naively argue that undefined behavior cannot travel backward in time. Of course S must successfully execute, and only then can things go haywire due to the undefined behavior of unreachable.
But that's not the way it works. The compiler is looking at this before runtime. The compiler is free to assume that behavior is well defined. That's what makes unreachable work: if the program's behavior is well defined, it must be that the unreachable statement is never reached. Which implies that S is never executed. If S is never executed, it can just be deleted.
If S and the unreachable statement are deleted, but control ends up there anyway, the program will go haywire. And it will go haywire without producing the effects of S. So in effect undefined behavior has gone backwards into S, so to speak in naive language.
Logical reasoning over code while translating it does not follow runtime chronology. It follows chains of inferences.
As it is based on my C paper, I can comment on this. While the compiler reasons at translation-time the question is whether an operation that UB is allowed to affect previous observable behavior at run-time. We looked at this and came to the conclusions that 1) the wording of the C standard never really allowed this (but the C++ standard did), 2) it is completely useless for worthwhile optimizations, 3) examples where compilers exploited this intentionally turned out to be buggy, 4) it makes UB even more dangerous. So we made sure the C standard clarifies that UB can not travel backwards in in time.
I agree the title of the paper is unfortunate. I do not believe the author was intentionally trying to send an antisemitic message, but I do not know him well (I corresponded with him about his other paper)
The entire article is a lot of name calling for many C++WG members for sexual harassers, rapists, hate speakers etc.
It argues that C++WG made various mistakes and full of incompetent members by presenting various seemingly technical topics but it's so random and unorganized it's hard to follow.
> Andrew Tomazos submitted P3403, a paper titled “The Undefined Behavior Question” (which HOOBOY man we’re just knocking it out of the fucking park with possible anti-semitic dog whistles today aren’t we?)
Riiiight. To be fair apart from that their criticism of Tomasoz seems relatively justifiable, if unnecessarily angry. Tomasoz has said that "almost noone" has ever written anything productive in Rust, which is a stupid thing to say. And he thinks ChatGPT is on par with humans now, which is also pretty obviously untrue.
This is one of the most toxic blogs I’ve ever read - so much swearing, vile hate while criticizing various persons they dislike, rambling incoherence. Wow.
And their specific criticisms of the contributor this post is discussing, are very mild but full of personal attacks and expletives?
Absolutely unhinged rant accusing everyone of being some kind of Nazi or sexual predator. Seeing the "content warning" and design of the page should already be enough to know exactly what to expect about what you are about to read, and what kind of person wrote it.
1. Person publishes a thing with a title including the word “Question”
2. People say this title has some resonance to do with the Nazi genocide and ask him to change it
3. He refuses to change it
5. He gets expelled from the committee
You see the missing piece? Unlike the title, the body text doesn’t say he was expelled for the title or even for refusing to change it. It says he refused to change the title and then later was expelled. I could see a hypothetical situation in which he was totally in the right to refuse to change the title but acted like such a jerk in the ensuing debate that they fired him from the committee. We just don’t know. Imagine I publish a thing, my employer ask me to change the title, I say no, then the next time I go to work I steal all the furniture and they fire me. It would have the same pattern as the facts in the article.
Personally it seems very strange to fire him for using the word “Question” (if that’s what they did) but it also seems very strange for him to choose to die on that hill and not change the word if people find it really provocative (if that is what he did). “On the effects of undefined behaviour” seems a much better title than the one he chose for example. So it seems we’re lacking context here.
I'm not sure if you are being serious or not. If the former, there are two problems with the "employer": (1) finding a problem where there is none, (2) firing a person for sticking to the common sense rather that giving in to meaningless accusations.
About 20 years ago, I suggested in comp.language.c++ on USENET that the committee's refusal to take memory safety seriously constituted material support of terrorism. That really got some people upset, and the posting was removed from USENET, which is hard to do.
Now, of course, C++ is frantically trying to become memory-safe, with heavy pressure from the cybersecurity parts of the US government.
Has anybody even read Marx's 1844 essay in recent years? When the USSR went down, the Stanford bookstore had a sale - "All Communism 80% off".
The 19th century was "The age of questions"[1], a book subtitled "Or, A First Attempt at an Aggregate History of the Eastern, Social, Woman, American, Jewish, Polish, Bullion, Tuberculosis, and Many Other Questions over the Nineteenth Century, and Beyond".
The Schleswig-Holstein question [2] was a border dispute between Denmark and Germany, and was a big deal from about 1806 to WWI. That's probably the most famous of the "questions" because there were several wars over it over a long period.
"On the slavery question" is a famous speech by Sen. John Calhoun (D-SC) made in 1850.[3] That's part of the run-up to the American Civil War. (Or the War of Northern Aggression, for those below the Mason-Dixon line.)
"On the bullion question" is a famous speech by Sir John Sinclair made in 1811.[4] It's about the gold standard for money.
Nobody has a unique claim for "On the (whatever) Question". It's historical, but once widely used, terminology.
While the title could indeed be a reference to the 4chan "The xxx question" meme (e.g., "The femboy question"), which is derived from "The Jewish question," it's not clear if that was the author's actual intention, and even if it was, most uses of the meme (see the femboy example) are not facially antisemitic and at worst are just examples of edgelord humor.
It looks like C++ is finally succumbing to entryism, meaning it will no longer serve as a sane alternative to Rust.
> it's not clear if that was the author's actual intention
The paper[1] doesn't appear to have any other connections to the book/response/memes. A clear distinction is that the UB paper very directly and prominently states the question, rather than cloaking it in allusion or having a lengthy preface trying to contextualize it.
It is literally the first time I heard the "femboy question" phrase. You can literally insert any noun here and have the phrase used already. Whatever, a "bear" let's say:
The fact that people associate such unrelated phrases with one another on the basis of their grammatical similarity just speaks of them, not of the author.
...according to alleged victim. Without more independent information or at least the other side's take this is just "aggrieved person is aggrieved" and ragebait.
and r/cpp mods just woke up, banning everyone who question (am I still allowed to use that word?) this lunatic behavior. For context: A week ago, someone out for blood put out a slander article referencing this amongst other things.
edit: After going on a banning spree, foonathan nuked the thread with "I am not going to deal with this on a Sunday". Nice
Hey, u/ss99ww. We did not go on a banning spree, we banned only one person, you. After removing the comment we're you insulted someone, I checked your history, noticed that you did not meaningfully participate in r/cpp outside this thread, and decided to remove someone from the community who'd only be there to cause trouble.
(And for the record, we barely removed any comments, just the ones that directly insulted people.)
> Interesting that you did not choose to voice your opinions using your main accounts on that community then.
I'd love to, but reddit and cpp keep banning/suspending accounts - so I can't! Funny how that works isn't it?
> Nah, that was just the comment I used to get to your profile. I banned you for insulting someone.
That is not true. Here is the message:
> Hello, You have been permanently banned from participating in r/cpp because your comment violates this community's rules. You won't be able to post or comment, but you can still view and subscribe to it.
4. After noticing your lack of contributions to r/cpp, I decided you are just someone who causes moderation trouble without contributing useful technical insights, so I decided to ban you. That's why the above comment is listed in your ban reason. If you had posted the slur on an account with actual history in r/cpp and no previous removed comments, I would not have banned you.
Edit: 5. Reddit administrators have now removed your comment as well.
> Interesting that you did not choose to voice your opinions using your main accounts on that community then
Yes, it's interesting that someone opted to use an alternate account to discuss a contentious issue on a platform rife with censorship and deplatforming.
Why does it so often seem that the people complaining about censorship are the ones punching down?
Why is it so often someone's right to complain and make problems for others but never concern about people's right to be tolerated when they're being decent humans?
Either people need to be banned who insult others and use slurs and those who maliciously push right up against the rules, or they will bully people out. Look at modern X/Twitter allowing hate speech has pushed out advertisers and something like half of the users?
This is basic Paradox of Tolerance stuff, decent people aren't Banning anyone for pointing out actual arguments like discussing if "question" is okay, asking for extra context if this guy did something else or if this is council overreach. But people complaining about wokeness, DEI, diversity hires, or other technically allowable but obviously hostile nonsense are clearly just trying to attack other people and often in ways that are racist dog whistles. If people insist on being hostile up to the amount allowable by the rules instead of just trying to get along then the rules need to keep changing and adjusting and of course the people who are willfully choosing to be assholes will scream "censorship". Before teaming up with someone complaining about censorship be sure they're actually at risk of censorship and not just trying to use Free Speech as a shield to hurt others.
Not sure this _is_ a huge issue. As someone who's not involved it just seems like standard issue interpersonal drama that happens on every committee, board etc and to every tech project from time to time.
eg in linux, git exists because of the Larry McEvoy Bitkeeper drama, there was the Eric S Raymond kernel build config drama, there were numerous Reiserfs and devfs dramas, etc etc etc. In the gnu/fsf world we have had the recent guy leaves because he doesn't like the fact that treesitter is the standard c++ mode drama, you had the emacs vs xemacs dramas, numerous "RMS intervenes to prevent people having an intermediate representation in the GCC compiler" dramas, etc etc. The list is incredibly long. People fight and lose political battles. They leave some committee that most people don't care about. Nothing really important is affected in any way.
Here as someone who was not involved it seems both sides are a bit unreasonable, and some guy has left the standards committee as a result. Really doesn't seem like you complaining about how reddit mods have responded to your posting there has any relevance here.
You were clearly banned for the comment where you used offensive slurs in reference to the author of a previously discussed blog post. I was happy to report the comment.
It would be better to judge the whole thing if you quoted the word instead of going "the word I used". If you get flagged for quoting here, at least we will learn a valuable lesson.
> jump into wild nonsense conspiracy theory or extreme bigotry.
Did they? The commenter was referring to "Simple Sabotage Field Manual", by the CIA. It's a very commonly cited list of actions to take, or that someone would take, to impede the effectiveness of an organization.
The commenter was not saying "CIA did it, and birds aren't real".
Yeah appealing to that book is literally conspiracy nonsense when you're talking about a group of engineers trying to do good engineering. That appeal fundamentally means that there are people trying to actively sabotage a thing, that by itself is a conspiracy theory particularly when you consider that much of the standards committee has been doing standardization work for ages, and all of them are experienced engineers focused on engineering.
Prima facie claiming that people who are joining an optional group that puts out optional rules that companies can opt into implementing for the sake of sabotaging something in such an esoteric way is complete conspiracy nonsense.
Edit - LOL, step one of my conspiracy and get a PhD and work at a company for 10 years using a programming language so I can get someone kicked off an optional committee! Brilliant plan, no notes!!!
It is a valid comparison to expose the similarity of one thing that someone thinks is reasonable to another thing that everyone should recognize is not.
The last few times I've seen technical groups kick someone out over racism, including anti-semitism, they picked one point where the person kept doubling down after a very long history of borderline rule following behavior that was clearly malicious. I would be very surprised to see if this was different.
While I agree in principle that we can't allow the word question to be destroyed by hate speech, there are always assholes who ride up to some line to be dicks to someone using whatever the boundaries of the rules are. I want to know what happened here and if that was the case.
What actually happened: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1gynl1v/c_stan...
It's even more hard to believe.
So this person is infamous for submitting ChatGPT generated WG papers.
Then he was blamed for "question" title, he refuse to change the title, his sponsor cut the tie.
I don't know. I'm deeply worrying about brain drain on C++ standard committee.
I was a C++ committee member once. They failed to understand the importance of char8_t, thinking char is enough. Then, they depends on locale on std::format. I quit for I lost hope on C++.
You can't expel members from SC/WG but this is... what are they doing?
There has to be extra context here. There is no way we’re getting the full picture. If it really is just as simple as including “question” in the title of a paper then there is some serious mismanagement occurring.
Those were my thoughts exactly - though it is 2024, and I have a sinking feeling it could be just as the article states.
The article clearly has gaps simply by not being an hour long read on the Atlantic, one obvious gap is that it doesn't seem to have a statement from the person removed after they were removed.
> one obvious gap is that it doesn't seem to have a statement from the person removed after they were removed.
I think the article is written by the person that was removed. It is lacking any statement of the standard foundation who removed him. No such statement exists, even on the internal committee mailing list it is just an "fyi, that person is no longer on the committee" without any reasons.
I can piece something together from his previous behavior on the committee mailing list, but that information is not public and I'm not at liberty to share.
That is entirely possible. We simply lack corroborating sources at the moment so we can't jump to any sort of conclusion.
As far as I am concerned this whole thing might not have happened until I see another couple of sources.
Another comment pointed us to
https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1gynl1v/commen...
The author of the paper is not competent in the subject matter.
A compiler can make assumptions that behavior is well defined, and it can also identify situations where it is confirmed undefined.
All of that reasoning happens before runtime.
For instance, and unreachable assertion works by invoking undefined behavior. What identified by the function-call-like syntax unreachable().
If we have:
then, ostensibly, it looks as if statement S is something that happens at run time before the unreachable construct is executed. (S is a simple statement which passes control to whatever follows; it does not hide a go to).And so we could naively argue that undefined behavior cannot travel backward in time. Of course S must successfully execute, and only then can things go haywire due to the undefined behavior of unreachable.
But that's not the way it works. The compiler is looking at this before runtime. The compiler is free to assume that behavior is well defined. That's what makes unreachable work: if the program's behavior is well defined, it must be that the unreachable statement is never reached. Which implies that S is never executed. If S is never executed, it can just be deleted.
If S and the unreachable statement are deleted, but control ends up there anyway, the program will go haywire. And it will go haywire without producing the effects of S. So in effect undefined behavior has gone backwards into S, so to speak in naive language.
Logical reasoning over code while translating it does not follow runtime chronology. It follows chains of inferences.
As it is based on my C paper, I can comment on this. While the compiler reasons at translation-time the question is whether an operation that UB is allowed to affect previous observable behavior at run-time. We looked at this and came to the conclusions that 1) the wording of the C standard never really allowed this (but the C++ standard did), 2) it is completely useless for worthwhile optimizations, 3) examples where compilers exploited this intentionally turned out to be buggy, 4) it makes UB even more dangerous. So we made sure the C standard clarifies that UB can not travel backwards in in time.
I agree the title of the paper is unfortunate. I do not believe the author was intentionally trying to send an antisemitic message, but I do not know him well (I corresponded with him about his other paper)
This appears to be the source of the backlash:
https://izzys.casa/2024/11/on-safe-cxx/
while not the direct subject of this issue, that blog post is completely unhinged.
as a sibling comment said: "idiots all around".
or perhaps simply extremely bad at interpreting and handling social skills and emotions.
The entire article is a lot of name calling for many C++WG members for sexual harassers, rapists, hate speakers etc.
It argues that C++WG made various mistakes and full of incompetent members by presenting various seemingly technical topics but it's so random and unorganized it's hard to follow.
It doesn't make sense at all.
To save anyone else the time:
> Andrew Tomazos submitted P3403, a paper titled “The Undefined Behavior Question” (which HOOBOY man we’re just knocking it out of the fucking park with possible anti-semitic dog whistles today aren’t we?)
Riiiight. To be fair apart from that their criticism of Tomasoz seems relatively justifiable, if unnecessarily angry. Tomasoz has said that "almost noone" has ever written anything productive in Rust, which is a stupid thing to say. And he thinks ChatGPT is on par with humans now, which is also pretty obviously untrue.
Idiots all round.
This is one of the most toxic blogs I’ve ever read - so much swearing, vile hate while criticizing various persons they dislike, rambling incoherence. Wow.
And their specific criticisms of the contributor this post is discussing, are very mild but full of personal attacks and expletives?
Absolutely unhinged rant accusing everyone of being some kind of Nazi or sexual predator. Seeing the "content warning" and design of the page should already be enough to know exactly what to expect about what you are about to read, and what kind of person wrote it.
This slashdot article has a big gap in it
1. Person publishes a thing with a title including the word “Question”
2. People say this title has some resonance to do with the Nazi genocide and ask him to change it
3. He refuses to change it
5. He gets expelled from the committee
You see the missing piece? Unlike the title, the body text doesn’t say he was expelled for the title or even for refusing to change it. It says he refused to change the title and then later was expelled. I could see a hypothetical situation in which he was totally in the right to refuse to change the title but acted like such a jerk in the ensuing debate that they fired him from the committee. We just don’t know. Imagine I publish a thing, my employer ask me to change the title, I say no, then the next time I go to work I steal all the furniture and they fire me. It would have the same pattern as the facts in the article.
Personally it seems very strange to fire him for using the word “Question” (if that’s what they did) but it also seems very strange for him to choose to die on that hill and not change the word if people find it really provocative (if that is what he did). “On the effects of undefined behaviour” seems a much better title than the one he chose for example. So it seems we’re lacking context here.
Is it dying on a hill or is it keeping up healthy boundaries and standing your ground?
I'm not sure if you are being serious or not. If the former, there are two problems with the "employer": (1) finding a problem where there is none, (2) firing a person for sticking to the common sense rather that giving in to meaningless accusations.
Sigh.
About 20 years ago, I suggested in comp.language.c++ on USENET that the committee's refusal to take memory safety seriously constituted material support of terrorism. That really got some people upset, and the posting was removed from USENET, which is hard to do.
Now, of course, C++ is frantically trying to become memory-safe, with heavy pressure from the cybersecurity parts of the US government.
Has anybody even read Marx's 1844 essay in recent years? When the USSR went down, the Stanford bookstore had a sale - "All Communism 80% off".
The 19th century was "The age of questions"[1], a book subtitled "Or, A First Attempt at an Aggregate History of the Eastern, Social, Woman, American, Jewish, Polish, Bullion, Tuberculosis, and Many Other Questions over the Nineteenth Century, and Beyond".
The Schleswig-Holstein question [2] was a border dispute between Denmark and Germany, and was a big deal from about 1806 to WWI. That's probably the most famous of the "questions" because there were several wars over it over a long period.
"On the slavery question" is a famous speech by Sen. John Calhoun (D-SC) made in 1850.[3] That's part of the run-up to the American Civil War. (Or the War of Northern Aggression, for those below the Mason-Dixon line.)
"On the bullion question" is a famous speech by Sir John Sinclair made in 1811.[4] It's about the gold standard for money.
Nobody has a unique claim for "On the (whatever) Question". It's historical, but once widely used, terminology.
[1] https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.23943/978140089021...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schleswig%E2%80%93Holstein_que...
[3] https://www.milestonedocuments.com/images/content/handouts/J...
[4] https://archive.org/details/sirjohnsinclairs00sinciala/page/...
You could entitle your post "On the 'On the Question' Question"
I recently bought a bottle of orange juice. And I probably should buy more as it might get banned.
Because someone might find similarity between juice and jews.
While the title could indeed be a reference to the 4chan "The xxx question" meme (e.g., "The femboy question"), which is derived from "The Jewish question," it's not clear if that was the author's actual intention, and even if it was, most uses of the meme (see the femboy example) are not facially antisemitic and at worst are just examples of edgelord humor.
It looks like C++ is finally succumbing to entryism, meaning it will no longer serve as a sane alternative to Rust.
> it's not clear if that was the author's actual intention
The paper[1] doesn't appear to have any other connections to the book/response/memes. A clear distinction is that the UB paper very directly and prominently states the question, rather than cloaking it in allusion or having a lengthy preface trying to contextualize it.
[1] https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2024/p34...
My point was that at worst it was just some edgelord humor.
It is literally the first time I heard the "femboy question" phrase. You can literally insert any noun here and have the phrase used already. Whatever, a "bear" let's say:
https://www.ywcamv.org/blog-newsroom/blog/2023/12/13/ywca-mv... (And this is from a reputable organization, not an individual.)
The fact that people associate such unrelated phrases with one another on the basis of their grammatical similarity just speaks of them, not of the author.
I feel like I read a book missing chapters in the middle.
...according to alleged victim. Without more independent information or at least the other side's take this is just "aggrieved person is aggrieved" and ragebait.
ISO considered harmful.
Madness.
and r/cpp mods just woke up, banning everyone who question (am I still allowed to use that word?) this lunatic behavior. For context: A week ago, someone out for blood put out a slander article referencing this amongst other things.
edit: After going on a banning spree, foonathan nuked the thread with "I am not going to deal with this on a Sunday". Nice
Hey, u/ss99ww. We did not go on a banning spree, we banned only one person, you. After removing the comment we're you insulted someone, I checked your history, noticed that you did not meaningfully participate in r/cpp outside this thread, and decided to remove someone from the community who'd only be there to cause trouble.
(And for the record, we barely removed any comments, just the ones that directly insulted people.)
I participated for r/cpp for a very large number of years, including quite a number of high-impact posts - just not with that account.
And would you be so kind to actually link to the comment you banned me for? This is it, for everyone to see and judge:
https://www.reddit.com/r/cpp/comments/1gyiwwc/c_standards_co...
> I participated for r/cpp for a very large number of years, including quite a number of high-impact posts - just not with that account.
Interesting that you did not choose to voice your opinions using your main accounts on that community then.
> And would you be so kind to actually link to the comment you banned me for? This is it, for everyone to see and judge:
Nah, that was just the comment I used to get to your profile. I banned you for insulting someone.
> Interesting that you did not choose to voice your opinions using your main accounts on that community then.
I'd love to, but reddit and cpp keep banning/suspending accounts - so I can't! Funny how that works isn't it?
> Nah, that was just the comment I used to get to your profile. I banned you for insulting someone.
That is not true. Here is the message:
> Hello, You have been permanently banned from participating in r/cpp because your comment violates this community's rules. You won't be able to post or comment, but you can still view and subscribe to it.
With the link being to https://www.reddit.com/r/cpp/comments/1gyiwwc/c_standards_co...
> That is not true.
I banned you, so I like to think I'm an authority on why you were banned. Here's a step by step timeline of what happened.
1. This comment of yours received a high number of reports and was automatically filtered: https://www.reddit.com/r/cpp/comments/1gyiwwc/comment/lyp3jl...
2. I agreed with the reports and removed your comments.
3. I read the rest of the comments in your thread, and noticed your username repeatedly. I wasn't familar with you, so when I reached https://www.reddit.com/r/cpp/comments/1gyiwwc/c_standards_co... I clicked on your profile.
4. After noticing your lack of contributions to r/cpp, I decided you are just someone who causes moderation trouble without contributing useful technical insights, so I decided to ban you. That's why the above comment is listed in your ban reason. If you had posted the slur on an account with actual history in r/cpp and no previous removed comments, I would not have banned you.
Edit: 5. Reddit administrators have now removed your comment as well.
> Reddit administrators have now removed your comment as well.
yes of course they have, they banned my entire account. Because that's what reddit does. See my points above
> Interesting that you did not choose to voice your opinions using your main accounts on that community then.
This is not "interesting", this is common sense.
> Interesting that you did not choose to voice your opinions using your main accounts on that community then
Yes, it's interesting that someone opted to use an alternate account to discuss a contentious issue on a platform rife with censorship and deplatforming.
Why does it so often seem that the people complaining about censorship are the ones punching down?
Why is it so often someone's right to complain and make problems for others but never concern about people's right to be tolerated when they're being decent humans?
Either people need to be banned who insult others and use slurs and those who maliciously push right up against the rules, or they will bully people out. Look at modern X/Twitter allowing hate speech has pushed out advertisers and something like half of the users?
This is basic Paradox of Tolerance stuff, decent people aren't Banning anyone for pointing out actual arguments like discussing if "question" is okay, asking for extra context if this guy did something else or if this is council overreach. But people complaining about wokeness, DEI, diversity hires, or other technically allowable but obviously hostile nonsense are clearly just trying to attack other people and often in ways that are racist dog whistles. If people insist on being hostile up to the amount allowable by the rules instead of just trying to get along then the rules need to keep changing and adjusting and of course the people who are willfully choosing to be assholes will scream "censorship". Before teaming up with someone complaining about censorship be sure they're actually at risk of censorship and not just trying to use Free Speech as a shield to hurt others.
Can't you see how extremist this viewpoint is? Raising issues about DEI and diversity hires is not "obviously hostile nonsense".
I’m not sure complaining on HN about being banned from a subreddit makes much sense.
I think it's important context that this huge issue is being silenced on the largest c++ community
Not sure this _is_ a huge issue. As someone who's not involved it just seems like standard issue interpersonal drama that happens on every committee, board etc and to every tech project from time to time.
eg in linux, git exists because of the Larry McEvoy Bitkeeper drama, there was the Eric S Raymond kernel build config drama, there were numerous Reiserfs and devfs dramas, etc etc etc. In the gnu/fsf world we have had the recent guy leaves because he doesn't like the fact that treesitter is the standard c++ mode drama, you had the emacs vs xemacs dramas, numerous "RMS intervenes to prevent people having an intermediate representation in the GCC compiler" dramas, etc etc. The list is incredibly long. People fight and lose political battles. They leave some committee that most people don't care about. Nothing really important is affected in any way.
Here as someone who was not involved it seems both sides are a bit unreasonable, and some guy has left the standards committee as a result. Really doesn't seem like you complaining about how reddit mods have responded to your posting there has any relevance here.
It's not silenced, the post is up for all to see. We have just disabled the ability to post new comments under it.
You were clearly banned for the comment where you used offensive slurs in reference to the author of a previously discussed blog post. I was happy to report the comment.
It was clearly not - as it was not the comment referenced in the ban. That - again - is an objective truth.
It word in the other comment was also not a slur, but - surprise surprise - the objective truth, again.
Saying "XXX is an asshole" if XXX is in fact an asshole is also the objective truth, yet warrants removal for insulting someone.
I genuinely don't think the word I used is comparable to asshole
It would be better to judge the whole thing if you quoted the word instead of going "the word I used". If you get flagged for quoting here, at least we will learn a valuable lesson.
Paranoia
Woke bullshit knows no bounds and seeps into everything.
These people must be working from the CIA sabotage playbook.
[flagged]
> jump into wild nonsense conspiracy theory or extreme bigotry.
Did they? The commenter was referring to "Simple Sabotage Field Manual", by the CIA. It's a very commonly cited list of actions to take, or that someone would take, to impede the effectiveness of an organization.
The commenter was not saying "CIA did it, and birds aren't real".
Yeah appealing to that book is literally conspiracy nonsense when you're talking about a group of engineers trying to do good engineering. That appeal fundamentally means that there are people trying to actively sabotage a thing, that by itself is a conspiracy theory particularly when you consider that much of the standards committee has been doing standardization work for ages, and all of them are experienced engineers focused on engineering.
Prima facie claiming that people who are joining an optional group that puts out optional rules that companies can opt into implementing for the sake of sabotaging something in such an esoteric way is complete conspiracy nonsense.
Edit - LOL, step one of my conspiracy and get a PhD and work at a company for 10 years using a programming language so I can get someone kicked off an optional committee! Brilliant plan, no notes!!!
It is a valid comparison to expose the similarity of one thing that someone thinks is reasonable to another thing that everyone should recognize is not.
It is "LOL" to read that only literally.
Thank you; glad to see some people understand an analogy when they see one.