The SQLite Code of Ethics(sqlite.org) |
The SQLite Code of Ethics(sqlite.org) |
Having a code of conduct and explicitly informing the world that you are Catholic and run the place in a Catholic manner, can be divisive. Not because Catholicism is a Big Bad™ or whatever current scandal, blah blah.
Because Catholics have a very distinct management style that excludes free flowing ideas and a two-way relationship with management, and focuses on nailing down perfect form. Sometimes it produces great results, other times not so much.
When it doesn't, it can be even more difficult to offer an alternative method, because of a strict CoC. For employees, the rules are sometimes used by management as an unintentional denial of different solutions.
People who know how this management style impacts their work life, may avoid the company. The internal environment becomes over-specialized towards one particular way of thinking and enacting technological change. Which is probably fine for SQLite to forever be the same as it was, which is all most people want out of the project anyway.
As a general trend though, it's concerning that otherwise solid companies are closing the front door to new ideas and opening the window so the non-CoC thinking can fly away.
The relationship everyone wants in the corporate world, is with the most skilled people at the best price. It doesn't necessarily correlate with perfect form or political CoCs.
If you re-read this with that interpretation, it's pretty amazing stuff.
> No one is required to follow The Rule, to know The Rule, or even to think that The Rule is a good idea.
Oh thank god for that...
Looks like we get this every quarter..
Anyway, if you dont like it, fork it... or use another Db.
Philosophize this has some good discussions about religious vocabulary when discussing Kierkegaard.
That want, for some, takes root in their beliefs and faith. May sound ridiculous but many things do to anyone alien to it.
2. Then, love your neighbor as yourself.
5. Do not steal.
6. Do not covet.
14. Relieve the poor.
15. Clothe the naked.
18. Be a help in times of trouble.
38. Be not lazy.
Those are all pretty deeply in line with marxism. Jesus was a communist, after all.
> Obey in all things the commands of those whom God has placed in authority over you even though they (which God forbid) should act otherwise, mindful of the Lord's precept, "Do what they say, but not what they do."
This would have you willingly submit to sexual assault by a priest. And really should be revised considering the slew of cases against the church, or at least be revised with some sort of exception not just to “not do as they do, do as they say”, but to not obey them when they commit such acts.
And yes, I understand that this is in no way forced upon anyone and is just a “I believe” statement, but still I would argue that the suggestion that those who live by these rules live happier lives is countered by every choirboy who submitted and obeyed a person god had place in authority over them, and got assaulted as a result. Plenty of those rules I would agree, though it seems every mention of the institution which is “god” is irrelevant, redundant, harmful or downright sinister. I think it right to cut down the list a slight bit.
Beliefs like this do matter. They inform the actions of millions of people across the world.
59. Fulfill not the desires of the flesh; hate your own will.
60. Obey in all things the commands of those whom God has placed in authority over you even though they (which God forbid) should act otherwise, mindful of the Lord's precept, "Do what they say, but not what they do."
I'm not seeing a lot of room for free will in this document.
That's not your freedom or your will, that's god's doing. Or so this document says. So by your definition, there is no free will in this document.
Whether one chooses good or evil, it is an exercise of one’s free will; but the purpose of human freedom (what it is) is that a human person can choose the good.
But what is “the good”?
For a modern treatment from a Christian perspective see Veritatis splendor:
https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/d...
For instance there were at least two rules about “tone policing”, which doesn’t even make sense (what is there to tone police?) and also seems to defeat the purpose of a CoC since moderation is a kind of “tone policing”.
https://github.com/vapor/vapor/blob/a7f340f64b7182e9e4202a9b...
The only bit I see about tone is
“Communicating in a ‘tone’ you don’t find congenial” on a list of things they said they would NOT act on complaints about.
I see nothing in there that isn’t obvious getting-along-with-others stuff. It still seems to me that it’s helpful to write those things out rather than have them unspoken. It would feel unjust and arbitrary to me if I was pushed out of a community for bad behavior but not pre-warned what was considered bad behavior. It would also feel unjust if i were to be pushed out of a community because people kept saying shitty stuff to me and I complained about the hostility and they said “we have no rules, so they didn’t break any, suck it up”.
Yes, that’s the problem. This is essentially the only thing that actually does come up on project forums that you need moderation for.
Note if they “take Marx and replace the concepts” it’s not secretly introducing Marxism, it’s another antithesis of Marxism, just like the right-wing ones.
Well, I read the very first line and see that he doesn’t want me, or people like me to be a contributor to this project. And that’s fine. His project, so I hear. But personally, I’ve felt welcome to contribute to every other open source project out there. I’ve felt welcome to apply to any job out there. It feels jarring to be excluded like this. I feel hurt. I shouldn’t be made to feel like this, just because of my religious views.
And no, please don’t split any hairs like “no, he’s not excluding, he’s actually describing…”. You wouldn’t be supporting him if the first line changed to be based on race instead of religion. Then why are you supporting him now?
This is strange to me, because... we're not welcome in every other open source project. Many open source projects are maintained by a single person or a small team and are not particularly interested in accepting changes from outsiders. SQLite is one of those; they generally don't accept contributions.
Reading from the top, he makes it abundantly clear it is a code their team adhere to, and external contributors are not expected to adhere to it or even respect it.
> SQLite is open-source, meaning that you can make as many copies of it as you want and do whatever you want with those copies, without limitation. But SQLite is not open-contribution. In order to keep SQLite in the public domain and ensure that the code does not become contaminated with proprietary or licensed content, the project does not accept patches from people who have not submitted an affidavit dedicating their contribution into the public domain.
what makes you think that every open-source project should "make you feel welcome"? "I shouldn’t be made to feel like this"—where does that idea come from? "shouldn't" on what basis? many open-source projects' Codes of Ethics/Conduct/whatever make me feel explicitly unwelcome, but a.) I don't care, and b.) I don't feel entitled to feel welcome in everyone else's project. what makes you feel differently?
Most open source projects Code of Conduct boil down to "don't be mean to other contributors, treat them well". I'm sorry this makes you feel explicitly unwelcome. That said, it's never been a problem for me to adhere to that.
This is a first time for me being excluded, and it feels bad. I'm commenting on why this person has gone out of his way to do that.
Exclusion is not the norm in online programming spaces. Nor would we tolerate it if someone started excluding people on the basis of something like race. But seemingly there are apologists for exclusion on the basis of religion.
> Listen willingly to holy reading.
> Devote yourself frequently to prayer.
> Daily in your prayers, with tears and sighs, confess your past sins to God, and amend them for the future.
Anyway, sqlite is a good product and I don’t even mind all that much to have a code of Ethics associated to it, just not a thing you see often.
[Edit] Found it: it's supported: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3912417/is-there-a-way-t...
Reeks.
But yeah, that's what a lot of other Codes of Conduct feel like. (And the discussions about them.)
Ethical stance must stand alone unconditionally.
As for the actual rules, picking one in particular, respecting someone purely for being senior is stupid. Respect is simply earned. I respect more people younger and in more junior positions than myself.
Let's do the math:
Christianity has been around for around two orders of magnitude longer than any of the compilers or dev tools you're using on your project.
There are probably three orders of magnitude more people who use Christianity than are using any of the languages used in your project.
There are probably six orders of magnitude more priests and churches than there are maintainers on all but the top 1% of libraries (open source or closed source) you're using on your project.
I'm pretty sure the complete disappearance of Christianity from the face of the earth is not the highest probability risk to worry about for your project, and if it were to completely disappear there would probably be enough other stuff going along with that disappearance that we probably all have bigger things on our mind than the code of ethics published by a software team.
If the concern is just "what if the maintainers give up on Christianity," they're probably far more likely to get tired of programming (that happens far more often), but we can observe that their need to make a PR to edit their own code of conduct is not really going to be a particularly hard thing for them to pull off.
People don't tell you they lost their faith. They just stop following their code of ethics that was bound to it.
I trust a faceless corporation over this attitude.
Incidentally, the page has some internal consistency issues:
``` Honor all people. ```
has historically not played well with:
``` First of all, love the Lord God with your whole heart, your whole soul, and your whole strength. Deny oneself in order to follow Christ. Prefer nothing more than the love of Christ. Put your hope in God. Attribute to God, and not to self, whatever good you see in yourself. Fear the Day of Judgment. Be in dread of hell. Desire eternal life with all the passion of the spirit. Keep death daily before your eyes. Know for certain that God sees you everywhere. When wrongful thoughts come into your heart, dash them against Christ immediately. Listen willingly to holy reading. Devote yourself frequently to prayer. Daily in your prayers, with tears and sighs, confess your past sins to God, and amend them for the future. Obey in all things the commands of those whom God has placed in authority over you even though they (which God forbid) should act otherwise, mindful of the Lord's precept, "Do what they say, but not what they do." Do not wish to be called holy before one is holy; but first to be holy, that you may be truly so called. Fulfill God's commandments daily in your deeds. Pray for your enemies in the love of Christ. Never despair of God's mercy. ```
But to rewrite them, see them there on the screen and not realise you have done it, in a much more inefficient way, and also much, much worse. Thats just a breakdown.
> "...[the developers] view The Rule as their promise to all SQLite users of how the developers are expected to behave. This is a one-way promise, or covenant. "
This speaks of the Founder and his team. Evangelism this is not, but an invitation to learn of the principles they pledge to adhere to.
I trust their sincerity, I trust the efforts they put into the products they shared.
I'm not sure that I claimed it's evangelism. For me personally it really did it's job of 'invitation to learn...' because I learned. I was surprised. This is probably not going to change my interaction with the product in any significant way, but it does make me wonder if 'ethical' reasons will in the future affect the technical decisions.
> I trust their sincerity, I trust the efforts they put into the products they shared.
Me too! They haven't given me any reason not to.
Why would you assume this about me and not take at face value that I really believe you don't find these often in the wild. It's just my personal experience that I haven't seen these out in the wild all that much (I can't think of an example), and it was surprising to me.
Edit: The unspoken part of the demand was a 'progressive' CoC.
Codes of conduct.
> Could J. K. Rowling require Harry Potter readers to follow a code of conduct? Could Werner Heisenberg demand that you subscribe to a code of conduct if you want to do quantum physics?
...
> Codes of conduct typically make laudable promises such as “We pledge to respect all people,” in an attempt to convince readers that they [the authors] will behave laudably. In my experience, though, people who put a lot of effort into telling you how laudably they will behave do not behave any any more laudably than other people do — slightly the contrary, in fact. ...
> ... I expect that I’ll be delighted if you send me patches and bug reports, but on that count I make no promises. Feel free to send them repeatedly through different channels if you don’t get a response at first, since I often don’t notice things. If you like how I respond when you send me patches or bug reports, then maybe it would be a good idea to do more of it. If you don’t like it, then maybe you would be happier if you stopped. I’ll do my best to be polite, but I screw that up pretty often, to be honest. ...
> But, as I said before, what humans tell you they will do is not a very reliable predictor of what they will do. If you want to know what to expect of them, look at their past behavior. Don’t just look at their self-reports of their past behavior, although admissions against interest there can be quite revealing; look at traces it has left that they cannot delete, such as your own memory, mailing list archives, past Gitlab issues, and other people talking about them.
Nobody attempts to apply codes of conduct to users of software - that's the domain of the license agreement. They only apply to communities. Virtually every online community around harry potter has some set of rules for participating in that community. e.g. https://stories.jkrowling.com/terms-of-use/
> Could Werner Heisenberg demand that you subscribe to a code of conduct if you want to do quantum physics?
Heisenberg was the post-ww2 president of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics (quickly renamed the Max Planck Institute post war) - which was involved in human "medical" experimentation in nazi concentration camps.
During his governence: "after 1945 neither active participants in the Third Reich nor hangers-on were called to account" - https://www.mpg.de/history/kws-under-national-socialism
So a guy who presided over an organization that didn't bother to clean house after being directly involved in the fucking holocaust isn't exactly my go-to for how to run a healthy community.
I dunno that I'd describe the most deployed database in the world "some (arguably small) thing", really?
There are religious folks whose work I reference or use frequently, but they keep their beliefs to themselves. Don Knuth is a canonical example of this for me. No issues there, anyone should be free to believe whatever gets them through their day.
In my (subjective, biased, maybe incorrect,) opinion, people whose code of "ethics" includes phrases like "keep death daily before your eyes, fear the Day of Judgment and be in dread of hell" are dangerous. I doubt they're even aware that hell was voted in existence centuries after their savior was crucified. The amount of life lost and the intellectual stagnation stemming from these religious fanatics, these broken people, is staggering. We'd have reached Alpha Centauri by now were it not for them.
Thanks for the perspective. I see now why folks in this thread are acting so cavalier about this - they haven't seen what I've seen.
What, OSS project codes of conduct?!? Weird; how the heck does one miss that whole phenomenon? There has been lots of controversy around (some of) them in much of online media about computing over the last few years, including huge threads of heated discussion here on HN.
Yeah, definitely biased and incorrect opinion. Are you aware that these tenants are not just in Christianity, but also in Islam and overlap with Judaism? That alone is way over 50% of the world's population.
> their savior was crucified
Not everyone who believes in God believes that Jesus Peace be upon him was crucified.
> The amount of life lost
Compared to what? The number of lives lost due to secular and/or atheist people like Stalin, Mao, Hitler, etc. are orders of magnitude more than any religious wars combined.
> and the intellectual stagnation stemming from these religious fanatics
Which religious fanatics? Are you aware that many of the things we take for granted today stem back to discoveries made during the Islamic Golden age?
what could possibly cause this sense of entitlement in your mind? what universal moral imperative do you believe exists that everyone is supposed to abide by with regards to publicly allowing contributions to their own open-source programming projects, and why do you believe it does or should exist?
I'd disagree there. The free-software movement, for example, is fundamentally tied up with a certain set of political-moral principles; the open-source movement is similarly tied up with a somewhat different set of principles.
If someone's "not political" then maybe they're a weathervane, or professionally neutral, but it's probably more likely that what they think of as "politics" isn't currently fighting over a topic of salience to them.
You keep typing this out in different words, almost like you're seeking to reinforce over and over that I'm entitled. I see what you're doing, you're heard.
And I'll say what I've said earlier - I feel entitled to be treated well because people generally treat me well.
And your brilliant contribution is "but why should that be the norm?" Thanks.
>I shouldn’t be made to feel like this
this is entitlement.
en·ti·tle·ment
/inˈtīdlmənt,enˈtīdlmənt/
noun
the fact of having a right to something.
I'm having trouble seeing the disconnect between "somebody on the Internet has a project whose Code of Ethics caused me emotional pain because it made me feel unwelcome" and the word "entitlement". could you please clarify?
And I thought this was THE fascinating thing about Richard that led to the database and other things.
But then I talked to him. He's a great engineer but a regular guy running a business around a thing he built.
He gets to be a bit whimsical because he can. He can use his own source control and license, and he can certainly make up a code of ethics, to check a check box on some form somewhere.
The cool thing about SQLite is that he built this thing and gets to do things his way.
This is just a specific instance of that.
Shameless plug: https://corecursive.com/066-sqlite-with-richard-hipp/
I'm happy that he's found a way to integrate his values into his products. Richard is not enforcing his beliefs on anyone; moreover the values espoused in the Code seem fair to any reasonable mind. It asks us to do good, and calls for good human/humane values whatever your religion or ideology or spirituality. How can that be wrong?
Often times these days in tech it's all about progress, liberal ideologies, and there's no sense of values or ethics rooted in anything but money. SQLite's code of ethics is a refreshing change.
SQLite itself is also an amazing piece of engineering, that I use daily and can't express enough thanks to him for.
P/S: I love your podcast! Have heard so many great episodes that changed my mind.
Hearing positive feedback keeps me going and I'm always happy to take guest or topic suggestions as well.
You did a great job, and it was really informative. Thanks for making it!
> No one is required to follow The Rule [...] or even think that [it] is a good idea. [...] anyone is free to dispute or ignore that idea [...]
> This is a one-way promise [...]. the developers are saying "we will treat you this way regardless of how you treat us"
No one is forcing their beliefs onto anyone. keep the pitchforks in the shed.
Now I don’t think that’s the sql lite folks and plenty of folks don’t do that thing… but just a splash of religion doesn’t make me feel much better about anything.
I do not subscribe to all the beliefs the author espouses, but I am sympathetic with them. Admittedly, I feel myself cheering him on for standing his ground against this vacuous criticism.
Having a written agreement and guidelines to mediate conflicts is vital once a community gets to a certain size. Humans have been doing this since Hammurabi.
This one’s in the Oracle Master Agreement too.
"SQLite: Code of Ethics" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26547201 (March 22, 2021 — 37 points, 23 comments)
"SQLite updated Code of Conduct" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18313131 (October 26, 2018 — 41 points, 89 comments)
"SQLite: Code of Ethics" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18297514 (October 24, 2018 — 34 points, 19 comments)
"SQLite: Code of Conduct" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18273530 (October 22, 2018 — 338 points, 288 comments [flagged])
"SQLite: Code of Conduct" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18273390 (October 22, 2018 — 157 points, 60 comments)
I’m out.
ROLLBACK TRANSACTION;It's truly about interior and exterior balance.
Do not murder -> Leave other people alive
Do not commit adultery -> Be truthful to your partner
Do not steal, Do not covet -> Be content with what you have
Do not bear false witness -> Speak the truth
Do not do to another what you would not have done to yourself -> Treat others like you want to be treated
Do not become attached to pleasures -> Practice moderation
Do not give way to anger -> Stay calm
Do not nurse a grudge, Do not return evil for evil, Do not curse those who curse you, but rather bless them, Do no wrong to anyone, and bear patiently wrongs done to yourself -> Practice forgiveness
Be not proud -> Be humble
Be not addicted to wine -> Drink in moderation
Be not a great eater -> Eat in moderation
Be not lazy -> Be diligent
(edit): formatting
Seems like a pretty simple case of CREATE TABLE ethics ( id INT PRIMARY KEY, rule TEXT );
There are also much more basic sects where the theology of the Gospel is considerably easier to preach, and where in particular the idea of God simply being other people, and our love for each other is prevalent. It is surprising to see this kind of Christianity here, in a piece of software. Surprising and uplifting.
It is all quite an Anglican perspective. I feel sorry for people who don’t have better access to Anglican Communion / Episcopalianism. The more deeply theological sects don’t hold a candle to it.
In fact the few priests, both Anglican and Roman, who I have encountered have all been practical people more concerned with people and their mundane problems than religion or theology.
I have failed, but sqlite yields no grumbling
I’m reminded of a passage in Great Expectations that helped me understand exactly just what this means:
> "so you're the blacksmith, are you? Then I'm sorry to say, I've eat your pie."
> "God knows you're welcome to it, so far as it was ever mine," […] "We don't know what you have done, but we wouldn't have you starved to death for it, poor miserable fellow-creatur.”
Here’s a guy, an escaped convict, who stole from them, and yet, he’s still being treated decently, and with respect.
I might be way off base, but I feel like that’s what it’s about.
Sure, some of us, try. Root our phones, host our own emails. But really, isn't being a good human underlying all that goes above it?
I'm not a Christian. I'm not even religious. IMHO though, if any software that I've ever written or would write in future, would help others realize that in the big picture, a belief and faith in humanity is the most important thing above all else, I would consider myself privileged.
The argument is tenuous but it reminds me a lot of the Shakespeare / Lope de Vega transition- sometimes population is dense enough to chnage something.
Each of the above civilisations went through a population / density transition - and did so within a few hundred years - and came out with some surprisingly similar religious / cultural rules that were a) different to what had gone before b) similar in some respects to each other
I am certainly not arguing there was some shared kernel of religion, just that there was a new economic/ social pressure and the "solution" to it was a new form of religion / social contract.
In short - as human economics and civilisation changes, so does the way we govern ourselves (religion is a governing force). It seems reasonable to argue that as different civilisations go through the same pinch points they will find similar solutions.
We also should assume we are going through such as pinch point today (either the long term industrial revolution or the near term internet revolution).
And yes - systemising minds need to be aware of their own proclivities- a hard won lesson
I do think it’s nice that “respect your parents” has been modified to “respect everyone”.
I'm grateful to the author of SQLite for releasing this excellent piece of software into the public domain and continuing to maintain it for the benefit of all. If providing this good work to the world was driven by his Christian principles, then really, who are any of us to criticise. Indeed, we should all be thankful.
The elephant in the room in many current attempts to encourage "diversity" is that a genuinely diverse range of opinions and/or beliefs ends up being not welcome at all.
This one seems to be just the same, for better or worse?
The SQLite developers (developer?) are not interested in inviting more contributors to the table and that's fine, but for a functional public community the Contributor Covenant or something like it is pretty much table stakes.
> Scope:
> This Code of Conduct applies within all community spaces, and also applies when an individual is officially representing the community in public spaces. Examples of representing our community include using an official e-mail address, posting via an official social media account, or acting as an appointed representative at an online or offline event.
https://www.contributor-covenant.org/version/2/1/code_of_con...
What's your motivation here?
I don't want a solution, I want to be mad.
Sure, as far as I'm aware code of conducts/ethics only ever apply to contributors, no-one has beliefs being forced upon them. But that seems to be about the highest bar of entry for an interested developer I have seen in any project.
Not waving pitchforks here, I'm fine with them having this code of ethics, even tough I disagree with about half the points and find being asked to do such a pledge way to intrusive into personal life.
"45. Be in dread of hell."
In zeal for mutual understanding, and practical fruit in general solutions that solve problems escaping a single perspective, would be that opposite for me.
We cannot approach the sublime within ourselves by fear, in my opinion.
There are a few other well-known teachings that appear to be missing from these rules, the first among them is the New Commandment.
It is an important distinction many people over look
I get frustrated at the SJW CoCs but this is arguably just as bad or worse.
...how could one possibly get this impression, when it literally says "No one is required to follow The Rule"?
The code of conduct push was a transparent game of social aggression — an attempt to shift open source power dynamics in favor of:
(1) Allowing social activists, who could not acquire institutional power on the basis of their own technical merit, to co-opt open source institutions for their own aims and to extract resources. See also the contributor covenant, DEI consultants, et al.
(2) Securing the necessary power structures to enforce the beliefs of their particular vein of progressive political activism.
In my experience being very involved with a few large projects that were pressured into adopting a code of conduct, the historically most toxic and socially aggressive personalities in the project became the biggest proponents of adopting a code of conduct, engaging in bad faith and with extreme social aggression to tear down any detractors, hiding behind their newfound righteousness as a defense.
Are you also satisfied with the diversity within the project communities that you contribute to?
Anyone who needs a document to understand what is acceptable and what isn't is not someone who you want in any project.
Answering reasonable requests for clarity in a community with mockery and derision doesn't sound like a very welcoming place.
Compared to what?
I don't know the history of the other things you mentioned.
It was a cogent breakdown of the flawed reasoning upon which then original author’s premise lies.
I addressed the point about when codes of conduct apply to users of software in the document linked.
He couldn’t. All he could do would be to dictate the code of conduct for physicists working at the MPI. And if you don’t like his code of conduct, you can go to a different institute, or take it up with the community or the board of directors for the institute. Your implied scenario of “what if a nazi wrote a code of conduct” doesn’t scare me because the only thing worse than a nazi is a nazi in hiding. And if the code of conduct contains no nazi agenda, well then he can be held accountable if he does something against the code of conduct (like, for example, being a nazi)
And that's precisely why I think it's absurd for a code repository to have a code of conduct.
Do you learn much with this approach?
But back to your point. Your point was made using two examples. Bad examples, in my opinion, since the first doesn't apply (consumption of work vs collaboration) and the second one also doesn't apply (building on others work vs collaboration).
Your further point about watching what people do vs what they say they do is a reasonable point, but doesn't have much to do with the value of a code of conduct. I'm pretty much in agreement, that's the best way to proceed when collaborating with a single individual - but communities are more than the sum of their parts. If there are three people collaborating on a project, and one swears a lot in their commits, and one prefers a lack of swearing, and one doesn't care either way - how do you resolve that conflict? Nothing you've said offers a useful tool to navigate that situation.
Not sure if this is true. Most Western values came from Christianity, even though the society today is not as religious as it was in the past.
I think it's the other way around: Like with many holidays, Christianity usurped previosly existing ethics and claimed them as its own. It's not as if there were no ethics in the years we write "BC[E]" after.
You and I see this differently.
Different monasteries enforce this different ways
I see some value in it: Being that old and still in widespread use proves its viability.
Medication works better.
1. First of all, love the Lord God with your whole heart, your whole soul, and your whole strength. 10. Deny oneself in order to follow Christ. 21. Prefer nothing more than the love of Christ. 27. Do not swear, for fear of perjuring yourself. 34. Be not proud. 41. Put your hope in God. 44. Fear the Day of Judgment. 45. Be in dread of hell. 49. Know for certain that God sees you everywhere. 50. When wrongful thoughts come into your heart, dash them against Christ immediately. 56. Listen willingly to holy reading. 57. Devote yourself frequently to prayer. 58. Daily in your prayers, with tears and sighs, confess your past sins to God, and amend them for the future. 60. Obey in all things the commands of those whom God has placed in authority over you even though they (which God forbid) should act otherwise, mindful of the Lord's precept, "Do what they say, but not what they do." 62. Fulfill God's commandments daily in your deeds. 70. Pray for your enemies in the love of Christ.
> 27. Do not swear, for fear of perjuring yourself.
This means: be true to your word. It's an excellent principle.
> 50. When wrongful thoughts come into your heart, dash them against Christ immediately.
This means: have self-control over your own, possibly not-very-good, impulses and desires. This too is a good thing.
> 58. Daily in your prayers, with tears and sighs, confess your past sins to God, and amend them for the future.
You might not pray, but self-analysis each day, putting the past behind you and endeavouring to make each day better, is also an excellent principle. Confessing the past is a great technique for getting over the past too: it lets you forgive yourself and move forward.
> 60. Obey in all things the commands of those whom God has placed in authority over you even though they (which God forbid) should act otherwise, mindful of the Lord's precept, "Do what they say, but not what they do."
I don't agree with this one, because I believe we should struggle against those in power when it is necessary. But you can still put forward a good argument for it.
> 70. Pray for your enemies in the love of Christ.
This is one of those principles that translates well even without prayer or religion: act in empathy to your enemies; hope that they will improve; do not let yourself become evil in your own heart (you know that anger that can grow? The things that make you behave not so nicely, even if you think of yourself as a nice person?) towards them but keep a loving attitude even to those who don't deserve it.
I don't agree with all of the principles they listed. I could not become a SQLite developer. But none of these -- none! -- are 'ridiculous'. In fact, they are tied closely to being a good person, and to living a peaceful, kind life.
Or do you consider they may be fair to a reasonable mind informed by Christian faith but unreasonable to non-Christians?
You can do a lot in a thousand years if you put your mind to it.
Maybe some avout would develop a discipline where they execute programs in their minds. Some sort of Chinese Room setup but for general purpose computing.
And we know this because monasteries kept a large army of monks guarding the knowledge so that it would one day serve society.
Bacon, Grosseteste, etc
> Representation of a project may be further defined and clarified by project maintainers.
Eg, if you say something the maintainers don't like on your personal Twitter, all they need to say is "you're representing the project in a bad light" and it's fair game to ban you.
Then in version 2.0 the text you quote appears, but changes
> This Code of Conduct applies within all project spaces
to
> This Code of Conduct applies within all community spaces
but never defines what community spaces are. Is your personal Twitter account a community space? Well, once again that's up to the maintainers to decide. It's the same loophole as 1.4 but more cleverly disguised.
In any case, I fail to see how this is any worse than any other project. Do you expect some sort of due process before you're banned from any random OSS project? I wouldn't. If you don't like it, you can fork the project. That's how it works.
Just because other cultures also supported slavery doesn't mean Christianity didn't contribute to that horror.
It’s not a few. They’re primarily a tool for bad actors to secure institutional power.
However, even if we take the surface-level arguments for a code of conduct in good faith, the entire concept is rooted in the premise that a healthy community arises out of strictly codifying social norms and permissible beliefs, imbuing a central, unaccountable authority with the power to police and enforce those norms, and treating dissension with this approach as a moral failing in of itself.
> Are you also satisfied with the diversity within the project communities that you contribute to?
I don’t know how to answer that question; can you define “diversity” for me?
What personal attributes should I poll from all contributors to measure their diversity? Do you have a score sheet I can use? What does it mean if our “diversity score” is too low? What does that have to do with a code of conduct?
Forums have long had rules, spoken or unspoken. Making them more explicit is helpful IME.
The most useful thing you could have in a CoC would be declaring who’s responsible for making decisions about it.
No, every project needs to be completely homogeneous. All members should be interested in creating the best piece of software they can. Anyone who doesn't agree with this goal should be removed from the project.
> The Orithenans had used a system of computational chanting that, it was plain to see, was rooted in traditions that their founders had brought over from Edhar. To that point, it was clearly recognizable to any Edharian. It was a way of carrying out computations on patterns of information by permuting a given string of notes into new melodies. The permutation was done on the fly by following certain rules, defined using the formalism of cellular automata. After the Second Sack reforms, newly computerless avout had invented this kind of music. In some concents it had withered away, in others mutated into something else, but at Edhar it had always been practiced seriously. We'd all learned it as a sort of children's musical game. But at Orithena they had been doing new things with it, using it to solve problems. Or rather to solve a problem, the nature of which I didn't understand yet. Anyway, it sounded good -- the results, for some reason, just tended to be more musical than the Edharian version, which was serviceable for computing things, but, as music, could be hard to take.
Which is why it gave us Linux.
If so I'd argue Linux succeeded in spite of Linus's prickly personality. Certainly not because of it.
It was absolutely Linus's no bullshit policy that made it a success and a target.
don't belong in the same sentence in the United States.
There are other societies in the West.
So I do consider most of these insane, ridiculous and worthless. Anybody is free to think otherwise.
A code of conduct that has persisted and remained used for 1500 years cannot really be described as 'ramblings'.
Referring to someone's code of ethics as 'insane', 'ridiculous' and 'worthless' is, perhaps, not quite as kind as it could be. It also doesn't fit the HN culture: we try to discuss things rationally here, not emotionally, and if I may so so, a bit more kindly.
This Register article sheds more light on the decision to use the code from the Benedictines: https://www.theregister.com/2018/10/22/sqlite_code_of_conduc...
> "Nobody is excluded from the SQLite community due to biological category or religious creed," [SQLLIte creator, D Richard Hipp] told us. "The preface to the CoC should make this clear. The only way to get kicked out of the SQLite community is by shouting, flaming, and disrespectful behavior. In 18 years, only one person has ever been banned from the mailing list."
> In other words, Hipp decided to adopt a seminal Christian text rather than grab some cookie-cutter code of conduct from elsewhere, reflecting his beliefs and, he believes, the general world view of those who contribute to open-source software projects for free.
So the rules do not require you be Christian or Benedictine to contribute to SQLite. He's chosen something that's stood the test of time, rather than writing something new - he explicitly notes in that article that he asked himself if he really regards himself as wiser than St Benedict, and concluding no, a reason not to edit the rules. He also chose a set of rules that he believes match many of the ways open source developers behave and the behaviours they believe they should have.
I respect that.
Can't a software project be like a Christian church?
How common are those views in question tough? I’d say about 9/10 Christians I know from Europe and Latin America would find several of these points too extreme. But yes, that leaves probably still more people than lisp devs …
I'm attacked ! out with your intolerance :P
It gives the same rights and the same limitless nature, so why use an arbitrary license which might cause problems in some countries ? And also makes the contribution workflow more complex?
CC0 was not intended to be used as a software license, and IRCC includes a clause that the author withholds any patent rights, which which has its own set of concerns.
In practice, either of them would have worked fine, but part of the beauty of public domain code is that you can avoid having to specify a license.
I don't know why you keep asking me questions that are answered in the document I linked at the top of the thread. It's less than 1000 words long, you can read it in three minutes.
You don’t actually specify any beef with what you call purpose #1 - an agreement within a group about how it should be governed. Except for, as you say, single developer or small group projects - that’s the stated purpose of ALL codes of conduct. Some may contain ethical postering or demands of users (i’ve never seen that) - but those are malformed codes of conduct and should be criticized for those flaws not for being codes of conduct
>The founder of SQLite and all current developers have pledged to follow the spirit of The Rule to the best of their ability. [...] In other words, the developers are saying: "We will treat you this way regardless of how you treat us."
I would definitely not be able to honestly commit to such a pledge. Do you think they will add a "(except epa095)" if I get hired? Or maybe I just won't get hired. IDK, but just like OP I read it as a requirement for contributing.
But you asked why I would not be able to commit to such a pledge. For me pledging is a kind of social contract (I don't belive in God, so its not between me and it), and I care quite alot that other people know that when I promise something it means something. So it becomes important that we, me and the people who care about the pledge, agree on what it means. If we all agree that it essentially means nothing, then fine, I pledge. But if it means something, what does it really mean?
It says "They [the founder of SQLite and all current developers] view The Rule as their promise to all SQLite users of how the developers are expected to behave". So the developers view it as a promise of how the developers are expected to behave. If I take the pledge, and start working there, am I breaking the pledge if I:
- Don't "[...] love the Lord God with my whole heart, my whole soul, and my whole strength."? [1]
- Don't love fasting. [13]
- Prefers cremation to burying. [17]
- Make people laugh [54-55]
etc etc, you probably get the point. There are a lot of rules, and they can all be interpreted. It is kind of hard to be certain that we all agree on what it actually means to pledge to follow the spirit of these 72 rules.
So, that is why I find it hard to commit to the pledge.
Now, I agree with you that is says that "No one is required to follow The Rule". But it also says that "They view The Rule as their promise to all SQLite users of how the developers are expected to behave". So, it very much says that the founder of SQLite (part of "They") promise SQLite users that he expect SQLlite developers to follow "the code". Maybe, because of the "No one is required to follow The Rule", that means essentially nothing. Or maybe it means something. IDK.
why does it matter? If a company only hires men would you tell woman that they could just say they identify as men, and therefore there is no problem?
Now hear here miss, while true that the board of directors are all men, and have been so for 5 decades, we reject any notion of sexism as we clearly have here a document which states that “We believe men are superior to women, but we do not require employees to hold this belief…” also it’s voluntary and a compete coincidence that all employees have voluntarily vowed that they agree to this and that all employees are also male. It can’t be sexist since we do not force anyone to agree to do anything.
Hope the context shift makes it a bit easier to see why some people might call this suspicious.
Even Linus has said his past behavior has been a problem.
You, and everyone who thinks code of conducts are good, can't because you're too incompetent to.
Such as???
which, of course, is the elephant in the room, isn't it.
Good faith contributors don't need the code, because it was not written for them. It was written for the pathological cases.
And systems designed around pathological cases are themselves pathological.
Good faith citizens don't need laws because the laws weren't written for them, etc.
Systems designed around the pathological cases help keep those pathological cases at bay. They are a framework for allowing the good-faith people to continue to act in good faith without having to constantly worry about the pathological cases themselves. I'd love to go back to the days when people left their doors unlocked and no one had a password to get into their account, but those days are gone. So are the days of not having a code of conduct on your open source project.
Perhaps the fact that we as a society are so ready to associate codes of ethics with policing should be raising some red flags in how we think about this issue.
Everyone has a CoC, some people write them down.
The justification for the banhammer is "I think you should be banned." The CoC doesn't enable or permit the mods to ban you. The mods can ban you because they're the mods; "can ban you" is pretty much definitionally identical to "is a mod." At most a CoC can serve as a guidebook for users.
This is nonsensicle and shows a lack of understanding. A code of conduct is just a guidebook for users to understand how your moderators will act, what to expect in a community.
How does "good modding" remove the need for that?
Moderation starts and ends with the mods, not with the CoC. The CoC just saves labor.
Using a prefabricated CoC is what you do when you need to fulfill a checkbox item saying "has a CoC", but have no intention of actually following it.
Maybe you think spaces would be better if we allowed unmoderated bigotry in the name of free speech, but a practical consequence is that when the bigots move in, the people that they are targeting go away. The end result isn’t “diversity of thought” and it was never intended to be- it just ends up being one more space where people get bullied into leaving.
- President Obama, complaining he can't be a bigot.
https://www.thefire.org/obamas-abc-news-interview-transcript...
If you a actually read the article you quoted, the main argument he’s making is essentially “well, they may be bigots, but you need to learn to argue with bigots if you want to make progress”. That may or may not be true on a college campus (and at a public college the argument is likely immaterial because a government run institution is, and should be, bound by free speech in ways that private forums are not and should not be).
Open source projects and technical communities are different- they have different goals, needs to operate under different constraints, and so should behave differently.
If anyone is radicalizing others it is those that treat everyone that does not 100% agree with them as radicals that must be pushed out instead of as people.
> The paradox of tolerance states that if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually seized or destroyed by the intolerant. Karl Popper described it as the seemingly self-contradictory idea that in order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must retain the right to be intolerant of intolerance.
> in order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must retain the right to be intolerant of intolerance
I have a lot more respect for people whose ethics are not conditional on the behavior of others.
Imagine you live in a society that allows personal gun ownership. Obviously, in such a society you still don't want people running around shooting each other willy-nilly, so you make a law: shoot someone, go to jail.
Now imagine someone pulls out a gun and shoots you. Result: you're dead, they go to jail.
However, you'd really prefer not to be dead. So imagine that someone pulls out their gun to shoot you, but then you pull out your gun and shoot them. Result: they're dead, you go to jail. It's what the law says, after all.
This is undesirable to most people because it looks like you've been punished for defending yourself. So we'll change the law: if someone is pointing a gun at you, you can shoot them without going to jail.
Now imagine that someone pulls a gun on you, then you pull a gun to defend yourself, but then they shoot you anyway. Result: you're dead, and they don't go to jail. It's what the law says, after all: you were pointing a gun at them. Oops, it's equivalent to having no law at all! This is the worst form of the law so far, and it's also the same thing as the paradox of tolerance.
The way you solve this is the same way you solve the paradox of tolerance: you say that the initial aggressor does not receive any protections if their own weapons are used against them. This produces a result that matches people's intuitions. This also creates a lesser problem, where people try to toe the line of aggression and goad someone else into making the first move so that they can justly retaliate, but it's still a vast improvement on the situation that intuitively matches how people expect things to work, which just so happens to involve ethics that are conditional on the behavior of others. The condition in this example: violence is acceptable, if it's in self-defense.
EDIT: I see this is being downvoted, would anyone care to explain their reasoning?
In historical context, it's seems squarely aimed at the paramilitary organizations of various movements popular around the 1930s or so who physically injured people for saying things they disliked.
It’s about not tolerating people who make it impossible to have debate, not declaring arbitrary sets of views intolerable or beyond the pale.
> But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant.
Note that Popper is not claiming that "fists or pistols" are a necessary condition for not tolerating intolerance: they're a final stage of said intolerance. Popper explicitly says that we might reserve the right to preempt intolerance before it reaches the point of its followers resorting to violence.
The problem with tolerance and intolerance is, that a few people (a loud minority) think they're the universal good guys, even in cases where their "good thing" is incompatible with itself.
> I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols.
As long as nobody is bringing pistols to tech conferences or starting fistfights in the hallways, Popper would not support excluding attendees for having intolerant ideas. Perhaps if contributors to your open-source repository are doxing and SWATting each other, putting lives at risk, then Popper would exclude them. But as long as they're just making offensive comments, Popper would not "claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force." (It might still be better to decline their patches so as to avoid being associated with them.)
I wouldn't go even as far as Popper, because his argument eats itself; as demonstrated in this thread, when people start applying his ideas, Popperism itself becomes an intolerant idea that, according to Popperism, we should suppress by violence. Moreover, any political position that advocates that the government take an action is advocating that some policy be imposed on the unwilling parts of the population by violence.
Much more sustainable is to suppress the violent actors and protect those who are merely calling for violence, while remonstrating with them to change their minds.
Wow, this ironically sounds exactly like the people spouting off about needing to "fight intolerance" in the past couple years.
It’s also interesting that the more extreme version of the “paradox of tolerance” is very close to the legal reasoning used during the Red Scare to justify bans on communist parties.
Popper's Paradox of Tolerance is widely misunderstood to be a licence to be intolerant yourself. For the last time : it is not.
Popper was talking about a very specific case, where the intolerant exploit the tolerance of a society to physically take over that society and enforce their views.
Until and unless you have evidence of that plausibly happening, there is no Paradox of Tolerance. You can perfectly tolerate people who hate women, who hate men, who hate gays, who hate the rich, who hate the poor, who hate any and every religion, ideology, way of life, identity, worldview or personality type. You can tolerate each and every single one of them, you can tolerate infinite number of them, as long they don't try to make reality conform to what they preach.
It's well known in software that a data structure can have infinite readers, but the presence of even a single writer either necessitates that the data structure is completely private to the writer, or an explicit and consistent writing policy needs to be devised to coordinate the writer with the readers and possibly other writers. Popper's Paradox of Tolerance is a restatement of this basic observation in the context of human societies. You can have infinite tolerance and diversity, as long as not a single ideology or group "writes" their conflicting views to society. If you have a group that does that, then you must choose whether you will cede all control of society to that group, or to set a strong writing policy that is much less permissive than infinite tolerance.
Stop using an argument for tolerance as an excuse for intolerance.
If you let them say whatever they want on an online forum without any moderation you’ll end up with Voat, or something similar. The intolerant views take over.
Argue all the philosophy you like, practical experience shows that every time someone tries an unmoderated forum in any medium it ends up a cesspit of intolerance.
Where they pose a danger of it.
If you let them do it before reacting, you've already lost, and that's the point.
Anyhow, it's not widely misunderstood, AFAICT, since when it is invoked it is invariably with the strong implication, and usually the explicit statement, that that is the threat being addressed. You might at times question the judgement behind the assessment of the risk, but that's not a misunderstanding of the paradox of tolerance.
I didn't know about Voat, sad that it was closed down. I would have loved to try it.
>The intolerant views take over.
This sounds to me like a you problem. You can very well admit that you don't know how to argue and shout back (in whatever style necessary to win), or that your views are so unpopular that you can't defend them unless to a supportive audience, but don't make this some sort of universal law or inevitable tendency. There is nothing about any view that makes it inherently more popular or appealing.
>a cesspit of intolerance.
This usage of 'intolerance' hints that you don't really understand Popper's sense of the word. Popper wasn't talking about what offends you, Popper was talking about people violently forcing you out of a society. There is no intolerance on 4chan or 8chan or any similar platform, literally everyone is allowed there, everyone is just an anonymous unique number. Only your own offence prevents you from participating, which is not anybody's fault. Every single "bad" tech platform, the ones that allow speech that mainstream progressive-dominated US companies love to rave about, only suffer due to external pressures imposed on them, the audience of those services very much like it, and they don't seem to physically force reality or other people to like what they like. The only one doing the forcing here are the self-appointed tolerance defenders, who are so so worried about tolerance that they are willing to freely dispence intolerance left and right to protect it. It's like how pro-war folks say that war protects and preserves the peace: It's indeed very true in a certain narrow sense, but you can't be doing it willy nilly, or you will risk destroying the very thing you claim you want to preserve.
I also don't understand why defending unlimited expresssion of views must imply defending unlimited expression of view without moderation. There is no reason why we can't moderate any ideology at all, see the subreddit r/themotte for example to see a place where everyone from radical feminists to white nationalists expressing their views in moderated threads.
The laws of a society are imposed on you regardless of whether you want them. A person's code of ethics is adopted by choice. The law you are referring to is only unjust because it is being imposed on everyone. A devout monk can be a good person, while a society that forces you to behave like a monk would be tyrannical. The coercion is the difference.
I think you would agree that a person whose code of ethics includes "if I shoot someone, I will promptly report myself to the police for murder" is not an unjust condition at all. However, a society that forces you to live that way in a gun-loving society would be very unjust indeed.
a) someone being shot and someone pointing a gun are very well defined things while what is or is not intolerant is very subjective
and
b) unlike in your analogy, if someone expresses a opinion you consider intolerant then you are not dead, you can still defend your own opinion and counter theirs and most importantly you have not been harmed irreparably.
1. I've been on the internet.
Your example really has nothing to do with the paradox of tolerance or the idea of ethics being independent of the actions of others.
FTFY
> would anyone care to explain their reasoning?
I think a lot of people on HN are just anti gun/very left wing, which may taint their judgement while your example was nice about the initiation of violence being the issue.
It doesn’t work nearly as well with knives, which other people aren’t totally defenseless against (or cars, which are hard to pull out of your pocket in response to someone pointing theirs at you).
Ok, so maybe I couldn’t resist being a little bit snarky, but really, it was a good example.
FYI: contrary to popular belief, these are mutually exclusive.
"Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary." -- Karl Marx
Anyone who advocates disarming the working class and leaving it entirely defenseless against capitalism and the state apparatus it inevitably begets is not leftist, and I'm personally rather tired of pretending otherwise. Gun control advocates might be "left" of the far-right, but that's a stunningly low bar.
Karl Popper is not talking about today's progressives, because he died in 1994. The closest extension we can reasonably draw does not include them either, because Popper exclusively identified totalitarian ideologies with reactionary beliefs[1].
It's very easy to use the PoT as a blunt weapon, and there are some embarrassing applications of it on the political left. But none are quite as embarrassing as suggesting that Popper might seriously entertain "free debate" with a Nazi.
I didn’t say Popper would entertain free debate with a Nazi. My point is that, under Popper’s framework, there’s a huge incentive to declare anyone you don’t like to be Nazis, and reframe speech as tantamount to threats to physical safety.
(This really is a genuine question) who is to be allowed to determine if our opponents are that, and hence worthy of what one might call preemptive intolerance?
"...when people complain about lack of a diversity of thought/opinion, it’s almost always a complaint that they can’t be a bigot."
Supporting diversity of opinions and being a bigot are very different things. As can be seen with Obama. Labeling any one who disagrees with you on the topic of free speech as a bigot is A) rude, dismissive and B) not an effective argument. Its easy to think you're right when you assume the other side is racist.
The crux of my experience is that when the thing people disagree with you on _isn’t_ racist/homophobic/misogynistic/etc. then they tend to directly name and openly discuss the subject of their disagreement. The general and innocuous sounding term “diversity of thought” tends to get brought out when the opinions themselves are one of those opinions that people don’t want to admit to so openly.
If people are going to disagree about a choice of software license, or technical architecture, or copyright assignment, or even about moderation standards and free speech, they tend to just directly name the thing they are disagreeing about (as we are now).
I’ll give some ground here and say that in some cases “diversity of thought” isn’t raised because the particular person raising the thought wants to say bigoted things, but at the very least it tends to get trotted out to defend speech that ends up driving people away because of either direct overt bigotry or, more often, a pervasive use of dog whistles.
Q: Who gets to determine if something counts as a "dog whistle" or a "trope"?
I don't find the typical usage of either of those terms ever contributes much to honest debate.
In my experience, the more opinionated a person is, the less rational they are, so arguing with them is a waste of time. Most bigots enjoy arguing with you, but it doesn't change their opinions.
The implication here is of course that it is only worth talking to those that you can convert to your side, which is of course admitting that you are in fact opposed to diverse thoughts. Are you open to change your opinions or do you only expect others to adjust to your standards?
Of course those calling others bigots and using unionically using dog whistles like "dog whistle" is a very opiniated thing to do. Should we also take those things as a sign of irrationality and not engage with their ideas? Perhaps.
I think most people can get on board with that. The trouble comes when people start berating others for using words/phrases like blacklist, sanity check, backlog grooming, master, and spaz - just to name a few. 99.9% of people who use these words do not possess the mens rea of bigotry or intolerance.
E.g.: Right now, someone who read your comment is probably enraged on behalf of the people who have been hit by buses. Most of us know you mean no harm by it.
You might not believe that language affects thought or behaviour, but saying so directly might arguably be a better way of making your point than singling out others who disagree with you.
> Popper was talking about a very specific case, where the intolerant exploit the tolerance of a society to physically take over that society and enforce their views. Until and unless you have evidence of that plausibly happening, there is no Paradox of Tolerance.
Considering what the USA is going through right now... well, I just have no words.
I wish more people would actually agree with that and not just apply it to groups thet they think need protection.
Those tropes (and the reactionary politics that underlie them) strike me as precisely the kind of intolerance that Popper might have concerned himself with.
(Separately: it's unclear how progressives have satisfied the "intolerance of intolerance" condition here. Are you claiming that progressives have successfully won some on that front of the culture war? Current policy suggests otherwise[1].)
[1]: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/immigration-biden-first-year-ti...
Dealing more abstractly: I personally think we are justified in practicing "preemptive intolerance" when the party in question (1) has a bad faith (not merely faithless) relationship with the "language" of our political systems, and (2) demonstrates repeated intent to employ the mechanisms of our systems to subvert them. Both conditions are necessary; the absence of the latter makes the individual a LARPer.
Weimar Germany wasn’t fertile political soil for extremism because there weren’t enough people punching Nazis. In fact, the opposite — pervasive, normalized political violence gave cover to extremists who could then argue that they were justified in escalating their behaviors.
If I were to follow your own ethos (and to be perfectly clear, I do not), I should be advocating punching you in the street, as your ethos represents a bad faith attempt to undermine and subvert our political systems by using violence to control the words and ideas shared by others.
And no, that's not what caused the decline of Weimar (and the rise of Nazism). Nazism was preordained by a confluence of political factors, including the need for an easy post-war scapegoat in the form of Jews and other outsiders. 20th century European Fascist movements follow a uniform pattern: the loss of face or sovereignty (Trianon, WWI), followed by irredentism and revanchism towards any group perceived as having either benefited (or merely not suffered enough). Those sentiments culminated in a concerted effort to use newfound civil freedoms to undermine the system itself, chiefly by directing a disposition for intolerance towards those easiest to vilify.
This is all in marked contrast to our current situation and historical context, one where liberal activism has consistently made America freer for increasingly large swathes of its population. We easily forget that you could have gone to jail in 1955 for buying a copy of Ulysses, or been fined for daring to eat a meal with a more privileged race. My sole interest has and will continue to be expanding those freedoms.