NixOS is electing a committee that will elect the new governing body and design its systems.
One popular proposal is for this committee to consist of five people, of which two are intersectionally marginalized. (That is, marginalized in at least two ways) That is, of course, a quota.
Aaron Hall, who objects to all of this, has arrived.
I value fairness and treating everyone equally regardless of their class status. I would be wary of any statements that make some users feel they will be treated less preferentially to others due to their class status, sowing distrust and conflict.
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It's a meta comment about distrust and conflict. There has been several comments made on this thread about privileging some people over others. We're on the internet. Nobody knows who is what class. I suggest we not make those kinds of comments because they are controversial and will lead to arguments and distrust in the broader community if users think they will be treated unfairly because their class is being unprivileged.
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I know everyone looks at statements that privilege some over others and thinks they are sketchy. (In what way are they privileged? How does that work? Does that mean we get suboptimal decision making so that some class-privileged person can have a seat of responsibility and privilege?)
Nix is very cutting edge, and we'd like to see more diversity. Diversity will come with growth. Controversy will stifle growth. These kinds of statements are going to cause controversy and conflict, stifling the growth that will result in diversity. Instead you may be able to rope in tokens of diversity, but you won't actually achieve real organic diversity because the growth just isn't there.
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Can you explain what did you put in place to obtain that diversity, can you qualify a bit that diversity? I'm looking at statements like "There was BIPOC", etc. Also, how did you measure that diversity?
We grew. We advertised on Meetup.com. We let companies know we existed so they could host us. We let colleges know we existed so students could find us. We were open to everyone. We made every effort to help everyone who was trying to help themselves.
One of the things we did that helped: We treated people fairly. We did not talk about elevating anyone with privilege over others because of their class.
Who? Black (native, island, African), White (European, Russian, native (all ethnicities)), Asian (Korean, Chinese), Islanders, Native American, Transgendered, very old, very young. etc.
I'm highlighting this because it's a reoccurrence of the discussion Jon Ringer kept having in apparent bad faith.
I read his blog a while and I agree with you.
Overall the Dimes Square guys seem very similar to each other. To me they're interesting in aggregate, described once, but there's nothing to look at beyond the surface. If you read any two blog posts on Mike's site, you know everything about them.
Of course they have day-to-day lives -- every so often one of them releases a book or something, but this has no real purpose -- none of them ever change. It's not like a man with six funny hats becomes more interesting when he acquires a seventh funny hat.
The social pattern Mike is describing seems pretty fast-paced and destructive. They do a lot of signings and court a lot of press attention, and as long as you're still shocked, they're interested in you. Past that, you kind of have to behave exactly like them to get invited, but it doesn't seem like they actually like their own -- I would be really, really surprised if they read each other's books. They just kind of brood next to each other and engage in disaffected, ironic narcissism.
I can see why he'd be valuable to them, though. Mike has his own pattern -- he's clearly learned how to be entertainingly shocked, but only intermittently -- on other occasions he denies them supply, and sometimes he burns them by being a surprisingly coherent critic. He's hard to reach but ultimately attends often enough that they remember him.
If you substitute "affection" with supply in the form of outrage, and leave everything else the same, he's basically a pickup artist.
I suspect that the actions that make up Mike's pattern are deliberate, but when it comes to explaining them, he has zero self-awareness. He's doing it too well for it to be accidental though, as much as there's a lot of denial there, and when he makes comments like the one I've selected, I think that's the mask slipping.