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Comment by cyberpunk

1 day ago

What does a personal politics matter?

I’m vaguely aware of the dude having removed a lot of rubbish ansible roles which I think he wrote over the years, and now he’s some kind of blogger or something?

He’s not a technical person, sysadmin cosplay aside — and so I think, at least here, we should only judge technical contributions; of which his is a handful of yaml files for installing apache which don’t really count for much.

Should I be comfortable going to this event if I'm queer? Is there a benefit to excluding queer people from this event?

I like this idea and hope someone else is inspired to run a more inclusive event.

  • Why would anyone there care if you’re queer? The guy posted a blog 10 years ago (since removed) with one paragraph about his personal religious beliefs; and now suddenly the event he’s hosting is “queer not welcome”? I mean come on.

    You want equality, I’m absolutely sure you’ll be treated like everyone else there if you go to the homelab event, regardless of your alignment.

    • With the amount of comments about it I'd hope that the host would make a statement at the least. Silence is telling. Your garauntees are obviously meaningless.

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Personal choices:

"I don't eat meat."

"I won't have an abortion."

"I pray 5x a day."

"I won't be homosexual."

Versus religious coersion of:

"You cannot eat meat."

"You cannot have an abortion."

"You must pray 5x a day."

"You cannot be homosexual."

Religious types are never happy in doing only what they say and believe - they want to force these views on others, whether they like it or not. I've seen what religious imperialism does. These choices are not personal and will never be personal.

Worse yet, when you allow SOME types of hate (against women and against homosexuals), it opens the door for other hate. This is Catholic teachings, so are non-Catholics welcome? How about Jews? Moslems? How about pagans and witches? Are bisexuals welcome, since they are half-homosexual?

When you refuse to draw the line at hate, but draw it where you find it convenient, you leave the door open for hate to sneak in everywhere, under the guise of tolerating intolerance.

I put my foot down at any form of hate. Attending, paying, or otherwise supporting this event is tacit acceptance that his form of hate is acceptable.

Frankly, personal politics matter a great deal to me. I can't look away.

I don't support people who advocate for policies that hurt and kill people (mostly women in this case). That cause tremendous suffering.

I can't support such people in any way, even if their personal politics have nothing to do with their work or whatever event they plan.

People can believe and support what they want, but they should not be free of consequences for such beliefs: exclusion and boycots.

  • The abortion and homosexuality stuff seems to me mostly religious beliefs in the US tho (as far as i can see from the outside) so what you’re really saying here is that you support ostracising someone because of their private religious views? Isn’t there even something in the US constitution about that? If you want to change the constitution to support punishment for wrong belief, and don’t see how that could backfire on you, I’m not sure what anyone can tell you.

    Seems like an obvious slippery slope to me. While I disagree with those religious views personally, I strongly believe people should be able to hold whatever beliefs they want and shouldn’t be punished for them.

    Maybe I’m just too liberal in that regard tho.

    • I'm relatively confident that the US Constitution doesn't contain any prohibitions against the private boycott of people with different religious beliefs.

      I've thought about it a fair bit, and I don't think there's really a very clear line between which religious beliefs people should politely decline to comment on, vs openly critisise. The cultural taboo that exists in much of the west against privately excluding people on the basis of religion has had some really positive effects (the marked decrease in religious violence of the past few hundred years is amazing), but it also leaves society somewhat vulnerable to the spread of some particularly cancerous ideas.

    • My remark was to inform people so they can make up their own mind what to do or support.

      At no point did I talk about government intervention or something like that.

      Just civilians being informed to make choices they want to make

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  • > Frankly, personal politics matter a great deal to me. I can't look away.

    I think if you'd also say under every traditional Muslim's post "by the way this person thinks gay people should be thrown off roofs, and women's votes should be half that of men's, and they should only be able to divorce if the man consents, and men should be able to hit their wives to discipline them, and women should walk around in dehumanising clothing because only women are to blame for rape, and supports a religion that builds the most backward societies on the planet" then you'd look a lot more honest.

    But you won't. Because you look away from the catastrophic stuff and instead poorly mis-summarise mild stuff that you disagree with to make it sound catastrophic.

    • There’s no point trying with these people, they’re too far gone. They can’t even recognise their breathless intolerance of others for what it is, it’s echo chamber stuff. May as well go piss upwind.

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> What does a personal politics matter?

Not a lot. But being anti <X> and letting anyone know is imposing your views on others.