Not a bar, but plays one on TV

6:24 AM

@trogdor I say it's the other way around: Englishmen are taught about gender in a not weird enough way. It's a language with a rather simple gender pattern. Which wouldn't do anything bad by itself (because Sapir-Whorf is a myth), but then they're apparently taught to conflate gender with social gender (nowadays more than before) and with biological sex (nowadays less than before).

@trogdor Case in point: this sentence just used a biological adjective in place of a grammatical/linguistic one, treating the two as one and the same.

trogdor

6:48 AM

people do treat those as one and the same thing

also, I call the way we are taught weird because it is

it ignores a large section of people who exist and teaches us by omission that they do indeed not exist

7:56 AM

@trogdor Not all people. For example, around here, crows and wars and programmes and humans are feminine, and ships and soldiers and ravens are masculine. And of course nobody would think that all of the former are female (despite being feminine) and the latter male (despite being masculine). Nor would they think that a war is socially feminine either.

@vicky_molokh I think that is something of a gross misrepresentation of the effect that linguistic influence is believed to have, but okay

@Carcer Err, maybe I phrased that badly. On the contrary, I'm showing an example of a lack of linguistic influence.

@vicky_molokh my point is that nobody argues that the grammatical gender of a thing being feminine makes people actually think all of those things are female, the effects empirically observed are far more subtle than that

I.e. people get by just fine when actual gender, social gender, and sex of nouns (including nouns referring to people) mismatch.

but I feel like we've had this argument before and I doubt we're going to get anywhere by repeating it

8:10 AM

@Carcer There was just a statement that people do treat those as one and the same, to which I replied (perhaps hastily?) with a counterexample pointing out that it's a thing that varies between different (usually linguistic and cultural) groups of people.

okay

trogdor

9:53 AM

@vicky_molokh I mean ok, yes there are some linguistic differences, but I wasn't really talking about that

But I think I see your point at least

Sdjz

4:08 PM

There has been an update on the recent issues in the main Meta.

Q: An Update to our Community and an Apology

-66

Friends, Last week we made an important decision for our community. We removed a moderator for repeatedly violating our existing Code of Conduct and being unwilling to accept our CM’s repeated requests to change the behavior. We recognize it has caused concern in the community as a whole. We mad...

So I guess we're perpetuating the vague "circle around the issue without actually explaining the issue" trend. And here I was worried this problem was going to escalate. 🙄

4:45 PM

mmm

I already expressed yesterday why I was skeptical of Monica's account of the situation, so the fact that this post is making me reconsider that stance ought to be pretty telling. If your official response to a controversy makes me think "huh, I'm no longer feeling like you did the right thing", you've messed up.

Of course, a lot of this could be resolved if they'd just post the actual offending conversations, even if they have to post them behind a CW for possibly transphobic language or something. I get there's concerns about privacy, as V2 pointed out, but at this point, it's blatantly obvious that SE's accounting of events and Monica's accounting of events do not line up.

(Although apparently some of the conversation happened through email, so I guess that's also a factor)

yeah, the two narratives they do not meet, and Monica's is the one with more (any) detail so it is naturally going to appear more believable

meta.stackexchange.com/questions/334248/… answer alleges this is actually about Monica (and others) repeatedly refusing to use neutral they when requested

which, if accurate, contextualises what has happened much less favourably on her end, though SE have still royally ballsed it how they handled everything as per usual

And I'm not saying I totally buy Monica's side: people have a funny way of turning "I don't think you should exist!" said in a private conversation into "I was just expressing a difference of opinion!" or "I was just asking questions!" when they give their explanation to their outraged peers (... from personal experience). But until someone posts transcripts, with as much context as literally possible, I'm not prepared to dig in my heels and insist that's what's happening.

@Xirema .... is what I was writing before clicking on that link.

@Carcer Cosigned with all of this. SE could have just said "Monica did not accurately represent the tone or context of her conversations with us, this is our perspective on what she did wrong...."

But instead, they're just doing this mealy-mouthed "she broke the terms of the CoC repeatedly", and like... Okay. She says she didn't. Are you saying she lied about her version of events? Because you could just say that. "She lied about her version of events". Dress it up in corporate-speak, like I just did, if that's unpalatable for you.

5:02 PM

I can sort of see where a problem is happening now though

if the CoC violations are about her interactions with (or about) other mods who want to use neutral pronouns, it's difficult to properly evidence that without putting those affected people in the line of fire, and it's apparently established that the majority of the moderation team is opposed to the use of neutral they and came down on her side of that argument so it would really be dropping them in the deep end

if they say that's what it actually is, it's not going to help anything, because apparently the majority of the base is going to go "but that's not a CoC violation!"

@Carcer Hmmmm. That's actually a good point. My general sense was you could censor names if you wanted to protect the identities of people who objected to Monica's argument, but the way these things go, someone would probably try to find a way to dox them by unmasking the speakers.

and SE ends up in the difficult position of trying to enforce a good moral standard on a group of people that explicitly disagree with it and think they should be allowed to overturn it

I'm not sure there's any winning moves in this game, but I'm a bit surprised SE have chosen this particular hill to fight on

@Carcer And that's where I started when examining the issue yesterday. And if the post you linked is accurate, then I don't think I'm in a different position now.

I would really love to know the truth of the matter, yes

But there are SO MANY BETTER WAYS to issue a response than this. Fine: you can't post any transcripts. There's too many issues with that. But does it violate Corporate Policy so badly that you can't just say "we've read Monica's account of what happened, and we feel it is not an accurate account of the circumstances or context of her dismissal as Moderator".

Like, you'd be in the same boat, but at least the people trying to understand what happened would be better informed.

5:14 PM

okay what is going on with SE

@Gwideon Do you want the long version, or the really long version?

really long give me all the details

Rubiksmoose

← 1 message moved from RPG General Chat

Some of the details aren't clear, but the events so far seem to be:
- Site mods were discussing a proposed change to the new code of conduct (CoC), and a well-known moderator either questioned or opposed part of it.
- The moderator went away for the weekend due to a religious holiday. When they returned, they learned that their moderator privileges had been taken away.
- The SE public relations folks basically accused this ex-moderator, by name, of being transphobic, on a public platform (https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/10/01/stack_exchange_controversy/) . Because the original conversati…

oh wow

5:21 PM

I tried to word that as neutrally as possible

im also hearing accusations that the proper demodding process wasn't followed

That also seems to be true. Unless there is some super-secret special demodding process that nobody knew about.

though whether or not it was the appropriate process to use in this case may be debatable

I also appear to be getting sucked into argument with a disagreeable person on those answer comments

I should just go home

also from her side of the story it seems that they're saying that gender neutral pronouns are misgendering. Really it's not. Also that forgets about people such as myself who prefer gender neutral pronouns such as they and them

it's gotten pretty complicated, Gwideon

5:26 PM

yeah it has

But I think by this point I'm on the moderator's side

@Gwideon That seems to be the discussion that started it. The current fracas is about SE's actions and the community's reactions.

yeah from what I can tell SE has not been handling this well

Also the "update" is so boiler plate that it doesn't really help calm anything down

Alright. So last week, a Moderator named Monica Celio was dismissed from her position by SE Corporate staff.

She claims that the dismissal happened with little-to-no warning, and came off the heels of trying to seek clarification on the changes to the Code of Conduct that would mandate that users on this network respect the pronoun use of other users (especially Transgender users, whom this policy mostly would affect). She further claims that she tried to send an email to corporate, got an unsatisfying response, tried to contact them again, got no response, and was later terminated from he…

@Gwideon This is not quite accurate. SE's stated policy (change) is that if someone asks for neutral pronouns, users need to respect that decision; Monica wanted to argue that abstaining from any pronoun use, correct or incorrect, would not be misgendering. As we discussed yesterday, I'm generally of the opinion that it can, especially if it seems like the reason they're avoiding pronouns is to avoid having to call someone by the pronoun they've chosen.

And based on "I dont want to participate"'s claim about her behavior, it sounds like Monica was nominally refusing to use "they/them" to refer to gender-neutral users.

Now the problem is, and continues to be, that we don't know the full truth of what happened. We have two accounts of events that contradict each other, and a Corporate-speak response that refuses to actually make claims about what happened, other than vague-"well, she broke the rules"-posting.

hmm maybe god theres so much going on and it's so hard to get information on this. This whole things is so confusing

24 hours ago, by Xirema

But again: someone please correct me if my assessment of the situation is mistaken, because trying to precisely determine what went down from the several dozen posts I examined was taxing.

5:37 PM

why won't they release proof

@Gwideon See Carcer's post above: given the community has galvanized behind Monica and her account of events, putting out transcripts could turn fire onto the moderators who objected to her behavior.

true

Believe me, I've bemoaned the fact that no one involved have put out concrete proof of what happened.

but it also makes it feel like they have something to hide

@Gwideon Yes; but just so we're clear, that applies to both Monica and to SE.

Because she was pretty vague about the details of what the conflict was over too, and only post-hoc edited in a vague-post about what her objection to the CoC was.

5:42 PM

okay

Whole thing seems weird and bad.

yeah until more info is released I can't really determine where I stand but I do understand why several moderators have resigned. they feel the circumstances of removal where unfair to both the moderators and monica. This what I'm getting from uit anyways.

can someone give me a real quick TL;DR about what's going on cus i'm completely out of the loop

@Himitsu_no_Yami Scroll up in chat. There have been a few summaries so far.

@Himitsu_no_Yami I posted a big summary about 15 lines up. ;)

5:48 PM

Beloved moderator had permissions removed over some discussion about code of conduct (CoC) changes. Discussion and emails were private.

this whole situation just kinda makes me feel really anxious. I hate conflict like this.

@Gwideon Yup.

So let me get this straight. TL;DR, mod got dismissed by Corporate, claims there was essentially no warning, whole thing started by a question on CoC requiring people to use everyone's preferred pronouns, now several mods have resigned as a result?

@Himitsu_no_Yami Essentially. Although how much of that is verifiable, I don't know.

ok well at least now I know wth is going on

5:50 PM

there's just to much to really process

@Himitsu_no_Yami We have assertions and allusions to what went on from a number of perspectives.

right but what I mean by "what's going on" is more the matter that's being discussed and what the claims are

some one needs to make a post that just gathers all these responses

Oh. Oh wow.

So I didn't actually read the post that Christianity.SE moderator wrote in its entirety, but I just realized he quoted ‎Martin Niemöller's "First they came" poem in his response defending Monica.

That's... uh.

Am I correct in the assumption that there seems was alot of resentment towards corporate even before this whole debacle

5:59 PM

@Gwideon Generally speaking, yes

@Gwideon I mean, I've not made secret the fact that I don't hold a high opinion of SE's management myself, and I'm (tentatively, pending actual evidence) actually on their side in this issue!

alright. I noticed that the general SE community was kinda tense. I get the feeling that the mismangement of this situation is kinda the breaking point for a lot of people

@Gwideon These things happen now and then. Unsure how this one will get resolved.

yeah same

Ultimately, given the fuzziness of the information available, it's probably safe for most users to avoid taking sides. RPG's main chat seems to be more of a casual social area, compared to many other SE sites, so we're not as closely tied to the corporate politics.

6:02 PM

@Gwideon Yesterday, I compared this situation to when the Linux Community updated their Code of Conduct to sanction Linus Torvalds for, you know, being a bit of a *****. The parallels are uncanny.

@MikeQ Definitely agreed. I obviously have a stance/opinion on which side I think is probably in the right, but that's contingent on a lot of information I can't confirm.

i'm not familiar with the linux community so yeah.

Rubiksmoose

I appreciate, as always the respect and compassion you all are showing when talking about this :) I obviously can't say much but do always keep in mind when talking about this that individual people are involved on all sides. People have been hurt. People are continuing to be hurt and there's just a whole lot of mess.

6:18 PM

@Gwideon it is

god it sounds like hell to be a mod sometimes

reading over some old stuff

I'm morbidly curious about what the verbatim language was that prompted the removal of the moderator. I can image a range of possibilities.

meta.stackexchange.com/a/334289/398983 has some rather stronger allegation about what happened, now

6:34 PM

@Carcer Definitely a data point to factor in, thanks for linking it.

(Cyn's answer is also worth reading on that page in the same vein, elaborated in their writing.SE post)

The only thing about the pronoun issue I've read has been posted to stacks about religious issues. Which I thought was kind of peculiar. The discussion in this chat earlier about, "can I just default to they" was pretty cordial.

I was assuming the discussion in the ~~Teacher's Lounge~~ chat that must not be quoted was as polite. Now I wonder if that was the case.

@AndrasDeak the thing is it is entirely plausible and believable that Monica is a generally wonderful, kind and progressive person in most circumstances who just has an awful, misplaced hangup about using singular they

that is exactly what it seems to me

but I know I'm not aware of all information, and I don't want to ruffle the peaceful island that is RPG :)

we keep it in NAB and we're avoiding getting too ruffled

6:45 PM

I've been deep in drama all this time elsewhere

Yeah. From all accounts I find intentional malice or fomenting discord difficult to believe.

at least on Monica's part

@AndrasDeak The chatizens here seem to handle ruffles rather well.

@Carcer Yes.

some of the mod resignations (or at least Caleb's) were definitely "I don't want to call a man a woman" type responses

some maybe, but that's not the core of the issue

It isn't even demodding Monica. The reason why this blew up is how she was blindsided by the process.

6:47 PM

well, yeah, it's a complicated conflagration of several issues that have all come to head at once

Still, I've had people be really really cruel out of a misplaced sense of right or morality or whatever and they didn't even realize they were doing it. For that sort of thing, the one-to-one heart-to-heart in neutral terms and I statements really does wonders.

SE overlords are probably on the right side of the triggering issue and they still somehow managed to wrong everyone involved

if you look at the mods resignation noticed you'll find quite a few that say "I don't agree with Monica but the way she was treated means I have to stand up"

@Carcer spot on

and they've done it at a time when faith in management was already apparently at an all-time low