I’ll give my take on it. Something many fail to grasp is that it’s not about a singular thing, you need to look at the context. Let’s go through some of it:
Andreas Kling, lead developer of (now-)Ladybird, rejects PR that changes “he” to “they” in documentation.
This is the most frequently mentioned example of Andreas’ issues.
The “he” in question referred to any user, where “they” is already commonly used instead by everything from companies, to news, to the Linux Kernel docs (an arguably much more important software project).
Andreas’ exact words: “This project is not an appropriate arena to advertise your personal politics.”
This code was eventually merged 3 years laters in a different PR, this time described as “Grammar fixes” (it changes even more pronouns to gender neutral than the original did).
This PR was merged two hours after its creation and, coincidentally, around a month after Andreas announced his stepping down from the project.
Andreas Kling likes interacting with far-right, queerphobic, or otherwise controversial persons.
Here’s him calling Brendan Eich, known homophobe, kicked out of Mozilla for… being a homophobe, now CEO of the foremost crypto browser, infamous for its bravery and attracting like-minded fans, “Senpai.”
Trudging through Bryan’s slop wears on the mind, but here’s another example of him being ridiculous. Highlight of the article: “There are multiple Software and Computer organizations which have declared their support for the Trans fetish over the last few years…”
Read anything by Bryan, then look into what he’s talking about. There are at least as many examples, as there are times Bryan has touched upon LGBT topics or linux in recent years.
Here’s relatively prominent KDE developer Niccolò’s hour long video detailing how Bryan is a horrible, lying “journalist,” and how people need to stop giving him a stage.
He also often interacts with other various degrees of right-leaning users on twitter, a platform he describes as full of positive energy, unlike Mastodon.
Other funny things about Andreas that could be irrelevant in isolation but… look at all of this.
Would I look at that PR and say I’m not touching Andreas with a ten-foot pole? Maybe that’s excessive. Would I ignore all the rest and say he’s just misunderstood? Hell no. For all its issues, I do hope Ladybird succeeds as a new browser engine because the internet needs more of those. But I’m not touching or otherwise supporting it unless Andreas gets his shit sorted.
I honestly can’t tell if there’s a disguise. Maybe there isn’t! He seems to genuinely and stubbornly believe in the apolitical-centrist stuff, which you wouldn’t think him capable of since he’s so intelligent when it comes to programming… but programming intelligence is not necessarily applicable anywhere else.
Unfortunately—99.999% of the time—“apolitical” just means “I haven’t taken the time to consider my deeply held values and how they show through in my day-to-day life and I want to stop hearing from people who challenge my worldview,” not “I would like to not have this space devolve into discussions about governance nor economics” (which is also a political statement when you consider it’s a community leader saying no one is allowed to question how they govern the community).
E.g. why the fuck are pronouns “political”? Just because certain pundits have vilified anyone who uses less common ones to refer to themself? That just means any topic is potentially political, and all it takes is some asshole making the community you and your loved ones belong to part of their political agenda for your PR to be dismissed. “Sorry, that kind of usecase is common among Straight White Males™, and I don’t want this project to be made unnecessarily political.”
Some people have no self-reflection, and it shows when they say shit like this. Only a matter of time before Kling claims people calling him out for being rightwing “pushed” him into the rightwing (because he realized the values he aleady held aligned with theirs, but lets conveniently forget to mention that part).
I refuse to believe a reasonable, healthy mind sees someone cheering for queerphobes and thinks there’s nothing wrong with that. “He’s just interacting, he doesn’t do the bad things” has to be the most insane or trollish response to this, because it shows you don’t understand or outright don’t care about how this harms people.
By that absurd logic, if I like interacting with Nazis on the daily it’s fine, so long as I don’t actually pull the trigger on the jews myself. When people call me out, I’ll just say I’m apolitical. That’s how Andreas describes himself, by the way. Apolitical.
I’m not calling Andreas an outright Nazi, to be extra clear. If I had to take a guess, I’d say he’s a right leaning “thinks he’s a centrist and apolitical” person who doesn’t see the harm in many of the things he supports or is otherwise sheltered from them. This seems to be a trend among self-described centrists.
Maybe I’m the odd one out, and do tell me if you think that’s the case, but when I can, I don’t support homophobes with my wallet nor my words.
It’s like voting with your wallet, but for free. Image is a tool, just like capital, and I feel that contributing to theirs is a form of (albeit minor) support. Maybe I should’ve used supporting, or another word. Point is, Andreas does that, and I think it’s because he likes Brendan. Thinks he’s great, shouldn’t have joined the people decrying him for being a homophobe.
People who care about LGBT folks don’t usually like homophobes, and aren’t usually against decrying them. I don’t think this is a good sign for Andreas. That’s the kind of thing that you need to keep in mind when you see that first PR.
Are you trying to convince me that making a neutral meme about a shitty person’s success is equatable to supporting/being a nazi?
No, I tried to make that clear. I actually don’t get how you read it that way. Also, the meme isn’t neutral when you consider how he views Eich, just like it isn’t originally neutral towards Gaben and Steam when gamers use it.
What’s surprising is his complete lack of care that Eich is probably still against gay marriage.
It’s not just a few interactions, it’s Andreas’ entire attitude around these topics. You absolutely can judge people and guess their beliefs from their online actions. Connect the dots, why don’t you?
I’m not “separating the art from the artist” when the artist is alive and frolicking with a homophobe. That’s very much relevant to me, I see LGBT folks being harmed every day due to such indifference.
The issue is that he’s politically polarized into believing that the word “they” is inherently “political.”
It’s great to hear he doesn’t partake in dehumanising others for their past behaviour/statements
Calling someone out for doing shitty things isn’t “dehumanizing,” you fucking disingenuous hagfish.
All documented behavior is necessarily in the past. Do you mean we must assume he’s changed based on no evidence? Or is their some magical timeframe beyond which certain beliefs must have changed?
If you’re feeling attacked by people calling out Andreas Kling and Brendan Eich for their irrational prejudice against people who aren’t straight and cis… Good! It means you have enough self-awareness to realize you fit that category too, so now you have the option to change that. Or you already have made that change, but still feel guilty about who you used to be—in which case I, a LGBT, give you permission to stop feeling guilty and move on with your life! Just stop jumping to defend assholes with paperthin excuses that sounded good when they were brought up in their “apolitical” echochambers
If you read the commit, you would see it was referring to a built-in non-human account.
In no way did he assume the gender of any people, so who cares if he referred to a built-in account of his operaring system as ‘he’ instead of ‘they’?
A more accurate description would have been ‘it’.
As somebody who also identifies as LGBT, I don’t want or need your permission to feel anything.
I don’t feel guilty for not participating in the cancel culture of the internet.
I did read the commit, and I loved the part where Andreas Kling said:
This project is not an appropriate arena to advertise your personal politics.
As his reason for dismissing it. Because the commiter was trying to use idiomatic language for a builtin account. But it must be “politics” because pronouns amirite.
That also ignores all the other points brought up about his questionable values.
I don’t feel guilty for not participating in the cancel culture of the internet.
There is no such thing as cancel culture. This is what the Free Marketplace of ideas allows: “your ideas are shit and I won’t support you and I will let others know.” That’s not “cancel culture,” that’s just how society fucking deals with toxic ideas that harm communities.
As somebody who also identifies as LGBT
Then put the bare fucking minimum into acting like you’re part of a marginalized community, and stop rushing to defend online chuds who support that marginalization from being critiqued. Seriously weird simp behavior.
Sure. Lets just ignore ladybird/serenity and the positive impact Andreas is making because he didn’t accept a commit that changed a pronoun for a system account on the operating system he wrote from a ‘he’ to a ‘they’.
And lets ignore that it’s been changed since. People ‘never’ change, so lets fuck up their entire career and public image for life.
Yeah no thanks.
If you think that comment outweighs all the positive impacts Andreas is making, that’s your prerogative. I’m not interested in holding everyone up to such high expectations.
So it’s not just the PR, it is also him interacting with “the wrong people”. Because it is so unthinkable to post about another browser developer while developing a browser regardless of politics. Idk anything about Andreas Kling, maybe he is a bad person, but the reasoning in your comment seems unhinged to me.
PS: Maybe off topic, but FDO reasoning for banning Vaxry is also wild. FDO admits he never broke the CoC on their platforms, then the CoC enforcement sends him a threatening email demanding he moderates his community differently and when he pushes back and says he will ignore this person sending unsolicited threatening emails, that is a reason to ban him. Because somehow this unsolicited threatening email is somehow considered part of FDO. Literally manufacturing a cause…
Read again, it’s not just interacting, he’s praising, promoting, and gladly and voluntarily engaging with these people. Not “the wrong people.” Say it with me: far-right misinformation propagandists, queerphobes, a genocide defender. Not “wrong”, with scare quotes, but actually shitty people. And I’m not even done with that comment.
About your ridiculous defense of vaxry, I’m going to be straight with you: violating CoC or not is irrelevant. If you manage a community that toxic, don’t see anything wrong with it, and don’t want to do anything about it, it is normal to want nothing to do with you. No magical binding social contract is necessary for this—if you suck, people don’t want to deal with you.
Collaborating in FDO isn’t a natural right, it’s a privilege earned by contributing. Vaxry made people not want to be there. Vaxry was detracting.
Your entire reply reeks of “it’s not that bad,” which to me reads as “I don’t think those things are bad” and sincerely makes me not want to talk with you further if that’s truly the case.
EDIT: So, I checked your profile, and you have a giant comment thread on things you dislike about DEI, and you also do mental gymnastics to defend the right. Cool, cool. And a comment equivalating “what if kamala did the sieg hail” to the question “what if elon did it?”
First off, I don’t know anything about Vaxry or the Hyperland community, so I am definitely not defending him or implying it is not bad or anything of the sorts. I am saying the public reasoning for the ban is manufactured BS, and I am pretty sure that is because it is hard to call yourself “free” anything if you want to police peoples behavior unrelated to your project.
If you think projects should do such policing, that’s fine. It even makes sense, if you ignore the potential for misuse. But they certainly shouldn’t advertise themselves as free. It’s the hypocrisy of trying to do both by manufacturing an excuse I am calling out.
As for the rest of what you write, I feel it all comes to the same unhinged idea that because someone is a bad person, everything they touch, create or any person engaging with them is also bad.
I dislike Brave, and it’s founder. Doesn’t mean everything Brave does is bad or can’t be promoted by me as good. If you choose to not do it for your personal beliefs, that is fine. But the idea that I am not allowed to praise Brave browser features or other actions because of something unrelated its founder did or said is ridiculous.
EDIT: Regarding your edit, yes. I criticize parts of DEI or stupid anti-Trump arguments. That’s the whole point. Stupid arguments are stupid even if a good person is making them and good arguments are good, even if evil person like Trump makes them. Parts of DEI can be bad, even though discrimination is also bad. The world is not black and white.
EDIT2: Here is my post on DEI if anyone wants to read it and decide for themselves whether it is reasonable criticism or not.
You’re defending him—intentionally or not—because you’re giving legitimacy to the idea that, somehow, the party that kicked him out is in the wrong, not the guy that defends genocide. It’s likely there would be complaints regardless of their official reasoning, because Vaxry’s problem is beyond reason.
I feel it all comes to the same unhinged idea that because someone is a bad person, everything they touch, create or any person engaging with them is also a bad person.
Not at all? There’s a chance I edited my comment after you replied. I’ve made many edits, and I’m not exactly keeping track. Please reread the end of it:
For all its issues, I do hope Ladybird succeeds as a new browser engine because the internet needs more of those. But I’m not touching or otherwise supporting it unless they get their shit sorted.
I hope the project succeeds, that it helps the internet. Doesn’t mean I must like or support the person behind it, specially when they’re acting this way. I believe there are others like me. I would like them to be informed as well.
The idea that I am not allowed to praise Brave browser features because of something unrelated its founder did is ridiculous.
Good news: I never said that. Go on, praise Ladybird. Someone asked about details on “Andreas’ gender issue,” I replied with details. Because I’m tired of people defending it in isolation, I brought more details. Any criticism is of Andreas actions, based on Andreas’ own actions.
You’re defending him—intentionally or not—because you’re giving legitimacy to the idea that, somehow, the party that kicked him out is in the wrong.
Yeah, I am tired of this shit. My entire comment repeatedly spells out that criticizing one party does not mean supporting the other. Both FDO and Vaxry can be in the wrong. If you can’t even comprehend that, there is nothing else to talk about.
Dream, sorry if managed to bungle up and completely misinterpret that point. I feel like I was answering with something important to note, but can’t even tell anymore. I’m physically tired, so maybe I should’ve returned later. In any case, I hope this won’t bother you for long.
I’ll give my take on it. Something many fail to grasp is that it’s not about a singular thing, you need to look at the context. Let’s go through some of it:
Would I look at that PR and say I’m not touching Andreas with a ten-foot pole? Maybe that’s excessive. Would I ignore all the rest and say he’s just misunderstood? Hell no. For all its issues, I do hope Ladybird succeeds as a new browser engine because the internet needs more of those. But I’m not touching or otherwise supporting it unless Andreas gets his shit sorted.
Oh wow… He seeks to be ant alt right in disguise. God damn it.
I honestly can’t tell if there’s a disguise. Maybe there isn’t! He seems to genuinely and stubbornly believe in the apolitical-centrist stuff, which you wouldn’t think him capable of since he’s so intelligent when it comes to programming… but programming intelligence is not necessarily applicable anywhere else.
Unfortunately—99.999% of the time—“apolitical” just means “I haven’t taken the time to consider my deeply held values and how they show through in my day-to-day life and I want to stop hearing from people who challenge my worldview,” not “I would like to not have this space devolve into discussions about governance nor economics” (which is also a political statement when you consider it’s a community leader saying no one is allowed to question how they govern the community).
E.g. why the fuck are pronouns “political”? Just because certain pundits have vilified anyone who uses less common ones to refer to themself? That just means any topic is potentially political, and all it takes is some asshole making the community you and your loved ones belong to part of their political agenda for your PR to be dismissed. “Sorry, that kind of usecase is common among Straight White Males™, and I don’t want this project to be made unnecessarily political.”
Some people have no self-reflection, and it shows when they say shit like this. Only a matter of time before Kling claims people calling him out for being rightwing “pushed” him into the rightwing (because he realized the values he aleady held aligned with theirs, but lets conveniently forget to mention that part).
So there’s no issue with Andreas, just some people he’s interacted with before?
It’s great to hear he doesn’t partake in dehumanising others for their past behaviour/statements :)
I refuse to believe a reasonable, healthy mind sees someone cheering for queerphobes and thinks there’s nothing wrong with that. “He’s just interacting, he doesn’t do the bad things” has to be the most insane or trollish response to this, because it shows you don’t understand or outright don’t care about how this harms people.
By that absurd logic, if I like interacting with Nazis on the daily it’s fine, so long as I don’t actually pull the trigger on the jews myself. When people call me out, I’ll just say I’m apolitical. That’s how Andreas describes himself, by the way. Apolitical.
I’m not calling Andreas an outright Nazi, to be extra clear. If I had to take a guess, I’d say he’s a right leaning “thinks he’s a centrist and apolitical” person who doesn’t see the harm in many of the things he supports or is otherwise sheltered from them. This seems to be a trend among self-described centrists.
What cheering?
Are you trying to convince me that making a neutral meme about a shitty person’s success is equatable to supporting/being a nazi?
Maybe I’m the odd one out, and do tell me if you think that’s the case, but when I can, I don’t support homophobes with my wallet nor my words.
It’s like voting with your wallet, but for free. Image is a tool, just like capital, and I feel that contributing to theirs is a form of (albeit minor) support. Maybe I should’ve used supporting, or another word. Point is, Andreas does that, and I think it’s because he likes Brendan. Thinks he’s great, shouldn’t have joined the people decrying him for being a homophobe.
People who care about LGBT folks don’t usually like homophobes, and aren’t usually against decrying them. I don’t think this is a good sign for Andreas. That’s the kind of thing that you need to keep in mind when you see that first PR.
No, I tried to make that clear. I actually don’t get how you read it that way. Also, the meme isn’t neutral when you consider how he views Eich, just like it isn’t originally neutral towards Gaben and Steam when gamers use it.
The guy literally created javascript. It shouldn’t be a surprise that somebody who’s developing a web browser holds some amount of respect for him.
We could argue about this all day, but neither of us are Andreas, so we shouldn’t be assuming his beliefs based on a few interactions on social media.
None of this should get in the way of the web browser’s success anyway, because it’s not relevant to the project.
What’s surprising is his complete lack of care that Eich is probably still against gay marriage.
It’s not just a few interactions, it’s Andreas’ entire attitude around these topics. You absolutely can judge people and guess their beliefs from their online actions. Connect the dots, why don’t you?
I’m not “separating the art from the artist” when the artist is alive and frolicking with a homophobe. That’s very much relevant to me, I see LGBT folks being harmed every day due to such indifference.
The issue is that he’s politically polarized into believing that the word “they” is inherently “political.”
Calling someone out for doing shitty things isn’t “dehumanizing,” you fucking disingenuous hagfish.
All documented behavior is necessarily in the past. Do you mean we must assume he’s changed based on no evidence? Or is their some magical timeframe beyond which certain beliefs must have changed?
If you’re feeling attacked by people calling out Andreas Kling and Brendan Eich for their irrational prejudice against people who aren’t straight and cis… Good! It means you have enough self-awareness to realize you fit that category too, so now you have the option to change that. Or you already have made that change, but still feel guilty about who you used to be—in which case I, a LGBT, give you permission to stop feeling guilty and move on with your life! Just stop jumping to defend assholes with paperthin excuses that sounded good when they were brought up in their “apolitical” echochambers
If you read the commit, you would see it was referring to a built-in non-human account.
In no way did he assume the gender of any people, so who cares if he referred to a built-in account of his operaring system as ‘he’ instead of ‘they’?
A more accurate description would have been ‘it’.
As somebody who also identifies as LGBT, I don’t want or need your permission to feel anything.
I don’t feel guilty for not participating in the cancel culture of the internet.
I did read the commit, and I loved the part where Andreas Kling said:
As his reason for dismissing it. Because the commiter was trying to use idiomatic language for a builtin account. But it must be “politics” because pronouns amirite.
That also ignores all the other points brought up about his questionable values.
There is no such thing as cancel culture. This is what the Free Marketplace of ideas allows: “your ideas are shit and I won’t support you and I will let others know.” That’s not “cancel culture,” that’s just how society fucking deals with toxic ideas that harm communities.
Then put the bare fucking minimum into acting like you’re part of a marginalized community, and stop rushing to defend online chuds who support that marginalization from being critiqued. Seriously weird simp behavior.
Sure. Lets just ignore ladybird/serenity and the positive impact Andreas is making because he didn’t accept a commit that changed a pronoun for a system account on the operating system he wrote from a ‘he’ to a ‘they’.
And lets ignore that it’s been changed since. People ‘never’ change, so lets fuck up their entire career and public image for life.
Yeah no thanks.
If you think that comment outweighs all the positive impacts Andreas is making, that’s your prerogative. I’m not interested in holding everyone up to such high expectations.
If that makes me a simp in your eyes, so be it.
So it’s not just the PR, it is also him interacting with “the wrong people”. Because it is so unthinkable to post about another browser developer while developing a browser regardless of politics. Idk anything about Andreas Kling, maybe he is a bad person, but the reasoning in your comment seems unhinged to me.
PS: Maybe off topic, but FDO reasoning for banning Vaxry is also wild. FDO admits he never broke the CoC on their platforms, then the CoC enforcement sends him a threatening email demanding he moderates his community differently and when he pushes back and says he will ignore this person sending unsolicited threatening emails, that is a reason to ban him. Because somehow this unsolicited threatening email is somehow considered part of FDO. Literally manufacturing a cause…
I’m baffled by your comment.
Read again, it’s not just interacting, he’s praising, promoting, and gladly and voluntarily engaging with these people. Not “the wrong people.” Say it with me: far-right misinformation propagandists, queerphobes, a genocide defender. Not “wrong”, with scare quotes, but actually shitty people. And I’m not even done with that comment.
About your ridiculous defense of vaxry, I’m going to be straight with you: violating CoC or not is irrelevant. If you manage a community that toxic, don’t see anything wrong with it, and don’t want to do anything about it, it is normal to want nothing to do with you. No magical binding social contract is necessary for this—if you suck, people don’t want to deal with you.
Collaborating in FDO isn’t a natural right, it’s a privilege earned by contributing. Vaxry made people not want to be there. Vaxry was detracting.
Your entire reply reeks of “it’s not that bad,” which to me reads as “I don’t think those things are bad” and sincerely makes me not want to talk with you further if that’s truly the case.
EDIT: So, I checked your profile, and you have a giant comment thread on things you dislike about DEI, and you also do mental gymnastics to defend the right. Cool, cool. And a comment equivalating “what if kamala did the sieg hail” to the question “what if elon did it?”
First off, I don’t know anything about Vaxry or the Hyperland community, so I am definitely not defending him or implying it is not bad or anything of the sorts. I am saying the public reasoning for the ban is manufactured BS, and I am pretty sure that is because it is hard to call yourself “free” anything if you want to police peoples behavior unrelated to your project.
If you think projects should do such policing, that’s fine. It even makes sense, if you ignore the potential for misuse. But they certainly shouldn’t advertise themselves as free. It’s the hypocrisy of trying to do both by manufacturing an excuse I am calling out.
As for the rest of what you write, I feel it all comes to the same unhinged idea that because someone is a bad person, everything they touch, create or any person engaging with them is also bad.
I dislike Brave, and it’s founder. Doesn’t mean everything Brave does is bad or can’t be promoted by me as good. If you choose to not do it for your personal beliefs, that is fine. But the idea that I am not allowed to praise Brave browser features or other actions because of something unrelated its founder did or said is ridiculous.
EDIT: Regarding your edit, yes. I criticize parts of DEI or stupid anti-Trump arguments. That’s the whole point. Stupid arguments are stupid even if a good person is making them and good arguments are good, even if evil person like Trump makes them. Parts of DEI can be bad, even though discrimination is also bad. The world is not black and white.
EDIT2: Here is my post on DEI if anyone wants to read it and decide for themselves whether it is reasonable criticism or not.
You’re defending him—intentionally or not—because you’re giving legitimacy to the idea that, somehow, the party that kicked him out is in the wrong, not the guy that defends genocide. It’s likely there would be complaints regardless of their official reasoning, because Vaxry’s problem is beyond reason.
Not at all? There’s a chance I edited my comment after you replied. I’ve made many edits, and I’m not exactly keeping track. Please reread the end of it:
I hope the project succeeds, that it helps the internet. Doesn’t mean I must like or support the person behind it, specially when they’re acting this way. I believe there are others like me. I would like them to be informed as well.
Good news: I never said that. Go on, praise Ladybird. Someone asked about details on “Andreas’ gender issue,” I replied with details. Because I’m tired of people defending it in isolation, I brought more details. Any criticism is of Andreas actions, based on Andreas’ own actions.
Yeah, I am tired of this shit. My entire comment repeatedly spells out that criticizing one party does not mean supporting the other. Both FDO and Vaxry can be in the wrong. If you can’t even comprehend that, there is nothing else to talk about.
Dream, sorry if managed to bungle up and completely misinterpret that point. I feel like I was answering with something important to note, but can’t even tell anymore. I’m physically tired, so maybe I should’ve returned later. In any case, I hope this won’t bother you for long.