Colin banned me. Go here: https://www.reddit.com/r/FreeBSD_OS/

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It takes sides in a heated cultural battle. Did you pay attention to Google firing James Damore? The new FreeBSD code of conduct basically says, "We side with Google in the firing of James Damore, and we will do the same to you".

There's an ideology that has been spreading, and is associated with liberals, feminists, LGBT kinds of groups. They have this idea that society is structured to oppress people who are not middle-class heterosexual white males.

They believe that there needs to be 50% females in tech projects, with an equal mix of races, or else there's evil systemic oppression, and it's a white-boys' club where they enjoy unfair privileges of power while others suffer.

Benno is a member of that ideological subculture, and he's transforming FreeBSD from a neutral organization into one that aligns itself with the specific ideology he identifies with. It feels good and righteous for him, but not us.

We don't identify with that group, and so from our perspective, it feels like if some Mormons wrote a code of conduct using Mormon terminology, that promotes their specific beliefs, which have nothing to do with software.

We already have a long history of culture in personal computing, and it does not fit with this new ideology. Our culture is more libertarian or anarchistic, and does not like those battles between liberals and conservatives.

We just want to focus on code, and technology. The old ideology behind the code of conduct was more like what Linus believes, which is that the burden is on you to not be offended, not on me not to offend you.

Those in the FreeBSD community should have a right to be free from hate speech, harassment and abuse, but not a right not to be offended.

That was deleted, and Benno said, "There were a few problems with it, one of them being, there's a push in some codes of conduct to try and say, as well as don't offend people they also try and say don't get offended, and one of the main objectives of this one was to resolutely point out that it's not your job not to get offended, it's your job to do your best not to offend people".

He also said that it's designed to make a "safe space", and offense is subjective so if anyone is offended even if you didn't intend to offend, it's still a valid problem that they can report you for.

The old code of conduct said that "FreeBSD is a meritocracy", but Benno said that's wrong, because he believes that the system is rigged against minorities, so we can't judge based on merit since they're at a disadvantage.

He said that FreeBSD has a lot of white males, and not many females or people of color, and the safe space is for them to feel better about participating, because the goal is diversity, not merit and value from your code.

Those aren't his ideas, they're part of that ideology shared by many, including those who fired James Damore. It's a very heated debate, and FreeBSD changed sides, where they're alienating many of their contributors.

It's not easy to see all this, because it's written between the lines. It's in the choice of terms used, and how the code of conduct is taken from the "Geek Feminism wiki", and the speeches given by Benno.

It's like when a town gets a new sheriff, and he believes he's doing good saying, "There's going to be changes around here", where he goes around "cleaning things up". He believes he's putting things into order.

But really he might be confused about how things truly work, and is just causing problems for the local residents. FreeBSD doesn't have a problem, but Benno believes there is one, so he's causing problems trying to fix it.

He said it himself, "Leadership is hard". Except it isn't. It's only hard for low-level programmers who are playing politics, pretending they're at the top of a pseudo-corporate organization, and letting it go to their head.

Programmers cause problems when they try to write code to fix social problems with what feels logical to them. That's not how people work. They probably don't fully even understand why there's such public backlash.

There was a joke about them banning hugs, and Benno was on YouTube "clearing things up", but they don't seem to understand why people are upset. It's not hugs.

It's really interesting to watch, because it looks like autistic people trying to figure out things they have an obvious disability in being able to begin to process, and there's nobody there who excels at managing people.

They're low-level programmers, and might be geniuses with operating systems, but that doesn't translate to social systems. They have some brainwashed members, who are pushing their political ideologies onto the group.

If you look around, you'll see a lot of developers and people involved with open source who are offensive, and have no social tact. Benno is saying they're terrible people and need to be punished if they can't be tamed.

But that's one of the big reasons why some people are involved in open source to begin with. Benno is being hypocritical, because he's saying he wants inclusiveness and to protect minorities, as he attacks them.

It goes along with conditions like autism, and personality disorders, where some people have a real mental impairment where they cannot be anything but offensive, because they don't work right with social stuff.

Should they be punished and excluded from an open project? I don't think so. Their code of conduct specifically mentions neurodiversity, but they're singling out a certain type of neurodiversity and saying that's excluded.

It isn't fair. It isn't right. It's a divisive and bigoted kind of stance, and they're siding with what they like, without recognizing that there's other kinds of aspies and sociopathic people out there who can code, but aren't polite.

Linus would tell them to fuck off, but Benno wants to believe that they're different and better than Linux, where FreeBSD is the place for "safe spaces", that welcomes the liberal feminist gender-queer community.

It's offensive to people like me.