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GlyphJeff Geerling, the affable and adorkable raspberry pi guy, was a misogynistic forced-birth tradcath extremist from at least 2009 to 2013, and as far as I know, still is today. Do not link to him and do not support his work. This is a matter of record on his own website: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/tags/abortion
I hate this kind of callout post and nothing would make me happier than to find out I am mistaken, that he's changed his views, and that I can watch his work guilt-free. But we cannot afford to allow people like this to become load-bearing fixtures of the open source community, nor can we afford to give them resources to advance their dangerous political agendas.
D2A: agreed. Like, full on “damn skippy” agreement that we should cautiously curate who gets our support.
B: no idea who this guy is, anyway.
Dreaming of dad jazz.I've used his Ansible modules before and have recently been seeing his videos pop up online a lot more.
He does a lot of hardware testing and lab projects on youtube and he's often working with RISC boards and small radio projects.
He's burrowed his way into several niche communities.
@michaelcoyote @glyph Ah. Well. An overweening peen on gender and civil liberties would need to be ah-maaaaaazing on tech to be tolerable. Zoop out the airlock.
@cascheranno
The dangerous thing about this dude is that he knows not to say anything about it on main.
@glyph
The dangerous thing about this dude is that he knows not to say anything about it on main.
@glyph
@michaelcoyote so it’s extra awesome glyph @glyph called it out. Peer vigilance is gonna save us.
@cascheranno @glyph absolutely.
Koos Pol 🇺🇦@michaelcoyote @cascheranno @glyph Which is a good thing I guess. The less he says about it, the less influence he has on the people from the Middle Ages.
Nivex 🐧 📻
obscurestar@glyph The toxicity of this guy's kind of ideology is a big part of why women are underrepresented in STEM. Cannot tell you how many times I've mentioned what I did for work (18yr Sr Software engineer) and not had to say another word because some 20-something guy 'splains my job for me, and to me, usually while talking himself up, and usually in a way that is so full of fallacies and assumptions that I feel ashamed for him. Cut their mics.
Cassandra is only carbon now@glyph TIL. Uh. Wow. Um. Well... fuck.
@xgranade It felt a little mean-spirited posting this again, but I guess if my impression that folks did not know this is accurate, then worthwhile. Sigh.
@glyph Eh, mean-spirited or not, it is practical and useful information to know, and I'm glad for it. That's not something I had seen last time around (or at least, I've forgotten in the general mire of news soup), to be sure.
Gemma ⭐️🔰🇺🇸 🇵🇭 🎐@xgranade @glyph You should never feel that it is cruel to someone to let others know what they clearly want others to know about them, because they have published their ideology publicly.
Geerling has a right to his opinion about abortion, and I have a right to tell him to fuck off because his opinion of abortion, which he definitely wants me to know, is absolute evil.
Kumar Ghosh@glyph I didn't know, thanks for flagging!
John@glyph On the one hand, fucking milkshake duck, on the other I always feel a bit iffy around people who feel very performative "friendly geek dad", since that's the public face of 'controlling creepy dad'.
Not always! Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, so I would never _assume_ the iffy vibe has any substance without something more. But still, it was there.
@semanticist see this is why, as a real-life friendly geek dad, I take care to behave and speak more like a philosopher king from an alternate universe driven mad by the unraveling of the spacetime continuum
Cassandrich@glyph @semanticist If you're not the creepy one, you need to be visibly outspoken and back that up with action showing that you're not.
@dalias @semanticist in all seriousness I do consciously try to modulate my affect to avoid being unintentionally threatening, but I do take care to never modulate it to the degree that anyone gets the sense that I am attempting to be *so* nonthreatening that I am going to convince them to get into a van
Laurent Bercot@semanticist @glyph I feel iffy around performative people no matter what the performance is. Oftentimes the performance is harmless and only stems from insecurity. Sometimes, unfortunately, it's more serious.
@ska @glyph I dunno, I think there's a lot of reasons to do something in a performative way that aren't negative at all. @glyph mentioned making a show of being a "safe person" to help people feel at ease. Being performatively queer can be important to show that you're safe around other queer people or in queer spaces, etc, etc. Very few people are going around out in the world without some sort of social performance.
Max Harmony@glyph He was in another Youtuber's video a couple of months ago and got dropped when someone pointed out these posts. If he had changed his views I'm sure he would have said something.
schuelerminethat's quite bad
however
I've become a bit exhausted with zero tolerance against bad opinions.
I don't think it's reasonable to expect everyone to agree with our values nearly as closely as is often expected.
In this case I think it is reasonable to condemn these opinions, they're quite far out there.
But will people agree that it's worth boycotting?
Of course you want to limit the influence of these opinions, but
1. I don't think our ideas are popular enough, if construed narrowly enough, that we'll succeed
2. I think it's possible to distance yourself from these ideas and suppress them and counteract their proliferation without e.g. refusing to share any content by someone who is bigoted
idk how much this really applies here, that is indeed some proper catholic skulduggery, but I just wanted to air my frustration here
@anselmschueler I’m not a cop. You may ignore me if you so please and there will be no significant consequences for you. I (correctly) inferred that many people in my own following (yourself apparently included?) would want to know this so they can withdraw their support from him, in whatever form they deem appropriate.
I am not really sure what frustration you are trying to air here if you agree with that course of action.
@glyph not a frustration with you. I will not share in your response of refusing to link to him, but I will certainly not sponsor him
jz.tuskMe, I've gotten a bit exhausted with people thinking it's okay to impose their religions on others.
> I think it's possible to distance yourself from these ideas and suppress them .... without e.g. refusing to share any content by someone who is bigoted
Maybe. But we will definitely be more effective if people have to pay a price for advocating such shitty governmental policies.
If you want to have some interaction with fascists while criticizing them, that's your choice. Don't know why you feel the need to critique someone making sure others know they're fascists.
@anselmschueler @glyph Treating 51% of the population as inferior (which, let's be real, that's what it is. He is asserting HE 'knows' what's good for a woman he's never met more than she does) is not open source ideology. It's not collaborative, it's not recognizing the work of contributors.
There are tons of content creators out there. Plenty who serve the whole community, not just the fragile egos of insecure little boys.
@obscurestar @glyph look I literally said this chain of thought isn't really that applicable here of all places as much as other places
@anselmschueler @glyph I understood you. I simply reject your defense. Let's put it in terms of code. I was a senior core developer on an open source project for 18 years. We did not blindly accept any push request, we vetted them and verified that they wouldn't have negative consequences for the rest of the codebase. This is what responsible developers do. You're saying 'accept code full of global void pointers'. Hard pass.
To extend my argument to your analogy, imagine we're in a developer project where most people on the team think that it's not that problematic to include null pointer dereference—they think you shouldn't do it, but it's not that big a deal if it happens accidentally—and where there's various parts of the code base that are more or less important and people wanting to do various levels of bad code, from null pointer dereference through ridiculous code duplication to inconsistent indentation.
Your approach would be to refuse to allow any code from anybody who has ever proposed a null pointer dereference or something similar.
I believe this will not work, and would rather try to
1. use the fact that there are shades of grey to try and accept the lesser of two evils, e.g. people who use slightly better code, or in a part of the code base that isn't that important
2. explicitly distance our own position from their position on code safety and style, calling for these code practices to stop without refusing anything to do with them
3. try to get more people in the team to agree with us in the long term
In practice this might look like sharing a Jeff Geerling video with a note that says you disapprove of them and avoiding things that explicitly give him money, rather than refusing to link to or watch anything by him outright.
Now, I understand that this might be a biased way of presenting this, because this just seems reasonable to me. I think that in some cases, the disagreement between me and someone with a similar stance as you isn't over this principle per se, but over whether a line has been crossed, and how practical and effective, really, my solution is.
I think I am more pessimistic about how many people will agree with our assessment, and more optimistic about how easy it is to play this hedging game.
@anselmschueler @glyph Where your defense of anti-social behaviors falls apart is this: His poor social programming rejects half of the available resources. Around half the population are born with vaginas, ergo he needs to fix his idioms to be compatible with the hardware. Anyone of course can take the constructive criticism from a rejected branch, make the fixes requested and re-submit them. That does not appear to be the case here. He's still pushing bad code.
@anselmschueler @glyph I feel odd about making a number of edits this comment. On second read I didn't care for the way I had phrased a few things and even how what I had written, in its own way did not well consider bodies beyond binary.
I would have made such an edit regardless and generally made a note about it. Mistakes happen.
How we handle them is what matters.
Florian@anselmschueler @glyph
I do have a similar feeling of unease here.
I think the fundamental problem is that we generally want our communities (and societies at large) to be inclusive of as many ideologies and world views as possible², but substantial clashes in ethics will be inevitable.
Its easy⁵ to exclude people like dhh or lunduke for their active contempt and hatred for other humans, but with @geerlingguy after reading the blog posts³ in question and without any further indication to the contrary I am willing to believe that to him this is actually a matter of faith and not for example primarily motivated by trying to justify patriarchal power.
For me prioritizing some clump of a few thousand cells over the well being of an actual person is absurd.
However coming from the fundamental Belief that there is some kind of "soul" bestowed on every human at conception the argument for why abortion is immoral is perfectly coherent⁴.
My worldview does not include any Gods or souls, but I can't prove their absence either¹, so its not like there is any objective truth to rely on here.
For me denying a woman an abortion is an appalling violation of someones bodily autonomy at the best of times and it only gets worse when you pile on things like the additional trauma from having to birth the child of your rapist or see it in the context of the general objectification of womens bodies by a patriarchical society.
If you do derive the value of a human being from their soul and believe an embryo has one, none of that matters because an abortion is still murder.
The stakes here are way to high to just agree to disagree, but I don't have a practical solution either. If I refused to associate with anyone I have major moral disagreements with that would affect anyone from many vegans to people who believe they have nothing to hide.
I don't know how we can build healthy communities (which particularly in the case of open source are also inherently part of a political project) in light of this. I totally understand why one wouldn't want to work with geerling, but i don't think boycotting everyone who has some shitty takes is really practical either.
Full Disclosure to my background: Im a guy and was raised in a reasonably christian catholic/protestant family
1: and I would be highly suspicious of anyone who claims they can
2: Both as a matter of practicality and from putting an inherent value in diversity (which is ultimately also ideological, but something i agree with)
3: they do read as primarily theological discussions aimed at convincing other catholics and don't talk about things like legislative action (although if you agree with his conclusions seeing a moral imperative to use coercion of force to prevent women from getting an abortion wouldn't be far fetched)
4: for the most part. Putting a big X to doubt on things like natural contraception being more effective than condoms
5: or sadly should be rather
Alex von Kitchen@anselmschueler @glyph Ah yes, the classic dude who's happy to look the other way when it comes to misogyny
What else do you look the other way for?
What else do you look the other way for?
@Dangerous_beans @glyph I'm not in a position of power over him. I'm trying to make the best of my limited tools without refusing to engage with anything ever. Please don't imagine opinions I might have. I get why you're apprehensive about this and I understand the pattern you're seeing, that's not what's happening.
@anselmschueler @glyph that is exactly what's happening. you're publicly arguing against boycotting a vile misogynist because you find it too hard
you're using your time and energy to argue that we should do nothing about these dickheads
that is a very suspicious choice
@Dangerous_beans @glyph I took this as an opportunity for what I'm saying. I'm not defending him specifically. I'm expending effort because I think it's a good point in making.
@glyph he left a comment on one of the posts that says he still holds those views (https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2012/changes-nothing-contraception)
Views that are also homophobic and implicitly transphobic, not that that's surprising with Catholics
IrishMASMS@Dangerous_beans @glyph if & when I ever see this guy, I will hand him a new, unused condom
Ember is so tired of people. 
@glyph ai bros continuing to be disgusting in all ways possible
AJ Collins@glyph TIL ty
@tortuguita yw and I am sorry
Ω 🌍 Gus Posey@glyph It seems like no one knows this. Thanks for your post.
council of anthonys@glyph ugh, gross, thank you
Neil@glyph Holy crap. It's so exhausting to have to basically screen everyone for this kind of thing. There's inexcusable cruelty displayed in those posts.
While you're right about callout posts being icky, I genuinely learned something that I consider important, so thanks!
@troglet you’re welcome and I am sorry, and yeah it absolutely sucks that we need to have this kind of corrosive hypervigilance about everything now, but in our collective defense, it’s the assholes’ fault for being assholes, not ours for noticing. c.f. https://mastodon.social/@glyph/115511309238524065
randomhappening
0xC0DEC0DE07EA@glyph ugh, damnit… thanks for the heads-up
@glyph I mean, I guess I should just be suspicious of other white peoples since so many of them hold abhorrent views…
CheeseburgerPost this in reddit: more people ought to know.
Linh Pham@HauntedCheeseburger @glyph It was brought up in r/nebula when Grady from Practical Engineering mentioned Jeff in a video.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Nebula/comments/1nvzjpx/grady_from_practical_engineering_shouts_out/
Grady's response:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Nebula/comments/1nvzjpx/comment/nhdnlfm/