Re: A contribution to ongoing terminology work

[Phillip Hallam-Baker <[e-mail]>]

Mostly agreeing with Wes, I will just add that as a past member of two out
groups, (the Web community, Certificate Authorities) people have
deliberately made it clear I am unwelcome on several occasions in the past.

On one occasion someone hissed when I gave my company name at the mic. Oh
and when a working group chair was allowed to override the WG consensus on
a proposed change to DNS SEC by referring it to a 'DNS Directorate' and
folk wore 'black helicopter' hats to ridicule my protest at the abuse of a
cabal, yeah that was pretty shity of y'all. And that little tantrum put
back deployment of DNSSEC by at least six years.

Since I do crypto and other contentious stuff, at one time I did politics
at the national level so I am quite used to that. But that doesn't mean I
like it and most others are not willing to engage on those terms.

We have to be careful about bullying but we also have to be very careful
about rules against bullying being weaponized to bully. In one standards
group I was involved in multiple complaints against one particular
individual led to the need for a conduct code. The minute it was agreed,
that same individual used it to make a series of specious complaints.


This set of issues has particular valence in the US at the current time due
to local political issues and the politics of the US tend to make waves
throughout the English speaking world.

Rather than accept the fact that a certain set of language was used to
intentionally denigrate people on account of ethnicity, gender, etc. one
party has made even the acknowledgment that this occurred to be a partisan
political issue. It has spent the last four years demanding that everyone
take sides and now they are having an epic tantrum because along with the
vast majority of polite, educated society, we chose the side opposing
bigotry.


Why do people get so exercised by the IETF deciding to avoid the use of
master/slave terminology but not cry 'censorship' when we are told we must
use one particular dialect of SVG which is not supported by the current
version of any tool whether commercial or open source (I had to modify
Goatify). If freedom of speech is so important, why is nobody upset about
the lack of hard core porn in Internet Drafts and RFCs?

I think the answers to these questions are rather obvious. We are a
community and we live by a particular set of shared values and
understandings. And ever since the murder of Heather Heyer, by those
attempting to force the rest of us to suplicate to their symbols of
bigotry, we have been called to show our rejection of such symbols.