r/Clojure • u/darth_zidious • Apr 13 '21
Extremely disappointed
Casually browsing the sub today, and ran across a link to the Clojurists Together Board Nominations.
My day was going on calmly and as usual, until I clicked that.
There, I found this extremely problematic paragraph:
The Board shall nominate no more than 12 candidates seeking board membership in any given election. In nominating candidates for Director positions and in choosing the number of candidates to nominate overall, the Board shall use reasonable efforts to maintain a Board composition consisting of at least: (1) 25% female Directors, (2) 25% non-Caucasian Directors, and (3) 35% from any category(ies) of persons (e.g., race, gender, ability) commonly considered to have suffered from discrimination at some time and then-currently under-represented in the technology industry, in each case as determined by the Board in its reasonable discretion.
I am extremely confused, and disappointed, that such arbitrary criteria such as sex and race are apparently being used as filters like this. Those are the very definition of racism and sexism, are they not?
Another way of reading all of the above is: "only 15% of the board can be white men". How is that not extreme discrimination against white men?
Why? Because historically most open-source software was written by white men?
Ok, first of all, how about some gratitude then? Because clearly all this software improves all of our lives, no matter your sex or color or whatever arbitrary attribute you want to single-mindlessly focus on.
And second, what do the competent people that happen to be white and happen to be men (both attributes they had no choice in, by the way) have to do with it? Is it fair, really, to cast them aside?
What if they were the most competent candidates?
What does that inevitably do over time?
And finally, how can anyone - both the privileged person who gets a seat because of their color and/or genitalia, as well as anyone from the outside making a judgement/call - now be sure that person X is there because they are really the most competent for the job, or because the room needed to be filled by some people of a certain sex and/or a certain color and/or more random attributes that are surely to come? (not sure if anyone brought it to their attention, but midgets are very under-represented in technology! and their absence in CT's board clearly must mean rampant discrimination according to their interpretation of the facts, no?)
"commonly considered to have suffered from discrimination at some time" - this is basically *everyone* at some time or another in history.
"currently under-represented in the technology industry" -- so we have moved from equality of opportunity to equality of outcome, have we? What evidence is there that unless a distribution based on arbitrary attributes is proportional, that this automatically means discrimination?
What a narrow way of seeing things. Do I care that Rich is white, blue, red, pink or whatever? No, I care that he writes quality software, and evidently he does.
Do you care if the commercial pilot flying you home is of whatever color, do you care about the sexual orientation, or do you care that this person is the most competent person for the job, which incidentally in this case also means you stand the best chances at making it home alive?
Ditto for the surgeon. And countless other things.
This is a very troublesome direction, far-left ideology metastasizing inside tech communities. And I am incredulous that no one is calling it out.
This is not the way.
