Thread by @masonremaley

I understand where @dhh is coming from—the full post reads better than the summary, I recommend reading it before forming an opinion—but I have a major concern, and a possible solution.

https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1386773744484552715

Whether or not anyone at basecamp sees this thread, I think my perspective on this is valuable elsewhere, I’ve been part of many communities that considered adopting this rule. I always advise against it—I’ll explain why, and a way to mitigate my concerns while keeping the rule

My concern with this kind of rule is pretty straightforward: what’s considered political in the first place is itself often a political debate.

For example, nobody thinks it’s political to be openly straight, but is it political to be openly queer? Is it political to ask your pronouns be respected? I’m sure basecamp’s answer is that everyone should be able to be themselves and be respected! And that’s great! But...

There’s still an issue. Underrepresented folks are really used to this kind of rule being used to silence them, and lots of other folks are used to wielding it against them.

Enacting this rule as is will inadvertently cause a lot of underrepresented folks to feel unsafe speaking up for themselves, and a lot of other people who don’t actually speak for you to feel empowered to shut other people down under the guise of enforcing the rules.

I think the easiest solution is to not adopt this kind of rule in the first place, but, if you feel you need to here are some suggestions:

1) Make clear to everyone that you support the underrepresented folks in the group, that this rule is not a weapon built for use against them when they speak up

2) Make an extensive set of specific examples of what is okay and what isn’t. This is going to be a lot hard work, you can’t cover everything, and the decisions you make will upset people. That’s necessary—you want people to be upset at you, not at the underrepresented folks.

Consider this scenario. A queer coworker is getting married, and says so at work. Another coworker who dislikes queer people says “you can’t talk about that here, that’s political. Didn’t you see the announcement?”

(If you think nobody would say something like that, try being queer for a month!)

If you’ve made clear that you support queer folks, those words have no power. This company had made clear it supports queer people, your bigotry isn’t welcome at work, etc. If you don’t make that clear? Well...now the burden of sorting this out is on the minority.

My takeaway? This is a messy space to get into. I personally wouldn’t. But if you want to tell people not to be political in your space, you have to be willing to express some of your own politics in your design of that rule, or else things are going to go very bad very silently.

Update in response to new info

https://twitter.com/masonremaley/status/1388261429652959233