when somebody publicly endorses slavery, that is vice signaling
they are attempting to demonstrate how blatantly evil they are, because that is the type of social approval they want
take them at their word and have nothing to do with them
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*amorphous
it's challenging to put forth a vision of how we'd like the social side of all this to work, which is why we've thus-far resisted doing so. if we ever write something like that it'll only be after we've worked through all the hard questions.
the biggest challenge we see is avoiding us/them framing, which is one of those things that it's easy to accidentally uphold while trying to oppose it.
"us" can be as bad as "them"; if we're drawing an impermeable line around ourselves and saying "not you" to people outside it, we should expect that we're not actually grappling with the existing fracture lines in society. we should expect that anyone trying to raise concerns about racism or classism or ableism will find themselves on the outside of that line, and the oppression will continue without proper discussion.
that's bad. that's not the goal.
so we think the hope should be to define ourselves by ideals that we try to live up to, and not by other characteristics. anyone who's doing that is inside, anyone who isn't is outside. acknowledging injustice and seeking to right it should be one of those ideals.
will that work? we don't claim to know. it seems like a start, though.
on a related note: a "community" is a group of people who know each other and care about each others' well-being.
so for example if we are speaking about the queer tech community, well, yeah, any time we join a new chat room it turns out we already know two or three people there. we'd imagine many of you reading this have the same experience. that is a community.
something as amorpous as "the open source community" is, um, not that. it includes people who publicly advocate for the state-sponsored murder of other people in it. that's not caring.