( Tail end of Brett and Tim clarifying meaning and intent using actual quotes. Hmm, there’s an idea, should see more of that) 
3 Likes
In Memoriam
When @gussis (Lorene Walden) first posted, I was delighted. A fresh voice without an apparent axe to grind, someone who actually checked facts before pontificating, and who gently corrected factual errors in other posts. I liked her at once, and was one of (just) a couple dozen who gave a heart to her careful posts.
Turns out there’s s reason: I knew her! In fact we had been best friends for decades, and met for dinner every day. In fact, she was my last surviving sister.
But I didn’t know at first. She’s wasn’t a computer person, and never used Python. As she said, she did give the PSF some money in the early days, trusting that her brother wouldn’t steer her wrong. This wasn’t easy for her. She and her husband weren’t driven by money, and were poor. They were about real-life community action, based on principles. Money, words, and posturing didn’t impress them.
Anyway, she found this forum on her own, dug into the messages on her own, set up an account here on her own, and posted on her own, without breathing a word of it to me.
Her educational background was in social psychology, and she presented the most profound mix of wisdom and kindness of anyone I’ve ever known. I was proud she was my sister. She was proud I was her brother.
She died unexpectedly late last month, so won’t be posting again. I’m still devastated by the loss.
She didn’t hang out in any online forums (this is, best I know, the only one she graced), so I wanted to leave this here in her memory before “the system” relegates the topic to the eternally silenced graveyard of failed attempts at communication
Why didn’t she use her “real name” here? She told me she did at first, but quickly switched to a pseudonym because she didn’t feel safe here. I don’t blame her. This wasn’t her community, and she had nothing to gain here but grief for her efforts. I do want to thank those who showed her some respect. I know she was genuinely pleased to see some hearts. She appreciated them. She wanted to help by injecting some calm sanity.
What would she say if she were still alive? I suspect she would echo a social psychologist who enjoyed more worldly success, Miles K. Davis. It needn’t be complicated unless you’re trying to obscure the issues:
You can tell a bully from a leader by how they treat people who disagree with them.
That was the heart of it for her. She could explicate at length on various conceptions of justice, morality, ethics, and “fair play”, but her bottom line was plain old decent behavior. “The Golden Rule rules” apparently runs in my family 
.
Thanks for trying, Sue!
48 Likes
I am so sorry for your loss. May her memory be a blessing.
10 Likes
Been a long time! As I said I would in the Kiraly topic, I’m moving this offshoot here, to where it belongs. I think it would be good if the other posts there about this were also moved here, starting with
To my eyes, “exactly that” is a misspelling of “nothing like that”. But it involves a hidden post, and I think it’s against some rule here (if not the letter of one, the spirit) to show the text of a message once ruled to be so out of line that the community must be protected from seeing it. Judge for yourself if you dare, at the top of my blog’s updated “Ban Q&A” page
I’m very happy to see that a piece of “evidence” has finally been unambiguously identified.
A reminder that, far as I’m concerned, this is almost nothing about “the ban”. It’s specifically about the list of claimed “CoC violations” displayed at the top of my ban annoucement. I’m hardly alone in believing they’re almost entirely without merit, and now you can finally see an exact message they had in mind, and how it was spun, and what it actually said.
And another reminder to play nice.
3 Likes
2024-10-01 Wed 03:00p CDT
I too yearn for years gone by (your blog lists the wrong year).
1 Like
Thanks! Although I repaired that before the Wayback Machine captured it. Now I just have to tell my army of bots to flag your post, so it also gets erased from history 
2 Likes
I’ve been privately informed that the hidden post isn’t of high quality. Agreed! Of the (at least) tens of thousands of posts I’ve made over the decades, it’s near the bottom of the barrel, too telegraphic and uncharacteristically sloppy.
But I’m not recommending it for its own sake, and it’s not being nominated for some “Post of the Year” competition. It’s completely forgettable (and better off forgotten).
None of that matters here. The question is whether it’s sufficient grounds for a “defended the doctrine of reverse sexism” chargeable offense. To my eyes it obviously is not. It never used the phrase, apart from a verbatim quote of it inherited from a previous poster’s message..
So expand it to whether it’s sufficient grounds for a “defended the doctrine of reverse racism” chargeable offense. That’s a topic I did explicitly address (once), and my guess that they were complaining about that post now appears to have been completely wrong. Complaining about that post didn’t even make hallucinatory sense to me. It seems clear now that they actually were implicitly referring to this same hidden post for both.
In which I did indirectly mention that doctrine, but strongly implied I agreed with the PSF’s view, and opposed Karl’s view. It’s just an implication, because to pick up on that you have to already know about how more than one “reverse X-ism” doctrines are dismissed within the academic framework of “power dynamics” analysis.
I talk about various aspects of “social dynamics” so often it should be no surprise that I’m on board with that approach. Indeed, in the context of my posts, people should have been very surprised if I had rejected that general approach in these specific cases. Cherry-picking a relatively rare relatively vaguer post isn’t a good look either. Such a reading goes against my entire posting history on matters related to social dynamics analyses of many flavors. Not to mention that it’s not a good-faith reading on its own.
But many people in real life aren’t on board with such academic analyses. So we disagree. BFD. I wouldn’t suspend them for that even if so. [Queue one of the 3-panel web cartoons distorting Popper’s “Paradox of Tolerance” to the point of appearing to endorse “cancel culture” actions Popper cautioned would “certainly be unwise”]
3 Likes
- I read your “Smoking gun”, hidden post/thread document.
- I stand by my support for you after reading this extra evidence.
(And how you introduced Timsort to the community on comp.lang.python is dear to me).
2 Likes
I appreciate that, but it’s not needed. If this were only about me, I would have quit the PSF in disgust the day I was suspended, and never come back.
I’m endlessly annoying here for the sake of future targets. I never again want to see a target wake up to “100% surprise” defamations broadcast to the world after they’ve already been suspended, or later 100% stonewalling, refusing any trace of accountability or transparency after the community rightfully pushes back.
As the end of my original blog post said, “The Golden Rule is spinning in its grave.” Nobody should be treated so poorly.
As in this case, “preserving privacy” had nothing to do with it either. I couldn’t care less who misread English, and nobody else cares either.
So I’m very glad that Łukasz finally said something materially relevant. Although, far as I can tell, it only intensifies that “just trust the system” is being applied to a system that demonstrated it doesn’t merit trust, at least not so in its highest-profile cases in some years. I expect they do better in less charged cases, but we have no way to know, and my trust in this system is long gone.
7 Likes
Let me jump the gun For the first time in my life, I asked the mods why these posts were hidden. Never did that before, and no mod has ever told me before why a post of mine was hidden. But after a night of sleep, it occurred to me that my best guess was wrong: while I find it all but dead obvious that a “reasonable person” reading the original hidden post would find the claimed offenses without merit, the PSF remains silent on the matter. So it’s the mods’ job to continue to act as if the PSF were wholly justified in hiding the original from the community.
Which I should have realized. The current hidden posts very openly disclose what the original hidden post said. I’ll get around to showing them on my blog instead, where I should have left it. I do think they’re interesting, on more than one basis.
BTW, by “jump the gun” I mean the mods haven’t yet replied to me. But it seems clear enough to me now why they did what they did, and I have no objection to the hiding. They’re just doing their job. For full disclosure, I’ll also put what I wrote to the mods on the blog. If they do reply, I won’t reproduce their response unless they say that’s OK by them.
6 Likes
And that’s done now. A reminder that the relevant page is loaded with messages that were hidden here, so view at your own risk. Consenting adults. I predict you’ll survive it .
I won’t repeat a link. If you care enough, it’s easy to find above. I did not update the “Ban Q&A” page, but rather updated the page that one points at for this sub-issue.
2 Likes