Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated) @joepie91@pixie.town

I think it's a good thing to prefer a peaceful approach. Not just because I personally dislike violence, but also because *defaulting to* violence makes it untenable to keep a society functioning in a more general sense.

However.

The problem I have is with the particular brand of 'pacifism' that *structurally* rejects violence from an individual perspective. You know the type: "we are above that sort of behaviour, just because they do it doesn't mean we have to."

The reality is that peaceful approaches only work as long as all parties involved have (genuinely) committed to peace, in every way. And sometimes, you will be dealing with situations where that is not the case - such as bigotry, for example, which is a form of deliberate violence.

In those situations, "being peaceful" is not a strength; it means that you are actively refusing to defend yourself - or more importantly, others - from an external act of violence, letting harm come to them, and handing the reins to the violent party.

This makes you complicit. It is a position of harm, not one of superior ethics. You have directly allowed harm to come to another person through inaction.

Pacifists of this brand will frequently tell you how such-and-such problem has been solved in a peaceful manner, so clearly violence isn't necessary. What they *won't* consider, however, is exactly *why* that worked.

What reason does someone committing deliberate violence have to stop, just because you're politely asking them to? They don't, and they won't.

What *actually* did the job here is the knowledge that this peaceful situation *could* escalate into violence if the polite request isn't honored.

This line of thought is not specific to any one ideology either; even problematic concepts like the "social contract" and "violence monopoly" are directly built on this principle; the threat of state violence as a deliberate underlying enforcement mechanism.

It works the same way for things that *aren't* state legislation; like protests, for example. Peaceful protests only work because the "recipients" know that if the demands are ignored, it will escalate into violent protests.

And indeed, in countries where this escalation has become socially unacceptable (eg. the Netherlands), protests have lost virtually all their power. They can be safely ignored, because of the belief that they're not going to escalate anyway. It's just a bit of temporary noise.

Ultimately, the only way to deal with violent malicious actors of any sort is violence - either applied or, preferably, just the threat of it at first. Your politeness will not make them stand down; if that actually worked, things wouldn't have gotten so bad to begin with.

That's the harsh reality of it. None of your 'polite' and 'peaceful' mechanisms actually have any teeth whatsoever without some kind of threat of violence to back them up.

The problem with weeding out widespread misbeliefs about programming languages is that they are rarely isolated cases; usually, they are built on a whole tower of lies.

Take this seemingly simple turn of phrase, for example: "slow, interpreted languages like Python or Javascript". It's a phrase you've probably seen or heard in a few places.

The first problem there is that the classification doesn't make any sense; under typical circumstances, these two languages are in *entirely* different performance classes, and they're really not comparable at all.

But the deeper problem there lies in "typical circumstances" - because if you want to make this point correctly, then the *next* misconception that you have to correct is that performance is a property of the language; it's not, it's a property of the runtime and/or compiler.

And it doesn't stop there; because "interpreted languages" isn't correct either! Whether something is "interpreted" is, again, dependent on the implementation and not on the language.

And that doesn't even hold true for the common case for JS either; almost all JS is actually run through a JIT compiler, not an interpreter. Python is used in many different execution models. And so on, and so forth.

And just like that, a quick correction of a misbelief has turned into a 10-minute rant about how everything someone believes about programming languages is wrong, and you'll have spent your entire 'credibility budget' that way, and the listener will probably believe *none* of the points anymore.

But you *also* can't make those points individually, because then they sound out of line with what the listener already believes about how programming languages work in a general sense... and that's how these beliefs stick around, and any attempt to correct easily-verifiable misinformation turns into a holy war :|

Giving an evening person an 8am appointment is roughly equivalent to giving a morning person a 4am appointment, and it's equally destructive for said person's well-being to expect them to keep it

If an instance keeps showing up on fediblock every month, every time for a different incident, with every time people saying "it would be unreasonable to ban over this one incident, I don't see the problem", that's maybe an indication that you should be looking more closely and that there's some sketchy rule-skirting shit going on