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

We all know the concern trolls who are "raising some concerns" when talking about protections for marginalized folks, and who already know that they're not problems, they're just trying to sow discord.

But another, more insidious form of this are the people - usually centrists or liberals - who legitimately believe that they are raising legitimate concerns, and are doing so in a harmful manner.

There's an obvious form of privilege here; those raising the concerns are typically not part of the affected group, and so unlike the affected group, they can afford to treat it like some hypothetical thought experiment, whereas the affected marginalized folks are living the consequences right here and now.

But that's not what I want to talk about. Because it goes much deeper than that.

For example, these "concerns" are usually the absolute most obvious things that you could think of - and somehow, the concern-raisers believe that they are specially qualified to have such a novel insight.

They don't stop to consider that maybe this concern was already raised hundreds of times before, and relitigated over and over again, and found to not be (sufficiently) relevant. They don't really take the time to research it - instead just assuming that they're the first.

That's privilege.

This usually combines with another problematic factor; when the concerns are raised, a response like "yeah we've thought of that" isn't considered enough. Instead, the concern-raiser will not stop pushing until *they, personally* are satisfied that it's addressed.

They are not merely raising a concern to help; they are considering themselves to be the arbiter of truth, as if their approval is required to go ahead with the plan. They are assuming authority.

That's privilege.

Those in the best position to understand the circumstances and needs of marginalized folks, are those marginalized folks themselves. Approval by the privileged is not required.

Listen to marginalized people. Yes, even if you have "concerns".

This is honestly barely even a subtoot, more like an evergreen paraphrase of reactionaries and conservatives everywhere

"Still, [this thing that you've been doing for years with great success, while others struggle to succeed at this] is not a solution"

The conundrum: all the hackercons are during the summer, so all the fun vulnerabilities are getting dropped, but all the hackercons are during the summer, so nobody's around to patch the affected systems

Hi other white folks, can you fucking *stop* splitting hairs over the evidence of racism when it is presented to you? If it's not obvious to you, you should take that as a sign that you have things to learn, not that the accusation is wrong.

Signed, someone who is very tired of it becoming difficult to track down the origins of accusations because of this fucking behaviour discouraging people from providing receipts in the first place. You're not just directly harming the victims this way, you're also making things much harder for everybody actually trying to work on the problem.

"I'm looking for a FOSS alternative for this thing."
"Why not use CorpThing dot io? It's FOSS"
"That's run by a corporation."
"So what? Why does that matter? It's still FOSS."
"They should hand over the project to community governance then."
"That's unrealistic, they need to protect their business interests!"
"Exactly."