Proposal: Community Vote on adopting zero-tolerance for bigotry and abuse

Governance
1

In a previous draft of the DAO charter Radix DAO Charter | RADIX Wiki, section 11 set out Community Guidelines which:

“establish standards of conduct for all participants in Radix Network DAO governance — on all DAO communication channels, GitHub, the consultation dApp, and any other DAO-affiliated platforms”

and prohibited:

“Hate Speech

Content that promotes violence or discrimination against individuals or groups based on race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion, disability, or other protected characteristics."

That section has now been removed and there’s a separate Code of Conduct document governance-framework/pending/governance/code-of-conduct.md at main · RadixDAO/governance-framework · GitHub which says in section 3.2 “Respectful Conduct”:

“All participants must:

  • Not engage in hate speech, discrimination, or derogatory language targeting individuals or groups”

and in section 4 “Prohibited Conduct”:

“The following constitute serious violations:

  • Discrimination — treating participants differently based on protected characteristics including but not limited to race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religion, disability, or nationality”

I don’t know why section 3.2 and section 4 are so different, as it suggests that the conduct described in section 4 will be viewed as serious but the conduct described in section 3.2 won’t be. Section 4 is much weaker than the previous section 11, as it means that a group full of white, straight men is free to promote violence or discrimination against black people, gay people or women if there are no “participants” in the group with those characteristics. Of course, if any of them did pop their heads in to see what Radix is about, they’d soon nope out before ever becoming participants if they see people posting derogatory comments about them.

In any event, regardless of the specific wording, any rules like this are going to be pointless when the community has decided to associate itself with and support flightofthefox (a toxic racist who is so insecure that he feels the need to keep posting derogatory comments about Dan, including on the anniversary of his passing) and to censor and mock anyone who opposes racism and homophobia and argues against electing bigots to the DAO.

For some background to this proposal, I read Giles Morris’ post here Sleepwalking into disaster in which he said that he didn’t really know what Andy does but that he nonetheless felt that he could do whatever Andy does and he wanted the community to pay him to see if could. He also invited us to read his blog to find out more about him, and on doing so I saw that he boasts about being a far-right racist, homophobic, bigot, who is so disturbed by the existence of LGBTQ+ people and the fact that they’re allowed to have a festival in London to celebrate “their weirdness” that he felt compelled to make and distribute clothing expressing hatred for them fuckthatshit.store – Giles's Blog

On 14 July I posted a message in the official TG channel expressing my concerns that it would harm Radix if we elect bigots like Giles to the DAO. About 3-4 people agreed with me and 5-6 disagreed but the mod, Markus, decided to censor that discussion by deleting all the posts, with no warning or suggestion that I had broken any rules. So, I can’t quote exactly what people said, but I recall that someone argued that the whole world is turning far-right so it will be a good thing if we support racism and homophobia, and Fox said something like “Hyperscale-rs supports sinking the boats”, expressing his support for murdering black and brown men, women and children by drowning them at sea. When I challenged him, he claimed it was obviously a joke because software can’t express political views. Well, software didn’t post that, he did, and if we choose to associate Radix with devs who express such views, investors and companies will rightfully decide that we agree with them and want nothing to do with us.

James then changed his handle to James Sinkem, expressing his support for murdering black and brown people, which Markus is apparently fine with as he hasn’t banned him.

The next day in the Hyperscale-rs TG, Prophet said “May I propose the genesis block of Hyperscale bears the message “sink the boats”” and Fox said “no, dezza’s spirit has inspired me. From now on – hyperscale-rs will be available to everyone (even blacks and jews). https://t.me/hyperscale_rs/9876

Markus said “I don’t really care what views someone holds in their private life or on their own blog, as long as they behave appropriately at work and do their job well” and Azel agreed and said “we need people who can get shit done, not some fools who cry that others are evil while not even bothering to pick up the gloves themselves”.

Markus also said “There is a simple solution that has become all too rare these days. Mind your own business”. https://t.me/hyperscale_rs/9911

So, it’s clear where the mod of the official Radix TG stands. He doesn’t mind if people express hatred for and incite the murder of minorities and won’t even warn them let alone ban them, but anyone who objects to racism and homophobia should mind their own business and we’re not allowed to discuss whether electing a proud far-right racist homophobe might harm Radix because that’s “political”.

projectShift also seems to think it’s OK to be a hateful racist bigot as he encouraged James (Sinkem), to stand for election and said “Whatever the history, you have been quite the supportive and consistent member of this community” https://t.me/hyperscale_rs/9965

James has certainly been consistent. His regularly posts the N word and he’s always trolling and abusing people who are actually doing something, including the volunteer RAC members, but that’s the opposite of supporting the community.

On 10 August a Radix Recap was posted to mark the anniversary of Dan’s passing https://t.me/radix_dlt/997666 which said:

“Dan spent more than a decade working to solve some of the hardest problems in decentralised technology. He was driven not by hype or recognition, but by the belief that better systems could and should be built.

He brought that same honesty, curiosity, and determination to the community around him. He treated people with respect, listened to different perspectives, and inspired others to believe in what Radix could become.

One year on, his work continues. The foundations Dan built remain at the heart of Radix, while the community he brought together is stepping forward to shape its future.

As Radix moves toward community governance, the journey is entering a new chapter but the vision remains.

Dan started something he believed could change the future. Together, we continue building it.”

47 people hearted that post but Fox decided to insult and mock Dan on the anniversary of his passing, accusing him of being incompetent, achieving nothing in 10 years and misleading us whilst extracting large sums of money. Basically, calling him a talentless scammer, and most of the community, including the people who had just hearted that post, said nothing to defend him.

Only 4 people (Vlad B, tomsn, Validador and myself) defended Dan against Fox’s cowardly attacks on a dead man who can’t defend himself. Gary said he agreed with Fox that Dan was incompetent and didn’t achieve anything in 10 years and misled us, but claimed to be doing his best to support Dan’s wife “as she works with us on the future of Radix” and pretended to be concerned about how she would feel reading Fox’s insults. I’m sure she’s very grateful for Gary’s “support”! https://t.me/radix_dlt/997698

This toxic environment is why so few people are willing to volunteer. Why would anyone want to invest in, let alone volunteer to work for, a project dominated by bigots who hate them and their friends because of the colour of their skin or their sexual orientation, who will turn on them and subject them and their families to vile abuse and threats if they’re unhappy about the way things are going, while the rest of the community implicitly supports this by saying nothing, because they only care about getting rich and they’re afraid that if they stand up to toxic racists like Fox we won’t be able to find anyone else to finish Dan’s work?

Fox might be a good developer but he’s certainly not a good businessman. Back in June he posted this about Business Development in the Hyperscale-rs channel https://t.me/hyperscale_rs/8997

“BD means understanding a potential stakeholders business as well as they do. If you go into a meeting with Cloudflare with the intention of just talking about Radix, you’ve already lost the business. You should already have a hyperdimensional baysian mental process which is accurately predictive of what they want strategically. you should already have consumed every piece of public information this person has ever written/published/quoted to better know how to lead the conversation. you should have already tapped your personal networks to coalesce first-party information you think would surprise and delight this individual.”

Sounds impressive but if he’d done 5 minutes research he would know that Cloudflare is committed to diversity, inclusion and equity and has been recognised as “one of Human Rights Campaign’s Best Places to Work for LGBTQ Equality”. Life at Cloudflare

They’re not going to betray their values and alienate half their staff and customers by doing a deal with Radix if we’ve chosen to associate with and support or elect racist homophobes. There’s currently 16302 members in the Official TG and 496 in the hyperscale-rs TG and only about 20 people post in either, so there may be people lurking from rival projects, or from companies like Cloudflare, or Jimmi alts or other people who are pissed off with Radix and want to see it fail, who are watching what is being said and taking screenshots to use against us in future when we try to do a deal.

If we elect bigots to the RAC and allow our members and devs to express and incite hatred against individuals or groups, any potential investors and companies aren’t going to care that we have some guidelines which say they can’t do that on some DAO channels but we don’t mind if they do it in an unofficial TG, or on X, or on their blog.

We also need to remember that we don’t really own anything that we can sell to anyone. Fox decided that he’s going to publish Hyperscale-rs as open source, even though we were paying him to develop it (before he decided that even that arrangement was too much of a burden for him) so anyone can use/copy/fork his code without asking us or paying us anything, and I think anyone is free to fork the wallet too. So, if Radix is too toxic for Cloudflare to touch they could just decide to fork the code, pay their own team of devs to spin up their own network and use that, cutting us out completely.

If you’re thinking “Screw Cloudflare and their support for minorities. We can do a deal with someone like Elon Musk instead who shares our bigoted views”, that’s just naïve. Musk is infamous for taking credit for other people’s work, so he’s not going to agree a deal with us when he can just take the code for free and setup his own company and pay a few of his own devs to spin up a network that he can claim credit for. Our only chance of doing a deal is with a company like Cloudflare that has some values and won’t screw us over, and that’s not going to happen if we’ve shown that we’re a bunch of racist, homophobic bigots.

So, we have a choice to make. Either we adopt a zero-tolerance approach for bigotry and abuse wherever it happens, whether on the official TG channel or anywhere else, or we can forget about ever doing a deal with Cloudflare, or any other company that is opposed to discrimination and bigotry. That will probably mean having to dissociate with Fox and finding another developer to finish Dan’s work, and hopefully there’s enough money in the treasury to pay for that, but even if we have to do a deal with a VC to fund the development I think it will be better to give them a chunk of the project in exchange for getting untainted code that companies will actually be willing to use, rather than waiting for Fox to publish his open-source code for free when it’s unlikely that any companies will touch it or speak to us.

Therefore I propose we hold a vote so the community can decide whether it cares more about building something that will actually be adopted and used and succeed, or allowing members to express hatred for other people. I hope it’s the former but if it’s the latter then the community will only have itself to blame when no-one wants anything to do with us.

2

Your interpretation, and yet, you’re incurring on the very same behavior you’re accusing others of: you are assuming things to your will, instead of checking and ask for clarification, and putting your own judgement out as facts.

This whole post, that I have now read twice and with care, shows a single-issue, single-minded stance from you.
However strongly you feel about it and however right you are on your base claims about bigotry, hatred and so forth, and how relevant it all is, including some very important aspects of the consequences/collateral implications it may hold, I find it lacking the breath and reach it deserves.

And the why I find it lacking is because you made it entirely personal, about specific persons and specific situations - all of that being relevant as examples - but failed to explain how and what needs to be done to address it in a general and universal way, perhaps akin to the process a nation crafts base laws that are applicable to everyone.

This leads to a very awkward position to your post as a proposal: you’re essentially calling out a vote on “who’s with me on this?” versus “you’re with them if not!” and no real action to be taken as a universal possibility.

Because you also fail to see if we start voting on “zero-tolerance” on any subject, then all and any subject may become a target as well, for such a strict pattern of action, a path that normal healthy communities (granted that ours is radically very far from one!) do not seem to engage in lightly or just on account of specific, particular events, individuals or cases.

Furthermore, you express what can be read (but only you can clarify that in detail) as deep unavailability to work with ppl that do not share your values and societal views on the subjects addressed … and completely bypass the fact that our common here, are not societal values, it’s the Radix Network and all it encompases.

The way you wrote this can be read as a call for banning out anyone that doesn’t agree with you on such matters … from contributing to the common!
So it’s ok to have any dev … as long as it’s not a bigot and racist? it’s ok to elect anyone to the RAC, as long as it’s someone that fits your views and shares your values? Other examples I could use, but I’m sure you get the idea already and these have a direct relevance to the examples you used.

Moreover, you don’t even address the fact that ppl simply lie and hide or are dismissive of where they stand on such matters if the context doesn’t feel of relevance to them.
So, if someone is coy and intently hides their true view on these subjects, thus not giving you any signs or evidences of it, it’s all good and ok and that persons is welcome to contribute?

This, if taken to extreme, means that it doesn’t matter if your a bigot and a racist, as long as you do not show it and no one finds out. This is how bigotry and racism are exactly able to persist and exist, no matter how zero tolerant the rules are. You present things in a way that comes out as it’s only a matter of public appearances … thus making it so, because then the zero tolerance you want to see ratified and adopted is nothing but for show.

Ironically, zero-tolerance policies like the one you propose, have the exact same impact that you’re claiming is not acceptable: they fully discriminate.
Anyone that doesn’t see eye to eye with you on these subjects might just go away, because they can clearly see they are not welcomed in that regard. So we lose those to, but you’re ok with it??

Why would we want some forms of discrimination to be held as high-moral and acceptable whilst others are not?

Then there’s the fact that you are factually wrong about a few key matters that you refer to, and I find that intriguing, in the sense that I can’t tell if you’re just ignorant about them and didn’t bother to inform yourself … or you just take for true and granted whatever you believe to be facts.
Something only you can clarify and I hope you do, as I do want to avoid doing to you what you did to me: assuming, instead of asking.

Foxy isn’t continuing Dan’s work and never was. There is factually ZERO code from Dan on Foxy’s code. Foxy as been clear from the beginning, in his own blunt and displeasing way: he believes Dan to be incompetent and that he never produced anything that works. That’s his conviction, so he also stated at least twice that he’s mostly operating out of spite and is building his own solution to the problems, not on top or pursuing Dan’s work.
As a matter of fact, he explicitly refuses quite a lot of Dan’s views and ideas and is implementing completely different approaches and engineering solutions.

Moreover, Dan’s work is also not possible to be continued by anyone because it’s not available - by a weird combination of RDXW/RDXH and FND issues, Dan’s code was never released to public, after the tests caried out with the help of Timan when he was having that job at FND.
It’s not available to us till this day still and there’s no commitment nor assurances from anyone if it ever will. We were never funding Foxy to continue Dan’s work, we agreed to provide him some funding for his own work - *and this is regardless of the shitshow around Foxy’s latest decisions on that particular subject of funding.
*
My personal message to you is the following:

Regardless of your personal views, values and beliefs, you cannot force others to be in agreement with you. That’s also regardless of mine.
No matter how much I can agree with you on it all, about bigotry, racism and all those stupid and intolerable lack of what I also see as basic human qualities, the world is not made of only ppl I like, there’s all sorts. And none are dispensable by definition alone.

I rather live in a world where it all exists, taking in the ugliness, pain and stupidity of it all, than exerting my own form of discrimination and make it all go away by decree, policy or rule.
I don’t pretend to know where the balance is or how brittle it may be, I just believe that zero-tolerance = absolute discrimination and it doesn’t serve us, in general, any better than having full tolerance.

It’s for sure messy, toxic, unfairer and downright not acceptable in all sorts of ways and intensities - and yet, I still do not accept myself imposing my strict view of things onto others.
For I have changed many times on many subjects over my life, have adopted different convictions and beliefs throughout time, some of them antagonistic between then when looking in hindsight.
I refuse to judge ppl on my views alone and I am weary when my convictions point towards zero tolerance paths.

Bu that’s me, ofc. The person you so quickly judged to be in accordance with bigotry and racism because I did not immediately shunt, despised nor arbitrarily discriminated against it in a chat in TG and went as far as incentivizing someone to participate and recognized their presence, a long lasting one, in a community.

You know how you keep bigots and racists out of the roles you believe they should not be in, for the betterment of a Commun?
By making sure they are NOT discriminated when running for those roles, so everyone can at least have a chance to say no or yes to them , even if not willing to do so publicly.

Let us not embark in a path where the loud become the rulers, carving a dictatorship out of a minority they are. This goes both ways of the spectrum.

You’re making yourself loud but entrenched, as a reaction - I can understand and appreciate that. I cannot fully support it as a general valid claim or universally applicable reasoning.

You will find support. You will also find opposition.
You must accept and embrace both.
Else, you’ll be defeating yourself on your own and with no one else to share the burden.

If you truly wish the Community to ever vote on smtg other or sensible changes to what compromise the current Charter up for Ratification is proposing wrt to these matters, I strongly suggest you compose a rational, not emotional, factually accurate proposal to be discussed, one based on general principles to be taken and adopted, not on particular case-based assumptions or outcomes.

Instead of venting and lashing out - yes, I am judging you now, based on this post - use your rage/indignation as tool to construct smtg that can foster true principled discussion instead of defensive/offensive chitchat and personal replies to accusations and bickering past events.

To my own demise, that is what a great chunk of my own reply falls into being, I have no illusions on it.
I sincerely hope a little part of it, though, might provide some value to you and possibly to others that might read it. Worst case, there, I also vented and lashed out, as uselessly as anyone can, for I am no better than anyone in that.