it probably isn’t exactly where it started as the entire thing’s in bad faith, but I’ve found the blog post being spammed absolutely everywhere at the time that went into excruciating detail on tim’s history with python then tried its best (and absolutely failed) to paper over and misrepresent the shit Tim did that got him temporarily ejected
e: my strong personal impression is that Tim’s just been like this for 30 years, and nobody managed to call him out before cause he’s the Timsort guy and open source projects always seem to think technical achievement should absolve you of all the other shit you do, regardless of how much that shit damages the project technically
Defending “reverse racism” and “reverse sexism”,
lol yeah this was the line at which the post revealed its entire ass
it’s remarkable that the post spends so many paragraphs priming the reader into thinking Tim’s an irreplaceable part of the Python community and should never have been suspended, and now at least two people have gotten to that exact sentence and gone “no actually fuck Tim”
if memory serves, it gets much more mask off from there, but I remember I didn’t finish the entire thing before I closed the tab and started blocking Tim’s fans
this guy was IIRC also furiously defending the totally not nazis at Nix
still this post is a glorious example of a defense brief that would work even better for the prosecution
i did stumble over a worse one just now: a guy banned from the Mesa community for being a Nazi defends himself by saying he only said that:
if I run a discord server around cultivating tomatoes, I should not exclude people based on their political beliefs, unless they use my discord server to spread those views. which means even if they are literally adolf hitler, I shouldn’t care, as long as they don’t post about gassing people on my server
that is inclusivity
and writing a prosecution brief about himself in his defense
Actually reading the python discussion boards, what’s striking is the immense volume of chatter produced by Tim, always in couched in:
- “Hypothetically”
- “Everyone tells me they are terrified of inclusivity, you wouldn’t know because they are terrified of admitting it to YOU”
- “I’m not saying that you are an awful person 😉” (YMMV: But I find his use of the winking face emoji truly egregious)
- “Hey I’m liberal like you, let me explain everything wrong with it”
- “Hey we were inclusive before any of this PC bullshit” proceeds to use unpleasant descriptors of marginalized individuals, and how very welcome they were, despite what he seems to see as “shortcomings”
In his heart he must understand how bad he his, or he wouldn’t couch his discourse in so much bad faith, and he wouldn’t make so much of a stink out of making removing Python Fellow status more easy to remove.