[gentoo-project] ComRel membership vs politeness on mailing lists

[Michał Górny]

On Wed, 2019-06-19 at 08:03 +0300, Andrew Savchenko wrote:
> On Tue, 18 Jun 2019 20:33:09 +0200 Michał Górny wrote:
> > On Tue, 2019-06-18 at 19:20 +0300, Andrew Savchenko wrote:
> > > On Tue, 18 Jun 2019 09:43:05 +0200 Michał Górny wrote:
> > > > On Sun, 2019-06-16 at 23:00 +0000, Robin H. Johnson wrote:
> > > > > Only active Gentoo developers who are also Foundation members may be
> > > > > nominated. [1]
> > > > >
> > > > > Nominations MUST be made by posting to gentoo-nfp@l.g.o, and
> > > > > the nominated candidate must accept not later than the end of the
> > > > > nomination period.
> > > >
> > > > Ok, let's try someone else.  I nominate:
> > > >
> > > > David Seifert (soap)
> > > > Mikle Kolyada (zlogene)
> > >
> > > You violated the rules:
> > >   Nominations MUST be made by posting to gentoo-nfp@l.g.o
> > >
> > > But you sent them to gentoo-project@l.g.o mail list.
> > > Hereby they are not valid. Please perform your duty properly and
> > > send nominations to the aforementioned NFP mail list.
> > >
> >
> > You could also have understood it was a honest mistake and be nice about
> > it.  But I suppose that's too much to expect from a ComRel member.
>
> I politely pointed out your mistake and nicely asked you to fix it.
> I even used the word "please". I honestly don't see what was not
> nice about my previous e-mail. Maybe we have a language barrier
> issue here.
>
> My comrel membership has nothing to do with this discussion and
> I'm participating in it as a common Gentoo developer with my comrel
> hat off.
>

Do you really believe that a ComRel member (read: a person whose duty
involves judging other people's behavior) can just take ComRel hat off
and stop caring about providing exemplary behavior?  Following that
logic, I could join ComRel claiming that all the things I've said
and done were 'with my comrel hat off' (since I don't have any)!

I understand that there might be a language barrier.  However, since you
decide to perform a very specific and important role, I'm afraid you
need to learn to use English in a way that's actually polite rather than
using the excuse of a language barrier.

Let me explain.

A neutral (i.e. not really polite but acceptable) way of saying that
would be to say 'you have posted the nominations to the wrong list'. 
That's plain and factual.

You said 'you violated the rules' which is an accusation.  Accusations
tend to render one as guilty of doing something very bad.  Accusations
are not polite.

Furthermore, 'perform your duty properly' is passive aggressive.  Adding
'please' doesn't make it any more polite -- in fact, given just before
a insulting statement it may have the exact opposite effect.

The polite way of saying that would be to strip the first part
of the sentence and just say 'please send nominations ...'  In fact,
as you can see the passive aggressive part is completely unnecessary to
convey the meaning, so what's the purpose of adding it besides
intentionally offending someone?

I hope this explanation helps you improve your language skills.

-- 
Best regards,
Michał Górny