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The fight against sexism is not a free pass

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Re: The fight against sexism is not a free pass

#12

Nice job by Joyent. A lot of people will feel that this firing is an overreaction, but this is how civil rights movements work. You inconvenience the apathetic until they realize that apathy is as unacceptable as anything else. This is the only way it can change the developer community. Don't be a sexist and you won't run into this problem.

Please stop devaluing the term sexism.

Re: The fight against sexism is not a free pass

#13

Nice job by Joyent. A lot of people will feel that this firing is an overreaction, but this is how civil rights movements work. You inconvenience the apathetic until they realize that apathy is as unacceptable as anything else. This is the only way it can change the developer community. Don't be a sexist and you won't run into this problem.

Oh please. No one was sexist here. A diff of 3 characters on something wholly non-code or operations-related is hardly a change that requires attention.

He deliberately made the pronoun masculine for no apparent reason other than to stick it in women's eyes.

Re: The fight against sexism is not a free pass

#14

When the original blog post showed up on HN, I couldn't understand why it was penned. As best I could tell, here's what happened: * Party A submitted a pull request for a minor change to the libuv docs * Party B (who can signoff on changes) declined it for being an extremely minor change * Party C merged it after getting signoff from Party D (who can signoff on changes) * Party B reversed the change under the impress…

That requires far too much, and far too nuanced thought. BURN THE WITCH.

No, no, no. This requires careful and measured thought before passing judgement. Bring me a duck and I shall fetch my largest scales.

Re: The fight against sexism is not a free pass

#15
I'm sorry to invoke Godwin's law on this, but this is beyond absurd...

Stating that defending that pronouns should be gendered is a fireable offense is more than just ridiculous political correctness, it's criminalizing opinion. It's the Holy Inquisition.

Re: The fight against sexism is not a free pass

#16
Things that are obvious: 1. Gender neutral language is obviously and undoubtedly preferable. 2. The changes would have been incredibly easy to implement, the work was already done.

I can't think of a good reason not to accept the pull request. It all seems like such a simple problem getting blown way out of proportion.

Re: The fight against sexism is not a free pass

#17
Ok, even though I think the singular they is awkward, I can understand the fight for removing gendered pronouns.

However, something I've been wondering for a while now is: how does this issue manifest itself in other languages? Are there similar movements? How does it work in languages where every noun has a gender?

Re: The fight against sexism is not a free pass

#18
So far as I can tell, it's a fundamental of all forms of feminism (though especially radical feminism) that yes, everyone must make fighting sexism and supporting feminism their #1 priority, over and above the actual goals of whatever businesses or groups they're involved in, and that anyone who doesn't is a women hater. You get stuff like Atheism+, where a bunch of feminist activists went into the atheist movement and declared that from then on, it must revolve entirely around their form of feminism, and that it didn't even matter if members were actually atheists so long as they supported that kind of feminism. Radical/non-intersectional feminists even tried to do the same to groups fighting against other forms of discrimination such as racism and homophobia.
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