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Collaboration not Derision in the Node Community

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Re: Collaboration not Derision in the Node Community

#101

Post by aaronem »

quinnchr wrote: post #54
mintplant wrote: post #31

From Joyent's blog post [1]: > But while Isaac is a Joyent employee, Ben is not—and if he had been, he wouldn't be as of this morning: to reject a pull request that eliminates a gendered pronoun on the principle that pronouns should in fact be gendered would constitute a fireable offense for me and for Joyent. For comparison, here is bnoordhuis's comment from the pull request thread [2] that the post is referencing:…

Looking through the closed pull requests it does not seem like rejecting typo pull requests is in fact standard practice. There are multiple accepted pull requests that merely fix typos. Additionally, if you look at the context of the full pull request he's commenting on, he completely ignores the dozen's of other comments on the issue, simply stating they're rejecting it because it's trivial. I'm not saying he's nec…

> he clearly doesn't care about combating sexism

Well, that is his job, of course.

Re: Collaboration not Derision in the Node Community

#102

Post by aaronem »

yetanotherphd wrote: post #48
[deleted] wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

Those people are already far beyond the pale, but I was referring to more benign cultural explanations. A professor was fired for his "racist" suggestion that cultural differences could help explain the relative poor performance of Black Kenyans relative to Indian Kenyans in running local businesses. The sad irony is that this man committed suicide over this, and that he was a committed liberal anti-racist. In this c…

> In this case the progressives had no compunction in sacrificing one of their own.

Of course not. What is a mere person, compared to the progressive ideal?

Re: Collaboration not Derision in the Node Community

#103

Post by GrinningFool »

Lazare wrote: post #78
GrinningFool wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems not: https://github.com/joyent/libuv/commit/804d40ee14dc0f82c482d... Ultimately, it looks like Ben was fairly impartial about the whole thing - he didn't accept it because it wasn't a significant enough change to merit accepting. He tried to revert the acceptance because the acceptance had been done without approval.

Technically, he was in the right. Politically, reverting Isaac's commit (and especially doing so with a passive aggressive "Isaac, consider yourself chided." commit message) was clearly a mistake.

A mistake, but only in context of the larger issue. In the context of a reverted commit, it was a fairly laid-back way of saying "you shouldn't have done this direct merge and you probably knew better".

Re: Collaboration not Derision in the Node Community

#104

Post by benmmurphy »

skwirl wrote: post #99
acdha wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your spin attempt ignored the part where he reverted someone else's commit with a threatening message. Nobody would ge talking about it if he had simply ignored it or asked Isaac about it first.

What was the threatening message? Could you link to it?

I believe he said, 'you are chided' or something along those lines. A public reprimand is quite harsh but I wouldn't call it a threatening message.

Re: Collaboration not Derision in the Node Community

#105

Post by austinz »

acdha wrote: post #96
austinz wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ben was called a bigot and his rejection of the pull request was ascribed to the "principle that pronouns should in fact be gendered" (from the Joyent blog). The problem is, all of this is being extrapolated from his statement "sorry, not interested in trivial changes like that", which could be seen as a flippant dismissal of gender issues in the tech industry - or it could be simply a curt response acknowledging sta…

Your spin attempt ignored the part where he reverted someone else's commit with a threatening message. Nobody would ge talking about it if he had simply ignored it or asked Isaac about it first.

Here's his revert message, copied from below, in the full:

"@isaacs may have his commit bit but that does not mean he is at liberty to land patches at will. All patches have to be signed off by either me or Bert. Isaac, consider yourself chided."

Refers to a procedural matter, kind of snarky. Hardly 'threatening'. Does not discuss the pronoun, content of the revert, or any content related to gender issues at all.

By the way, it's rather fatuous to refer to my comment as a 'spin attempt' just because I didn't reflexively grab my pitchfork and torch and run out to join the mob trying to crucify this developer as a incorrigible misogynist, but asked for evidence and clarification instead. Food for thought.

Re: Collaboration not Derision in the Node Community

#106

Post by skwirl »

austinz wrote: post #105
acdha wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your spin attempt ignored the part where he reverted someone else's commit with a threatening message. Nobody would ge talking about it if he had simply ignored it or asked Isaac about it first.

Here's his revert message, copied from below, in the full: "@isaacs may have his commit bit but that does not mean he is at liberty to land patches at will. All patches have to be signed off by either me or Bert. Isaac, consider yourself chided." Refers to a procedural matter, kind of snarky. Hardly 'threatening'. Does not discuss the pronoun, content of the revert, or any content related to gender issues at all. By…

I would really appreciate it if acdha could explain how they view this comment as a threat. acdha made the same claim elsewhere in this thread as well.

It appears that some people are attempting to lower the bar for something to be a "threat" to be any statement made by someone they don't like (or they've been told not to like).

Re: Collaboration not Derision in the Node Community

#107

Post by gruseom »

aroman wrote: post #68
quinnchr wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah for sure the english language couldn't possibly itself be influenced by sexism. That's just how it works. We should just accept it. The pronoun itself isn't sexist it's the reason behind it's use. Beyond indicating (possible) differences in biological sex, what purpose does using a gendered pronoun serve? It doesn't add information, it merely reinforces gender norms. http://www.english.wisc.edu/rfyoung/336/gende…

Thanks for your reply. > Yeah for sure the english language couldn't possibly itself be influenced by sexism. That's just how it works. We should just accept it. That was not my point, nor do I believe I implied that. I acknowledge that the original reason why English's nonspecific/neuter pronoun is the same as the masculine is almost certainly because of ages-old sexism and masculo-normativity. > The pronoun itself…

Two of your beliefs about English are demonstrably wrong, in a good way. First, singular "they" isn't a recent construct: it goes back at least to Chaucer and never fell out of use. Second, it has never been "an established point" of English grammar to use generic "he"; that one was a prescriptivist construct, introduced by grammarians in the 18th century, most prominently by an author (and entrepreneur!) named Ann Fisher as well as by the perhaps aptly named Sir Charles Coote.

You'll find many sources on all this if you plug "singular they" into HNSearch (or Google for that matter), but this article is good on Fisher: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/26/magazine/26FOB-onlanguage-....

The point is that singular "they" is actually more authentic and more historical English than generic "he" is. That's why I said you were wrong in a good way: there's no conflict at all between inclusive language and good English, and never has been. The language has had an answer for this all along; it was generic "he" that was the interloper, and this was at least partly for ideological reasons—the British parliament even passed a bill in 1850 mandating it! So the ideologues and outrage addicts have been at this for a long time. They just switched sides at some point.

Re: Collaboration not Derision in the Node Community

#109

Post by dreamfactory »

Brakenshire wrote: post #58
dreamfactory wrote: post #39

Are these people illiterate? Are they not aware that in the English language masculine pronouns are correct for both gender-specific and gender-neutral uses? Mankind refers to everybody. It may seem awkward, particularly to over-literal types, but so is our spelling, grammar, and pronunciation generally.

Mankind is gender neutral, it's highly debatable whether he, him or his are also.

> gender neutral, it's highly debatable whether he, him or his are also

Not in the English language. It's debated by some whether this might have a subliminal effect and reinforce social gender stereotypes (though no evidence for that hypothesis as far as I'm aware) and therefore whether masculine prepositions _should_ be treated as neutral but that's in the same category as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_spelling_reform.

There's nothing wrong with that of course and it can be an interesting hypothesis to pursue - but I find it depressing that a self-proclaimed educated and science-based open source tech community so easily engages on a witch hunt based on pure speculation.

Re: Collaboration not Derision in the Node Community

#110

Post by yetanotherphd »

piscisaureus wrote: post #86
austinz wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ben was called a bigot and his rejection of the pull request was ascribed to the "principle that pronouns should in fact be gendered" (from the Joyent blog). The problem is, all of this is being extrapolated from his statement "sorry, not interested in trivial changes like that", which could be seen as a flippant dismissal of gender issues in the tech industry - or it could be simply a curt response acknowledging sta…

Well, there you go: https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015#issuecomment-29568...

"To me as a non-native speaker, the difference between 'him' and 'them' seems academic but hey, if it gets us scores of female contributors, who am I to object?"

I sense some subtle irony in that statement.

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