511–520 of 845 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> or replaced it with git Thank you so much for that. The irony is delicious.
'Git' and 'retard' aren't really substitutes...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> because those words contribute to a culture that cause actual harm. No it doesn't. Where's your proof? Plenty of people have said plenty of nasty things throughout the years, and no one died. Yet our empire uses remote control drones to bomb small children, and that's totally OK. (Now there's a real "culture that causes actual harm") What is really harmful, and what isn't? Take a good, hard look around. Sticks and…
There are cases of people who have completed suicide because of bullying based on their LD. There are cases of people who have attempted suicide because of bullying based on their LD. These are significant because people with LD are under-represented in suicide statistics. > Try it. Go on. Call me whatever you want. And watch me not give two fucks what you think. Next time you need medical treatment to keep you alive…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Quac^H^H^H^HMedical professionals also don't use "stomach" to denote the abdomen. So what? > any more I.e. they did ! Lay people still do. Anyway, what matters here is not the standard used by the medical community. I suspect that if a github project had some code that "assists the mentally retarded", it would not bring on the TOS violation police.
Quick biology lesson: stomachs and abdomens are different things. The stomach is an organ inside the abdomen, and the abdomen is a region of the body. >I.e. they did! Lay people still do. As do rude people. Here's what you can do: invent a time machine and go back to a time when the term wasn't offensive. Then your statement that the term isn't offensive will be true. Right now, it isn't. >Anyway, what matters here i…
For people who don't see what's wrong here. The issue is not about whether the word 'retard' is or is not offensive to anyone. You need to consider that GitHub currently hosts a large percentage of the web's open source repositories. This is censorship plain and simple, something that IMO has no place in open source. The issue is that there are plenty of things some people might find offensive on GitHub but you dont…
1. This isn't censorship of the type that is illegal or not allowed. It is a private company deciding a word was inappropriate. 2. It seems like most in this comment thread agree that this action, as a singular act, is a good thing. The word was offensive. Github asked the repo to change it. They did. The end. 3. As for the larger context, the problem with the frequent use of slippery slope arguments and cries of "ce…
For people who don't see what's wrong here. The issue is not about whether the word 'retard' is or is not offensive to anyone. You need to consider that GitHub currently hosts a large percentage of the web's open source repositories. This is censorship plain and simple, something that IMO has no place in open source. The issue is that there are plenty of things some people might find offensive on GitHub but you dont…
1. This isn't censorship of the type that is illegal or not allowed. It is a private company deciding a word was inappropriate. 2. It seems like most in this comment thread agree that this action, as a singular act, is a good thing. The word was offensive. Github asked the repo to change it. They did. The end. 3. As for the larger context, the problem with the frequent use of slippery slope arguments and cries of "ce…
This isn't censorship of the type that is illegal or not allowed.
Neither is posting something offensive. Have you thought about that? Yes, GitHub owns the servers. If you haven't notices already, someone owns every single piece of the Internet.
people are choosing to die on some pretty ridiculous hills.
If you just ignore it, censorship and selective enforcement becomes a socially acceptable practice through sheer repetition and groupthink.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Quac^H^H^H^HMedical professionals also don't use "stomach" to denote the abdomen. So what? > any more I.e. they did ! Lay people still do. Anyway, what matters here is not the standard used by the medical community. I suspect that if a github project had some code that "assists the mentally retarded", it would not bring on the TOS violation police.
Quick biology lesson: stomachs and abdomens are different things. The stomach is an organ inside the abdomen, and the abdomen is a region of the body. >I.e. they did! Lay people still do. As do rude people. Here's what you can do: invent a time machine and go back to a time when the term wasn't offensive. Then your statement that the term isn't offensive will be true. Right now, it isn't. >Anyway, what matters here i…
http://www.wowktv.com/story/29652314/missing-mentally-retard...
The URL has "retarded" in it! And Google's index still has the original article text, which uses the term in the body. They changed it to "challenged".
"Officers are looking for a mentally retarded man they say walked away from a supervised group home where he was ordered to stay."
"Mentally retarded" isn't so offensive that a TV station in America wouldn't initially use the term in July 2015, only to be corrected by some PC people into changing it.
It's just kind of a very direct term for something that is delicate. There is (or should be) some range of separation between "insensitive" and "offensive".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 1. This isn't censorship of the type that is illegal or not allowed. It is a private company deciding a word was inappropriate. It is a private company, alright, but it is also becoming a critical company for the internet as a whole. Which points to an important question our society will have to face more and more often with increasing centralization and globalization: When does a company become essential infrastru…
It is a private company, alright, but it is also becoming a critical company for the internet as a whole Hardly. OSS was in a very healthy state before Github and it will manage just fine without it. I'm not saying Github doesn't add value - it absolutely does - but if it died tomorrow, I'd simply create an account at a different vendor, push my repos to it, and pick up the pieces from there.
I was referring, though, to all the surrounding aspects of GitHub, e.g. issue tracking / discussions and discoverability. Quite a lot of projects have no online presence except GitHub pages. Let me again draw an analogy with Facebook: Of course there are many ways to contact people - (e)mail, phone, instant messenger - but a lot of people rely on Facebook to stay in contact with each other and don't bother to exchange other contact information.
Besides, censorship is far more subtle and pervasive than closing shop. It changes the perception and values of the community, instead of driving the participants to some other place. Also there are surveillance and subversion issues. When it becomes common to install binaries directly supplied by GitHub, I better trust them not to include any (targeted) malware.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here's my concern. Let's say I forked a repo and started contributing to it. I built an app that depends on that repo. Suddenly that repo vanishes because GitHub found it some word in it offensive, and my fork and all my contributions vanish. All because of some line like: var x = getX(); // this is retarded, needs fixing I didn't write the said offensive code nor did I even know it was there, and GitHub possibly doe…
..but it's git. Github don't host your repo - they host a copy of it. You still have all your work in your local checkout. What are you concerned about?
This obsession with making every single website a hugbox these days is moronic. The word retard/retarded is seldom associated with actual retardation instead it's just a synonym for moron. Even if you dissagree with that you should still be able to see that even if we did s/retard/moron/ or replaced it with git, idiot etc it would still violate the TOS.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
1. This isn't censorship of the type that is illegal or not allowed. It is a private company deciding a word was inappropriate. 2. It seems like most in this comment thread agree that this action, as a singular act, is a good thing. The word was offensive. Github asked the repo to change it. They did. The end. 3. As for the larger context, the problem with the frequent use of slippery slope arguments and cries of "ce…
"This isn't censorship of the type that is illegal or not allowed. It is a private company deciding a word was inappropriate." As a Github user, that kind of thinking worries me. Google Code went away, and Sourceforge started packaging adware and spyware with other people's projects. They could do this because "they were a private company". Now Github's management is starting to throw their weight around. We now need…