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Bro pages: like man pages, but with examples only

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Re: Bro pages: like man pages, but with examples only

#671

Post by VexXtreme »

jabelk wrote: post #660
VexXtreme wrote: post #612

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "this makes me feel excluded" I personally find it EXTREMELY offensive that you assume women have such delicate sensibilities that they wouldn't find this funny or simply see it as a joke. What do you think they are children or mentally incapable of processing wordplay? In this context, "bro" is an obvious pun on "man", what more needs to be said about this? I don't know a single woman who would feel excluded by th…

Me. Right here. I am a woman and while I can obviously recognize that it is a joke, seeing these "jokes" everywhere is literally the worst part of my day. Reading tech news, browsing this site, and on every other technology related site, 10+ times every day I am inundated with these hilarious "jokes" implicitly suggesting that this community, this interest, is for a specific group of people that I am not, and will ne…

Rather than forcing the entire world to change to fit your world views and personality, it's always a better idea to simply stop seeking validation from the world and stop caring about things like this. If you are feeling excluded it's because you are choosing to feel excluded, not because anyone is deliberately trying to make you feel that way. I am a western person living in an incredibly exclusionary and xenophobic east Asian country and if I cared about every time I'm treated differently, I'd go nuts. And since I am a white person living among a bunch of Asians, trust me when I say that I get treated differently all the time. People often start acting differently when I enter the room, store clerks and waiters often treat me a bit different than the locals etc. And you know what? Most of that is not even intentional. It's just the way humans are and that's ok.

You can't force people to give up every single piece of their identity and what makes them different in order to fit this new politically-correct bland mold of people who all act and think the same so that no one feels "excluded". As humans we are different, diverse, have different types of humor depending on the geography, age, gender, subcultures etc. Being able to cope with that is part of being a mature, well adjusted person.

All this PC "let's-all-be-the-same-hold-hands-and-sing-kumbaya" crap is getting tiresome. It goes against everything that makes us human, different and unique. If that's the world you want to live in - fine - keep going with your crusade and feeling indignant every time someone shows a trace of uniqueness and being different. I for one refuse to live in such a suffocating colorless world. I love being different from other people because everyone is more interesting that way, and yet at the end of the day I can still find a way to relate to others.

The world owes us nothing. If you decide to take away positive aspects from your daily experiences, that's what you'll get. If you decide to feel miserable and angry when people don't act the way you want them to act, then sadness and misery is what you'll get.

Since I know that some blockhead is going to try to strawman me, I will preempt that by saying that I don't believe we should start calling black people "niggers" or take away women's right to vote. Just saying that if people manifest their diversity in a way that's not harmful to others, there is no reason to get upset.

Re: Bro pages: like man pages, but with examples only

#672

Post by davesque »

ComSubVie wrote: post #260

A very nice idea and I hope it will gain a lot more examples (at least I will try to add further examples)! And I love the name and it's play on the manpages. But a lot here seems to recommend changing it - can anybody explain to a non-native-speaker what the problem is with the current name?

The problem is that "bro" summons up the image of the hyper-masculine culture of college fraternities in the United States which has, to some extent, infiltrated the tech world in recent years. Some unfortunate aspects of this culture include:

- Excessive drinking

- Objectification of women

- Fear/ridicule of homosexuals

- Practice of hazing rituals

- Cults of personality/Hero worship

Basically, role up all the regrettable, animal-like behaviors of immature, dishonerable men. Of course, the average startup is nowhere near as bad as the average college fraternity, but its tragic indeed that you can even mention them in the same sentence. The whole "bro"grammer thing is beyond tiresome.

Re: Bro pages: like man pages, but with examples only

#673

Post by wutbrodo »

mkr-hn wrote: post #586
jlees wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the other usages? I genuinely don't know of any beyond the "bro culture" thing. But then I'm not a bro, so maybe I wouldn't.

It's short for brother. People sometimes refer to their brothers as "bro."

It's worth nothing that, AFAIK, this usage is a lot, lot older

Re: Bro pages: like man pages, but with examples only

#674

Post by mkdir »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #656
mkdir wrote: post #619

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're fighting to create a world in which the intellectual currency is not reason, evidence, or logic; it's self-proclaimed victimhood. If I claim I'm a victim in a way that you're not, it becomes literally impossible for you to prove me wrong. If I go on to claim that we need new policies to protect me from (and/or compensate me for) that victimhood, you can't disagree. You can't do anything other than supplicate.…

"If I claim I'm a victim in a way that you're not, it becomes literally impossible for you to prove me wrong." This is a very ungenerous reading. (Ungenerous readings are very common in 'discussions' like this, on both sides.) You're translating the claim to a nebulous sense of victimhood, but that's not really the context, is it? Instead, the example should be that you're claiming to be subject to discrimination tha…

> "If I claim I'm a victim in a way that you're not, it becomes literally impossible for you to prove me wrong."

> This is a very ungenerous reading. (Ungenerous readings are very common in 'discussions' like this, on both sides.)

I think you're misunderstanding me, because you the rest of your post precisely describes what I'm talking about (up until the final paragraph, which I'll get to later).

If I claim that I'm a victim in a way that you're not, it means that there must (in some way) be quantifiable categorical differences between us. Otherwise, of course, we'd both be victims.

For example, we could have different different cities of birth, different ages, different ethnicities, different religions, different specific houses of worship, different visual appearances, different heights, different friends, different incomes, different hobbies, different offices, different voice pitches, different teachers, different childhood fears, different parents, etc. We could be different people with different brain chemistries and different life experiences. So even if we are at the same table together at the same restaurant, you could not tell me how I experienced the waiter speaking to us.

And you could not judge how I experience being told, "You are not allowed to reason with a woman when she claims victimhood on the basis of her sex. You are not allowed to point out any problematic aspects of her claims. You are not allowed to say that you as a man are equally affected by the phenomenon she is describing. She knows that you are wrong. Somehow."?

> But isn't it even more patronizing for men to come in and say that she has no basis to make that claim?

No, it's not patronizing at all disagree with a woman and explain why.

> And that sounds uncomfortably like we're saying to women: you can't disagree. You can't do anything other than supplicate.

Saying to women "we are allowed to disagree and reason with you" is completely different from saying to women "you aren't allowed to disagree and reason with us".

Re: Bro pages: like man pages, but with examples only

#675

Post by cuttle »

prodigal_erik wrote: post #608
KuraFire wrote: post #568

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey dude, here's a hint: perhaps these women are arguing on social media because guys like you fail to give them the basic modicum of respect as a human being, and they have to spend time fighting to be respected, which takes away from their time to build stuff. Whereas, unlike your privileged life wherein people don't fundamentally deny you basic human respect, you have plenty of time to spend on doing things you en…

> unlike your privileged life wherein people don't fundamentally deny you basic human respect Nerds are not afforded basic human respect unless their rare obsession happens to become valuable to somebody. We're merely being tolerated for the time being. And I don't believe anyone has ever gained a shred of respect by complaining about the lack of it. That just reinforces one's image as weak and unpleasant to interact…

Are you really arguing that the “oppression” faced by white, heterosexual, cisgendered, male nerds is comparable to the denial of human rights that women, non-whites, transgendered people, and other oppressed groups face every day of their lives? I'm not looking to get into the oppression olympics, but to claim that it's in any way comparable suggests a fundamental, offensive lack of awareness about others' experiences.

Re: Bro pages: like man pages, but with examples only

#676

Post by jabelk »

overgard wrote: post #472
reallyseriously wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I may cut in, he's saying "bro" is poking fun at other men so it has nothing to do with making a joke at the expense of women. At the same time, all people, both men and women can take aka understand "the joke" so others don't need to protect women from it like they are children without adult reasoning abilities.

Exactly. Thanks.

The entire problem is that "saying 'bro' is poking fun of other men"! It is a joke, by men, about men, in regards to programming. To reiterate: a joke, regarding programming, written by men, that completely disregards women.

Of course, on its own, that is pretty irrelevant. There are jokes like that all the time on all sorts of topics. But in this situation, it is ALWAYS men joking with/about other men. Women are excluded from the jokes completely. And these sorts of "jokes" and other little implicit signals are all over everything remotely related to CS/tech. Which gets pretty discouraging, day after day.

Re: Bro pages: like man pages, but with examples only

#677

Post by vectorjohn »

[deleted] wrote: post #269
ilyanep wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Not_a_woman http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/You%27re_the_sexist#.22Ta...

[deleted]

This is like someone on Fox News asking for a more neutral source about climate change than climate scientists.

Re: Bro pages: like man pages, but with examples only

#678

Post by yummyfajitas »

Steuard wrote: post #657
overgard wrote: post #625

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Signals". Ok. So what's the signal being sent to women by a bunch of men that think that women are so weak that a mild mild MILD joke about fratboys is going to chase them away? (A lame joke that doesn't even involve women directly). Do you really think they're that emotionally fragile? Don't you see how incredibly patronizing this discussion is towards the people it's supposedly benefiting? Which do you think is mo…

It's difficult for me to see how you read my post as suggesting that the awesome women I know (or women in general) are emotionally fragile. I really tried to go out of my way to avoid giving that impression; that's why I called them "unflappable", among many other things. I do understand the point you're aiming for here. But when the premise of your objection is so explicitly at odds with my actual words, it might b…

I'll attempt to explain the point I think overgard is making in a little more detail:

There are many ways to signal not-belonging. For example, conversations like this one send a signal of not belonging to people who are culturally lower-middle class (hypersensitive political correctness is a social signal of upper-middle class liberal types). I imagine a similar signal is sent to brogrammers.

It also sends a signal of not belonging to those who have been bullied by politically correct sorts. See Scott Alexander for further thoughts on this: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/01/12/a-response-to-apophemi-...

It is clearly impossible to shield everyone from signals they do not belong, particularly from signals as subtle and tangential as the ones you are advocating against. So why do you single out women for protection on this ground?

Note: much like women, lower-middle class people are underrepresented in computing. So underrepresentation can't be the reason.

Re: Bro pages: like man pages, but with examples only

#679

Post by Crake »

Steuard wrote: post #324
overgard wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely, lets throw away our sense of humor and wordplay because there are theoretically people that might be offended (maybe, kindof. You know. In theory.). (N.B. the people that seem to be offended so far are offended on other peoples behalf..) Isn't it way more offensive to assume that women are such dainty delicate creatures that like, they won't get the joke?

It's not about offending people. It's never about offending people. Plenty of people could have delightfully off-color senses of humor, love playing Cards Against Humanity, and still find this name highly problematic. It's actually about the signals that we send by using language closely associated with groups or attitudes that have long histories of excluding women or others from our culture and community. And just…

In my experience, it's always about offending people. But only theoretically, of course. It's hard to find significant quantities of people who are actually offended, which is in itself deeply ~problematic.~

>their impression is that the community here closes ranks to shout her down rather than accepting the legitimacy of her experience

It does say a lot about you and your friends that they assume that anyone who disagrees with them isn't coming from a legitimate experience of their own. Why is it only you and your friends that are Designated Spokepersons for All Women? Not everyone on here is biologically male, you know. Some of the people who think Adria Richards is an idiot happen to be women. Quite a few, actually, since oversensitive feminists make life much harder for women in tech to be taken seriously.

> brilliant, fun, unflappable women

Sure.

>But that means that Hacker News (and to some degree, tech in general) doesn't get the benefit of their participation.

Anyone this upset about the word "bro" isn't someone I want to spend time around anyway.

Re: Bro pages: like man pages, but with examples only

#680

Post by Crake »

jabelk wrote: post #660
VexXtreme wrote: post #612

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "this makes me feel excluded" I personally find it EXTREMELY offensive that you assume women have such delicate sensibilities that they wouldn't find this funny or simply see it as a joke. What do you think they are children or mentally incapable of processing wordplay? In this context, "bro" is an obvious pun on "man", what more needs to be said about this? I don't know a single woman who would feel excluded by th…

Me. Right here. I am a woman and while I can obviously recognize that it is a joke, seeing these "jokes" everywhere is literally the worst part of my day. Reading tech news, browsing this site, and on every other technology related site, 10+ times every day I am inundated with these hilarious "jokes" implicitly suggesting that this community, this interest, is for a specific group of people that I am not, and will ne…

>seeing these "jokes" everywhere is literally the worst part of my day.

You must lead a very privileged life.

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