Meet Oliver.
I’m a Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) researcher and programmer living slightly north of Castle Black. I study online communities, focusing on how people consume content, how user behaviour varies between desktop and mobile platforms, and how we can best understand systemic bias in peer-production communities.
He writes C++ and R code. His perspective sounds like the kind of contribution a lot of programming communities need, so I would think it valuable to keep him around. Unfortunately, he has resigned from the R community. He found something simple, obvious, and wrong, so he fixed it and submitted a report. Exactly as you’re supposed to do, right? Only this was the problem:
It points to a line in the R source code containing a variable called, with all seriousness…
iGiveHead
I don’t think that this is an intentional sexual reference – far from it, I’m certain it’s just due to an absence of familiarity with one particularly crass English idiom, and I have only ever known the developer who wrote the code (whose first language is not English) to be entirely proper, entirely reasonable, and the model of what a productive Core member should be.
But it needs to go anyway: it’s exclusionary as all hell to have language like this in the core implementation and we can’t expect people to instantly understand intentions.
It seems like a minor issue, easily dealt with, and that the R Foundation ought to be appreciative or at least accept a slight improvement that does nothing but slightly sanitize the publicly available code. Nope. There were cries of “SJW thought-policing!” and shrieks of “PC!” and oh horrors, a line must be drawn in the sand to stop this slippery slope into a flaming tar pit of feminist sensitivity, a mixed metaphor which sounds like the worst beach ever. The fix was locked out.
The second was a set of emails from Duncan Murdoch, President of the R Foundation and an R Core member, in which he dismissed my “bug report” (note the skeptical scare quotes he put on it) “about some variable name that you find offensive is clearly an example of nothing more than shit-disturbing” and stated that myself, and those who had commented in favour of changing it, were no longer welcome to participate in R’s bug-tracker.
I independently confirmed that our accounts had been banned and locked – as had the bug, and replied to Duncan explaining my thinking and motivation and asking in what capacity the ban had been made.
There is some good news, though. The R Foundation eventually came around to reason and accepted the change, which only makes sense. Unfortunately, though, the news got spread around first, and there’s a certain kind of person in programming communities — usually white, male, libertarian, and extremely sensitive to suggestions that perhaps they are insensitive to their own privilege — who exploded in fury and demanded the immediate ejection of everyone who thought this was a reasonable change. You know the kind of person I’m talking about. The ones who object to political correctness so forcefully that they start policing everyone’s language, and the ones who tell everyone to grow a thicker skin while they are melting down in impotent fury because someone laughed at their dick pic.
You know, like Vox Day.
Theodore Beale (Vox) featured the story of the “IGiveHead” variable on his blog, and of course, his fans agreed with his demand to Don’t cut them any slack. Don’t give them any second chances. Identify, eject, and ignore
, and started the policing and impotent fury act, sending Oliver lots of email.
“Lots of email” to a data person says “lots of data”. So he analyzed it. Of course. And came up with a useful definition of “Arsehole”.
Defining “arseholes”
This isn’t a formal study so my definition of arsehole can be basically whatever I want it to be. I settled for any comment which exhibited one of the following traits:
Accused me of lying about everything that had happened to get some benefit that apparently comes alongside threats, harassment and weird emails. Nobody has explained to me what this benefit is but I eagerly await my cheque in the mail from the nefarious SJW cabal apparently causing me to make things up;
Contained threats, goading-towards-suicides, or generally obscene and targeted harassment;
Used terms like “SJW” or “pissbaby” or “whinging” or really anything else that indicated the author had, at best, a tenuous grasp on how the world works;
Was premised on the idea that I was “oversensitive” or “overreacting” which is pretty rich coming from people whose idea of acceptability includes insulting people they’ve never met on somebody else’s website.
So I took this definition and hand-coded the comments and grabbed the data. We ended up with 107 users, of whom a mere 40 weren’t arseholes, producing 183 comments in total. Then I worked out their referring site and geolocated their IP address, et voila.
And then he was able to say what the frequency of arseholes on various media were. The results were a little surprising, but of course, also skewed because he was only looking at individuals on those sites that had heard of his little conflict. But still, only 25% of user complaints from Twitter were arseholes? I would have put that number much higher. Only a bit more than 50% of the emailers from Reddit were arseholes? Impossible. But OK, that’s his data.
The one result I found entirely plausible: if your posting is prompted by reading something on Vox Day’s website, there’s a 100% chance you’re an arsehole.
Unsurprisingly, Vox Day’s readers are arseholes. Not just some of them, but all of them: every one of them who managed to painfully peck at their keyboard and hit save was a pillock of the highest calibre, contributing absolutely nothing of value to to the conversation.
It’s good to have empirical confirmation of something I always simply assumed was obviously true.
Sorry, but being offended by a variable name is ridiculous. I would have at least written something like “renamed the variable to something more serious and clear”. And what does “exclusionary as all hell” even mean in this context?
That said, of course the other side overreacted “as all hell”. The worst a sensible person should have done in that situation would be write a sarcastic comment in the merge message, maybe with a rolling-eyes-emoticon. My own reaction would probably be “Eh, whatever. *merge*”
What an awesome story. I’m glad the Go programming language community has a good, and enforced, code of conduct. The thread regarding it is very long, and every once in a while someone would pop in (who had never contributed) and yell something about SJWs run amok and Freeze Peach and then leave again.
Good story. Good guy.
Wow, that’s really ridiculous. People change variable names all the time and in fact having good variable names can be quite important.
prae @ 1:
Can I ask, just to make certain I get your position, that there’s nothing a variable could be named that would would find offensive, or are you just saying you didn’t find this particular example offensive?
@4: ok fine. I definitely can think of some names. Point taken. But still, “iGiveHead” I would consider childish, somewhere along the lines of “iFart” or “iReek”, but exclusionary? Whom does it exclude? Straight men? Lesbians?
I love what Oliver has done with the more reactionary comments on his blog post – changed them to references about kittens (or puppies for those of the Sad variety), or cleverly summarised their rants in a humorous way.
I see our old pal Pitchguest on there, too, probably railing away in impotent rage.
I would disagree with the seriousness that motivates Oliver. As he said himself, it is unintentional. At worst, it can provoke so-minded people to an outburst of immature “humour”. (“Hur, hur, hur… he said XXX!”)
But “it needs to go anyway”? It is “exclusionary as all hell”? Seriously?
That said: while this may have been a slight overreaction to some really minor issue, the reaction to that is completely unacceptable (Though expected from such people as Vox Day).
I rather take slightly oversensitive than complete-assholeness.
Well, I learn something new everyday. The only context I knew about was the head-butts cats sometime give when they like you.
@5 prae
It smacks of bro culture – dick jokes and blowjob references. You really can’t see how a woman reading that code could potentially see that as a culture she wouldn’t be welcome in?
Yes, it’s childish. It excludes people who would rather not read about sexual references when trying to get work done, or who really would rather not give the men in their work group excuses to make sniggering allusions in discussions of the code.
You seem to be unaware of the fact that women often have to deal with arseholes, and don’t want to see incitements to arseholes in their work documents.
I read to the last graph. Poor Sweden. :(
I see no indication that he was “offended”. In fact, he made it pretty clear that he wasn’t offended, but simply thought it was a bad choice. Here’s what he says:
Does that sound like somebody’s who’s offended to you? He’s bending over backwards to be reasonable, whilst still pointing out that the variable in question is poorly named.
Apparently these days you can just describe any objection anybody has to anything as “offence”, no matter how proportionate, reasonable, or well-argued, and it just magically goes away… “You’re offended” has become shorthand for “I refuse to engage with your point”.
How about that it excludes anyone who doesn’t want to see stupid sex jokes in their goddamned work code?
(note: I was typing the above while new posts were being made, and PZ said the exact same thing for me)
When you have to deal with innuendo all the damned time, then yes, it does feel exclusionary to see it not just in your interactions with people, but to see that you can’t get away with it even in the fucking code. Perhaps you’re confusing the reaction labeled “excluded” with “inappropriately hurt feelings”; the correct description is “tired to the bone of dealing with this yet again” with a soupcon of “contemptuous of people who can’t seem to get through the day without making a dick joke”.
Correction: That should have been “can’t get away from it”
Okay. I think I was never in any proximity to that “bro culture”, so I didn’t even think about that. Fine, I see your point(s) and accept defeat. It is also somewhat sad that such references to oral sex have this dudebro connotation.
:snort: In a nutshell.
@15 prae
Thanks.
prae @ 15:
Your sadness aside, why is it, at first anyway, okay with you and others that references to oral sex are in work in the first place? This is work, this isn’t an evening spent at home with consenting adults focusing on the sexy stuff.
Your comments do prove Oliver to be right – even though he didn’t think the reference had anything to do with sex in the first place, that’s certainly what’s being assumed by all those who read it, and no, it does not belong in any professional work which isn’t sex work.
It shouldn’t have to be clarified, but I think that most of the objections here, like from prae, were defending against the nonexistent claim that the code was sexist. That is not what is offensive about the code–it is not sexist; it’s sexual. And why the hell is anything sexual involved in computer code in a professional workspace? There’s a reason sexual harassment laws exist–because unwanted sexual behavior makes people uncomfortable.
@19 Marshall
But such ‘humour’ is often indicative of an unwelcoming space for woman, so while not being sexist, it’s just another microagression in the predominantly male-dominated coding culture.
Yeah, it’s not professional, but that’s not the only side to it.
OP
Free speech, thought crimes, witch hunts.
Funny how those who frequently complain about these issues manage to get as close to committing those sins as possible-
PZ
Exactly, especially if you’re in the particular demographic that is generally thought to be the ones bestowing blow jobs. I know, I know, it’s difficult to understand for dudes how offputting that can be, especially when it leads to the predictable jokes.
And before the dudes start whining: This has nothing to do with being a prude and totally against sexual innuendo and jokes, but there’s a place and a time for everything and all the places and times have a particular feature in common: control. Being together with friends and joking is one thing. Trying to work on something while constantly being bombarded with sexual innuendo is another thing.
hmmm:
Marshall @ 19:
Actually, it’s both. Women get to deal with such references all the fucking time, and this sort of thing is very high in STEM fields, to say the least, so it’s difficult for me to see this as innocent of being sexist. It’s just one more drop in the storm.
Where did I trigger the filter again….
Ah, I see, it wan’t me, it was the OP…
OP
Free speech, thought crimes, witch hunts.
Funny how those who frequently complain about these issues manage to get as close to committing those sins as possible-
PZ
Exactly, especially if you’re in the particular demographic that is generally thought to be the ones bestowing blow jobs. I know, I know, it’s difficult to understand for dudes how offputting that can be, especially when it leads to the predictable jokes.
And before the dudes start whining: This has nothing to do with being a prude and totally against sexual innuendo and jokes, but there’s a place and a time for everything and all the places and times have a particular feature in common: control. Being together with friends and joking is one thing. Trying to work on something while constantly being bombarded with sexual innuendo is another thing.
I wonder what his arsehole metric would yield, if applied to Richard Dawkins’ twitter feed?
Probably not. Dawkins is more careful than Vox Day and uses infrasonic dog-whistles and passive/aggression, whereas Day has been pretty shameless since he ‘outed’ Mason, too.
I see our old pal Pitchguest on there, too, probably railing away in impotent rage.
Hahahaha, I should visit the pit for the lolz.
Loud:
In a male-dominated culture, particularly one with a high content of brocialists, “iGiveHead” would be read as those who give head, and those who receive, split into the standard binary, giving more value, of course, to the natural receivers (themselves), and that reads sexist to me. Perhaps I’m alone on this one.
lotharloo @ 25:
If you must be as childish and dim as they are, perhaps you could simply go where you wish without needing to comment on it, yeah?
Nope, you are not alone on this one.
@26 Caine
That was my impression as well, although from my perspective the first thing that came to mind when seeing what equates to “people who give head are funny/inferior/gross” was the homophobic component.
So, yeah, exclusionary indeed.
lotharloo
Yeah, I mean they’re wishing for me to be raped by a thousand men, that’s totally funny, hahaha.
If you must be as childish and dim as they are
Don’t be ridiculous.
Ah, yes. I indeed assumed that the criticism was because of the var being sexist or homophobic or such. And I do not disagree that it doesn’t belong into professional code, that’s what I meant by calling it “childish”.
@23 Giliell
Oh, but it does, it’s just that the prudes are the bros. They make a huge fucking deal about how awesome it is to receive a blowjob, but they demonise the person giving it to them. They are the ones who think a particular sex act is disgusting and dirty and makes the people who practice it inferior and deserving of mockery. Sounds like prudishness to me (as well as the obvious sexism and homophobia).
As for the sexual innuendo and the jokes, i’m all for it, but not if the “joke” is how disgusting i am for participating in a particular sex act. If that’s someone’s “joke”, they can fuck off. And no that doesn’t make me a killjoy with no sense of humour….it makes them prudes and homophobes and whatever else the particular “joke” entails.
@26 Caine
No you’re not alone, that makes total sense – I agree it is sexist.
Cain @22 yeah, I guess I can see that. It’s one of those things where the term head “technically” is all-inclusive to all genders, but given the context it’s probably most often interpreted in either a 1) sexist manner, or 2) homophobic manner as Dreaming @29 stated.
Frankly I never understood why the fact that someone “gives head” is an insult…it’s basically an accusation of generosity. Ok, I do…but it shouldn’t be!
@26 Caine && 34 Loud:
well, that’s what I would call over-interpretation. I would never even think in that direction. But again, I am quite isolated from the dudebros, and have probably read way too much Oglaf to see any problems with fellatio.
I’m guessing now would not be a good time to bring up the ‘bjobs’ command used to submit batch jobs in the CERN computing network…
The anti-SJW crowd insist on the right to uncontested speech. Chomsky wrote
on the topic back in 1994 in the context of The Bell Curve controversies:
“Part of what is happening is simply a scam. The trick is to take some
position that will be greatly welcomed by the powerful (say, the editors
and readers of the Wall Street Journal, etc.) with no need for concern
about the status of the alleged empirical grounds or the validity, or
even sanity, of the arguments.
Service to power will suffice to guarantee rave reviews, massive
exposure, huge sales and the other corollaries to service to power. Then,
the authors pray that someone will condemn them — if not, they can
invent it. At this point they can portray themselves as tortured victims
of powerful forces — like Black mothers, the radicals who (as we know)
run the universities, etc.
The original gets huge media exposure, and the suffering of the victims
who dared to brave the Black mothers and radicals who rule the world even
more so. As I say, it’s a scam, quite a comical one in fact, but one that
works brilliantly in a highly conformist intellectual culture, with
remarkable intellectual and moral standards.
The “political correctness” comedy has many of the same features. In
fact, the remarkable issue of the New York Times Book Review that was led
off by a long praise of Herrnstein-Murray had many examples of the scam:
effusive praise for a book that “dared” to say the elite had merit, even
notice of the “brave, heroic” book by Harold Bloom that had the courage
to say that students should read Shakespeare.
One must be awe-struck in admiration of this heroism. In the intellectual
culture, it is all taken quite seriously, an interesting indication of
that culture’s character. “
Marshall @ 35:
It’s submissive, so it’s something only lesser beings would do, women, or those other women (gay men).
Prae @ 36:
Gosh, it’s just so darn sweet it’s over-interpretation to you, and that you would never, ever, think like that, after all, you don’t have to, so…
If you’re sensing a hearty fuck off and shut the fuck up here, give yourself a gold star. Check your fucking privilege – just because something hasn’t happened to you does not mean it isn’t pervasive and a major problem for other people.
Are you truly this fucking stupid? No one here is talking about problems with oral sex.
penalfire. Really?
:eyeroll:
Next week, in Pedantic Programming Purges: the removal of standard (std) namespace from C++. We can do without all those STD jokes, thankyouverymuch!
Needed a name to post here.
Him the Almighty Power
Hurld headlong flaming from th’ Ethereal Skie
With hideous ruine and combustion down
To bottomless perdition, there to dwell
In Adamantine Chains and penal Fire,
Who durst defie th’ Omnipotent to Arms.
alkisvonidas
If you don’t understand the problem, it’s OK to just admit that you don’t understand.
alkisvonidas:
Did you actually read the post, follow the links? Or do you belong in the ranks of the truly stupid also?
Obviously. That doesn’t, in any way, negate the eyeroll.
Look, the name needed to be changed. If for no other reason then because it’s in a context that people don’t want to run into stupid jokes. Much like the gene Sonic hedgehog got renamed when it turned out to be significant in a number of diseases. Because no one wants to have the doctor tell you that you’re dying of a mutation in your sonic hedgehog: that sounds like they’re making fun of you at a tragic moment. Change the stupid name and stop whining about it.
@chigau
You are absolutely correct. I do not understand the problem, which is to say I do not understand why there IS a problem.
Let me clarify: I do not in any way approve of Oliver’s banning, or the harassment, or the overall storm in a teacup produced by those who either defend or oppose his bug fix. I find it absolutely baffling that the issue would produce anything but amusement. Now, if I were the one to evaluate the bug fix, instead of making a fuss about PC and SJW, I would simply maintain that altering functioning code in order to remove an (admittedly) accidental innuendo is not the way to do things. And that would be the end of it. No need to ban anyone. No need to start howling.
But just because I don’t approve of the way Oliver was treated doesn’t mean I have to take his bug fix seriously.
I intended to answer the question “really?”, not to negate your response to the name.
Now I feel a bit bad for naming my local variables of types SPRoleAssignment and SPRoleAssignmentCollection ass and asses respectively.. however working with these classes I can confirm their stubborn nature.
@48 alkisvonidas
You’d also be maintaining the unprofessional nature of your software, and the hostile-to-women culture of your community. Good job.
@Caine
I should very much like to see you try to substantiate that. Because I can easily see how you can think I’m inconsiderate, insensitive or ignorant of my privilege, but stupid? Or is that your generic term for “people who disagree with my viewpoint”?
alkisvonidas @48:
With modern software engineering tools and techniques, there is absolutely zero risk to a change like this. None. Tools allow automated renaming of variables, never mind that this is a local variable with the scope of a few lines, and unit tests would fail with any errors. If there is no risk, why is this not the way to do things?
alkisvonidas @ 52:
You want me to substantiate a question? Well, perhaps it has been answered.
sqlrob:
And have the dudebros being made to think about things like sexism, exclusion, privilege, and moronic senses of humour? Never!
If it’s “pedantic” to change those jokes, what was it to make them in the first place? Why is it a problem to correct those mistakes but not to make them?
@39 Caine
Not just submissive. For many, it is also strongly linked to the idea that anybody else’s cock is disgusting (or at least they make a lot of noise about how disgusting they think it is, whether it’s true or not, just so that others know).
alkisvonidas
Oh, good, I guess that settles the discussion and solves all the problems. Just pretend there is none and declare all people who say there is to be wrong because you say so.
@Loud – warm smiles do not make you welcome here
I’m sorry, I’m really having enormous difficulty taking any of this seriously, and I’m pretty sure it’s not because of my male privilege, but because of the utter triviality of the issue.
Unprofessional? Hostile to women? Do you have any sense of priority? One variable name, one that might have been constructed out of an entirely reasonable template, happens to also allude to a sexual act, so what? What is offensive to women programmers is to say that they can’t handle one suggestive variable name!
I mean, why don’t we also rename Uranus, it’s been the butt of countless jokes (no pun intended). If you understand why no-one in the scientific community has bothered to do that, you will also understand my point.
@57
But make sure you do it with an air of patronizing mock-professionalism so that any possible response from the other person can be written off as over-emotional or reactionary.
Whoop, there it is. Knew that canard was going to get dragged out eventually.
“Stop complaining about sexism, you’re the real sexist for thinking women can’t handle sexism!”
Screw up a variable renaming and you’re not even going to hit the unit tests, you’ll get compile-time errors, with a handy indication of exactly where you missed each change.
Wrong. The offensiveness lies in the unprofessional behavior that adds such a unnecessary name to the code. You fail/don’t want to understand that. It isn’t professional behavior to either add the name, or object to changing it.
Do you have any sense of irony?
Gods, women can handle lots of shit, the question is, why should we?
Why the fuck should we always have to put up with some additional level of bullshit put into our ways?
@58, alkisvonidas
Why, it’s offensive to women to say that they can’t handle being cat-called whenever they’re walking outside! Why, it’s offensive to women to say that they can’t handle having men touch them without their consent! Why, it’s offensive to women to say that they can’t handle being told to “smile!” Why, it’s offensive to women to say that they can’t handle a steady stream of crude jokes in a professional setting!
Yes, we *do* handle that shit. And we’re FUCKING TIRED OF IT. One ‘small’ incident might be easily brushed off, but existence for women is not one small thing, every great once in a while. A single snowflake is nothing, but a blizzard is made up of single snowflakes, and women are trying to wade through that every single fucking day of their lives.
And if you think that’s trivial, because you don’t face it, you are an asshole and you should feel bad.
R is interpreted. Not sure how picky it is about variable names though.
Vivec @ 60:
That’s such a chestnut at this point. I suppose we could safely assume alkisvonidas didn’t recognise theirself in this ever so helpful cartoon. Ah, nothing like the screams of “we must defend the status quo” in the morning.
alkisvonidas
Since it’s all so trivial, why not be the bigger man and just change the variable name?
@Dreaming of an Atheistic Newtopia
Because it wasn’t a joke:
In other words, it was not intentional, it wasn’t created as a joke, therefore it was named this way for some other reason. Presumably a good reason, but hey, who cares, it’s offensive and it must go.
I really haven’t got the hang of this “being sexist without even knowing it” thing, but I’m learning.
@Caine
Oh, I see, it was a question, not a statement! My bad.
Say, are you always so dishonest in your discussions?
It is indeed a quite trivial issue, but in this case, it is the other side who’s overreacting over it, generating drama about teh_SJWs and banning people. Also, I don’t know what kind of IDE you guys are using, but Eclipse and the JetBrains-derivates are quite good at renaming it everywhere. Even more, if that guy actually submitted a pull request where he did the work already, and the tests still run through, merging it should be a non-issue.
No, as someone already pointed out with modern refactoring tools available in any IDE you can change variable names willy-nilly without fear that you’ll miss, duplicate or shadow. Whatever the merits of any of the arguments, the danger of changing a variable name is nonexistent. Unless you are stuck in 1989 with emacs.
Now you’re kinda getting it.
It’s great when people try to be sarcastic but end up actually correct.
I think the variable in question was in the source for R itself, not in some other code written in R.
Caine@40: “It’s submissive”.
Friendly amendment: it’s coded as submissive (in one or more pernicious codings of human behaviors; and of course the coding of “submissive” as “not an acceptable way to be [for men]” can also be pernicious).
Yeah, I know, I do this stuff for a living… My point was that even if you’re using a plain text editor and a command-line compiler, a change to a local variable with a well-defined scope is very low-risk.
Which is partially in R. I went to the code, this was in str.R.
@Dunc
Well, I’m still here, so… yes?
@Giliell, professional cynic -Ilk-
Why the fuck should other people do maintenance work with the sole purpose of shielding your eyes from the unspeakable horror of offensive variable names?
@chigau
I’d have to know a lot more about R programming to answer that, but I wouldn’t automatically assume the ones who DO know and oppose the change are doing so out of sexist motives.
Which, you know, is basically what everyone here seems to take for granted.
Leerudolph @ 74:
You’re right, and that’s an important distinction. Thanks for the amendment.
@58 alkisvonidas
You think that variable name is professional?
Yeah, it’s just another microagression in a long line of microagressions.
Yes thanks. You’re the one here getting all upset about changing a variable name. I mean, sheesh, is it that important? Even if you don’t think it’s a problem, can you not even see that others might?
Wow. You can’t be this clueless, right?
Also, why should it matter if it’s interpreted or not? As long as you don’t expose the var to external libraries or use some reflection dark magic or suchlike, it’s name is absolutely irrelevant for both compilers and interpreters. See Javascript minifiers, they work by giving variables to shorter names, among other things.
Don’t accuse people of dishonesty when you turn right around and claim that we think this is some huge deal or “unspeakable horror”, because that’s simply a misrepresentation. It’s an incredibly minor detail, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth changing on principle.
Why the fuck are you defending the easily changed variable name, other than to be offensive?
You have nothing.
As has been pointed out to you there is no risk to change it. So pray tell, what motives remain?
alkisvonidas:
So, you didn’t read the post (there was certainly no comprehension going on your part) or click the links and do the rest of the reading.
Whoa. When I post something, and turn around a short while later and see 80 comments and growing, I just know some clueless idjit has shown up and is obstinately defending stupidity. And I’m never wrong.
RowanVT
QFFT
Especially when it’s something that happens in our free time. We cannot avoid putting up with that shit in our professional lives (->points to next thread “Smile”). I teach adults. I have the equivalent of a Master’s degree. And I cannot count the amount of men who think it’s funny or original or appropriate to tell me how lucky my husband must because I’m obviously so good at cleaning because I’m quite adequate at wiping the fucking blackboard.
But they’re my customers, my job depends on them returning for the next semesters, so I laugh and smile and they never know that this is totally not OK.
If you’re running a project that depends on people voluntarily putting in their time you should think very hard about things that turn people away from your project.
Looks like the slymepit has slopped over to here.
@Vivec
The fact that you are entirely serious fills me with despair.
@Loud – warm smiles do not make you welcome here
In the words of one Philip J. Fry, “I wouldn’t count on it”.
But seriously, “i” is a fairly common indicator of integer (or Apple products, but I digress), “Head” is commonly used for the first item of a list or the address of a pointer, and I can easily imagine that “Give” is the canonical term for returning an item.
But noo, obviously the name was created as a microagression against women, even though the very person submitting the bug fix doesn’t think so. You would know better.
My mistake.
Wait. Nobody is asking anybody else to do any work on their behalf. Somebody spotted the issue, made a patch, and submitted it, other people have then voluntarily reviewed it and voted to commit. Job done, free, gratis, no need for anybody else to do anything. Then somebody entirely else pitches a shit-fit about it and starts banning devs – i.e. making extra work for themselves in order to punish valued and productive members of the community for having fixed this. Seriously, who is getting things out of proportion in this scenario?
@88 alkisvonidas
No one is claiming it was created as a microagression against women. The OP even highlights the fact the the person submitting the bug report even said he didn’t think it was intentional.
But intent isn’t fucking magic. It still looks like a bad blowjob reference. This is not difficult.
Are you actually capable of doing anything but spouting sexist canards and attacking strawmen?
I’m terribly amused by the fact that alk has responded to just about everyone else… except me.
Apparently they understand that acknowledging the constant stream of low-grade shit women deal with daily turns into a giant steaming dump truck of shit when viewed overall will prove that they are being an asshole.
If you don’t have coverage, you don’t necessarily know the impact in an interpreted language. If the build process lints, likely no difference. If it doesn’t, you better have coverage, since the runtime behavior can change based on a typo. Compiled fails fast. Interpreted fails or behaves differently when it hits that line.
a_counter = 1
while a_counter < 10
a_countr = a_counter + 1
I guess more the issue could be better qualified as explicit declaration required or not versus interpreted or compiled.
Giliell:
There’s a thought. It’s a pity so many people are proving themselves to be utterly thought-free.
alkisvonidas @ 88:
The fact that you are entirely serious fills me with despair.
Despair. Really. Goodness, it must be absolutely crucial to your existence that iGiveHead be maintained! The Dudebro culture is in danger, sound the alarms! For fuck’s sake, do you hear yourself at all? Why is it so bloody important to you that this change must not be made? (Even though it was changed, and all is well in the world.)
Rowan
Oh, and me. Invisible female pixels again…
@Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls
It is obviously no use to try to convince you that I have no intention whatsoever to be offensive. I’m defending the variable name on the basis that it may well be part of a consistent naming scheme, in other words it may have other merits. I don’t know that it is “easily changed”, and I’m not the one to decide it.
Again: the (ugly, overreacting) way people opposed the change does not prove the change was the right way to go.
Now feel free to pigeonhole my motives.
Nobody gives a shit about your intentions. They’re quite meaningless when it comes to the actual effect.
Hey alkisvonidas, I wonder if you would be defending the variable if you knew that the person who wrote the code, when informed of the slang meaning of the var, as English wasn’t his first language, was super embarrassed about the unprofessional nature of it and asked the dude in the links to go ahead with the patch. Or this the hill you stake your internet reputation on, the great battle to prevent the ebil jackbooted SJWs from taking away your trite and tiresome juvenile humour from within the coding community?
Well, thankfully, there’s like three or so people in this very threat who have pointed out how trivial it would be to rename it. So, with your sole objection gone, what else?
@alkisvonidas 88
You keep going on about people here thinking that the name was created to be offensive, and now that it was created to be a microggression. Microaggressions often simply are microagggressions because of the cultural context. Are you going to end the cognitive distortions of what you perceive at some point? At them minimum you could have the decency to quote the people accusing the coder of being deliberate.
alkisvonidas:
Hey, Stupid! Yeah, over here. I mentioned, upthread, in explaining the negative nature of iGiveHead that while it wasn’t intentionally sexist, that doesn’t stop it being perceived that way by, well, everyone. Most people’s minds would go straight to one place upon seeing iGiveHead, and you well fucking know it, too.
If that were the case, then I imagine those who originally objected to the change might have mentioned that at some point. They don’t seem to have.
No, it’s down to the patch submitter and the reviewers to decide that. They apparently decided that it was.
As far as I am aware, there is no suggestion that anybody involved ever even attempted to provide any legitimate reason for objecting to the patch.
alkisvonidas:
It was changed. The sky did not fall. Coding goes on. So does life. And as your reading skills are so fucking abysmal, I’ll quote Arawhon, @ 98, so you can’t miss it:
It’s very telling that these SQWs have to blow things completely out of proportion and pretend like people are rabidly foaming at the mouth over something small, so that they can feel perfectly justified to rabidly foam at the mouth over something even smaller.
@96 alkisvonidas
Liar. You are attacking the people who wanted a change on the basis that to you they are pedantic. Don’t change your tune now.
What did the iGiveHead variable do? He doesn’t say, and he says himself that he thinks it was unintentional- it could just be an ivar that indexes into the beginning of an array slice. In which case the name is perfectly apt but has unfortunate connotations in our dialect.
The reaction is of course wholly predictable, open source is almost synonymous with sociopathic male — when they rejected his patch in the first place as “shit-stirring” they were completely accurate. It doesn’t change how the software works in any way, and it pokes the little Eric Cartman who lives in the brain of every lonely dweeb software dev.
It’s a totally defensible and obvious change, it’s a good thing they accepted it, but open source culture is extremely political and clique-driven (and all the while they insist it’s the opposite) and it’s not a surprise that the patch became a holy war, because everything is a fucking holy war to these people. They don’t know how to understand interpretations or shades of meaning, they don’t respect other viewpoints and are used to only the most facile and self-evident values.
(I guess on the one hand I’m glad a woman won’t feel excluded or offended when she reads the source, but on the other I don’t understand why she would waste her time interacting with the people who wrote it, let alone giving two fucks about what they think about women.)
They’re coming for our:
1) video games
2) porn
3) code
You aren’t listening. You are trying to pull a “dear Muslima”, when a simple change to the code would solve the problem. And did.
I will acknowledge that the name might have been done naively. If so, the originator should learn like any professional from their mistakes. It is unprofessional to complain about correcting the name when it was easily done. There should be no ruckus, simply “I’m sorry, it is now fixed”. End of story.
But Nerd, if people react to criticism graciously and respond accordingly, the SJWs win!1!
Imagine, we might someday live in a world free of sexist microaggressions in coding! What a shame that’ll be.
Just a quick note (as the author) on the methodology; it was comments left on my blog, rather than harassing emails or whatever (actually, all the emails were alternatingly nice messages of support or heartbreakingly similar stories). That’s how I was able to easily tie the source website to the message.
Back when I was an EECS student at UC Berkeley (latter half of the 1960s), there was a check in the FORTRAN compiler for a list of 4 letter words attributed to an Anglo-Saxon origin. If the compiler found one used as a variable–often inserted in frustration by some poor student who was having trouble getting his program to run–the compiler would throw a high level error and terminate compilation.
Mind you, I never encountered the error myself, but I saw listings from others who had. (I did once–years later–get a “D” level error from a COBOL compiler. That level of error meant the compiler had found some problem it couldn’t deal with and ended unsuccessfully. They were rather rare.)
@Caine
To what, indeed? I realize this should have been my first question, but somehow I’ve missed it.
alkisvonidas @ 113:
You have missed every single fucking thing. I asked you, repeatedly if you read the original post, and clicked through the links. “Somehow missed”? I don’t think so. You simply refuse to see or read anything that might go against your view. FFS, from the OP, right up ^ there:
I’m not clicking links and doing your reading for you. Do your own fucking work, and try to comprehend what you read.
@whheydt
Neat! Who implemented it, the Bastard Operator From Hell?
“We do nothing for users. We do things TO users”
But then again, the card reader must be protected from profanity. It’s only logical.
alkisvonidas, #48
Why not?
Moreover, if it is being acknowledged that it is a) accidental and b) innuendo that people are objecting to, then why is removing it not the way to do things?
Isn’t that precisely the correct way to do it? When you mistakenly/unintentionally do something that a group of people finds objectionable, you correct it, right? What do you lose? It was unintentional to begin so you should have no dog in the fight, right?
You, alkisvonidas, are a fucking disingenous asswipe.
This discussion remains me of another one yonks ago about an bit of standard naming in the Unix/POSIX/Linux core API. A new process (broadly speaking, a new program) is started with with
fork(there is nospoonorchopstickorknifeor similar, albeit there there is mostly-unrelated commandfinger). The creating process is generally known as the parent, and the newly-created process is universally called the child. When you want to force the child to terminate, you usekill. This lead to the observation that a “parent kills their child”, which the individual making that observation was very uncomfortable with, and felt that “kill” should be renamed.Renaming “
kill” is a non-starter, unlike in this case, as it is used all over the place, and there are many variants on the name. So the suggestion was never going to fly (rather like a certain parrot).There was, as I now recall, quite a long discussion about this, mostly (as I now recall) trying to reassure the individual that that unfortunate interpretation is reading something into the naming that wasn’t intended (rather like this case), and that this was a case of anthropomorphizing an inert representation of an algorithm. Also, the terminology child and (especially) parent are conventions; and there are quite a number of other names which can be used instead (albeit you may first have to explain what you mean).
The thing I now recall about the incident was that it was quite polite. No name-calling, tantrum-throwing, etc.; there may have been some outright dismissal of the individual’s concern (I don’t recall), but there definitely were people who saw — albeit few-to-none who concurred with — the suggestion and the reason behind it.
“Clearly this would be a big deal to change, and I’m ignoring every post that explains why it was completely trivial to change. Also, I’m going attack a strawman over and over while dredging up sexist canards.” pretty much sums up alkisvonidas’ contribution to this thread.
Hey, proof that Canadians are nice! Or at least not arseholes.
I had read the start to this story before, found it shocking and yet so familiar, and *totally missed* that the author was a man — I read the whole story with a female narrator, because the link I’d clicked on was posted by a woman sharing a post by a woman who shared this link. It’s good to see that arseholes are equal-opportunity, I guess?
Keyes’ endeavor kind of reminds me of the Recurrent Fury paper, which was analyzing blogospheric responses to their prior paper.
Hmmm…. I’m terribly conflicted on this convo.
I see how a variable name like that would be cause for concern. However, there are valid reasons a variable (or method, class, proc, etc) might end up with a suggestive sounding name that has absolutely nothing to do with micro aggressions.
For example: I’m working on a game right now that has “IGetHead”. When I wrote it, I thought to myself “Oh no, really!? Well, can’t really be helped.” Our naming convention is such that, in this case, I can’t rename it without going against our conventions and causing a whole lot of changes and confusion. In isolation, “IGetHead” sounds bad but we also have “IGetBody”, “IGetRightfoot”, “IPutHead”, “IPutBody”, etc.
I guess my point here is that context does matter, in some cases. Not knowing the context of the variable name, I can’t immediately condemn it, and doing so based on incomplete info only gives the douche-bros ammunition against valid cases.
* I’m speaking to the variable name referenced in the article, not to any of the other stuff that occurred regarding the bug fix, etc.
@Saad
Again: the sexual reference was unintentional, but there was some other intention behind the name choice, that must also be maintained. I understand that the original coder didn’t want an accidentally offensive name to remain in the code. That doesn’t tell me how minor the impact of changing it would be, and therefore if it’s worth the trouble.
Let’s say you change it to iGVHD, as proposed. Very well, you have removed the innuendo and created an opaque variable name. What about other “safe” variable names that perform similar functions? Should they also change?
So whether or not you have something to lose depends on how extensive a change you have to make, to correct what is essentially a matter of aesthetics and not functionality.
That is my whole point, and has been since my OP.
Aside from your attempted “Dear Muslima” and constant strawmanning, presumably?
“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. “
The coding convention arguments are dubious. Here is the entire coding convention where I work:
(1) Follow the existing code. Even if you don’t like it.
(2) All reasonable exceptions are allowed.
(3) A “reasonable exception” is anything the developer and code reviews agree on.
Guidelines 2 and 3, or variants similar to them, should be in any coding convention: They are always situations that simply aren’t covered or which present a difficulty.
This unfortunately-named variable is an example of the later — a difficulty — and hence guidelines 2 and 3 should be used.
It’s that simple.
Why?
blf:
That’s because a discussion about parent/child isn’t threatening to dudebro culture.
YOB @ 121:
Y’know, in this thread, you’re being just another guy who is fogging the issue to no point. The name was reported, which should not have been a big deal at all, but look at the reaction it garnered – that is the fucking issue. I’m getting the feeling that it wasn’t just alkisvonidas who didn’t bother to do the reading.
Giliell, #126
Why, to stick it to the feminazis of course.
blf@118: some older CS research talks about father/son relationships instead of parent/child. I feel really weird when I read that usage, which indicates that by the mid-1990s it was already old-school.
There’s also the master/slave relationship, which is decreasingly common, thank goodness. The main branch in a source control repository is often called ‘master’ but its offshoots are ‘branches’ — I always interpreted that as being based on a recording master, but what is *that* a metaphor for?
The ‘finger’ command is … unfortunately named for the dirty-minded. It’s been obsolete for about 15 years already, which limits the impetus to do anything about the name.
As for ‘fork’, the analogy works far better as a fork in the road than as a utensil. But when you fork a process you create a branch in the process tree. Leave no metaphor unmixed.
@121 YOB
That’s interesting, thanks for sharing. However, correcting the unintentional “joke” is benefitial and doesn’t cost a thing, so this is a no brainer. Fix it and move on.
Unless you are alkisvonidas or any of the other complete and utter wankers that made a huge fucking deal out of a small and easily fixed matter because reasons.
alkisvonidas:
I’ll ignore the two one-liners before this, which you actually opened with, since they had no discernible point:
(1) You’re baffled. (2) The way to do things is not like this way but is like your way, whatever that amounts to. (3) Your way would be to declare that it won’t change, bug fix not taken seriously, the end.
This doesn’t seem to be making a point like “whether or not you have something to lose depends on how extensive a change you have to make, to correct what is essentially a matter of aesthetics and not functionality.”
There’s not even a hint that your way would be to thoughtfully and seriously consider how much trouble it would be to make the change. It just isn’t your way, because you’re baffled that anyone else would think that it is some kind of a problem to fix (however difficult fixing it may or may not be). So your “point” was either that you don’t take it seriously, therefore no else should — or more literally, you only wanted to point out uselessly that you don’t “have to” take it seriously, even though you (or anyone else) might actually have a reason to do so. But you’re baffled, so you’ll dismiss it out of hand before you even try and for apparently no other reason than your own personal bafflement, which I guess is the completely arbitrary way it’s supposed to be done. Not sure where that’s written in stone, but you’re the expert here.
Oh, come on. How bad a programmer are you that you can’t change a variable name without it causing all sorts of problems? Changing variable names is trivial, at least in a reasonably workable programming language. I admit, I’ve never used R, so maybe it’s a crappy programming language where things can’t be changed without creating major problems.
I’m curious as to why you’re willing to spend so much energy defending a decision that’s already been reversed–the change was made, apparently without any dire consequences, over an issue that you called, upthread, “trivial”. Why do you care so much about this “trivial” issue that you have to keep talking about it?
Probably not the reason at the time: This was over two decades ago, on USENET, albeit not-quite pre-WWW. I do not recall if the newsgroup was moderated or not. Anyways, very probably well-before this toxic “culture” existed, other than in perhaps a few deranged loons’s fantasies.
blf @ 134:
Heh. I was active on Usenet back then. Yes, there was more politeness all around, but there was plenty of toxicity boiling underneath.
ummmm, I thought the OP was not so much about the variable name and the refusal of the source to adjust it, but more so about the Vox cabal outrage against something so trivial, that it produced a way to qualify the use of the insult “arsehole”. All the discussion about the silly variable name seems to be missing the point.
single word: focus
Me @ 135:
Adding to this – even with the general politeness, the discussion of parent/child would have differed wildly over one of iGetHead or similar, even back then.
blf,
Same where I work.
Yes. Even ignoring the über-toxic
alt.*cesspool, there was an astonishing amount of sexism and bigotry (and very probably other toxic idiocy), but my own biggest annoyance was all the woo-woo.Probably not the reason at the time: This was over two decades ago, on USENET, albeit not-quite pre-WWW. I do not recall if the newsgroup was moderated or not. Anyways, very probably well-before this toxic “culture” existed, other than in perhaps a few deranged loons’s fantasies.
I’d be interested in hearing how women perceived USENET culture, Back In The Day. My suspicion is that although there have always been a lot of toxic *people* out there, it was easier for the sexist jerks to pretend that everyone agreed with them–in part because of the general lack of uproar over things like ‘finger’ and other microaggressions. Now that they’re being called out on it, it’s that feeling that the greater culture is slipping away from them that’s made the dudebros as loud as they are, and essentially concentrated this previously pervasive background sexism into a festering boil of toxic culture. All IMHO, of course.
And between the time I started to write my last post and the time I posted it, I got my answer. Color me unsurprised.
On the claim the
fingercommand / protocol was deliberately named as a microaggression: I’ve never heard that before, and a quick check with Ye Pffft! of All Knowledge does not agree:I have heard the “snitch” connection before. An ASCII-art drawing of “the finger” was, unfortunately, a too-common part of some
.planfiles.@130
In the vinyl days the master was actually called a “mother.” Somebody got the idea that this should be a little more obscure though, and so the term you hear nowadays more often is “matrix,” which of course is the exact same word.
The word “master” is sortof evocative in that there’s always only one or a few masters but thousands or more copies. Also the machine producing the master was often itself a “synchronization master” to which other playback equipment was “slaved,” and in that case it’s a lot more obvious the idea that’s trying to be conveyed.
@blf–further upthread, you’ll see a whole lot of women saying that *it’s not about intent, it’s about effect.* And if the effect is that women are made to feel unwelcome in ways that men aren’t, then the intent doesn’t matter. OTOH, not changing something that was done inadvertently when called on it? That’s intentional.
the “controversy” or shit storm surrounding the simple name change which has already been accomplished with only minor delay is really amazingly strange. I am not a programmer but what I see in this reminds me of the funny signs and product labels that occur where some one makes a label for some product or puts up a sign in english and because they do not speak english very well makes a big mistake and says something absurd or suggestive, there are whole web sites dedicated to them some are very funny. What is so strange is some ignorant people seem to be defending the original mistake by making excuses for it and questioning anyone who points it out.
Like defending the ADD copy for the camper that ended with has marine sanitation that sleeps 4. I know what was meant but still no one remembers who made the camper.
uncle frogy
The “
master” SCM naming convention is not, in my own experience, all that common. Another frequently-used name is “main“, at least one notorious system uses “trunk“, and if you consider really old systems, they didn’t have names at all — they used dotted-numbers (e.g.,3.4,1.3.3.5.7.9, …). Offhand, however, I cannot recall any alternative to the terminology “branch” — I assume because, especially in the older systems which lacked the concept of a “merge”, if you drew a graph representing the relationships, you got a tree.Y’know, the conversation about naming conventions is interesting, but I wonder, have you all noticed that it’s happily ignoring the issues here? This happens every time there’s a discussion involving sexism, and even more when there’s a discussion about consequent dudebro reactionism.
johnwoodford@144: Yes! I would not limit it to females, but that is a minor quibble.
I am puzzled, however: What are you responding to? That variable should be renamed and there is no obvious technological reason not to do so. There may be a procedural problem, but as per me@125 and, implicitly, Beatrice@138, all that means is the procedures are borked.
I suppose you may be responding to my
finger@142, but the connection eludes me. The finger command / protocol is basically obsolete and a historical curiosity, and frequently not even deployed thesedays. As far as I am concerned, it should simply be retired.@ consciousness razor
Those two one-liners were all I intended to post. They were obviously (in retrospect, not so obviously) jokes, and their point was to say that (1) I consider the matter trivial enough to joke about it, and (2) I’ve known of several such naming blunders in the past, that have only produced amusement to men and women alike.
Then, I was called stupid, I was told I don’t understand the problem, that I’m a terrible human being, and so on and so forth. My mistake was that I didn’t leave the discussion there and then.
@dianne
FFS, I’m not. What do I care what variables R programmers use? See my reply to consciousness razor above. This whole thing boils down to that I don’t consider that variable name to be a big deal, while others do. It doesn’t follow that I want it to remain there in order to insult women, or that I agree with Oliver’s harassment. That’s reading too much into my motives.
If we could just agree to disagree, this whole argument would have been unnecessary. In any case, it’s pointless for me to go on arguing, so that’s that.
Caine@147, Random drift, not a conspiracy. Focusing largely on that idiotic “culture”‘s absurd overreaction to a trivially-fixable oversight is something like Whack-a-Mole. Or creationism. Or the diagram poopyhead posted a few days ago.
Yes, it is quite important to address it. To move people away from the toxicity. To enlighten and inform people. To challenge dubious claims. Or, if all else fails, to get a few forty-foot high killer rats stomping about the place.
What do you use? It’s the default in git.
Would you believe that the person who wrote this:
also wrote this:
Tell me you’re surprised…
Giliell @ 152:
Just once, I wish I could tell you that. Unfortunately, I can’t.
sqlrob@151, “
master” is not used in SCCS, RCS, CVS, SVN, ClearCase, and so on. I use GIT whenever possible. GIT is commonly-used, so “master” is commonly-used, but that is not the sense I meant. (And as per Caine@147, this really does have ziltch to do with the issues, however interesting it may be.)@Giliell, professional cynic -Ilk-
Well, if you had bothered to also mention that in the second quote, I was replying to the specific question of what reasons one could *possibly* have to keep the variable name (or doing a consistent renaming), you could easily believe I said both.
But anyway, I stopped caring when you said that my intentions are irrelevant, which is a rather funny thing to say in a discussion. If it’s an honest and earnest discussion, that is.
Yes, that’s obvious.
Why
Non sequitur.
I judge you by what you say, because that’s the only thing I can see. Your intentions are purely in your head and therefore not actually something I can judge.
We, like most contemporary sj discourse, hold intent tertiary behind actions abd effects.
That statement flatly contradicts the facts. You’ve written how many comments now about a decision to rename a variable. A decision that has already been made. The variable has been renamed. Every argument about how renaming it would make life harder now applies to the new, renamed variable. Why can’t you let it go? Just say, “Eh, doesn’t seem like an important issue to me, but if renaming makes people happy, it’s not my problem.” That would be that. Instead you spend multiple posts complaining about how this decision, which you describe as “trivial” was made in a way differently than what you would have done. That suggests that either you are rather obsessed with the issue or really just don’t have much to do. Why do you care so much?
You stopped caring, so you made 14 comments about it?
OK.
@Vivec
Are you saying that you see no difference between someone who holds genuinely sexist views and acts on them, and someone who obliviously blurts out something you find sexist or offensive? Or that the difference is unimportant?
Such a view might help you feel self-righteous, but it’s doing nothing to promote honest discussion. People *do* usually try to assume good faith when talking to others, you know. And while you are absolutely entitled to find my viewpoint insensitive, or wrong, if you are going to call me an asshole* you are definitely reading into my intent.
*not you personally, is that clear?
Anyone who spends that much time arguing about a point doesn’t actually think it’s trivial. It always goes this way though, doesn’t it?
Minor problem
Quick mention
Easy solution
OMG WAIT WHAT DID YOU DO WHAT IS YOUR PROBLEM WHY DO YOU CARE SO MUCH WHY ARE YOU MAKING SUCH A BIG DEAL OUT OF THIS
Calm rebuttal that it’s not a big deal and was already taken care of
I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU SPENT SO MUCH TIME ON THIS TALK ABOUT WASTING TIME ON MINUTIAE
No, it really wasn’t a big…
YOU ARE SO SENSITIVE YOU ARE BEING RIDICULOUS AND BLOWING THINGS OUT OF PROPORTION
Jackass
SEE YOU’RE BEING SO EMOTIONAL AND YOU WON’T STOP TALKING ABOUT IT AND DEMONIZING EVERYONE INVOLVED
Read what I said again. Intent is tertiary, not irrelevant. That being said, what I care about is that they’re doing a thing (action) that hurts other people (effect), and whether they stop doing the thing (action) when that is pointed out. Why they did the thing in the first place doesn’t really matter too much to me with that in mind.
I’m not saying that I’m assuming bad faith of people, what I’m saying is that I judge people primarily on what actions they do to hurt people and what they do when it’s pointed out that they’re hurting people.
Not necessarily. If it appears your a trolling for effect, there is no reason to assume your posts are in good faith. I don’t believe they were. They were a “dear Muslima” campaign to belittle those objecting to something that, by professional standards, shouldn’t have been made public.
Honest mistake? Maybe. But once corrected, there should be no feedback about correcting it. Unless you have an agenda…..
Yeah, you’Re positively radiating so much good faith I need to wear a hazmat suit
If I may make an observation: It appears to me that the reason alkisvonidas has written so many posts on this subject is that he’s replying to the (many) posts of those attacking him. Skimming through this discussion, I noticed at least two posts by people complaining that he hadn’t replied to them. In this context, it seems peculiar that alkisvonidas is catching flak for the number of posts, rather than (or rather, in addition to) their content. He’s clearly dug himself into a hole, so maybe just give him some space to climb out of it with a semblance of dignity.
I lurk here a lot and rarely post, but one thing that turns me off a bit is the dogpiling (even when someone seems to deserve it). Not to judge, I just thought I’d add a viewpoint.
alkisvonidas:
You don’t. You haven’t done that once in this thread. You’ve argued to no point, you’ve argued when you’re willfully ignorant of the facts, you’ve argued that it’s the wrong way, you’ve argued it isn’t your way, you’ve argued that it would cause major work, you’ve argued it would make more work for someone else, you’ve argued that it isn’t really sexist, you’ve argued that women are the real sexists, and you won’t shut the fuck up about how much you don’t care about any of this. You have not once argued in good faith, and you sure as shit have not listened to anyone else in this thread, and you have shown zero signs as to taking anyone else in this thread as being in good faith.
Honestly, you should simply shut up, but that seems a bit beyond you.
@Giliell, #24
Thank you, this makes a lot of sense, especially the part about control.
(I came to the conversation in the same shoes as @prae, and my answers would have been very similar to his).
That seems problematic Vivec. Turn it around– do you think people should judge social justice advocates by their actions and effects, before considering their intentions? On a certain level you need to accept someone’s intentions before you can evaluate their actions and effects, without some prior understanding on intentions, we have no framework to assign actions and effects value. Discounting intent seems like a strange thing for social justice, unless you’re asserting people’s actions are to be judged against objective moral values?
seleukos:
Right. We should just all be quiet while shit floods the thread. If alkisvonidas had bothered to read in the first place, perhaps they would not have missed everything. If they had paid attention to any of the people who first responded to all the wrong, there wouldn’t have been any need for all the posts, including the mass amount that are all about alkisvonidas not caring a whit about any of this. Not judging, you understand, just a viewpoint.
sigaba, some reading for you: Intent is not magic.
sigaba, some reading for you: Intent Is Not Magic.
I had a look at the actual code, the `give.head` construct seems inescapable (the rationale for using a verb for a variable name escapes me though) but the `iGiveHead` variable name is entirely out of place and does not fit with other names.
It was a completely unnecessary choice.
Whoever wrote it knew perfectly well what they were doing, and choose to make a stupid joke.
This should not have passed code review in the first place.
I’m not suggesting you or anyone else should be quiet. I just find it ironic that someone is bombarded with posts and is then faulted for writing many replies. I don’t agree with alkisvonidas in this thread, but I see how being called stupid when he was only making a couple of jokes in reference to similar coding conventions would cause someone to become defensive. It went all downhill from there.
sigaba
Yes.
Easy answers to easy questions. If you think that the end justifies the means and you can’t make an ommlette without breaking some eggs you ain’t no friend of mine.
Let’s get back to basics:
You step on my foot. Let us assume it was not your intent. Does it hurt any less?
I say “Ou, this hurts!” and you go “why are you making such a fuss, it was never my intent to step on your foot!”
I say “get the fuck off my foot!” and you go on about how I’m just such an awful person cursing at you when you never intended to hurt me while ignoring the fact that my toes are bleeding.
Tell me, how much does it matter that you never actually intended to step on my foot?
Your intent matters when it comes to how we react after something bad has happened. As in the example above, the normal way of action would be for the person who stepped on my foot to remove their foot quickly and apologise. I might still be angry because the toes are bleeding and if they’re broken I’d still be justified in bringing civil charges but I’d probably not call the police.
And after the person broke three of my toes because they never give a fuck about where they go, their lack of ill intent becomes irrelevant.
If the intent was to step on my toes and hurt me, a call to Law Enforcement might be due.
That’s why intent isn’t the most important thing. The most important thing is to asses the damage and care for the person hurt.
If the paramedics showed up and spent the first 30 minutes consoling the person who didn’t intent to break my toes instead of taking care of my broken toes I’d rightfully be pissed.
Don’t care. I could give less of a shit about intent, but it’d be an amount imperceptible to the naked eye.
If someone calls me a slur, I don’t give a shit whether they’re malicious or just ignorant. They did a shitty thing, hurt my feelings, and are an asshole if they keep doing it after being told that they did a shitty thing.
@160:
Hmm. You and your friend are in your yard tossing a ball around. On one of your throws, you miscalculate and your friend misses the catch and it goes through the neighbor’s window.
Now, you didn’t “intend” to throw the ball through the window. Your “intentions” were for you to throw the ball to your friend and for your friend to catch the ball.
But all your intentions didn’t stop the ball from going through the window. The window is still broken no matter how much you try to explain your intentions.
And you are still responsible. Oh, your intentions might help us to determine if you’re a jerk or not, but your intentions don’t absolve you of responsibility. After all, someone who throws a ball deliberately through a window is different from someone who did it accidentally and even in accidents, there is a difference between someone being a blithering idiot who isn’t paying attention to what they were doing and someone who was actually paying attention but had some bad luck.
The window is still broken because of what you did. Own up to it and do something to fix it.
F.O
Don’t assume that. English has way too many expressions for oral sex and completely weird constructions.
I remember when I learned about hand jobs and blow jobs in Ireland (cause those are usually not terms taught in highschool and introductory level university classes) and then I found one of my housemate’s magazines lying around on the kitchen table and it talked about Miss World or something like that with the headline “Of sleazy men and nose jobs” and I was wondering how the literal fuck that is supposed to work.
The difference is that the one who broke the window unintentionally (or broke the toe) would have to apologize and pay the cost to fix the damage, while the one who broke it intentionally is a sociopath who should be rehabilitated in some way – the crudest one being to punish them in a way that may deter them from doing it again. They’re both made to pay, but it’s the jerks that we punish.
There’s no need to speculate about variable naming conventions. Here’s the actual changes that were committed to the actual file:
https://github.com/wch/r-source/commit/dcbf8084e4a2cd3f4c9005ad3c7e9f753272845f
They renamed “iGiveHead” to “which.head”. The original name did have a contextual meaning for programmers outside of nasty jokes, but considering how the variable is populated, the new name is arguably is a more-informative variable name than the original, even if the original hadn’t been unintentionally offensive.
And the world keeps turning.
seleukos
Congratulations. You once again completely ignored the perspective of the person suffering the damage and completely concentrated on the person who did the deed.
The point: Look over your head and to the right, that’s where it flew.
@170
While I take the point, I’m not sure the titling of “iGiveHead” constitutes an act tantamount to murdering a transwoman on the street, or justifying it, or even tolerance of it.
(But then again, the entire article is framed as “sarcastic,” so any point I might try to make out of it can instantly be disclaimed as either a joke or an exaggeration. That’s the thing with sarcasm, no matter how good or bad a point it makes, arguing with it is a mug’s game.)
Nor am I sure such a thing is a demonstrative of any sort of systemic or institutional oppression or bias. That’s the thing with systemic problems or a “functionalist” approach to social problems — simultaneously everybody and nobody is at fault, it becomes this huge and, this is important, totally impersonal entity, and wether individual acts are part of the dysfunction is totally non-faslfiable. Everything stops being about individual human beings and their problems, their errors and their virtues, and everything becomes arguments over generalities and abstractions.
Also I know this was dealt with upthread, but I’m not sure why “giving head” is being coded here as particularly female, or if it is sexually submissive why that would be objectively harmful. I think you can only make that conclusion if you were to read into the writer’s intentions, and read into them far beyond the reach of any evidence. But intentions, they are fucking magic, in so many ways.
Microaggressions, part of institutionalized bigotry. Educate yourself.
Sorry, forgot the link in #181
Microaggressions, a part of institutionalized bigotry. Educate yourself.
blf: “SCCS, RCS, CVS, SVN, ClearCase” — oh god, I’m going to break out in hives. But you’re right, none of those used “master.”
@177:
Oh, yes. Those who do things deliberately get treated differently from those who do things accidentally.
But even those who had no malice and took precautions and still screwed up are still responsible for their actions. We can be sympathetic and say, “No, that’s OK,” but that’s for the person who suffered the injury to decide. The one who breaks the window doesn’t get to say, “Well, that’s why you have insurance,” just because he didn’t mean to break the window.
It never ceases to amaze me that people don’t get it but now that I think about it, we kinda teach kids to think this way. When something happens, we make the kid who did the bad thing say they’re sorry. And that’s good. We want to teach children to understand the importance of apologies…but then we make the kid who was wronged accept it and then neglect to follow through on what an apology is. Contrition is only half of it…restitution is required. By forgetting to make the kid who screwed up fix what he had screwed up, by forcing the other child to accept the apology, and by then making them move on as if nothing happened, we are teaching them that all you have to do is say, “I’m sorry,” and that will be the end of it, that anybody who dares demand a full and real apology is somehow “overly sensitive.”
Giliell, professional cynic -Ilk-
I think it is you who missed my point, since I’m mostly not disagreeing with you. In both cases I expect that the person who suffered the damage would be given compensation for it, but it is only in the case where the one doing the damage did so intentionally (or tried to escape culpability afterwards) that there should be hostility against them. If someone stepped on my foot by accident, I wouldn’t hold it against them. I’d tell them to get off my foot and be less careless in the future, and if toes were broken then they (or their insurance company) would have to pay for my medical costs. If they wouldn’t get off my foot, or if they’d continue to be as careless in the future, I’d start to ascribe their actions to arrogance, rather than ignorance, which is a form of intent. When someone tells you not to step on their foot and you do so anyway, that is a form of intent. It’s not the absence of it. You intend to ignore that other person, even though they have told you that your actions cause them harm.
If the paramedics spend 30 minutes consoling them instead of tending to your foot, you are indeed right to be pissed.
And see, I don’t give a shit what the intent behind their decision to remain standing on my foot after I tell them not to. All I care about is the action (continuing to stand on my foot) and the effect (my broken toes).
@174
Vivec, while nobody should offend you, I hope you consider the possibility that even someone who offends you may be a good person.
(I’m trying to construct a sentence where I’d tell you there are more important things than what someone’s language makes you feel, but I can’t find a phrasing that wouldn’t be mad-mau’d as mansplaining so I give up. Sorry, the language rules you folks enforce on these arguments make it impossible to voice disagreement without being written-off.)
@182
Right but at who? How do you know this is a microaggression?
@184 rrhain:
I fully agree. That’s why I made sure to write “pay the cost to fix the damage” and “They’re both made to pay” in 177. Restitution goes (or should go) without saying, but in threads like this it should be made clear.
Man, I already said that I’m not starting out assuming poor intent. What I said is that I don’t care what their intent is.
If someone calls me a slur, but then apologizes and stops, I’m fine with them, regardless of whether the original intent was out of malice or ignorance.
If someone calls me a slur and then keeps on doing it after being made aware of that, they’re an asshole, regardless of whether they did it out of malice or ignorance the first time.
@189 Let’s not overdetermine the meaning of “asshole.” :)
I work in the film industry and I know people who are ridiculously flagrant assholes who, despite their flagrant assholery in their professional life, care deeply about LGBTQ issues.
I also know a few people who would refer to you as either “he” or “she” to their dying day, who, notwithstanding that, are profoundly kind and decent.
>”I’m trying to construct a sentence where I’d tell you there are more important things than what someone’s language makes you feel, but I can’t find a phrasing that wouldn’t be mad-mau’d as mansplaining so I give up.”
That’s because there is no such phrasing. You are literally trying to get people to adopt your priorities which are going to be based on your perspective and experiences. Their priorities are based on their perspective and experiences that necessairly have to do with such things as race, sex, gender…
Additionally why are feelings of emotion a problem?
>”Sorry, the language rules you folks enforce on these arguments make it impossible to voice disagreement without being written-off.”
To what rules do you refer? From my perspective our language customs here simply reflect reality.
No one that would knowingly misgender me after being made aware of that fact is a kind and decent person, by my standards. That’s pretty far in “ignorant, douchey bigot” territory.
Easy, listen to those who are not privileged if they say it is. You can’t do that until you learn how to shut the fuck up and listen. Otherwise, you come across as privileged ‘splainer.
Here’s a rule of thumb. If something can be solved by saying “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that, this is the fix”, the problem ends there, especially with an inadvertent microaggression. A classic example is with Matt Taylor, and his girly shirt during the ESA broadcast of the Rosetta probe rendezvous with the comet. The SJW folks shut up after his sincere apology.
Those who won’t let the incident go, are the MRA fuckwits like Pox Day (or a lesser degree Dawkins), who can’t stand to have anybody, much less any woman, tell them they are wrong. And their bullying tactics shows just what nice and concerned citizens they are for all people except themselves and their dudebros….
F.O.:
It has already been stated and established that the person who did the initial name was not a native English speaker, and was unaware of the slang usage. Do not be spreading shit all over the place.
@Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls (#108)
The originator did:
(from comment #98 by Arawhon, So Tired of Everything
It’s the usual douchenozzles who are making an issue of this.
@195 johnmarley:
I thought #98 was hypothetical. Did it really happen?
@191
That’s the problem. The experiences of a privileged person are worthless, privilege taints everything a privileged person knows, the beliefs of a privileged person are fruit from a poisoned tree. Oppression is the only way to actually know anything about culture; the privileged simply float on a cloud of lies and social constructions. The privileged must simply shut up. Your position is for epistemological closure, just who’s epistemology is moot.
They’re a very important problem, but we can’t judge things by how much it hurts our feelings.
Yeah that’s always how it apparently works. But there’s a of course a huge open debate over wether language customs reflect reality or actively construct it.
@193
Right, the guy who wrote the code was really apologetic and they accepted the fix. Thus it’s not a microaggression, by your definition, though I don’t know if your criteria really reflects what is meant by the term. The fact that people made a stink about it after the fact can’t retroactively make it into a microaggression — at that point I think it’s probably just plain aggression with the code as some sort of proxy.
When I was introduced to the term microaggression it made perfect sense because of a useful synonym, “maintenance dominance behavior”. They are meant to be lots of small things that keep one compliant instead of big intense displays, like the ones one sees when the microaggressions are challengedb (to reestablish control). For example the reactions that one sees to challenging cat-calling, or racist/sexist insults in online/gaming environments or many other things that have been covered here. It’s perfectly consistent with dominance psychology, it’s just that the dominant group often tends not realize what is going on even as they respond based on how they were role-modeled (the “good ones” anyway).
Johmarley #195,
Yes, if the originator of the code OKed the changes, the issue is now dead as far as I am concerned. We all make mistakes. Admitting them and learning from them is how we keep improving professionally and as a person. (Been there, done that.)
Yep, the sun set in the West tonight per usual. Some things are totally predictable.
sigaba:
NO. Profoundly kind and decent my rosy arse. No one who actually met the description of “profoundly kind and decent” would deliberately misgender, and continue to misgender a person who had made their preference known. Anyone who did that would be acting as a profound, committed asshole, one who did not care in the slightest about the harm and distress they would cause.
@197 sigaba:
I believe microaggressions do not require awareness on the part of the one making them. For instance, one may honestly believe they are giving a compliment when they say “you are so good at math, even though you’re a girl!”, but on a level beneath their awareness it sends the message that girls are inherently worse at math.
This case, from what it appears, isn’t even on that level. The one who wrote the initial code hadn’t internalized some social idea that women exist to give head to men, he simply didn’t know English idioms well enough to know what that series of words meant. The ones whom the OP focuses on are those who DO know what it means, and tried to block its change because they felt persecuted by PC culture, or something like that. They are the ones being improper about it.
seleukos:
Why in the hell would you assume that? Another idiot who couldn’t be bothered to read before jumping in, mouth wide open, without a single thought in their head. Christ.
@202 Caine:
Because #98 was phrased as “I wonder if you would be defending the variable if you knew that…” which sounds vaguely hypothetical to me. It doesn’t say that is the case and ask if alkisvonidas would still defend it. I may not be a native English speaker, but I like to think I manage basic reading comprehension, thank you very much.
@200
Caine, while I totally accept people who identify trans, or third sex, or none, or any other designation they feel suits their sense of their body, their mind or their conscience, I don’t know where you or anyone else gets off prescribing the correct understanding of the nature of gender. Gender is culturally constructed, that doesn’t mean you can ignore it or disregard it, but it also means that nobody has any kind of final authority to say what gender “really” is.
Again, I notice this use of “asshole,” because the speaker is trying to sidestep the question of wether a person is doing good or bad things, and just wants to substitute an argument about how much a person’s behavior offends them personally. If we’re just talking about privilege here, privilege is a bigger problem than just the people that piss you off, and privilege isn’t just the integrated sum of all asshole tendency in our society. I assure you there are a lot of people out there who actively sustain privilege in out culture, but who do nothing that offends you personally, they aren’t assholes. If the assholes are the only people who really upset you, you’re going to just end up sustaining a different kind of privilege.
@198 & 201 That makes sense, my understanding of microaggressions is about the same.
Male geeks, who, as we all know, are supremely rational, as a principle never argue about any trivial matter. Only whiny SJWs ever do such things. Right?
Also, when I ask you not to refer to me as something, and you ignore that request, that’s just not freaking “kind and decent” – a more innocuous example perhaps: when I tell you “Don’t call me buddy/Carl/[whatever], I hate that word/name and it triggers some crappy memory [I go by my second name instead, Ray]”, and you say “OK, buddy/Carl/[whatever]” (without immediately apologizing and vowing not to do it again – and then actually making an effort!), even though it would mean no significant cost for you to comply with my request, I’ll just assume you are an obnoxious jerk at best, and avoid you from now on.
People not wanting to be called the name in their birth certificate or on their IDs is not that foreign of a concept. Remembering the correct pronouns may be trickier in some cases, but should not pose an insurmountable problem for a person of average intellect in the medium term. Mistakes happen, but usually you can tell when a person does not even make an honest effort to respect your preferences.
And when people inform you that certain language makes them uncomfortable and asking you to avoid it in their presence (which happens to be the very concept this whole shebang is about) and you refuse to attend to their wish even though the effort to do so would be negligible, you’re just an indefensible asshat.
Misgendering people knowingly = Intentionally causing harm = Bad thing
People that do bad things on purpose = Asshole
That a little easier to understand?
@Giliell, @Caine: It is a bit more than an assumption, it’s my educated opinion.
*All* local variables in that code have short, contracted and mostly lowercase names such as “uo”, “larg”, “str”, “ss”, “sL”.
`iGiveHead`is the *only* local variable that is long and non-contracted.
It really, really stands out, it breaks convention.
Regardless, all this is irrelevant to the matter at hand and I shouldn’t have posted about it in the first place.
Bullshit. Doing something unethical? Asshole. Doing something harmful to others? Asshole. Doing something like knowingly misgendering someone? Asshole.
You preferring to sidestep actual bad and harmful behaviour by insisting that some people who commit intentional bad acts, such as misgendering, are profoundly kind and decent people? That makes you an asshole.
It is sad that so many clearly intelligent people have such a difficult time parsing why igivehead was undesirable. I am very glad to know about Oliver, and that he not only understands, but is also taking a moral stand and refusing to be part of R because of the brogrammer behavior he got from it’s head, Mr. Murdoch. This quote comes from one of the links in the OP. I thought it bears repeating for all the people in this thread who keep insisting how very trivial and unimportant this is.
If your response to someone pointing out that something is exclusionary is to immediately start telling that person their concerns are trivial, baseless whinging , you are exemplifying the problem. See also sigabas response about intent. ( hint for sigaba : no fool, if somebody refuses to address someone using that persons stated preferred gender pronouns, they are being disrespectful and inconsiderate.)
Ironholds @ 110
Hey, thanks for taking a moral stand and working to make the world a better place. Sorry to hear you have been targeted by brotrolls. They’re simply the worst humanity has to offer, all rolled up in one entitled package.
First, I giggled, because apparently I’m an adolescent male at heart. I’m typically the person snickering and going “heh heh, you said…”, or giggling at words like “duty” or phrases like “lay waste”. *shrugs* Might as well own it. (I’ve also been known to have Came Out Wrong moments where I was saying something totally innocent and it sounded so, so dirty…)
Then I adulted: “That’s not appropriate for a workplace environment, so it should go.” We can discuss why it’s inappropriate until the cows come home — and where does that phrase come from, anyway, ’til the cows come home — we can talk about it for weeks on end, but it just comes down to a big old “Dude, no.”
Intentional, entirely unfortunate coincidence, doesn’t matter much the ‘how’ or the ‘why’. The rather unfortunate variable in question should be removed simply because it’s really inappropriate in that setting regardless of who may or may not see it.
@sigaba
This is where you appear to be replacing the things that people are saying with your own version combined with a lack of knowledge of important areas of knowledge and experience.
>”The experiences of a privileged person are worthless, privilege taints everything a privileged person knows, the beliefs of a privileged person are fruit from a poisoned tree. Oppression is the only way to actually know anything about culture; the privileged simply float on a cloud of lies and social constructions. The privileged must simply shut up.”
This is simply a textual temper tantrum.
You were NOT told that the experiences of a privileged person are worthless, you were told they were are worth less.
No one said anything about oppression being the only way to know a group of people, but people here are saying that the oppression they experience is important to them and want it addressed.
No one is saying that the privileged, which includes me by the way, must shut up, people have said that people who are privileged need to know when to shut up.
>”Your position is for epistemological closure, just who’s epistemology is moot.
You will have to explain your philosobabble. My position is that when people are an authority about their lives they get to speak with authority about their lives and ask us to listen to them on matters pertaining to their experience. When many of them say the same things we have even more reason to take them seriously.
>”They’re a very important problem, but we can’t judge things by how much it hurts our feelings.”
You seem to have little knowledge about emotion and feeling and how they work. I said “feelings of emotion” because emotions are like programs that run in response to something in perception. Programs coded from previous experience. Programs that determine changes to perception, cognition, and actions. Literally every conscious act we take uses emotion. Feelings are the sensation of emotional programs as they are being carried out. We can learn the self control to withhold action until we are sure or to develop multiple responses to individual things, but that changes nothing about the fact that we FEEL our use of reason and logic just as much as we feel a fight on the internet.
Negative emotion always comes with reasons for it and those are what we judge. I listened to the people here and I judged what they said to be of merit and value so I choose of my own free will to act in a certain manner because of my privilege, for rational and logical reasons. You don’t get to offer something so thin on reason or logic and get more from me than a contemptuous sniff as I keep on doing what I am doing.
>”Yeah that’s always how it apparently works. But there’s a of course a huge open debate over wether language customs reflect reality or actively construct it.”
And until you explain the relevance to this person who has spent the last six years studying the neurobiology and psychology of his cognitive advantages in rule-based language processes gifted by tourette’s syndrome he is simply going to sniff some more while he laughs. I’m not going to simply take a wave at reference to debates from you, I need to see the reason and logic for why I should give a fuck.
That is some cowardly bullshit. You seriously just waved away complaints made by a significant number of categorically similar individuals via something you did not even take the time to establish any reason or logic for. I see people up there explaining how collections of behaviors affect them, you at the minimum have to provide specific reason and logic from the actual debate and tie it to what is happening in this thread. At a minimum.
@sigaba
Also you never answered the question, to what rules do you refer?
I fully acknowledge that the communication environment here can be challenging and hard to figure out, especially for people who are privileged relative to others (in fact that is in all likelyhood a necessary side effect of addressing that privilege). There are a lot of implicit/covert phenomena. So I’m not expecting a huge amount of rigor or precision on this one, but it would be nice to have something.
@206
I know Vivec, but the point is they don’t think it’s a bad thing, some people don’t believe misgendering is a thing, and there’s nothing you can point to in the world that can disprove them, except for your personal experience; so it’s advisable to talk about your personal experience and how it relates to other people’s personal experience, instead of labeling.
@211
I’m not sure even that’s acceptable, it’s still an argument ad hominem.
I’m not sure what any of that would have to do with the nature of language. Have you ever read any Roland Barthes? Or Eco? Language is not a physiological or scientific phenomenon; some people argued language was rule-based, but from Sausseuer to Derrida most people have rejected that hypothesis. (A lot of libertarian dorks with a background in computer programming seem to think human language can be fit into a rule-based schema but the reality of human interaction is obviously very challenging to them.)
I mean, when you say like, “from my perspective our language customs here simply reflect reality,” that’s a totally unsettled idea, it’s crazy contentious that anyone can relate their internal semantic conceptualizations (like, abstractions like “gender,” and “oppression”) to objective reality through language. It works as long as everyone agrees on certain aspects of the meaning of the terms, but when you run into people that don’t accept the prior semantics, everybody immediately runs to the callbox and pulls the “asshole” handle. That’s shitty.
The real concern is that even people who agree with you don’t completely accept the meaning you’re using, they just accept your value assignment, so terms like “oppression” become merely shibboleths, tokens clans of people use to identify each other but are contextually meaningless.
“Uses conventional gender pronouns = Asshole” would be the dictionary definition of a shibboleth.
And my point is that I don’t give a shit. If they want to keep being an asshole after I point out that they’re hurting me and others by misgendering us, they’re welcome to do such. Hopefully, society will eventually get to the point where misgendering assholes are ostracized and hated as much as other kinds. Then, there’d at least be a risk of social capital from being overtly transphobic.
Believe me when I say that I don’t give a shit. As long as it gets people to stop misgendering others, I’m not really bothered by what fancy term you want to boil it down to.
Like, as if it’s any news to me that someone can otherwise be nice but doggedly refuse to change the one thing they’re shitty about. My grandma was the sweetest old lady there was, before I came out and she decided that she didn’t too much like us queers – and especially didn’t like us trans people.
I told her in no uncertain terms that was hurtful, and she didn’t relent. So, I told her that she’s free to write me off her will, because she’s an awful person and I want nothing to do with her. She died with us never having reconciled, and I can’t say that I’d have done anything different in retrospect. Assholes are assholes.
@sigaba
>”I’m not sure even that’s acceptable, it’s still an argument ad hominem.”
Bullshit. Adhoms have to do with irrelevant characteristics. Your profound lack of experience of the lives of others is quite relevant.
>”I’m not sure what any of that would have to do with the nature of language.”
It’s mostly rhetoric, but the point is you have some work to do if you want to dismiss what real people right here are saying, and on top of that I know a thing or two about language, cognition and society and experience it at a different level than you. But obviously you don’t have to take my word on that, just like I’m not willing to take yours without more than some assertions and names.
>”Have you ever read any Roland Barthes? Or Eco? Language is not a physiological or scientific phenomenon; some people argued language was rule-based, but from Sausseuer to Derrida most people have rejected that hypothesis.”
Bull fucking shit. Language is not a physiological or scientific phenomena? Pubmed begs to differ.
Language is in fact being studied with the scientific process regardless of your ignorance, and changes to physiology do in fact alter language use. As a simple example emotional changes are physiological changes and emotional shifts in the perception of language are a major component of motivated reasoning.
Your name dropping is unimpressive until the value of the names is explained. I don’t care about assertions about rejected hypotheses, I care about specific concepts, the observations that supported them, and the reasoning and logic behind the rejection. All else is fear-spawned noise.
>”I mean, when you say like, “from my perspective our language customs here simply reflect reality,” that’s a totally unsettled idea, it’s crazy contentious that anyone can relate their internal semantic conceptualizations (like, abstractions like “gender,” and “oppression”) to objective reality through language.”
Holy fuck.
Just answer the fucking question already. What rules are you talking about? This garbage has no anchor to reality until you actually cite the rules you were talking about. You know, the objective reality that goes along with your reference to “…the rules that you enforce…”? This garbage might even be totally unnecessary but I can’t figure that out until you tell me what rules you were talking about. Goddamn you are whiny.
It’s still craven and cowardly to gesticulate at some controversy without explaining it. Not remotely impressive.
>”It works as long as everyone agrees on certain aspects of the meaning of the terms, but when you run into people that don’t accept the prior semantics, everybody immediately runs to the callbox and pulls the “asshole” handle. That’s shitty.”
And language objectively evolves around that as the centuries pass anyway. WE choose to be part of how it evolves in this way. If you don’t like it you don’t have to actively participate, but you are simply not going to be able to assert that your feelings can’t be hurt by criticism when you are not willing to respect the feelings of people here when they try to explain why you are hurting theirs.
Hell I have a neurobiological explanation for why these gendered differences in language perception likely exist based on the contents of “Self Comes to Mind” by Antonio Dimasio and how the neuroanatomy of emotion likely connects to language processing, but that is actually irrelevant to your inability to describe the things you want to wave away with mere references to disagreements.
>”The real concern is that even people who agree with you don’t completely accept the meaning you’re using, they just accept your value assignment, so terms like “oppression” become merely shibboleths, tokens clans of people use to identify each other but are contextually meaningless.”
What the fuck are you even talking about?
I have seen people get very specific here when it comes to oppression and on top of that you did not seem to have a problem with my description of microaggressions, though that could have been in the abstract. Let’s just say that a psychology like mine knows quite a bit about how one person oppresses another and how one group oppresses another. That problem with insults and pejoratives that some of us possesses, and the problem with boundary violations that we had to learn to control when children has to do with dominance and opposition psychology. You really have no idea just what the things you like to talk about looks like in neurobiology and psychology do you?
>“Uses conventional gender pronouns = Asshole” would be the dictionary definition of a shibboleth.”
The dictionary only covers language as it is currently being used. So my response would be, so what?
They’re not being faulted for writing too many replies. They’re being faulted (or at least commented on) for writing at all on an issue that they argue is too trivial to worry about. If they really thought the problem with the code were too trivial to worry about, they’d have shrugged and said, “whatever” to the whole argument or possibly commented on the harassment being bad and stupid. But to continue to argue that a change that has already been made should not be made is to suggest that you don’t like the change itself. They’re being faulted for the dishonesty of claiming to not care when they clearly do care and clearly desire the microaggression to be left in.
@#48, alkisvonidas
Considering that the Linux kernel team has repeatedly and deliberately changed both names and interfaces to the kernel in order to specifically prevent people from developing software for Linux*, you would not be prioritizing things in the usual open-source way, then.
*Specifically: in order to prevent closed-source device drivers for Linux, which were (and still are, although the Kernel team was sufficiently excoriated by just about everybody that they are gradually abandoning this standpoint) held to be a Grave And Serious Threat To All Things Open-Source, the kernel interfaces were continually changed without need or warning in order to render closed-source device drivers obsolete as fast as possible. This is why Windows and Mac OS X can do things like put devices to sleep when the laptop lid closes, and then wake them up again, while each individual installation of Linux tends to have to be tweaked for an eon before it can do some of the same things: the actual manufacturers, who don’t want to expose their own code, are basically told not to write drivers for their hardware for Linux.
On the off-chance that you’re sincere, here’s an analogy.
I’m a native speaker of English who learned Dutch as an adult. There are certain vowel combinations in Dutch that I cannot reliably distinguish (such as ou and ui). This isn’t because I’m a bad person or something. It’s just that I didn’t grow up caring about the difference between the two sounds. I didn’t speak a language where that difference mattered, and I have relatively little talent in acquiring languages.
As a result of this, my opinions on Dutch spelling and pronunciation are worth less than the opinions of a native speaker, or someone who can hear the difference easily. They’re not worthless; I can still proofread my kids’ school essays and give less-experienced Dutch speakers hints on improving. But if there’s a native speaker around, I know when to shut up. I know when it’s time to let someone with more knowledge and experience of the subject at hand take the floor.
Another analogy: I have a friend who is profoundly red/green colorblind. Whose opinion is worth less about the color of a shirt? Is that a moral statement or a practical one?
Pretty straightforward, huh? And yet as soon as we’re not talking about Dutch pronunciation or clothing color, as soon as it’s the experience of women in the workplace or the world, suddenly the idea that if you haven’t got any experience in the topic you should listen to people who do becomes enormously offensive.
Isn’t that interesting? It points to something big and complex. I’d think anyone with the most basic curiosity about the world, the most elementary love of learning for its own sake. might want to spend some time digging into it.
This whole kerfuffle reminds me strongly of this recent Wondermark comic: http://wondermark.com/c1195/
Sigaba
Get off that cross, will you?
That’s exactly the case of privileged whining that makes any discussion about privilege so damn exhausting. In my example you’re the person who keeps standing on someone’s foot while feeling unfairly maligned by the demands to get off that foot.
Head->Desk
“This hurts my feelings” is the one and only way to judge whether something hurts our feelings. And since this is important when considering things like hostile environment, stereotype threat, bullying and burnout it is curcial to pay attention.
Are you paying attention? It’s a microaggression regardless of intent. Because nobody who sees the code can know “oh, this person was totally unaware” and it will not keep anybody from making 1 million unfunny jokes about oral sex.
Right. But people get the final authority to say what gender they themselves are. To disregard that identification is not a matter of “public debate” or “ongoing construction” but an act of aggression against trans people and an act of extreme assholishness and transphobia.
If a person knowingly behaves in a way that “offends” (misgendering somebody isn’t just about offence) somebody they are doing a bad thing.
Very easy example: my mother in law has a second name she just hates. Now, there’s nothing wrong with that name. No horrible connotations or anything. And it’s her official name after all. Using it would still be an asshole move because I know she hates it and it costs me absolutely nothing to use her first name.
And just to make this clear: hurt feelings are not “nothing”. They are actual harm. Trans people commit suicide because of the accumulation of thousands of people doing all those things that “hurt feelings”.
Now you’Re moving into plain asshole territory. It is totally irrelevant whether they think it’s a bad thing. The harm is done nevertheless. Just because Republicans believe that climate change is a lie doesn’t mean their SUVs don’t add to the problem. “This hurts my feelings” is plain evidence that something is a problem that hurts feelings. And quite apart from hurt feelings and suicide rates we can point to the violence against trans people, to legislators who want to be able to inspect children’s genitals to determine their correct gender (usually we have a word for grown men who want to look at children’s genitals for their own satisfaction) and so on and so on. To claim it doesn’t is being a transphobic bastard.
Nope. Just like my opinions on evolutionary biology are worth less than PZs and his are worth less than mine on teaching English as a foreign language.
Yep, and unlike you I even understood what he said. Because if you did, you wouldn’t name-drop Barthes and Derrida and maintain that language isn’t really important in the greater scheme of things so intentional misgendering has nothing to do with whether somebody cares or systems of power.
evilrooster
But your experience qualifies you much more on “problems English native speakers have with Dutch”. As a language teacher, the “native speaker approach” annoys me the fuck to death. But that’s a side issue.
I love the way we are asked to not judge something if it hurts our feelings on the basis that it doesn’t hurt somebody else’s feelings. A pattern demonstrated multiple times in your posts, by the way. You are not the center of the universe. And yes, your privilege is making the shit you say completely worthless with respect to this particular discussion, not because anything “privileged person” says is worthless, you dishonest twit, but because you appear to be incapable of getting the fucking point and therefore what you are saying is constantly and obstinately missing it (which is what privilege does).
Also, Sigaba, learn to fucking read.
Dunc, #220
Dead on.
Nope. It’s a statement of fact. A cis-white-male should not tell anybody else what they should think. They should listen to women on women’s issues. They should listen to LGBT on gender issues. They should listen to POC on racial issues. That’s called learning.
It is offensive for that privileged cis-white-male to tell those not cis-white-male what they should think, how they should think, but they do it anyway. If they do, they are over bearing privileged assholes. Don’t be one.
F.O.@208 – yup, seems fishy indeed, like a strike of the adolescent brain.
There’s unhappy words littered around code I’ve written that came about from a frustrating work session, so fundamentally I understand the urge to be unprofessional. I’ve been called on it once in a while. It’s never been a big deal: you fix it and move on.