For people who don't see what's wrong here. The issue is not about whether the word 'retard' is or is not offensive to anyone. You need to consider that GitHub currently hosts a large percentage of the web's open source repositories. This is censorship plain and simple, something that IMO has no place in open source. The issue is that there are plenty of things some people might find offensive on GitHub but you dont see them threatening everyone with takedown notices. It is the selective censorship of certain reasonable uses of free speech that is concerning here. Retarded is off limits, but cursing is okay (maybe?). Who decides what is and is not appropriate?
1. This isn't censorship of the type that is illegal or not allowed. It is a private company deciding a word was inappropriate.
2. It seems like most in this comment thread agree that this action, as a singular act, is a good thing. The word was offensive. Github asked the repo to change it. They did. The end.
3. As for the larger context, the problem with the frequent use of slippery slope arguments and cries of "censorship" is that people are choosing to die on some pretty ridiculous hills.
4. If or when Github actually does something truly abusive of their power to censor, then I'll worry.
"This isn't censorship of the type that is illegal or not allowed. It is a private company deciding a word was inappropriate."
As a Github user, that kind of thinking worries me. Google Code went away, and Sourceforge started packaging adware and spyware with other people's projects. They could do this because "they were a private company". Now Github's management is starting to throw their weight around. We now need to think about a backup plan in case Github management gets out of line. All their value, after all, is created by others.
Not to say that Github couldn't close down some of their API endpoints in the future (like reading issues/comments), but they're one of the web services I use that I _don't_ actually fear lock-in on.
Let me add Launchpad.net (Operated by Canonical of Ubuntu Linux fame). They recently added Git support, albeit in beta and still quite rudimentary supported.
That said, if I recall correctly - the whole Launchpad platform is Free and Open Source Software. (https://launchpad.net/launchpad)
I know gitlab has an option to log into your github account and I believe you can copy everything down.
I use gitlab pretty much exclusively and I prefer it to github by a large margin.
I do maintain a "public"(you likely won't come across it unless you know about it) gitlab server and host a few people's repos including my own. I mean you have to trust me instead of github, but the server is always up to date, and I won't take down anything that isn't illegal. If anyone is interested, feel free to shoot me an email.
Glad to hear you like the import function. It works pretty reliably although it can struggle when someone imports 400 repo's (10GB+) with one click of the button, but we're working on that too.
That is fine as long as it is just you by yourself finding a place to stuff code nobody looks at. But if you have a long-term open source project homed at Github, your job uses Github, etc. and all your workflow and historical data is already tied to Github, it does not really help that the code could be stuffed on some other server.
Well, this is the fundamental problem of trusting private companies to build, maintain, and run public infrastructure, or at least, infrastructure which is treated as de facto public. They do in fact own it, and, being a private business, they are in fact going to respond more to mob upsets and strong-arming than to any kind of liberal (in the classical sense) principle.
If you wanted some liberal principle, there's an organization lying neglected in the corner whose charter says it more-or-less cannot censor anything under any circumstances. Or you could start it as a commons trust, or a users' cooperative, or some other form of organization that would ultimately leave your source repo company more accountable to its users than to baying mobs of internet raiders trying to threaten ad revenue with bad publicity.
There are competitive services available, you know. You could host yourself with Gitweb, Gitlab or if that's not your cup of tea, then simply switch to Bitbucket - they're even allowing private repos for free! Vote with your legs.
That's not the only reason people use Github. It's the Facebook of programmers in some sense and it's got a critical mass that switching to something else is not practicable (not without some serious momentum).
I think this is an unfair jump because they do have a legitimate business model with enterprise revenue - they don't need to start owning your life to continue to exist.
The "Facebook of programmers" is a great analogy. Because while the masses act like they cannot live without it, those of us who just don't use it really do not feel like we are missing anything in our lives.
There are other Git services. There are other source control mechanisms. There are other ways to do things. Just like you can actually leave Facebook, feel free to leave Github. Or stay. But make a conscious choice.
It is not a "kind of thinking", it is a simple statement. The word "censorship" doesn't work here. You may still argue that you don't like that Github behaves like that: the statement that you quoted doesn't oppose that view.
Censorship is not by defintion done by the government. It's perfectly correct to say "GitHub is censoring X on their platform".
Now censorship by the government is a much worse act, because you can't just go become a citizen of another country, but it's still censorship if a compay does it.
I use definition of "censorship" that people use when they think that "censorship is bad". Because this definition implies that this kind of censorship affects everyone and they can't do anything about it.
The other definition of censorship, that also includes private companies and people restricting some materials in their own domain can also be used — that seems to be what you have in mind. But this censorship, when you think about it, is almost always quite OK. Which contradicts the inherent negative connotations that people perceive when they hear the word "censorship".
So, for the sake of using words with definitions that don't contradict their cultural perceptions, I would stick the first definition.
Eh, seems to me there are lots of situations where censorship by private companies is a problem.
For example, if Chinese banks / communication companies / whatever refuse to do business with human rights groups, that's a bad thing even if the companies acted without being explicitly ordered to by the government.
And just because newspapers and TV stations are privately owned, doesn't mean it's a good thing if they all decide not to publish negative stories about Qatar/HSBC/whatever due to a profitable advertising deal. Such self-censorship, if it happened widely, would be deleterious to the independent checks and balances our democracy relies on.
Now, I agree with you that it's not censorship if Joe's Childrens Books declines to publish my manuscript "Best Of 4Chan Shock Images And Racist Jokes" - but I don't think it makes sense to ignore censorship by private companies all together, as sometimes such censorship can be deeply problematic.
I'm sorry, you must have misunderstood my point. I'm not saying that what these companies are doing is OK. I'm actually quite appalled by Github's behaviour in OP.
I'm just saying that we should use definitions correctly, and "censorship" doesn't work here.
I agree that it's not bad for them to not publish it [edit: I mean, not bad for the kids books publisher to not publish the 4 Chan book of shock images and racist jokes] (probably good actually), but does that mean it isn't censorship?
It seems like the only things which might be why it isn't "censorship" would be because either we like it (or it is objectively good by some reasoning) (which would be a terrible definition of censorship), or because there are sufficiently many comparable other options.
So, it seems that either some censorship is good, or whether something is censorship depends on what the other options for publication are?
I guess that conclusion (that or statement) is reasonable?
whoever downvoted this, that is entirely within your rights and all. I'm just a bit confused. This comment of mine seemed entirely inoffensive, so I'm not sure why it has been downvoted three times.
When I ended it with "Thoughts?" I meant to be inviting arguments against the line of reasoning that I proposed. I thought I was being fairly open minded about it.
If it is because I was allowing for the possibility of some censorship being good, know that I was not claiming that some censorship was good. I just was choosing to not immediately reject that possibility when looking for how best to define censorship. I was not arguing in favor of censorship.
I was hoping for a discussion to try to find reasons why some definitions of the word "censorship" would be better than others.
I really don't understand why my post would be sufficiently objectionable for 3 people to downvote it. I don't mean that they were incorrect to do so, their/your reasons could have been made perfect sense. I'm just saying that I don't understand what the reasons were, and I would appreciate understanding what they were or might have been (so, if you are only providing your best guess for why someone else might have, I would appreciate that also)
Let's take this a step furher, for arguments sake.
Say blogger.com or wordpress.com would delete any mention of police violence because, well, that offensive to many people. Is that censorship? If not, what should I call it?
Censorship does not require an act of Congress. Private entities are perfectly capable of censorship. How else could the term "self-censorship" have any semantic value?
Self-censorship only has value when people fear retribution by government.
"I won't use the word retard in my project hosted on github because github's TOS prevents it" is not self-censorship in any meaningful sense of the word. (Just as "Github doesn't let me spam all these users" is not Github censoring people.) Nothing is stopping you from hosting the repo in a wide number of other places.
"I won't insult my employer in this or that nation, because I risk a jail term" is self censorship.
This is nonsense. Self-censorship occurs whenever somebody censors himself. In polite conversation we might call it discretion (or valor). In a fiduciary or confidential relationship, we might call it adherence to the duty of confidentiality. In a contractual relationship, we would call it nondisclosure. In employment, on one hand we might call it professionalism—or self censorship on the other—depending on the context.
Regardless, the term "self-censorship" is not germane to or inherent in only citizen-government interactions.
People self-censor constantly on social media. You're not worried about the government taking a tweet out of context and driving your reputation into the ground, the mob of internet idiots has that covered. Fear of internet mobs causes people to censor themselves, and a definition of "censorship" that doesn't cover uses like that is not a particularly useful one.
Self-censorship as a term has value whenever people fear losing something that is important to them. With governments it might be their their career chances, personal freedom or even their life. With companies it might be your online identity, your data, your social contacts. Imagine being removed from Facebook/Google/Twitter/[your social network of choice] for writing the wrong post/email. While it is certainly orders of magnitude less threatening than being tortured by the secret police, it is still a deterrent.
I'm not commenting on this particular case, but in general I reject such arguments.
This isn't censorship of the type that is illegal or not allowed.
Neither is posting something offensive. Have you thought about that? Yes, GitHub owns the servers. If you haven't notices already, someone owns every single piece of the Internet.
people are choosing to die on some pretty ridiculous hills.
If you just ignore it, censorship and selective enforcement becomes a socially acceptable practice through sheer repetition and groupthink.
A website that, at the moment, retains a significant percentage of the entire free and open source software ecosystem. No, it's not quite as bad as genocide, but we're not suggesting putting anybody to death as a result either.
It's not a government, it doesn't have a monopoly on violence or information. People use it freely, and they can easily get most of their information out (wikis and issues no, but it's obvious that they are not part of the repo when you start to use it).
You can argue that it's bad, but for fuck's sake, don't compare it to a totalitarian regime that killed tens of millions of people. Please.
You can argue that it's bad, but for fuck's sake, don't compare it to a totalitarian regime that killed tens of millions of people. Please.
Why not? Before it became official government policy to discriminate against jews in Germany, it was considered socially acceptable to do so. Those people voted in the totalitarian regime. Recognizing this as a first step towards greater atrocities is not out of line.
Actually, it was the other way around. Hitler came to power thanks to his strong-arm leader and despite his anti-semitism. His first efforts to create hate against jews were met with resistance from german society. It took several years of concentrated propaganda to change that.
Hi. I've lived my life with a closeted gender because of words spoken by my parents, friends, and incredulous members of the LGBT community. It lead to depression, frustration, and many wasted opportunities. Now that I am no longer concealing this I still receive regular discouragement that is extremely frustrating.
The idea that "words do not cause harm" is so ludicrous. What if I started a rumor that cost you your job? What if I planted drawings (no one harmed) of child pornography on your computer? What if I reveal you perjured yourself in court?
All these things are just words. All these things could lead to consequences in your life, of varying types.
Of course semantics can hurt, obviously. But the choice of synonyms does not, and anyone claiming otherwise must try really hart to prove such an outrageous claim.
"idiot" is not a synonym for the word in question here. This is similar to saying that "t*ny" and "transsexual" are synonyms. They're not.
Let me give you an example of how referring to you in an insulting way can change your attitudes and discourage conversation.
1. Words have a lesser impact on you because you've [a lucky person] who doesn't live a life were they have been used to deny you opportunity and basic humanity constantly.
2. Words have a lesser impact on you because you're [a white male] who doesn't live a life where they have been used to deny you opportunity and basic humanity constantly.
Looking around the internet, #2 certainly seems more contentious. But let's be honest here, the overlap of case 1 and case 2 is much more likely in most of the western world than other ethnicity and gender and sexual orientation we could put in there.
The fact that you are hurt by certain words doesn't actually grant you quite enough moral authority to call up a rage-mob and apply it to the face of every entity that acts as a medium to provide an open, public space in which some people say the words that hurt you. There is real harm in rendering public space hostage to the moral outrage of self-selected groups and individuals.
It's nowhere near the harm caused by genocide, of course, but we're not even physically in the realm of genocide, so that was never an accurate framing in the first place.
Censorship is a fact of life and human experience. Calling for its eradication is to call for the erasure of a fundamental aspect of human cognition.
So we're going to apply the principle sensibly. The simple truth no one here wants to admit while they argue slippery slopes and excluded middles about how the only harm worth noting is total genocide: there is no real communicative value for github in allowing slurs on the site.
Calling the request to "find a synonym that is not in current use as a slur against a marginalized group of people" is such a modest and low impact request. It truly boggles my mind that this is the line so many people here want to draw.
>The simple truth no one here wants to admit while they argue slippery slopes and excluded middles about how the only harm worth noting is total genocide: there is no real communicative value for github in allowing slurs on the site.
That's not actually the issue at hand. Github isn't actually supposed to communicate anything at all on their site, good or bad. They're supposed to act as a platform and a common carrier for others. This requires that they not be subject to a heckler's veto, as anyone can understand if they stroll down to a university campus and look at what happens when an unpopular political group attempts to hold a meeting in a classroom (eg: they get blockaded and shouted down by hecklers).
And by "unpopular", I don't mean "Hey let's throw slurs around for the lulz", I mean, "Anything to do with the Middle East, or the Radical Students' Union, or the Campus Republicans, or anything to do with the Middle East."
> That's not actually the issue at hand. Github isn't actually supposed to communicate anything at all on their site, good or bad. They're supposed to act as a platform and a common carrier for others.
Here's the github term from their ToS that tells users to comply with local law.
Github doesn't think that Github is a dumb pipe. Github wants people in oppressive regimes to censor their projects.
> You may not use the Service for any illegal or unauthorized purpose. You must not, in the use of the Service, violate any laws in your jurisdiction (including but not limited to copyright or trademark laws).
Github doesn't want you to insult your employer if you were working in UAE. Github doesn't want you to insult various ruling families if you live in eg Kuwait.
> Github isn't actually supposed to communicate anything at all on their site, good or bad. They're supposed to act as a platform and a common carrier for others.
"Supposed" by whom?
Arguably, they might be analogous to a common carrier with regard to their paid services. Their free services appear to be provided on the basis of mutual benefit -- the consumers of those free services get the services, Github gets the promotional benefit of hosting the services.
At least in the case of the latter, Github has a clear incentive to view the exchange differently when the content exposed by the repositories in question is, in Github's view, inconsistent with the image that Github wants to present, and seems to me to have a clear moral right to decide whether or not to make the exchange in consideration of that basis, among other factors.
> They're supposed to act as a platform and a common carrier for others.
This is your projected mission. They've never claimed they should, would or even CAN do this. Feel free to find another vendor in the marketplace that will continue to allow you to protect racial slurs on the dubious mask of free speech.
But it's worth noting the case in question WAS just "throw some slurs around because we're just massively insensitive."
Now someone comes along and says:
I have been called a stupid fool all my life. I have reported this repo because it deeply offends me. We stupid fools prefer to refer to ourselves as brainless nincompoops.
Can you show people using the word "stupid fool" in hate crime? Because we can do that for the word retard.
Can you show people using the word "stupid fool" in a genocidal program of mass murder? Because we can show the Nazis testing their mass murder techniques on "retards" before moving onto Jews.
Can you show doctors not providing medical treatment to people because those people are "stupid fools"? Because we can do that for people who were labelled "retards".
Can you show doctors conducting medical experiments on people without their knowledge because those people were "stupid fools"? Because we can do that for people labelled "retard".
Can you show people being forcibly sterilised against their will because they are "stupid fools"? Because we can do that for people labelled "retards".
Can you show people being segregated from society because they are "stupid fools"? Because we can do that for people labelled "retard".
No, "idiot" is exactly a synonym, in even a strictest definition. And both versions of your sentence are equally wrong, deliberately misleading and twisted. Words have absolutely nothing to do with "opportunities" and "basic humanity".
Do you think it's clever to point out 'archaic' uses? Someone else has been trying to make the case that we also live 200 years in the past and modern social context shouldn't be relevant.
"Uh", at least try to keep abreast of the conversation "also."
Words do cause harm. It's a failure of imagination to think otherwise.
When you use the word retard you dehumanise people with LD. You contribute to a culture where it's okay to deny those people work; to segregate them in specialist housing; to deny them medical treatment; to kill them with lack of medical treatment.
It's a slippery slope to eugenics and genocide to think otherwise.
> When you use the word retard you dehumanise people with LD.
No. When I use the word "retard" I'm pointing out on a lack of mental ability demonstrated by a particular person. And I do not even want to discuss anything that contains the SJW newspeak like "dehumanise", "empower", "exclude" and all that crap.
> You contribute to a culture where it's okay to deny those people work; to segregate them in specialist housing; to deny them medical treatment; to kill them with lack of medical treatment.
Your imagination is likely boosted by an illegal substances abuse.
> It's a slippery slope to eugenics
Yes, another victim of the early SJWs. There is nothing wrong with the idea of eugenics per se, problems arise with its potential uses. I admire the eugenics efforts of Singapore, for example, and will be delighted to see where it all goes.
> and genocide to think otherwise.
It's a bullshit scaremongering to put these two words in one sentence.
People with learning disability have been the target of eugenics in various forms. They've been subjected to sterilisation sometimes without their knowledge and sometimes against their will. They've been interned in segregated care homes. They've been murdered - either directly killed because they have LD or allowed to die by doctors refusing to provide medical care or placing DNR notices without the patient's (or their family's) knowledge and consent. They've been shot and killed by police who lack skills to work woth people with LD. People with LD were used as subjects of medical experimentation against their will and without their knowledge. They were told they were being innoculated against hepititus when they were being infected with hepititus. (This was in the 1970s, a long time after Nürnburg Code and after Helsinki agreement). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willowbrook_State_School
Hundreds of thousands of learning disabled people have been killed purely because they have a learning disability. I stand by the genocide claim.
It's not "innocent derogatory language". "Cockroach" is just a word. Cockroach was used to dehumanise Tutsi in Rawanda. Use of that language was a small part of the genocide of Tutsi by Hutu majority.
We see similar dehumanising language in other genocidal actions: it's present in Nazi Germany when they describe Jewish people as subhuman - the same word has been used against people with LD. Not just by the Nazis with their T4 program[1] but also by British eugenics supporters.[2] these eugenic attitudes lost popularity after the war, but they were still easy enough to find.
And apart from these dehumanising effects the word is used to creat fear, alarm, and distress among the people it's used against. People are routinely attacked with that word.
If you think words can't hurt i) you've had a cushy life and ii) you spectacularly lack imagination and empathy.
Really: learn to English and come up with better insults.
Leanr a bit of logic. This is nowhere near a proof that a use of a certain language is a direct or indirect cause of a genocide and not just a symptom, and that censoring this language would have stopped the genocide.
Not to mention that now it seems to be a priviledge of the self-righteous SJWs to proclaim which words should be counted as offensive this week. It never comes from the minorities in question.
> Not to mention that now it seems to be a priviledge of the self-righteous SJWs to proclaim which words should be counted as offensive this week. It never comes from the minorities in question.
You're wrong. Use of the word retard has been strongly rejected by people with a learning disability in the UK. The word disability has also been rejected, which is why I use LD for learning difficulties, or I use specific diagnoses for granularity. They have rejected these terms for many years. The change in language is something they have been driving.
The word retard was used to describe these people as sub-human, as other, as not having any worth. That started in the Eugenics material from the UK and US in late 19th / early 20th century, was put into full effect in Nazi Germany (who tested their mass murder techniques on people with LD before movig onto killing Jews) and even though it slowed after WWII the attitude is still prevelant. You will still find doctors who do not treat medical problems in people with LD with the same vigour they'd treat people without LD. You find doctors placing DNR orders on patients with LD without talking to that patient or their family first.
The word retard is frequntly used during the commission of hate crime. Disability hate incidents (which aren't always crime and are not always about LD) are more common than homophobic hate incidents or religion based hate incidents.
People with learning disability live their life being bullied. A survey for UK charity MENCAP called "Living in Fear" shows how frequent this bullying is.
> A survey by Mencap of people with a learning disability has found that nearly nine out of ten respondents have experienced bullying in the last year. Two-thirds are bullied on a regular basis and almost one-third are suffering from bullying on a daily or weekly basis. People with a learning disability face prejudice and widespread discrimination that often makes them feel like outcasts and prevents them from taking a full part in society. Public attitudes in the United Kingdom towards people with a learning disability remain discriminatory. The Mencap survey suggests that the bullying of people with a learning disability is institutionalised throughout society.
If you want to cause fear, alarm, upset, distress in people who have a learning disability then please do feel free to continue to use the word retard as an insult. It's not much of an insult if the person you're speaking to doesn't have an LD; they probably don't care. To them it's just a word, like "that's so gay" or "hey my nigga" are just words.
You guys may be thinking about two different contexts:
1. calling someone with a disability a retard (which I would never, ever do)
2. using the word "retarded" in a generic sense. For example: I may have called my kids retarded, in exasperation, for doing something nonsensical. Not elegant, but has been used as a figure of speech, of sorts, for ever.
My problem with censoring words (and political correctness in general) is that it is an overly simplistic intent to make the world a gentler place - even if you forbid people from saying/writing certain words, you will not change how they think/behave.
Nobody dares to use the n... word, but there are still a lot of racists (and reverse-racists, it needs to be said) out there. The only way to fix it is education and culture - no other way around it.
Agreed, it is just that my example covered one particular race being discriminated, so I wanted to make it clear. For some reason, people think only non-white people can be discriminated against.
The difference is that you are picking on a particular nationality, while "retarded" is a generic term meaning "mentally under-developed" which, while certainly not a term of endearment, may apply to any human.
In the first case, you imply that Jews are stingy. In the second case, you don't imply anything about retards other than the normal definition of the word.
I support github banning all projects that use the word "pickle" or "umbrella" or "orange". Their servers, their rules.
I'm less touchy about mental illness words. I tend notto say anything when they're used. I sometimes say something if people (wrongly) link mental illness to violence. There has been more time for insane etc to change use.
Sure. Show me where words I use have been used by, for example, Nazis when testing their mass killing mechanisms before moving onto Jews and homosexuals. Or where my words have been used to deny people medical treatment; sometime causing the death of those people. Or where my words have been used in hate crime or hate incidents. (Hate incidents based on disability are more common than anti-Semitism in the UK, and anti Semitism is pretty common over here).
Show me the harm and I'll gladly chose differet words.
Imagine you're a parent who happens upon a repo that uses the word "retard" as a replacement for "stupid person" or "idiot". You also happen to have a mentally disabled child.
Perhaps you would have contributed to that repository and now you won't. That seems materially harmful to me, to reduce the sum total of people contributing to open source.
Compare that to the potential of falling down a slippery slope to "total censorship" and I think there's a reasonable case, in a utilitarian sense, for Github's actions here.
Imagine you're a person who hates women who happens upon a repo that uses "she" as the universal gender. Perhaps you would have contributed to that repository and now you won't. Is it therefore "harmful" to use "she" as universal gender?
"People with biases might not like it" gives basically everyone a heckler's veto. Now I recognize that you don't actually plan to give everyone with a bias such a veto - only the people you agree with - but your stated principle is not a good one.
This is a valid point. I don't really have a response to it other than, I know people like the one I asked y'all to imagine, but I'm having trouble thinking of anyone I know who might fit your imaginary person's description.
You're probably right that this betrays a bias of mine. And you're also probably right that this isn't a great guiding principle for decision-making in the future.
Still, if I'm interested in increasing the total number of people contributing to open source projects, I would give an issue like the use of the word "retard" a fighter's chance.
Maybe it's not worth bending on free speech in some specific cases, but there is a point where it is worth it, ie, if there are enough people in the offended audience that the chance of losing a potential contributor is nontrivial.
When I see someone who doesn't care about language I think the following: "I'm too stupid and lazy to use language creatively so I'll fall back on my stupid and lazy language. I can say what I like, and I'm going to try to deny you the same right. Some bollocks about SJWs and Leftists goes here".
Because I'm a supporter of all language, especially hate speech. Or the communist speech back in the 50's. Or Snowden's speech about violations of our government against us.
Banning thoughts and words, as you seem apt to suggest, is how we migrate away from the principles of the 1st amendment. Of course, you will be wont to tell me that a private company isnt bound by them. Indeed.
But where do we stop? It may be vogue to silence the KKK, which is pretty established for hate speech and actions. But what then? Who decides amongst us what hate speech is and isnt? How far do we go down this rabbit hole? The answer is, "We wont" from SCOTUS.
[F]reedom of speech...," Justice William O. Douglas wrote for the 5-4 majority, is "protected against censorship or punishment, unless shown likely to produce a clear and present danger of a serious substantive evil that rises far above public inconvenience, annoyance, or unrest ... There is no room under our Constitution for a more restrictive view."
Elsewhere in this thread you can find a comment from a brother of a mentally handicapped person who explains why he'd prefer the term 'retard'. So it's not that simple. I suspect that rational people (i.e., worthy contributors) won't take offence that easy.
> Compare that to the potential of falling down a slippery slope to "total censorship"
This is not a "potential". We're already rolling down that path with a very little chance to ever stop. Brendan Eich, Orson Scott Card, Matt Taylor, Tim Hunt - among the most high profile victims, with countless numbers under the radar.
The only intolerance society should promote is the intolerance of intolerant beliefs. Bucketing people off as "rational people" and "worthy contributors" because they disagree with your beliefs is an unfortunate way of dismissing conversation, probably something that you dislike when people that oppose your beliefs do it. That is, I'd say that claiming that all "rational people" would agree with you is minimally different than when "SJWs" cry "homophobe" to "polarize" discussion.
Also, how does the partial social ostracizing of the people you've listed amount to censorship? In the case of the first two, I'd say that their beliefs amount to censorship of another group of people. Don't want to allow a certain segment of the population to do the same thing that other segments already do? Sounds like censorship to me. For the latter two, I would say that those are probably unfortunate cases of a trigger-happy outrage-seeking media machine, that hones in on soundbites and screenshots. I do think that people can choose their words/attire/actions more carefully to be more inclusive of all, but I don't think we should crucify people when they fail to do that.
One good instance of disingenuity deserves another: wait a second, I thought you said words couldn't cause harm!! It can't be harmful if I call you/Eich/Card a homophobe. He'll/They'll just have to get over it and deal with the repercussions themselves!
How can you call the "just words" of what happened to Eich and Card a "shitstorm", but fail to see how "just words" can have a real, tangible impact on other people who don't share your particular persuasion?
Shitstorm was not just words - crybabies can cry whatever they want. But Eich got sacked, which is totally different. No retard was ever sacked for being called a retard.
EDIT: clearly you're failing to notice a difference between calling names and calls to action. "Kill all cyclists" is a call to action, evil and, likely, illegal. "All cyclists are dimwits" is calling names, innocent and funny.
> No retard was ever sacked for being called a retard.
Sure they have. You can deny it all you like, but that's what ignorant bigots do.
Retards have been murdered by people calling them retard. Retards have been driven to suicide by people calling them retard. Retards have been used for medical experimentation by people calling them retards.
You saying "it's just a word" ignores the fact that the word has been used as a package of behaviours to label these people as sub-human, and undesirable, and other, and then not treat them like humans.
Fantastic, you've made the connection! You're continuing to perfectly illustrate two of the points that I've made regarding your hypocrisy:
- To paraphrase: "I only want to censor opinions when they disagree with the positions that I hold. It's not fair to call (x) a homophobe." (What happened to Eich was different than calling someone a potentially hurtful label. And, somehow it's OK to want to prohibit freedom in others when it comes to their rights (a la gay marriage), but it's not OK to lambaste someone else's opinion re: that topic.)
- "Eich got sacked." (Aha! Words often spur people on to action.)
Note: I don't take offense at every use of the word "retard," as much as you are attempting to lump those that disagree with you, like myself, into the "SJW" camp. I do think that it has little place in a professional setting, or even a casual setting where deeper discourse is the aim. Why intentionally use words that might cause others discomfort, when there are other words that won't cause discomfort but will express your point just as clearly?
I don't know if Github should have taken down the repo, but I don't think that disapproving of the use of the word "retarded" is unheard of. Calling someone a "retard" probably won't do irreparable harm to that person immediately, but it's minimally different than the sort of "bullying" of Eich/Card that you think is just such a travesty.
EDIT: We're talking across one another. I most certainly understand the difference between an explicit call to action, and "calling names." The argument that I'm making is that "calling names" often spurs people on to action, or encourages negative groupthink. Throwing around the word "retard" in a professional setting serves what purpose? I personally find little use for the word outside of extremely casual situations with people whom I am very familiar with. I don't know to what extent, if any, semi-professionally oriented hosting services should monitor their channels for potentially distasteful humor, but I think that's the question at hand re: Github's role.
To go back to your Eich/Card comparison, I don't think that what ended up happening to Eich is completely justified, but I do think that we can't prevent the Twitteratti or whomever from having opinions on public people. How can you disapprove of Github stepping in in this instance, while at the same time saying that the public at large should stifle their opinions regarding Eich/Card?
And, to add another layer of hypocrisy, how can you tacitly encourage opinions such as those of Eich/Card -- which are inherently stifling of the freedom of others to associate, and is a "hands-on" approach to the lives of others -- while saying that Github should take a "hands-off" role here when it comes to the use of language?
For your point to make sense you'd have to believe that people ganged up on Eich because of the epithet "homophobe" and not because of the actions that led to that epithet being applied to him in the first place.
Perhaps you would have contributed to that repository and now you won't.
This is concern-trolling. Any project might have committers who are assholes. In that case maybe the project will be less successful than others, if it doesn't have other good qualities to compensate. Why should we care? You've arbitrarily picked out one specific flavor of asshole on which to concentrate, but the "it's for your own good" argument in favor of censorship is wrong in general.
"LD" is your term, which apparently is too general to be useful. As problematic as "retard" may be, no English speaker would hear it and ask herself, "are they talking about a dyslexic?"
People who don't know what they're talking about might make incorrect assumptions. I agree with you there. I don't think ignorance of a topic is a valid excuse to continue to be wrong.
From the "Learning Disabilities Association of America"
> The severity of this specific learning disability can differ in each individual but can affect reading fluency, decoding, reading comprehension, recall, writing, spelling, and sometimes speech and can exist along with other related disorders. Dyslexia is sometimes referred to as a Language-Based Learning Disability.
> Fact: Similar to the above myth, the International Dyslexia Foundation states that between 15% and 20% of the population have a language-based learning disability, dyslexia being the most common of these. The United States Department of Health and Human Services estimates that 15% of the U.S. population has dyslexia.
The fact you think LD is "my term" shows how ignorant you are of the topic. The fact you think dyslexia isn't an LD also shows your ignorance of the topic.
EDIT: since this thread is about the word "retard" it's probably relevant to remind people about how people with dyslexia were often dismissed as being stupid, lazy, retarded.
It seems you're attempting to convince people to use the word "retard" less. Introducing another term, and haranguing people for using (or potentially using?) that idiom incorrectly as well, is a rhetorical technique unlikely to accomplish that goal. However, if you need to get it off your chest anyway, I'll stop complaining about it.
[EDIT] The fact you think LD is "my term"...
I just counted. There are 536 comments [aside: why the hell hasn't this discussion been throttled off the front page by now?], and every single one that mentions "LD" or "learning disability" is either yours or in a thread responding to your use of the term. There is one "learning deficits" that seems to be someone else...
You have to be careful in the way you use nigger or retard on HN. Calling other people a those will probably result in a comment killed by user flags. Repeated use will result in a shadow ban. Casual use of the word retard (not in the context of mechanisms) might see a few downvotes to poke people into more creative insults.
Most people don't want to use such words and are glad they aren't used in normal conversation. They don't miss cross-burnings; they don't miss similarly violent words.
This is probably a cultural thing. I live in the UK which does not have a free press and which does not have freedom of speech. Most UK citizens find the US position to be extreme. Most UK citizens don't worry about banning Westboro Baptist Church from protesting funerals.
(And, again, this is assuming that Github has actually done something. They might not have; they might be ignoring all reports about the retard word and this is all a troll who faked an email.)
> Most people don't want to use such words and are glad they aren't used in normal conversation. They don't miss cross-burnings; they don't miss similarly violent words.
Most people don't have this tradition of "cross-burning" in their past and therefore don't attach any negative/violent meaning to the "n-word".
I honestly have no issue with people managing to contain their own righteous opinions (for either side of the debate) and not smash thousands of characters of spam and spam images into issue trackers.
That's not what they're for.
If the issue doesn't affect you directly (and it doesnt), and you're not a contributor to the project, then dont get involved.
The issue of someone else getting censored affects everyone who might also get censored. Being silent about injustice against others, just because it does not affect you, is umwise.
First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me. [1]
Please note I am not suggesting that this simple issue is in any way remotely related to the seriousness of what this quote refers too. However, plant enough seeds over long enough and you wake up one day without being able to express things that cause other people to be offended. You don't have to like what someone does or says but they should be able to none the less.
A bunch of mostly rich people of mostly above average intelligence using a particular service are asked[1] to refrain from using a particular word, but who are free to set up their own servers and use whatever language they like
Versus
A lot of mostly poor, vulnerable, people of (by definition) below average intelligence, who are subjected to bullying based ontheir disability; who are segregated from society; who were sometimes sterilised against their will (sometimes without their knowledge); who were used as test subjects in medical experimentation; who were used by the Nazis to test mass-killing techniques before the Nazis started killed Jews; who are denied medical treatment; who are sometimes killed just because of their disability.
> Being silent about injustice against others, just because it does not affect you, is umwise.
Yes, I agree. I disagree about where the injustice lies.
> 1. This isn't censorship of the type that is illegal or not allowed. It is a private company deciding a word was inappropriate.
This is about the dumbest argument in favor of censorship theoretically possible, btw. Free speech doesn't start and stop at the first amendment to the US constitution.
> 2. It seems like most in this comment thread agree that this action, as a singular act, is a good thing. The word was offensive. Github asked the repo to change it. They did. The end.
Actually I see a lively debate as opposed to the general consensus you're suggesting. Trying to win an argument by disingenuously suggesting your opponent's opinion is unpopular, is an underhanded tactic even when you're right. It's plainly stupid when you're wrong.
> 3. As for the larger context, the problem with the frequent use of slippery slope arguments and cries of "censorship" is that people are choosing to die on some pretty ridiculous hills.
No one cares about other arguments you've had on the Internet in the past. Stay on topic.
> 4. If or when Github actually does something truly abusive of their power to censor, then I'll worry.
After heaps of projects are already hosted there, and switching to something more open becomes a larger effort? If that works for you then fine - kindly excuse those of us who take a more proactive stance.
> Free speech doesn't start and stop at the first amendment to the US constitution.
You never had the freedom of speech you think you have. You never had the right to say what you like in my house without getting kicked out, and you never had the right to say 'retard' on GitHub. Sorry. You can mourn its loss now if you like.
I don't know what it is about this particular topic that compels people to flood the conversation with egregious strawman fallacies, but anyway: I never suggested any of the shit that you're implying I did, so your argument falls totally flat and completely misses the point.
Probably no one posting in this ENTIRE FUCKING THREAD is arguing that Github broke the damn law. Quit pretending otherwise. TIA.
I mean, it's right in what you quoted! Read it again:
> Free speech doesn't start and stop at the first amendment to the US constitution.
When people say "freedom of speech" and they're not talking about a government entity, it's a pretty safe bet that they're talking about the principle enshrined in the first amendment, not the first amendment itself.
Considering that The Internet as a whole is basically amounts to a whole lot of interconnected, other people's (back yards/restaurants/other poor analogies for physical spaces), saying "but the first doesn't apply" is both willfully obtuse and missing the point.
> saying "but the first doesn't apply" is both willfully obtuse and missing the point.
It's almost always a response to a person who seems to think that freedom of speech means they shouldn't have to face any consequences for the horrible things they say.
And this itself is a mischaracterization. The problem is that the rubric for "horrible things to say" has been extended so far as to cover usage of the word "retard".
Much like the rubric for "harassment" has been extended to cover simple incivility.
You can get fined a lot of money if you say it over the air. The FCC doesn't regulate cable, however. But those companies set their own standards, as do advertisers, and do limit or ban cuss words.
Typically cuss words will be bleeped if it is used: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bleep_censor . However people are so used to bleeps that their mind often fills in the cuss word.
It may be frequent by some standard (e.g., some threshold of average number of total number uses per unit wall clock time), but only on a very small percentage of TV outlets (particularly, premium cable outlets that don't have to deal with either advertisers or broadcast regulation.)
'Seven Dirty Words' is from 1972, and includes 'piss' and 'shit'. It's hardly a canonical reference for 2015. I recall Grampa Simpson using 'piss' in the mid-90s, for example...
Assuming this letter is true: they're not stopping you from using offensive words, they're stopping you from using a very small set of words because those words contribute to a culture that cause actual harm.
TV is a poor example: it's fine to make jokes about male rape on TV, but everyone loses their shit when an obscured nipple is shown.
that has to be one of the absolute most asinine concepts of insanity ever unleashed on the public. Only someone deprived of all sanity and logic would assume that the censoring of certain words would prevent someone from being subject to abuse. You are obviously incapable of the capacity for such understanding, what with your brain cavity filled with fish entrails and pig excrement.
I say the above as a bit tongue in cheek. I've made similar statements in the past regarding being asked to implement a language/bad-word filter on a sight. By contrast, "That is the most fucking bad-ass thing I've ever seen," is a positive statement but uses words that would normally be filtered. While the former statement is completely insensitive and insulting without using any "bad" words.
There are cases of people who have completed suicide because of bullying based on their LD.
You cannot solve bullying by banning words. Especially in cases when those words are used in an entirely different context, having an entirely different meaning, without any profound malevolence.
The words are malevolent because they contribute to a culture where it is acceptable to treat people with LD as sub-human. You don't get to use a word and deny the long history of that word. This is nothing like, for example, the fake etymology of "nitty gritty", or confusion between the word "niggardly" with "like a nigger". The word retard has a long history and is closely associated with oppression and murder.
White people don't get to say "nigga - no, it's okay, I'm not saying nigger!"
The other confusing thing here is that people are asking for the freedom to do what they like with someone else's property, and when that person asks them to modify their behaviour they lose their shit.
This is just github saying "no shirt, no service". What happened to "their servers, their rules"?
>Assuming this letter is true: they're not stopping you from using offensive words, they're stopping you from using a very small set of words because those words contribute to a culture that cause actual harm.
Says who? What you are describing is textbook censorship.
You're offended? So what. Not my problem, step away from the computer.
Downvoting isn't equal to censorship. The content remains available for anyone with an account.
The commit history of this project remains available too... however, they forbid the authors to use the word in the live version if they want their project to be hosted on github. Now, I guess it's their prerogative to set the rules for people using their service. But I think it's also fair to say that being the facebook of programming it feels like they're kind of bullying the authors into compliance...
I'm pretty sure it's a really a non-story. Someone at github overreacted when a complaint was received. Big deal. If they started blocking accounts for reasons like this on a regular basis, many people would move somewhere else. It's not like they don't have competitors with equally good solutions. Their only advantage is their large userbase.
Except when it is. Given sufficient downvotes, a post will fade to the same color as the background, making it easy to scroll past and not see it. Whether you want to admit it or not, brigading happens here too, and once in a while a perfectly valid, thoughtful, and reasoned response is silenced because it doesn't fit in with the group mentality here.
The only solution for this issue would be for everyone to adopt a personal policy of only downvoting trolls, intentionally misleading comments, off topic comments, spam, and "me too!" style comments that don't contribute to the discussion. Unfortunately we're only human, and instead of rebutting a comment one disagrees with, many of the users here take the lazy path and downvote. There's no easy fix for that, so the brigading continues, as does the censorship of valid but controversial ideas.
As for the topic at hand; while I agree with most people that the word "retard" is offensive and derogatory towards a specific group of people, I find it hilarious that its use is being questioned by people running a site/service named after an equally offensive and derogatory word.
> Except when it is. Given sufficient downvotes, a post will fade to the same color as the background, making it easy to scroll past and not see it.
It doesn't change anything. The content is still available for anyone to see if they want to.
Censorship is about making content unavailable. Not giving the exact same visibility to everything out there isn't censorship. Or upvoting is also a form of censorship, since it moves content above less-upvoted comments making less-upvoted comments more likely to be missed by people who won't scroll to the end of the page.
And for anyone used to HN's way of doing things, it's not hard to spot faded comments and highlight them if they seem of interest given the context around them.
I guess we'll have to agree to disagree. For me, attempting to whitewash something you don't agree with is censorship, and Merriam-Webster agrees with me, given their definition of "censor" means to suppress or delete anything considered objectionable (emphasis mine):
"Full Definition of CENSOR
transitive verb
: to examine in order to suppress or delete anything considered objectionable <censor the news>"[1]
Git is not equivalent to retard. Git is an everyday word. You can definitely get away with calling a pal a grumpy git. You're not going to get away with calling peoe retards unless you know them very well. And don't do so in public.
And 100 years ago you could get away with calling someone who was mentally impaired a "retard". That's the wonderful thing about language, it's always evolving.
Personally, if someone called me a "git" or a "retard" I would take it exactly the same way, since they are both connotations for "idiot" or "slow thinker".
yes, language evolves. Now we recognise that retard was used to define people as sub-human and then to murder them; experiment upon them; forcibly sterilise them against their will and without their knowledge; deny them medical treatment (which often leads to their slow painful death); to bully and harass them; deny them employment; deny them opportunity; segregate them; abuse them; rape them.
Using the word retard against people who do not have LD is a weak insult to them, but does cause hurt to a large number of weak, dis-empowered people.
Retard as an insult is fucking stupid and lazy because it misses the mark.
In every thread about downvoting ever you have people who strongly feel that downvoting anything other than flagrant rule-breaking posts is censorship - it makes the content less available.
> The content remains available for anyone with an account.
Github are not magically destroying content. They're just removing it from their servers. Since they own those servers it seems reasonable that they are allowed to chose what goes onto them. We can disagree about where they draw the line, but some people in this thread seem to think that Github does not have the right to draw that line anywhere.
Down-voting can be used as censorship, if not used properly. As in downvoting because you don't agree with the opinion, rather than because the post is irrelevant, ad-hominem, or content-free. If you don't agree, post a rebuttal.
'retarded' in it's current usage is not offensive. It means "very foolish or stupid."
'retarded' in it's dated usage is offensive, but it wasn't being used in that sense in the repo in question. This dated usage has fortunately fallen pretty much completely out of common usage.
If I tell you "my brother is retarded" you know exactly what I mean because if I had wanted to tell you that my brother has a learning disability I would have used a different word than 'retarded'.
Except for "lame" in a formal context is still a relevant term.
I can't remember the last time I heard "retarded" used with the intention of referring to a developmentally disabled kids. Whenever I do hear that usage, I do point out to those people that the term when used that way is offensive and they should stop using it that way.
> 'retarded' in it's current usage is not offensive. It means "very foolish or stupid."
Maybe where you live. Where I'm from "retard" is about as bad as nigger. Feel free to say it. Just don't be surprised when people tell you how annoyed they are at you for using it.
EDIT: not quite as bad. Media will use "the n word", but would not say "the r word".
> This isn't censorship of the type that is illegal or not allowed.
This is a weirdly common kind of thing for people to say. I don't understand what the point is supposed to be. It's still a bad thing. We have prohibitions on the government doing this because it's bad. We don't have prohibitions on people censoring third parties in their own homes, because that would be worse. This is still bad for all the same reasons it would be bad if the government were doing it. We're not criticizing github for doing something illegal. We're criticizing it for doing something wrong.
If you are actively being stabbed, the legality of it is pretty irrelevant to your situation. It is about a place that hosts a large part of the open source community. Should a private company have power over all their contents?
No, government censorship is qualitatively different. It is specially regulated for good reason.
The term isn't even usually applied in contexts like this one. This here is usually called moderation or content policy or editorial standards etc. And most people don't consider it a bad thing.
But certainly are arguments for largest market share holders to have some kind of neutrality standards, like implemented in common carrier or net neutrality regulations. And in the other direction: at least in the EU there has been a big push to hold forums responsible for things like defamation and hate speech. eg http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/06/shock-european-co...
>The term isn't even usually applied in contexts like this one. This here is usually called moderation or content policy or editorial standards etc. And most people don't consider it a bad thing.
This is false. Facebook's ban on photos showing female nipples is constantly referred to as censorship.
I definitely agree there is such a thing as censorship by non-government actors, but Facebook plays a very different role from Github. There's also a lot of uproar about Facebook and Twitter doing too little to weed out objectionable things.
But it's still qualitatively different from government censorship, which is imposed on third party media.
It's not offensive to me, or a lot of people I know. I can think of far more offensive words to use for disabled people, but retard is just colloquial slang now AFAIC.
...And I'm being downvoted, as proof of what `otherusername2` said above:
"That's just because those of us who don't are afraid we'll get chewed out here, so we're not commenting."
Words have different meanings for different people it's that simple. These guys shouldn't have had to change their docs.
Where will this end? Will we not be able to use cretin next either? What about moron or imbecile? PC gone mad because some people don't understand a joke. Good job South Park isn't hosted on github...
> 3. As for the larger context, the problem with the frequent use of slippery slope arguments and cries of "censorship" is that people are choosing to die on some pretty ridiculous hills.
> 4. If or when Github actually does something truly abusive of their power to censor, then I'll worry.
This is bizarre. Your thinking goes directly against our human nature: recognize future danger and try to avoid it.
The danger is that you seem to be choosing to not recognize the growing trend towards what are seen as appropriate responses to being offended: shaming, ostracizing, and the forced silence of the "offender".
The online shaming campaigns are stifling expression in a very bad way.
Imagine a source code repository where you have to be mindful of your comments, lest you become the target of a SJW out to destroy your career, friendships and reputation? Where is the utility in that?
It's bad enough on twitter now that you can only post dry comments if you use your real name. It's too risky to even post the teeniest joke or quip.
They tried that in the python-cuba wg. The former chair of it stepped down because he has been the target by SJWs trying to ruin his career. What is his crime? He spoke against the GGAB for its criteria on what is a "harasser" after he ended up on it without ever being part of GamerGate.
> The danger is that you seem to be choosing to not recognize the growing trend towards what are seen as appropriate responses to being offended: shaming, ostracizing, and the forced silence of the "offender".
So wait, do you have a problem with using language against people or not?
1. Nobody is saying what GitHub did was illegal or not allowed.
2. My biggest complaint about blocking the word is that they singled out this one guy. Even the parent repo still has "retard" and is still available. How ridiculously arbitrary is that? As a GitHub user do I have to worry that maybe one day somebody at GitHub will get butthurt and randomly disable my account over a technicality? Either make the rules apply to everybody, or don't bother having them.
3. Nobody is "choosing to die on some pretty ridiculous hills" over this. People are posting on the internet saying that it's stupid.
4. So you don't mind when you agree with GitHub, but you'll worry when you disagree with GitHub.
Private company or not, it's as much my right to say, "Hey, I think that's bullshit," as it is for them to remove content from their website.
Regarding 2) It does say in the linked message [1] from GitHub Support that this repository (nixxquality/WebMConverter) was disable as a consequence of the parent repository (WebMBro/WebMConverter) got disabled by GitHub.
5. Github as a commercial entity is pretty unlikely to abuse their (indeed worrying, but not scary yet) ability to censor unless some suits decide that they are big enough to not worry about the very community that made them big (IOW, I won't worry until they do a reddit).
1. Obviously or there'd be a lawsuit. Not everything that is wrong or destructive is coded into law. Censorship as a concept exists outside of the law. All censorship, legal or not, should be strongly scrutinized.
> 1. This isn't censorship of the type that is illegal or not allowed. It is a private company deciding a word was inappropriate.
It is a private company, alright, but it is also becoming a critical company for the internet as a whole. Which points to an important question our society will have to face more and more often with increasing centralization and globalization: When does a company become essential infrastructure and be judged (morally, by law, by the executive) different to any other private entity.
During the financial crisis we have seen that large parts of the banking sector were deemed "to big to fail" and kept on life support by the government. Facebook has grown large enough than any changes in their TOS and privacy policy are closely watched and often criticized by a multitude of public parties and the press (at least in Germany).
I've only recently realized how far we have come in terms of better development standards when I tried find the official repository for ncurses (which is a GNU project, by the way). There is none. The current development code is hosted via ftp as a set of tarball snapshots [1]. As far as I can tell, no development history beside the change notes of each snapshot before May 2015 is publicly accessible. Issue tracking seems to be handled over the mailing list [2]. And I asked myself, why can't this project be hosted on GitHub?
The answer depends on how reliable GitHub turns out - or continues - to be. If we can't hold GitHub to a higher standard than just "they are a private company, they may do whatever they want", then ncurses should host its own issue tracker and git repository. But if we judge GitHub as an infrastructure, then sure, host this core GNU project via a private company.
> 2. It seems like most in this comment thread agree that this action, as a singular act, is a good thing. The word was offensive. Github asked the repo to change it. They did. The end.
Note that how to deal with swear words or offensive words in general is very culture specific. In the society I live in I seldom encounter cussing or "inappropriate behaviour", but when I do, they are next to never beeped over or blurred out. Rather, when in bad faith, they serve to disqualify the speaker. (And when they are used in good faith they benefit artistic freedom.)
This is not to say "our" way of dealing with questionable or offensive behaviour is the "right" one. Rather, if we hold GitHub to internet infrastructure standards, then they have to find some middle ground between corporate America puritanism and the diverse culture that surrounds it. It's not an easy task, see for example Facebook's debate on nudity vs. breast feeding, but otherwise every entry on GitHub will be as boring as Oracle documentation - no more "Hurr durr I'ma sheep" releases for you.
It is a private company, alright, but it is also becoming a critical company for the internet as a whole
Hardly. OSS was in a very healthy state before Github and it will manage just fine without it. I'm not saying Github doesn't add value - it absolutely does - but if it died tomorrow, I'd simply create an account at a different vendor, push my repos to it, and pick up the pieces from there.
Distributed VCS are uniquely great in allowing one to switch hosters without much of a hiccup, yes.
I was referring, though, to all the surrounding aspects of GitHub, e.g. issue tracking / discussions and discoverability. Quite a lot of projects have no online presence except GitHub pages. Let me again draw an analogy with Facebook: Of course there are many ways to contact people - (e)mail, phone, instant messenger - but a lot of people rely on Facebook to stay in contact with each other and don't bother to exchange other contact information.
Besides, censorship is far more subtle and pervasive than closing shop. It changes the perception and values of the community, instead of driving the participants to some other place. Also there are surveillance and subversion issues. When it becomes common to install binaries directly supplied by GitHub, I better trust them not to include any (targeted) malware.
I get it, I just don't think it would be very hard to migrate those things. You'd probably even be able to download an OSS tools from whatever GitHub replacement you'd be about to migrate to.
I'm not sure I'm with you on the second point. I think I understand where you're coming from, but I think it's a reach to their from this incident. Being required to use civil language on a public site seems like a reasonable requirement to me.
1. This isn't censorship of the type that is illegal or not allowed.
This is true, but the same can be said of the Hollywood blacklist [1] during the Red Scare. Do you support Hollywood blacklist–style ideological litmus tests in technology? If you think such things are a bad idea, and you think a culture that encourages them is dysfunctional, then legality is really beside the point.
Sorry retard, it's actually a giant problem that access to this very popular and useful fork was interrupted for like a week (and would have been indefinite if the owner was inactive) due to an upstream repo using a mean word.
That is very sensible. Github is free to impose any arbitrary rule and repo admins are free to use competitor's products.
In fact Github cares very little about "offense" but probably only cares about their own profits. Private companies applying this sort of censorship is not a bad thing.
For example Apple, Google completely control the apps that will feature in their apps stores. That has actually improved the security of mobile devices lot more otherwise imagine a Ask Toolbar app playing an ad each time your call someone.
It seems to me they are just singling out a single commit to be a problem, probably because of someone oversensitive complaining about this single commit, not knowing that github is full of what could be considered offensive to some. I am personally very happy we solved all world problems and now can focus on wording in commits.
I think making the subtitle of the project 'Webm for retards' might have something to do with it.
It's possible this project was reported by an offended user. If it is automated I expect other projects that use the word 'retard' as a project name or subtitle might have email notifications giving them some length of time to change or be banned.
Bullshit! This might be true if they only censored for malware, but at present anyone on Android who wants an ad-blocker, or software to interface with various torrent / media servers now has to resort to off-store apps which aren't subject to any review.
Sooo, what you're saying is that it's OK for any company to ignore any rights of yours that they don't agree with? Interesting. Of course, it isn't illegal, but does that still mean they should do it?
> It isn't illegal, but does that mean they should still do it?
Exactly. They're a private company, they're free to do whatever they want within the legal limits. The argument isn't whether they're allowed to do it (whether the first amendment applies here), but rather, should they do it?
I say probably not. In many cases, morals/ethics are subjective and should not be enforced upon others. The key word is enforced -- I'm all for them contacting the user and saying "Listen, man, this isn't cool -- please change it."
In general, I'm against the enforcement of personal morals upon others, except in obvious circumstances (we probably shouldn't hurt/kill/steal from/etc. each other). Discussion and debate is cool, enforcement is not.
And just as the company itself has the right to censor whatever it pleases, its users have the right to stop using their services when they feel that the company is infringing on their rights -- which is what a lot of people here are saying (they're not saying "this is bad, the company should get in trouble for it," they're saying "this is bad, I refuse to do business with a bad company").
what kind of doomsday scenario are you imagining? all the open source repos in the world slowly die as github starts censoring increasingly larger portions of the english language?
I'm imagining a nightmare scenario where, by some vauge unwritten and immature consensus mechanism, we rationalize even a slight amount of censorship as being OK.
Actually, mature consensus on some graffiti is that it is art and should be treasured in the moment it exits. Banksy, for example. People are totally OK with removal for aesthetics, instead of the previously mentioned censorship.
The actual nightmare scenario is that people with learning disability are killed by doctors because those doctors think "retards have no quality of life". When people toss around the word retard they contribute to a culture that doesn't care about the high levels of violent hate crime experienced by people with a learning disability.
And most posts seem to miss the point: their servers, their rules. No one is stopping you from having an open source project that uses the word retard, they're just stopping you from using Github. There's a bunch of other censorship that Github does.
> You may not use the Service for any illegal or unauthorized purpose. You must not, in the use of the Service, violate any laws in your jurisdiction (including but not limited to copyright or trademark laws).
This, in particular, is restrictive.
(Also: we're all assuming the screenshot is genuine.)
> The actual nightmare scenario is that people with learning disability are killed by doctors because those doctors think "retards have no quality of life". When people toss around the word retard they contribute to a culture that doesn't care about the high levels of violent hate crime experienced by people with a learning disability.
I'm sorry, but this is ridiculous. It simply isn't how language works, never mind political change.
Simple example: "sinister" used to mean left-handed, and by extension, creepy and evil (as was believed by the superstitious in earlier times). Now it no longer means left-handed, but still means creepy and evil. The connotational meaning has become a denotational meaning, because the idea the word used to express is to all intents and purposes gone. Nobody believes such nonsense about left-handed people any more.
Mutatis mutandis, the abolitionists and later civil rights movement did not achieve their aims with regards to racial equality by harassing people for using n-bombs. They fought to change the structural, social reality (slavery, political disenfranchisement, lynchings) that supported the use of such epithets, using all manner of means, from civil disobedience to total war. They had success, albeit not total success.
The idea that you can affect the actual levers of power and privilege in society by imposing overweening social taboos on particular words is a peculiarly modern political disease.
I am not terrifically concerned about whether you can use the word 'retard' on github without incurring the wrath of moderators. (And really guys - github is your resume, I hear. Don't cover it with playground insults.) But it pains me to see plenty of people with some kind of social conscience completely wasting their energy complaining about stuff like this. You want to protect people with mental disabilities? I'm sure there's a state legislature or equivalent near you slashing funds for learning support in schools, or social care, or disability-related welfare benefits (and if it's anything like it is here in the UK, loudmouthed bigots in the press explicitly calling various needy social categories parasites). Cleaning up a github readme is not an adequate substitute.
>The actual nightmare scenario is that people with learning disability are killed by doctors because those doctors think "retards have no quality of life".
Woah, that escalated quickly. How the hell did we go from offensive words to hospitals as state run eugenics labs in one sentence?
There are a whole slew of simulated what-ifs that we could list and all agree would be horrible and atrocious and fill our nights with shaking our heads about them. As the song by the Submarines goes, "Somethings wrong when you regret
things that haven't happened yet" or as John Stienbeck's character in Grapes of Wrath put it, "Up ahead they's a thousan' lives we might live, but when it comes it'll on'y be one.”
My personal favorite was from my grandmother who said "If ifs and buts were candy and nuts, we'd all have a merry Christmas." Any way you put it, speculating on things good or bad is just speculation and doesn't deserve any feelings from me one way or the other given it's a waste of resources to dwell on things that have yet to come to pass.
>The actual nightmare scenario is that people with learning disability are killed by doctors because those doctors think "retards have no quality of life".
Are you...are you talking about abortion for disabled fetuses? Because that's not the doctor's choice, that's the parent's.
>When people toss around the word retard they contribute to a culture that doesn't care about the high levels of violent hate crime experienced by people with a learning disability.
Citation desperately needed.
The worst that would happen is what's happening in GamerGate right now: a split along ideological lines. Those who want to judge the merit of a work based on its code and those who want to judge the merit of a work based on the political opinions of the author.
Github is not a public service; they're a private company.
> Who decides what is and is not appropriate?
Github does. That's how that works.
If you prefer you could try and lobby your government to set up some sort of national source code repo. Maybe you'd find the rules on such a thing more to your liking. (Note: You really, really wouldn't.)
Alternatively, you could host your own source code repos, and then you can set the rules.
Edit: More generally, you seem to suggest that a place where a lot of people from different backgrounds come together to try and collaborate and work should be a place with no rules, norms, or even an expectation of basic politeness. Offhand, I'd think the opposite should be true.
You're also conflating something like, eg, efforts to get around the Chinese firewall with people who want to use slurs. People have, in my view, in intrinsic right to do both, but these are still not equivalent actions, and you're not going to reach a sensible conclusion until you abandon that moral relativism. Free speech is valuable, but not all speech is equally valuable.
>> Who decides what is and is not appropriate?
>Github does. That's how that works.
I don't think "github" does it; it's lobbyists either within or outside of Github - the SJW's, what used to be called the PC Police - that push agendas like this forward. Same happened / is happening with Reddit, to some degree - again the slippery slope mentioned above.
Now, the problem isn't these policies forbidding certain behaviour or language; the problem is that they're measuring with different sticks. In Reddit's case, it was banning subreddits making fun of fat people, whilst keeping racist and corpse-fetish subreddits around. In Github's case it's banning one 'offensive' word, while "git" itself is offensive and they should really censor themselves first before demanding their users do it to their own work.
AFAIK there's no official list anywhere of "Words You Shouldn't Use" on github either - which makes the enforcement of this thing completely arbitrary.
This is the great detractor from using anything in the cloud. Companies/groups/projects/developers should host things internally, themselves and that way they can control the whole process from soup to nuts. Depending on any cloud company, especially a private one is a massive gamble they don't decide to pull the rug out from under you on a whim.
> > Who decides what is and is not appropriate?
> Github does. That's how that works.
In practice, for Github and most companies, it is their customers who decide. Companies are beholden to their customer's for existence. That is why they pay so much for PR (trying to mold their customer's opinions into ones favorable to the company).
Github is not a public service; they're a private company.
They're both. They're a private company that offers a public service. As such, they can't do whatever they want. For example, if they wanted to ban all repos written by black men, that would be illegal.
Nobody is suggesting that banning a repo for using a bad word is illegal. A breach of trust, a breach of ethics and a breach of reliability[0], but not illegal.
[0]: if I were a company, I would be thinking twice about trusting any of my business to Github. If a British employee commits a word that is commonplace in Britain but very offensive in America (like 'fag'), does that mean my repo goes away? Could I mess with another company by purposefully taking one of their commits out of context and creating an internet controversy over it on twitter?
It's pretty easy to point and shriek at something out of context. It's also pretty easy to use the word fag in a seemingly offensive way until you consider the author of said code may himself be gay. It's pretty easy for anybody to tell the difference, but is that going to make a difference after it becomes a public controversy? Or will github just pull it to be safe?
Of course I think Github should have the right to do this, but I don't think they should do this in cases as silly as this one.
The free market doesn't always work here. Especially when it comes to the Internet. In this instance, sure they can host it anywhere they want and then not encounter problems, but that often doesn't work in other scenarios.
When some sites try to fork in that manner, due to censorship on the original, the forked site can end up with DDoS attacks, having their domains revoked, payment accounts frozen, hosting revoked, and so on, because groups will harass companies support, demanding that they stop supporting <offending site> for whatever reason, and almost all companies cave when this happens. Suddenly, forking isn't so easy.
There is plenty of more harmful censorship on this very HN thread.
People with controversial or different opinions are downvoted until they don't appear on the site any more, ultimately meaning that only a small range of human opinions are welcome and valid here.
Github asked for the use of a single word to be reconsidered - nothing has been censored in any meaningful way, and the result is that a different word has been used, which means the same in this context.
Who decides what is and is not appropriate? Github does. Github chooses exactly the terms that you need to meet to host there, and decides when those terms change. That's agreed contractually and implicitly when you sign up to use Github. It's important to understand that this applies to every online service you might use.
Free speech isn't just a legality. It's a valuable principal that's stood the test of time of being one of the few core features of functional societies.
Free speech is a value that we should all uphold regardless whether it legally applies or not. So stop making excuses for bad corporate behaviour.
"Free Speech" isn't a blank check to say and do whatever you want. Even SCOTUS says that direct threats of violence aren't protected by the first amendment.
I'm tired of reading people nebulously defining "free speech philosophies" online to act as a shield to justify nefarious behavior on private property.
Free speech exists as a protection from government censorship, and it doesn't protect you for acting like a dick on someone else's website. This sums it up pretty well: https://xkcd.com/1357/
Defending your position by citing that comic is basically the ultimate concession; you're saying that the most compelling argument you can make for GitHub's actions is that they weren't illegal. (For anyone who doesn't get the reference, look at the hovertext on that xkcd.)
I wasn't citing the comic, I said it was a summation.
The SCOTUS example points out that the people whose jobs are to interpret free speech say it is limited, and that claiming "free speech" a blank check to escape consequences is merely semantics to support a bias.
"Free speech exists as a protection from government censorship"
So what happens when the line between government and
corporation is blurred? The common justification why that
corporations aren't beholden to free speech is that you can
just choose another corporation to spend your time/money on.
What if you can't choose? What if it's prohibitively
expensive to just setup an alternative (perhaps due to
regulatory capture)?
What if there's no competition because corporations have
subtly merged with government?
Maybe it's simply just not right anymore to assume that if
it's a private organisation that they're exempt from
societal/governmental principals.
Slippery slope doesn't have anything to do with this. My point was that societal standards & expectation shouldn't end with the government. Yes it's not required, but that's irrelevant.
People are paying for these corporations through tax breaks, subsidies & other governmental projects (Tesla for example).
It is a slippery slope because you're trying to extrapolate public policy onto private property.
If you're upset with the tax breaks and subsidies, then elect someone who will deal with them. That and your arbitrary expectations doesn't give you entitlement to someone else's private property.
I think the fundamental misunderstanding we're having here is that people on the left side of the political spectrum believe the solution to all answers is more government control. The idea that the government isn't the beginning and ending of social control is outside of their realm of understanding.
I'm tired of reading people nebulously defining "free speech philosophies" online to act as a shield to justify nefarious behavior on private property.
This thread has been very instructive for me. I've come to the conclusion that you either get free speech as a social virtue or you don't. It's clear to me that most people don't and even can't understand it from that point of view.
What that XKCD comic doesn't even consider is what happens when you're the one being shown the door? Would you go quietly?
>you either get free speech as a social virtue or you don't.
False dichotomy. Many people get that free speech is a social virtue, because many people see protection from government censorship as a social virtue. What it sounds like is that you wish was a social virtue is the ability to behave or act in any manor on privately-owned websites without having to face the consequences of your actions.
We can consider hypothetical slippery-slopes about private websites implementing tyrannical policies, but that doesn't suddenly make it a "free speech" issue. Asking "Would you go quietly if banned from a privately held website" doesn't suddenly mean it's a "free speech" issue. Does making a certain amount of noise make something a free speech issue?
There are distributed networks (like bitcoin or other P2P) that are owned and controlled by the communities that support them. Maybe you should consider supporting those instead of trying to redefine "free speech" to fit your beliefs.
If GitHub used their privately-owned website to deliberately offend people, would you be defending them? To me it seems like this argument based on ownership is chosen purely because it is convenient in this particular case.
> having to face the consequences of your actions
This sounds ominous, except the "action" we're talking about is forking a repository that used the "wrong" vocabulary in its assembly title. Taking that into consideration, the response is disproportionate and selectively enforced.
Nobody would say a word if GitHub sent a polite request asking (rather than demanding) the change. I am willing to bet the owner would gladly indulge them.
Free speech as a concept isn't just about the first amendment and isn't just about the law. Free speech can be defended on any number of grounds, and many of them apply equally to privately enforced speech restrictions. For example, consider John Stuart Mill, one of the founding figures of modern liberal thought. In On Liberty, his spirited defense of free speech, he argued that shunning or widespread ostracism for expression of particular views was a danger, and would ultimately harm a society that engaged in it, even if the views being suppressed were obviously wrong.
"Free speech is only first amendment" is a shallow and ignorant view of the intellectual tradition of free expression.
What privately-owned properties do you know of where the owner allows guests or customers to speak as freely as if they were on the sidewalk, without fear of recrimination from the owner in the form of censorship or ejection? I can think of 4chan, maybe some IRC channels.
Mill also said that the Harm principal trumps freedom of speech (i.e. individuals should be prevented from causing harm to others and/or property at the cost of their liberty).
He also says that the offense principal should not trump freedom of speech, but acknowledges that there are cases of offense that cause psychological and social harm that still qualify for the harm principal.
Was the repo code change harmful? Maybe, depending on the definition of property. Mill saw freedom of speech as a path to the truth, and he also understood that principals and rules change over time. I think he might be in favor of Github censoring their repo since it was their property and not a crucial debate towards finding the truth.
Yes. Now, imagine you're in OP's grocery store. It's still private property, but he provides a public service out of it. Can he still prevent you from shouting at him? Do free speech laws cover privately owned public spaces?
Yes, you can eject someone from a store for being rude.
Your ISP is not allowed to censor content (as far as I know) because it is a common carrier. Google is not a common carrier, they can do what they want. If Google can do it, GitHub can do it.
Note that I don't necessarily think censorship is good. I just get annoyed when people mistakenly think they have a constitutional right to not be censored.
OP implied fuck-all, unless you take the ridiculous view that free speech and the 1st amendment to the US constitution are the same thing. For about the 99th time in this thread, they are definitely fucking not, and any arguments which rest on this assumption are, prima facie, fucking stupid.
E: Because I can't reply anymore, addressed to ectoplasm's reply to this post:
Because I said "fuck"? If that is seriously against the rules of HN then I do genuinely apologize (and will probably stop posting here so much). If it's just because I viciously attacked your argument, well, I'm actually pretty sure you're a wonderful person ectoplasm, and I am sincere in saying that, but the argument you're putting forward is fucking stupid, and ought to be called such. AFAIK that's not breaking any rules.
E2:
I have a reply link - I've hit some posting limit.
Not only stupid people make stupid arguments. You are probably not a stupid person. The line of reasoning of the argument you put forward here, most definitely is.
Somewhat appropriately, your comment is against the rules of Hacker News.
> Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face-to-face conversation. Avoid gratuitous negativity.
edit: To reply without a reply link, you have to click on the timestamp. Your comment wouldn't be civil even if you elided every instance of 'fuck'. Who makes a stupid argument? A stupid person. You didn't really viciously attack anything, you just said I was stupidly wrong.
edit2: What does it even mean for an argument to be stupid? That's not very convincing. Your arguments are also stupid. So we tie?
p.s. I wasn't really offended or anything, I just think it's good for property rights to trump free speech, and the HN rules are an example of that.
It's pedantic, yes, but on the other hand, I think it's important to distinguish between legal and illegal activity, regardless of one's opinions about the moral goodness of the activity itself.
That's willful ignorance of the real issue. This is not an isolated incident. Society is increasingly rejecting any and all "offensive" language and behavior.
Should we all be nice and respectful to each other? Yes, of course. Are people that way? No. Can we police ourselves fairly and achieve a society that is not offensive? Absolutely not.
The slippery slope argument is the only way to go when it comes to censorship, and it is not a fallacy. I can't even believe this is happening. I will end my years long relationship with GitHub over this, if this is not publicly addressed.
I can see at least one user in that comment stream that should also be censored (account deleted), if we're going down this disgusting road of censorship (https://github.com/MarbleFag). FTR, I wouldn't add him/her as a friend, but let me make that choice for myself. Don't censor my community, or I'll find a new one.
Just because it's an open source project, does not grant the author free pass to do whatever he/she likes. If I come and visit someone at their house, I make sure I observe their house rules.
So GitHub makes it clear that this is unacceptable. Whilst their actions / decisions may sometimes look arbitrary, we need to remember that GitHub is not just one person.
In addition, in a public space you would expect respectful public decorum. This repository is publicly visible and anyone could stumble upon it.
I know of one country that operates a web content filter to prevent its citizens from being exposed to offensive and objectionable content. The citizens of this country find it incredibly offensive that there exists instructions on how to circumvent this filter. However, github proudly hosts these instructions[1] in spite of repeated polite requests to remove it.
Now I'd like to know why the views of Bay Area SJWs is worth listening to, but not Chinese people. If we can censor words like this, why can't we censor content that actually harms (/s) a lot of Chinese people?
So what you're saying is that you're afraid that GitHub will go down the slippery slope of censorship?
If I reframe this another way, do you think this is an acceptable behaviour in a professional setting? Then the issue becomes less of censorship, but more of acceptable conduct.
Calling names for laughs is probably OK in private, between friends, but perhaps not appropriate in a public setting.
Again, I get that the author is just having a bit of fun. But not everyone will understand that.
I do not think it is acceptable behaviour in a professional setting. I would be less likely to hire someone who's Github had such references. That does not mean that censoring them is acceptable.
Github's previous policy was to allow any content that did not expressly break American laws. I thought this was a good idea, and it was the justification behind keeping the GreatFire repo up, even in the face of DoS attacks by China. Very commendable, IMO. However, when they start censoring people who break no laws, I do think they are more likely to censor things in the future.
Lastly, I'd like to point out that "git" is an offensive word to some people. It was chosen by Linus Torvalds for that reason. Now that Github has demonstrated their willingness to censor words that hurt people's feelings, would they consider censoring this awful project? [1] While they're at it, could they change their name too?
I get what you mean. We are getting into some grey areas though, where does GitHub draw the line?
I still think that it's not a matter of the law, but one of conduct. GitHub probably has some ideals on how their service should be used, and this instance the language did not match up to their ideals. What do you think GitHub should do?
It's probably the same issues reddit mods have when trying to maintain their community ideals.
I also get that `git` was based on something offensive, but it has taken a whole new meaning since it's attached to a particular method of version control. However, `retard` is still derogatory however way it is put.
Where they did previously - content that doesn't break American laws is allowed, everything else is removed. Words weren't censored because they hurt people's feelings. There was no respect given to Americans' new found affinity to the "right to feel comfortable".
You point out that "git" means something else entirely now. I'd point out that the word retard is changing in a similar way, just like "moron" did. As you know, moron used to refer to mentally handicapped people, but the meaning has changed to mean "stupid".
In this case people were marketing their repo as "WebM for retards". This seems to be extremely similar to the "X for Dummies" series of books. These books were controversial when they came out, but they've become an accepted part of our bookshelves now. If the SJWs had had their way, "X for Dummies" would have changed to something that didn't hurt the feelings of dummies everywhere.
1) That concept in itself is just as broken as the idea of offensive content: It's a personal or maybe regional thing. Examples: Germany vs. the USA
Why should one concept win over the other?
2) This is a corporation, offering a service. Free Speech is usually something that is discussed when we talk about the public or the government. You cannot enter a restaurant, shout offensive stuff and complain when shown the door.
3) GH is not the internet, GH is not open source. It's a company. So far they seem to be nice, but I'd have said the same thing about Google a couple years back. Don't tie GH to concepts you value (open source, free/libre software).
(I personally think that this incident is ridiculous and poor form by GH - but other than that I couldn't disagree more with the direction of your post)
sure, they're legally entitled to do whatever they want, but you're failing to consider the most important point:
>You need to consider that GitHub currently hosts a large percentage of the web's open source repositories
would you be happy if google abused its position as the leading search engine to favor right leaning websites over left leaning websites? what about censoring websites that are "offensive" to muslims?
Or what about if your comment were mass-downvoted on HN? Would you be happy?
The censorship card ultimately falls into a relativistic trap - it's always okay to broadcast hate if it's the speech of you or your friends, because you and I can protest ignorance, humor, or lack of wrongdoing, and your more overtly bigoted friends "are good guys when you get to know them." Criticism of such speech, on the other hand, is never okay, and is "the real censorship". You don't even have to invoke a specific ideological dialogue - it is an everyday occurrence in your homes, schools, and bars.
Now, you can go out there and fight and "win" by making your preferred flavor of speech dominant in your spaces, but that just exposes a different facet of this "gem of truthiness" - it doesn't reveal the whole thing, because you still get the same problem, no matter which side you take.
The typical modern response to this is nihilistic or fanatical, but if you really feel challenged by a hostile environment, why not follow the path of the ancients and turn your speech into a puzzle or parable that hides its true intention? If your ideas are good, they will survive the transition and reach the readers who put in the effort to care and figure it out. OTOH if the whole premise is to police the surface aspects of the dialogue and Be Right, then you're speaking politically, not intellectually, and political speech comes with Consequences regardless of the legal environment.
Funny, the same thing seems to happen with the "it's not censorship" card. For example, a while ago a social justice activist got banned from Twitter for death threats against Wil Wheaton, and suddenly all the tech industry folks who claimed sites should ban people for harassment were going after Twitter for doing it because it was an approved social justice death threat.
Your logic becomes flawed when you realize how many % of the world's open source projects are hosted primarily on Github.
Their actions are all legal and good, and since I don't live in America, the freedom of speech argument is invalid to me.
That doesn't make this sort or action OK, and should in fact be cause for alarm.
To quote my favorite comedian, Steve Hughes: "What offends me may not offend you. And you want to make laws about this? How do you make a law about offending people? How do you make it an offense to offend people? Being offended is subjective. It has everything to do with you as an individual or a collective, or a group or a society or a community. Your moral conditioning, your religious beliefs. What offends me may not offend you. And you want to make laws about this? I’m offended when I see boy bands for god sake!"
Don't get me wrong, I think GitHub's move is retarded.
It's just that no one has a right to whine about it any more than they have a right to whine about what their retarded neighbour does in their apartment. If your retarded neighbour has a "no cursing" policies in their home, you can either not be his guest, or not swear while in his house. Either way, it's his right.
* Either this is not OK for Open Source, and it will prompt people to move away from GitHub -- because, sure, we needed the INT_MAXth reminder that relying on a private third-party for a free service is a bad idea, or
* This is something most open source projects have no problem with, and they'll just keep going, while leaving open source "radicals" like you and me to whine about it.
Github didn't just magically become this super important center for open source work. It's an important center for the open source world because a lot of people are using it.
It can stop being an important center, that's not a problem.
One of the main things to keep in mind is that GH is a business. Businesses avoid negative controversies.
That said, politically correctness has the basic potential to just push these human tendencies internally. It's saying some people are too primitive and thus these things have to be made into taboos rather than let it be part of human communication flotsam.
We view this type of censorship as offensive because the word "retard" doesn't carry much weight. Nobody would be fighting for this man's freedom of speech if he littered the code with the word "nigger" or "lynching"
One of the executives probably has a son or daughter who is a retard. Makes sense why such censorship can occur. When you own a product, your bias will inevitably saturate into the product. Having a son or daughter who's a retard makes this bias especially strong.
Personally I agree that "retard" shouldn't be censored because I hate censoring in general. But I also agree that "nigger" shouldn't be touched either. Defending freedom of speech means defending the right for other people to have dissenting opinions, this includes opinions that are stupid, racist and bigoted.
> Personally I agree that "retard" shouldn't be censored because I hate censoring in general. But I also agree that "nigr" shouldn't be touched either.
The people who use the N-word should be called racists and shamed for using it though.
> Defending freedom of speech means defending the right for other people to have dissenting opinions, this includes opinions that are stupid, racist and bigoted.
Yep. Like I said though, those people should openly be called racists and be forced to know how their racism affects others.
"standards of professionalism" are used as a device of exclusion. It has a fairly narrow definition now, but that will change, just like the words "racist", "sexist" and "homophobic". You used to have to perform an action of actual malice to be accused of those things. Now, all you have to do is make an honest mistake and the entire internet's on you like jackals.
When are you referring to? Of course nobody jumped on you like jackals before you had a global platform to offend people. You used to have to look someone in the face to offend them. Then we invented writing and the world changed.
>"standards of professionalism" are used as a device of exclusion
Indeed. You exclude the behavior that doesn't mesh well with your goals. Every law, standard, and community that has ever existed has been used as a device of exclusion. Hacker News is a device of exclusion. That's not a bad thing.
Do you use twitter at all? And nobody here jumps on me like jackals because they use downvotes to do that for them.
Hacker News is a device of exclusion. That's not a bad thing.
You can't claim to be for free and open source software for all humanity, except for those people. Those people aren't ideologically pure, they can't participate. That mindset is why GNU is a footnote in programming history, but everybody knows what linux is.
No, I don't use Twitter. Any communication medium that severely limits the amount of text you can send is going to be prone to miscommunication, aggression, and triteness.
Anyway, nobody is forcing you to not write free and open source software. GitHub doesn't have a problem with the software. Nor are they preventing anyone from getting it or using it. They've erected what I would call a rather trivial obstacle for the developers: use a different term.
I mean, if that's too hard to accept -- if that is what has causes the downfall of GNU -- then we are doomed to fail from the start.
>Code quality, not political ideology.
The world is not black and white. You can have good code quality while making politically favorable decisions.
You should pay attention to what's happening over there. It's a good preview for what's coming.
Nor are they preventing anyone from getting it or using it.
You have an odd view of banning. Yes, that does prevent anyone from getting it or using it. That's like saying banning a book doesn't prevent anyone from getting it or reading it. People will find a way, but that doesn't mean we should encourage banning books.
You can have good code quality while making politically favorable decisions.
You can also have good code quality while making politically unfavorable decisions. You can also have good code quality while eating an all cucumber diet. The ridiculousness you would feel about being required to eat a cucumber sandwich before being allowed to commit code to github is exactly how I feel about being required to think politically correct thoughts before being allowed to commit code to github.
I don't need to use Twitter. Every time something interesting happens through twitter, people flock to forums and blogs to talk about it. Because Twitter is not a platform for mature, reasonable discussions. It's for self-promotion and advertising.
>Yes, that does prevent anyone from getting it or using it. That's like saying banning a book doesn't prevent anyone from getting it or reading it.
GitHub didn't ban anything. It edited it. In fact, it edited a part that you yourself said doesn't matter. "Code quality, not political ideology." Remember?
>The ridiculousness you would feel about being required to eat a cucumber sandwich before being allowed to commit code to github is exactly how I feel about being required to think politically correct thoughts before being allowed to commit code to github.
Or someone asking you to take your shoes off in their private home. It's so ridiculous. You should have a right to be rude in people's private spaces.
Or someone asking you to take your shoes off in their private home. It's so ridiculous. You should have a right to be rude in people's private spaces.
Good job avoiding the argument altogether for this particularly uninteresting non-sequitur. You don't trust your livelihood to being able to take your shoes off at a friend's house.
I don't trust my livelihood to the need to say offensive things, either.
Regardless, I'm going to excuse myself from this conversation. What I've done is present an analogy to you (no more of an "uninteresting non-sequitur" than your talk about cucumber eating) and apparently it fell on unwilling ears. And typically, when one's brain stops understanding analogies, that's a pretty good sign it isn't working at all. So get some rest and think about it when you're in better condition.
I don't trust my livelihood to the need to say offensive things, either.
You're trusting your livelihood to the idea that other people won't willfully misinterpret innocent phrasing on your part for their 2 minutes outrage.
And typically, when one's brain stops understanding analogies, that's a pretty good sign it isn't working at all. So get some rest and think about it when you're in better condition.
Aww, your argument is crap therefore there must be something wrong with me. The laziest of intellectual assumptions: he disagrees, therefore he's incapable of understanding. I understand your argument well, you don't understand my argument at all and there's something wrong with me?
We both understand each other's argument. There's something more interesting going on underneath the surface arguments; values and priorities.
You are taking what I say in rhetoric, interpreting it literally, and throwing it back in my face. That is dishonest and hypocritical at best. The reason there is something wrong with you is because you have no intention of solving any problems here, you are attempting to beat me into the ground with your intellect. Your priority here is winning the argument.
Well, you've won. Congratulations. You're the smart one who knows best. I was wrong about everything, and I'm a dull moron with nothing interesting to say. I'm not worthy of your respect, patience, or generosity.
Now interpret that as sarcasm, throw it in my face, and get the last word in; your feelings are more important than anything I have to say.
Being offended by racial slurs is a sign of professionalism. You could extend this to ableist slurs pretty easily. I know I cringe everytime someone (sadly including myself sometimes) uses it since I have a family member that is mentally handicapped.
Imho, this strikes me more as a similar situation as a primary school kid getting suspended for swearing at school. Sure, freedom of speech technically allows him to say whatever he wants, but at the same time the school is responsible for preventing classes from turning into a profanity-fest.
What's the big deal if Github did delete the repo data from their servers? Isn't the whole point of Git that you can just go and setup an upstream somewhere else with a one-liner? They are merely a free hosting provider among many.
This is not a dispute against the government, so the discussion about censorship and the rights and responsibilities entailed by free speech isn't relevant at all. Remember that the free speech provision is primarily intended to be about citizens' ability to self-organize to defend their constitutional rights if their representatives don't have citizens' interests at heart; it's not meant to be used as an excuse for immature behavior.
If you say or do socially offensive things, don't be surprised if there are social repercussions for it. GitHub is not the government. They are free to ban whomever they want for saying anything GitHub objects to.
And yes, "retarded" is more offensive than random swearwords because it is a slur against a class of people.
A bit early to say that. There may be others that haven't come forward yet, or that they just haven't got to yet (assuming it's not an automated process).
A private company choosing not to allow content for whatever reason is not censorship. People who choose to use the word "retard" are not a protected class, Github can ban this word as they see fit.
Well, in the literal sense it is censorship, being the suppression of materials deemed objectionable on moral, political, military, or other grounds. A bit like a (likely American) TV censor might "bleep" a word they don't want to expose people's delicate sensibilities to.
I mean, that doesn't make it "evil", but a lot of people might say that censorship of any sort is a bit of a grey area. That whole "I disagree with what you say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it" thing.
I never really understood this part of the american culture. I'm not american and to me they are just words, censoring offensive words with beeps on TV is really an american/british thing, it's really strange to me.
You don't think that people would defend to the death one of the basic principles of human rights?
To be clear, I'm not saying that Github censoring "retarded" is a human rights issue, but as long as we've gone off the rails let's see where the train comes to a stop.
> You don't think that people would defend to the death one of the basic principles of human rights?
A progressive making that claim would never take a bullet so that someone could fly the Confederate flag, for example. It's just not going to happen.
They may fight to defend the 1st Amendment, but that's easy because it's a proxy behind which exists all the specific instances of speech they would find horrible along with the speech they hold dear.
People making the claim probably mean the latter, but the wording implies something more specific, presumably for effect.
To be fair, I agree with your original comment. I'm just nit picking on that particular phrase, independent of what you wrote. I think your use of the phrase is appropriate.
Someone actually got arrested and went to jail in France for an offensive parody of one of the equally offensive Charlie Hebdo covers: https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/france-beg... (because it was insensitive to French people rather than Egyptians).
That's not entirely fair, either. I'm sure there are plenty of things that would offend them, but they understand that just because something is offensive does not make it wrong.
It's not required to be offended personally by something to protect freedom of speech, I can understand how else I should say it. And if you don't want to understand it - Charlie Hebdo also published caricatures about christian religion, so it was offensive for them too, for their friends. Muslims just were more aggressive.
They did publish the original danish cartoons, which they publicaly said they found not from a very good taste, and that some were pretty bad cartoons, but that they had to publish them for the sake of free speech, even if it made them a target ( which it did). That's how it all started.
So if a restaurant asks you to leave because you're shouting ethnic slurs, that's censorship? Come on. GitHub is not the entirety of your expressive domain. If you were disallowed by law from saying "retard" I would be sympathetic to this case. As is this entire thread reads like a series of entitled children whinging that their mums told them not to be nasty at school. If you dislike what GitHub has done, host your repo at one of the other free sites that provide this service, and stop insulting people in legitimately oppressive states by equating your churlish valley bigotry with legitimately repressed speech.
Hey, if you want to argue with the dictionary be my guest. I'm afraid my name isn't Oxford, though, and I'm not really sure how to reach him. Sorry about that.
In that case - since you're merely quoting the dictionary without voicing an opinion - I invite you to refrain from further diluting the present discussion with your vacuous commentary. I assure you that the entirety of HN readership can avail itself of word definition services.
False. When Trey Parker and Matt Stone wished to show Muhammad in South Park Comedy Central overruled them and placed a big black censored box over Muhammad in the cartoon. If you want to say that a black box with the word censored doesn't qualify as censorship then you're retarded.
You are ever correct that GitHub can ban the word if they want. They're fully within their legal right to do so.
I think where the confusion comes from is that along with many cries of "censorship", there is often a subtext of "this is illegal" or "this is not allowed".
> If you want to say that a black box with the word censored doesn't qualify as censorship then you're regarded.
This is a definition of censorship that removes any useful descriptive meaning from the word. It's not censorship when I refuse to listen to offensive things or refuse to repeat them to others or allow you to graffiti it on the side of my house. Similarly, it's not censorship when a private company declines to let you use its private resources to say whatever you want.
The difference between these types of "censorship" and scary, actual government censorship is that GitHub doesn't have the authority to hold a gun to your head and compel you to be quiet. You can take your repo and host it privately and say whatever you want. Comedy Central didn't have the authority to compel Trey Parker and Matt Stone to be quiet. Parker and Stone could have terminated their contracts and posted a Mohammed cartoon through some other channel.
You rob censorship of its depth of meaning -- compulsory silencing by force -- when you apply it to private actors choosing not to use their private resources to promote others' speech.
I could not possibly disagree with you any more strongly. I'm far from alone in my opinion. I may even be on the majority side. That doesn't make me right of course. But it is worth your consideration.
I could defend my stance. I think you're probably smart and probably know almost everything I'd say. If that's the case then we're resigned to agree to disagree.
Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication or other information
The argument is it isn't suppression because as a private company, people can still choose to engage in that speech elsewhere. The government can actually make laws to stop people from saying certain things in any context.
When a private company does it, they can only do it in the medium they control and for people who choose to use that medium.
It's simply incorrect to say that private companies cannot engage in censorship.
If they have enough control over a medium to effectively suppress speech, then yes. The argument is whether that is the case here. The definition of censorship is not merely "any case where someone prevents someone from saying something". The bar is higher than that.
And people can discuss whether that is or is not appropriate as they see fit. If enough people feel differently, that's when alternative services start to appear.
This always seems to happen in situations like this. People jump to defend the actions of the company with statements like "It's their website, they can do what they want". Which is true, except nobody is arguing that fact.
The argument is that Github's censorship is acceptable because those are the terms under which they choose to operate their business and if you don't like it you can go somewhere else (which seems reasonable enough to me).
I think toehead2000 was asking how that squares with a bakery not being allowed to operate their business under certain other terms.
Exactly -- it's not censorship when you give someone something for free but ask them to abide by your rules. If you want the freedom to say whatever you want, pay someone to host your repo or host it yourself.
You complain about censorship, but then you complain that Github doesn't censor everything. You ask for free speech, but you seek to deny Github the freedom to chose what they want to publish.
The sense of entitlement in this thread is baffling. "I want the freedom to use your property whoever I like, and how dare you try to stop me".
You're also not allowed to use github to insult your employer if you worked in UAE - that's censorship worth fighting over.
I'm not saying that this particular case is reasonable, but:
> Who decides what is and is not appropriate?
Common sense. For millennia, human society has regulated itself by employing common sense, civility and good judgement. It's not that hard, really, even without a foolproof mathematical algorithm. Sometimes mistakes are made, but that's just how we people roll. If you accidentally go beyond the confines of civility, someone will point that out to you, you say "sorry", fix your mistake and move on. It's no big deal. Your freedom of expression is not hurt, just your freedom to behave rudely in public with no good reason. AFAIK, this has always been regulated pretty much in every civilized society since the dawn of mankind.
Agreed on all counts, I really don't get why you're being downvoted. Not that we care about internet karma, more that I wonder why others disagree with the points you've made.
Censorship of your freedom of speech really only applies when the government is doing it. Github is not the government and, by contract law, you waived your right to freedom of speech when you agreed to their terms of service. If that truly does concern you then you're free to move your code to a new repo, or host it yourself.
Unless Github decides that "anything goes" on their servers then it's going to be a judgement call sometimes. Using the word 'retard' in this context might be seen as harassment, unlike using profanity. I personally think Github made the right call here.
I don't understand how censoring something because "it's offensive to someone" came to be acceptable in the first place. Nearly everything is offensive to someone, it's simply too low a bar.
I'm certainly not campaigning for more use of the terms "retard" and "retarded". On the other hand, I've experienced first hand the very common, reflexive and thoughtless use of these words. Whenever it's used in my presence I make a point to express my distaste for the term and I encourage others to stop using it. I've gone through these motions with countless co-workers and two people higher up on the management chain, including my direct supervisor. But where I live, it's practically a regional colliquialism.
In this case, perhaps removal or correction is reasonable and Github is acting responsibly; I've already established that I have problems with these terms and do find them offensive. Still, I am uncomfortable with the whole episode and I don't feel at all confident that the next time this happens, it will seem as reasonable. On the contrary, I expect that the next time this happens, it will end up being more about ideology as it seems more and more people conflate "I am offended" with "I disagree".
What's going on at Github is rather perverse. And it happens to be around the word "Meritocracy".
Because of the "feels", the word meritocracy is a 'disempowering word'. It makes people with less skill feel 'less valuable'. So the impetus is to raise your skill? No. It's to devalue others who call you on it, or disregard your uninformed opinion.
What this accumulates to is the Github rug in the headquarters. "The United Meritocracy Of GitHub".
As quoted,
"GitHub's Julie Ann Horvath, a designer who also founded the company's all-female lecture series Passion Projects, said the rug first became a problem when photos of it made their way into feminist discussions online.
The tech industry isn’t still predominantly white and male because white men are better at their jobs than everyone else, it’s because many white men have had more opportunities to succeed than their minority and female counterparts."
Yep. Because of patriarchy, meritocracy really isn't. Oh, and throw in a bash to Paul Graham. Because 'patriarchy'.
And of course, there are also allegations that the Feminist Hackerspace DoubleUnion denied a GH employee because of the rug. Some equality, huh?
So, the same cancer that hit Reddit (free speech -> 'safe space') is coming to other companies, unsurprisingly. And we have feminism to blame.
This isn't the real problem. Github's earlier obsession with the word "meritocracy" isn't even relevant. Horvath isn't relevant here either. Feminism isn't relevant here. Paul Graham isn't relevant here. Reddit isn't relevant here. You're all over the place with stuff that isn't relevant.
The issue is that Github's content policing has been turned up to 11 so that it's not just harassment or even seriously offensive content anymore, it's repos with words for "dumb" or "stupid" in the code that are getting ultimatums. This is not really different from banning repos for taking the Lord's name in vain, or writing offensive words like fuck and shit. So Github has become an unsafe space for average programmers, who sometimes cuss or call something stupid or even take the Lord's name in vain. And that is no good, because Github's whole purpose is to host code for people.
That's important and should be addressed. But you are only screwing us over by associating us with GamerGate, anti-feminism and all that crap.
> The issue is that Github's content policing has been turned up to 11 so that it's not just harassment or even seriously offensive content anymore, it's repos with words for "dumb" or "stupid" in the code that are getting ultimatums.
And that's the effect in "cause and effect".
The cause is feminism's creep into the boardroom as a group to appease. And the policies are as inane as arguing that "meritocracy" is an evil male word. Meritocracy is also considered a 'micro-agression' by similar said feminists because it "makes them feel bad".
So, youre right that the problem right now is Github content policing. Why? My comment explains it.
I disagree that the "meritocracy rug" story at GH is irrelevant.
It is another example of political correctness taking place (at GH, and elsewhere), but with a strong feminist-driven aspect to it. Fervent feminism absolutely tries to ride the PC wave and uses its methods - word censorship and name calling "if you don't agree with me, you are a misogynist".
>The issue is that Github's content policing has been turned up to 11
Stop here. Ask yourself "Why is GitHub dialing up to 11?"
Answer: A group known for being responsible for over-zealous political correctness and internet-mobbing is being over-zealous about their political correctness and internet-mobbing.
GitHub's answer to over-zealous politically correct internet mob? Cave in to their demands so they go away. "Turn it up to 11".
Do you blame GitHub for being pressured the internet mob - or do you blame the internet mob for pressuring GitHub?
A certain over-zealous politically correct internet mob made GitHub get rid of the word "meritocracy". A certain over-zealous politically correct internet mob was also responsible for the other things mentioned including the issues at Reddit. All of this stuff is related to the over-zealous politically correct internet mob.
The problem isn't with GitHub. It's with the over-zealous politically correct internet mob pressuring GitHub.
Thank you for providing this link. Even though the rug story happened last year (somehow I missed it), it is relevant to this thread (and a scary read).
Taken together (the attempt at censorship and the rug story) indicates to me that Github seems to be overly preoccupied with political correctness and not keeping their eyes on the ball. If this continues, watch for decreased quality/innovation coming from them as we go.
Feminism is not to blame. Feminism is wonderful and empowering ideology.
There is a distinct difference between the ideology of feminism and the behavior of a specific group of feminists. Lumping the two together like that is like blaming Islam for terrorists.
Words aren't legos fella, and they have more than one meaning.
"Sexism" is a good example. It can mean any discrimination by gender or sex. It also refers to a socio-political structure under which it is impossible for a woman to effectively discriminate or oppress a man. Which meaning you choose to wield says a lot about your biases.
You will accept that a large chunk of modern history saw women deprived of basic rights. Recent legislation may have made a dent, but hundreds of years of behavior and social structure do not vanish overnight. In this light, feminism emerges as a mode of analysis that seeks to understand how male-supremacy operates in society to elevate men and denigrate women. It is also a form of activism that seeks to correct the imbalance.
It means other things too. But since you clearly have an unsubtle and unsympathetic viewpoint, your point of view is frankly not relevant. You don't get to define it. Instead, consider talking less and listening more. Start by asking a woman feminist what feminism means to her, and see if you can actually keep your mouth shut while she's talking.
No, my point is that the rest of the world doesn't care what feminism "means to a single person": you.
You sit around and trash the work of thousands of committed people cuz "waah my fave internet site did something i didn't like". Go back to brogramming shitty ruby apps.
Insults aside, there is a glimpse of sunlight in one thing you say:
I look at what's happening using "feminism" and its abhorrent.
If you say you are objecting to censorship in the name of feminism, this can actually be articulated from a pro- (or at least neutral-to--) feminist viewpoint. There is nothing about feminism that implies or demands censorship. Someone clamoring for censorship in the name of feminism can be reasonably opposed on the grounds of defending free speech, etc.
Now: companies are allowed to prohibit whatever speech they want on their site. If they think it will make their customers or shareholders happy, or solve whatever bullshit internal politics are at play, nothing can stop them. Risk-aversion leading to all sorts of ridiculous bureaucracy is rampant in corporate america and it ain't just about PC, it's also why corporate music sucks, etc.
The problem with you is your incessant trolling of feminism itself. It's ignorant and insulting, especially rolling out the repulsive "SJW" slur. People are going to fight for their rights, you can stand in the way and get run over, or you can seek to achieve a higher understanding.
Etymology and definition are two different things, and the latter can not be reliably inferred from the former.
Your argument presumes an inference of the definition from the etymology, which would perhaps not be an unreasonable approach if you were a future archeologist stumbling on the fragmentary remains of our society and the only information you had for interpreting the modern English word "feminism" was an idea of its linguistic roots.
But it is unreasonable when you actually have access to the modern world in which it is used.
> Feminism, by its very name, is a sexist philosophy. And according to feminists, sexism (mainly patriarchy) is bad. Unless it's feminism.
That seems to imply that you don't think sexism is bad. Did you mean to imply that?
Feminism, is by definition, anti-sexist. There are sexists who claim to be feminists, but that doesn't change the meaning of the word.
While the term 'feminism' does come from the root 'feminine', it refers to an umbrella of ideologies that includes many advocates of equal rights for men as well as for women.
However, if you do believe in the value of sexism, I can definitely understand why you would dislike feminism.
Feminism, by definition, is sexist. MRA, by definition, is also sexist.
Both are centered around their own sex and "leveling the playing field" for their own gender. Feminists do not give a rat's ass about paternal child custody issues or "men's mental health" (particularly the much higher rates of suicide). Because those aren't issues where women are under-privileged. MRA's don't really care about women's issues. That's because both of these ideologies are sexist.
If you want equality that isn't sexist, try "egalitarianism". Equality for both genders (not sexist) and not only a single gender (sexist).
>Just because a movement/ideology is focused on advancing particular issues, doesn't mean they support discrimination against others groups, which is what sexism/racism/etc actually is.
White-pride groups that sing the praises of white people while not mentioning POC at all would be totally fine in your book, since they aren't supporting discrimination of POC? I think you're in the minority opinion here...
Don't get me wrong - I think that sexism/racism is about malevolent actions intended to harm or belittle or otherwise negatively discriminate against another group. But I'm of the minority opinion. Benevolent actions are considered sexist/racist nowadays, chivalry is extremely sexist. Always opening the door for women - but not always for men - is sexist.
Advocating for women's rights but not equally advocating for men's rights is therefore just as sexist as chivalry. One is an egalitarian if they're actually practicing behavior focused on equality. They can mislabel themselves as a feminist all the want, though I will call them out on promoting sexist ideology.
And yes - I've met a few "actually egalitarian but call themselves feminists". Most of them agree that egalitarian defines them better and they'd rather separate themselves from the extremely sexist "militant feminists" by labeling themselves as an egalitarian rather than a feminist.
In today's political climate, being an MRA and a feminist at the same time is like being a KKK member who's a member of the Black Panther Party.
> Don't get me wrong - I think that sexism/racism is about malevolent actions intended to harm or belittle or otherwise negatively discriminate against another group. But I'm of the minority opinion. Benevolent actions are considered sexist/racist nowadays, chivalry is extremely sexist. Always opening the door for women - but not always for men - is sexist.
Same here. There are actions that one can take that are overly sexist. Kitchen comments are common, as are "make me a sandwich", and the like.
There's also the class of subtle insults like "I didnt know you could program". They're harder to correct, but with some self discipline, they aren't that hard.
Then as you said, there's the "Not an insult at all, not even a subtle insult". I've been yelled at by a raging feminist for opening a door for her. Next time, I let it slam in her face, whilst leaving it open for her boyfriend.
I would also define myself as a staunch egalitarian. Aside pregnancy and birth, there are no differences between what a man and a woman can do. Even breastfeed....
>There's also the class of subtle insults like "I didnt know you could program". They're harder to correct, but with some self discipline, they aren't that hard.
No. Just. No.
Context matters extremely for this - and the assumption that they thought you couldn't program because of you gender is on you not them. That's why it's called an "assumption".
It's about perception. People who want to see negativity in it will and others won't. What if they're just genuinely surprised you can program because you've never talked about programming or shown you can program and it shocked them you were capable of it? How is genuine surprise an insult?
To illustrate my point:
"Your life is like a blank book."
1) You're free to write about whatever you want, to create your own decisions, and to decide what your book is going to be about. You have the ability to be anything you want to be - nobody has already written your book for you. It's yours to decide. (The common, positive perspective when this saying is used.)
2) You've done absolutely nothing in your life such that you've written nothing in the book. You're completely worthless and have accomplished nothing. If you had managed to ever accomplish anything in your life, your book wouldn't be empty. (Unnecessarily negative perspective that assumes an ill-intent where none was.)
Sexism in all of its forms is bad. That includes feminism AND masculinism.
> While the term 'feminism' does come from the root 'feminine', it refers to an umbrella of ideologies that includes many advocates of equal rights for men as well as for women.
Many (most?) definitions of feminism are along the lines of "supporting equal rights for men and women" or "equality between the sexes".
Feminism is an umbrella term for a group of ideologies, some of who do not agree with either of those definitions. In that sense my statement is not accurate. However it is still far more accurate that your attempt to use the latin root of the word to define its meaning while ignoring its use and history.
> Citation needed for italicized text
Here's one:
I am a feminist and I support equal rights for men as well women.
> Feminism is an umbrella term for a group of ideologies, some of who do not agree with either of those definitions. In that sense my statement is not accurate. However it is still far more accurate that your attempt to use the latin root of the word to define its meaning while ignoring its use and history.
In other words, you just keep moving the endposts so nothing is really "Feminism" unless you agree to it. Got it.
> Here's one: I am a feminist and I support equal rights for men as well women.
Repeat after me: The plural of Anecdote is not 'Data'
Feminism only sees to female rights in reference to 'leveling the playing field'. Any other "but they really also do ..." is just being disingenuous and deceitful.
If you support equal rights for men and women, that's egalitarianism.
> In other words, you just keep moving the endposts so nothing is really "Feminism" unless you agree to it. Got it.
That is the opposite of what I did. What I did was to acknowledge that the term feminism is used to include ideologies that I disagree with.
> Repeat after me: The plural of Anecdote is not 'Data'
Right, 'Data' is the plural of 'Datum' and I provided you with two of them. I did not make a sufficiently statistical claim that requires a representative sample to validate.
Most relevantly: "While equality feminism was the dominant perspective of feminism during the 19th and 20th century, the 1980s and 1990s brought about a new focus in popular feminism on difference feminism, or the essential differences between men and women."
> Feminism only sees to female rights in reference to 'leveling the playing field'.
I'd ask to you cite that, but I understand the impossibility of proving non-existence (especially given that I have disproven that non-existence).
> If you support equal rights for men and women, that's egalitarianism.
Egalitarianism is a different broader umbrella term with an even looser range definitions. I am amused that in defending your anti-PC rant you end up trying to control what language I use to define myself in a very PC fashion.
You are free to call yourself an egalitarian and not identify as a feminist.
I am personally proud to share the label 'feminist' with a large number people who have individually done more to promote equality in the world that you ever will. I don't mind also sharing it with a some assholes from the internet who do nothing to promote equality.
Nope. And yes you can blame a doctrine that people follow that succinctly makes recommendations to violence for being a cause of violence. Perfectly acceptable and so far quite accurate.
First of all, I said "terrorism", not "extremist islamic terroism". This isn't splitting hairs in because the parent is taking about forms of PC that do not directly relate to gender and blaming feminism for them.
> And yes you can blame a doctrine that people follow that succinctly makes recommendations to violence for being a cause of violence.
The ability to blame something for something does not mean that one is actually an effect of the other.
You can also blame western dependence on oil, cultural imperialism, the fall of the ottoman empire, human nature and many other things for islamic terrorism.
While all of these things do exist in the chain of effects that lead to islamic terrorism, that does not mean that blaming them is helpful nor particularly accurate.
Generally when assigning blame you should look for a reasonably proximal and changeable item in the change of effects. The level of violence expressed in a religious text is neither proximal to the level of violence perpetuated in its name nor is it changeable. Thus blaming it is not particularly useful.
Of course, you are free to blame whatever you want. I hope it works out well for you.
"No True Scotsman" isn't a good way to defend Feminism; continuing to be an example of an empowered feminist is.
In this case, though, you shouldn't even feel the need to defend it because feminism has nothing to do with the OP topic. It was dragged into the discussion because kefka blames feminism...because feminism.
I think Github is itself mostly white guys. Also, most of the people being labeled SJWs on the relevant Github issue are white guys. So this isn't about whether you are a white guy or being defensive about being a white guy.
Why should race or sex even be a part of the equation of "Hire or Not?"
But don't worry. Github hired a bunch of women for their women-only area, Passion Projects. They only hire women, so it's a "Safe Space".
... and it appeases the feminists so that we don't have to hold to high standards of programming. They do the frilly 'social media' productions because you know "women are good at social".
Edit: And that's the problem with specialized woman-only hiring procedures. They look good from a PR aspect as well as an appeasement angle, but the message they deliver is "Women aren't as good as men, so we have 'special' programs for them."
I never thought I'd see the day when HN's tide of hatred would turn from government surveillance towards the social justice boogeymen of Redditdom. You're arguing that feminism and "social justice warrior garbage" are the direct causes of Github censoring repos. It's not. If Github was pressured by people on Tumblr to use a regex to change the word, it would be a different story.
They have good intentions, but the way they chose to implement it is completely unacceptable. You cannot censor the internet. This furor wouldn't really have occurred if they'd just sent the sap an email politely asking them to replace the word with something more sensitive.
As someone pointed out in the thread on Github, the term "Git" is also an offensive term. Who's going to start the petition for Github to change its name?
Slippery Slopes Indeed.
From Wikipedia: "Git is a mild[1] pejorative with origins in British English for a silly, incompetent, stupid, annoying, senile, elderly or childish person.[2] It is usually an insult, more severe than twit or idiot but less severe than wanker, arsehole or twat.[1][3][4]"
That's not the same thing though. Calling someone a git is just calling them stupid, calling someone a retard is saying they're so stupid they're mentally disabled and they should feel ashamed for it. It's pretty insulting towards people with mental disabilities.
Even Linus has said he named git after himself because he's so egotistical.
Stupid, Git, Retard, Idiot, Dimwit etc.. In the context they are used all have very similar intentions to put someone down for not being smart.
There is one really important point to keep in mind, when someone is offended about something someone else says or writes that is their decision and it is their problem not the one who did the offending.
I personally don't generally use the term "retard" I also don't generally put slurs of any kind in my code. However I do take issue when someone says that I can't.
"Whoever is the stupid fucking idiot who made this dimwitted decision should go get their brain checked."
That's no less offensive then using the word retard and it's anyones right to down vote the comment on that basis or to just ignore me. Thus my point has been made.
No, they really don't. Retard has historically been used to classify the mentally disabled, it literally was a definition. Using it to call someone mentally disabled as an insult is more offensive to the mentally disabled than calling someone stupid. That's the issue.
You're free to use retard in your code as much as you want, apparently not on Github though. They, as a private company, are allowed to pick and choose what they want on their site.
Ditto for a lot of the words we use as synonyms for "stupid".
There's actually an entire ranking for those with disabilities - just below a "normal" person was the "feeble-minded", which ranked ahead of a "moron", which was more functional than an "imbecile" which was the last step before an "idiot".
This was all common parlance in the 19th and 20th century.
So explain to me again why retard is specifically offensive.
The reason "retard" is more offensive to people with mental disabilities (even when not used directly as a slur) is that its use in that context is more recent than the use of "idiot" or "imbecile".
That is all. Really. Give it a few decades and we wouldn't be having this discussion because no person with mental disabilities would feel offended by anyone using it as a mere synonym for "dunce".
Of course so-called Internet feminists might still demand your head on a silver platter even then, but (in stark contrast with actual feminists) nobody should be paying attention to them to begin with, even if they make it hard not to.
Just switch back to imbecile for the next 100 years? Problem solved? Clearly not, the underlying issue has nothing to do with the word but meanings that people attach to them and that is something that will not be fixed by outlawing the word as the meanings attached will shift to a new word.
It's insulting to some perhaps due to their own self-perception but the definition of the word and its word origins are separate from how somebody feels about the way a word may have been co-opted over a period of time. Retard is interesting because its meaning is pretty clear and innocuous. The word is also quite useful.
If you say a material is fire retardant, you not only are free to say this, it would be ridiculous to have to invent or supplant a new word because one was co-opted over time and personified, turned into a noun. People will disagree, but it takes mental gymnastics to be offended by things like that.
That's why people have developed the SJW social justice warrior moniker and I think it fits well. Because it's an imaginary problem and working within that framework these kinds of people will eat themselves to death. So why engage or contribute to it at the expense of time, logic, and a reduction in cohesion of everyone else working towards goals.
You have to give people the power to use words like this where a true meaning well defined is absent of insult and if used as insult, if not specifically directed at someone, you can't allow another person's claim of offense to affect the conversation thats apart from them.
this is my biggest problem of a lot of the narrative spread by certain people and the media. maybe it's a thing with modern society where foolish people misidentify real problems and instead use their valuable time on things like microaggressions thereby taking focus (sometimes on purpose) off actual aggressions. And so far it's recipe for a failed state. Christopher Hitchens said it well. "The fact that you’re offended has absolutely no bearing on the truth of the matter"
The sad thing, the very sad thing is the media do better on these kinds of controversies because they generate views. I have chosen to participate here on this in hopes it might actually set somebody straight. The people who claim this kind of censorship are the same people who purport that there is strength in diversity. But unfortunately they don't really know what diversity really looks like in terms of diversity of ideas. They imagine it means comfort but they are wrong. Understanding diversity means bearing with discomfort and dealing with the imperfections of speech, perception and letting go of this idea that you can break down useful frameworks and infrastructure and it will make things better. That's not how one becomes a valuable participant in anything and they make communities suffer.
SJWs are tilting at windmills. Except the windmills in this case are actual people.
The term "rebel without a cause" comes to mind. Except this time around it's borrowing a jargon that makes it sound legitimate enough to infiltrate everything.
The word they are looking for isn't "diversity", it's "gleichschaltung". For all their supposed grasp of academia, they're not very good at establishing cause and effect before getting their pitchforks ready.
Have people with mental disabilities actually spoken out against this use of the word (i.e. using "retard" to describe someone as "extremely stupid")? If the answer is "yes" the discussion is over.
We like to get offended on other people's behalf. This is incredibly disrespectful -- it's no different from male feminists speaking on the behalf of women.
If at least some people with actual mental disabilities find the use of the term (as a substitute for similar phrases like "idiots" or "dummies", not as a direct smear against people with mental disabilities) inappropriate and hurtful, I fully agree that we shouldn't be using it.
The reason we don't use the "N-word" (even outside the context of "black person") isn't that it's offensive, it's that a significant share of black people find its use in any context extremely hurtful. If it was just white people complaining, we shouldn't change a thing.
Outside of the use as a slur against people with mental disabilities, the only difference between "retard" and "idiot" is how long it's been since the term was considered appropriate when describing people with mental disabilities in medical texts. This in itself is not sufficient.
This is actually a big problem with self-identifying feminists on the Internet (read: leaking from tumblr) today. Instead of empowering the actual victims they get offended on other people's behalf or just plain insist they themselves uniquely have the right not to be offended (but nobody else does because whoever disagrees with them is wrong, even if they self-identify as feminists, too).
You're telling us a lot more about how you use speech in an attempt to shame other people and a lot less about how shaming and insulting 'stupid' is relative to 'so stupid'.
The problem is the historical usage of "retard" toward the mentally disabled and the trend to use the word to call not mentally disabled people mentally disabled as an insult. The "mentally disabled as an insult" part is why people don't want "retard" to be used.
I don't use either of the words because I'm an adult who isn't British.
Problem solved! Instead of calling someone who is not mentally disabled "retard" as an insult we should all now call them "mentally disabled".
So next time someone who is not mentally disabled cuts you off in traffic just yell out "You're a mentally disabled individual!"
The underlying issue has nothing to do with the word but the meaning, you can kill the word but the meaning will be attached to something else. People who don't have respect for the mentally disabled will not be changed by censoring a word.
#sigh
Note: I don't endorse actually calling anyone mentally disabled, retarded, slow etc.. We should try to be better humans then that and treat people with the respect they deserve.
So is "idiot" as bad as "retard" then? What about "imbecile"? What about "moron"? And what about "cretin"?
If "medical description of a person with mental disabilities" was a sufficient criterion, all of these would be equally inappropriate (even in an informal / vulgar context). But even tumblr will find it hard to get outraged about the use of the word "cretin" (outside the use as a direct slur against someone with mental disabilities).
Context is important and context is not just about the original meaning and use of a word but also time. We generally find archaic insults humorous -- this isn't because the phrases were harmless at the time they were in widespread use but because they haven't been in widespread use (in their original meaning) for a significant amount of time.
The problem with "retard" isn't merely its historical usage. The problem is that that historical usage is fairly recent.
I think that's not giving Github enough credit. They are clearly thinking very deeply about professionalism in a social coding frame, and I really doubt they will begin addressing every single complaint they receive.
If they do, again, there are existing alternatives or the people are free to build their own.
The alarmism over this "incident" is mind boggling. That people don't simple let Github conduct their business is incomprehensible to me. If I owned a Chipotle and someone came in yelling "retard" or any term I found offensive I would feel fine kicking them out. If the Chipotle down the street thought that was fine, they might get my business, but there is always choice.
Github's actions are entirely understandable - I agree. They are just trying to survive as a business.
But I don't agree that the resultant alarmism is mind boggling. Folks are becoming increasingly anxious at the ever increasing signalling costs being applied to innocent discourse; applied by people who have little to no institutional authority, and who certainly aren't recognised by folk AS authorities.
In response - folk are responding instinctively by upping their own application of signalling costs in retaliation. So you see folks saying things like: I'll never use GitHub again if they do this, instead of just remarking to themselves privately - gee, that was a bit harsh of Github, and moving along with their day.
What I personally find interesting is that I'm not seeing much discussion about what the real causes of these rising signalling costs are. I kind of expected Hacker News to be interested in that sort of thing - but here, as everywhere else, everyone is just getting caught up in the fever. We are all human I suppose.
My favourite explanation is one predicted by various game theoretic models about punishment in human groups. Game theory predicts that as human group sizes increases more people become "punishers" and apply higher signalling costs. I can link to research papers if people request.
With the internet - of course - group sizes have increased massively. Furthermore - the economic costs of signalling have dropped dramatically. So we are collectively applying much higher social signalling costs to compensate.
I haven't been able to find research that specifically tries to confirm this hypothesis - but various related hypotheses, as well as the game theoretic models that generated them, have obtained significant confirmation. Hence I set high credence for this particular hypothesis of mine (though it does need a much more rigorous formulation).
> So you see folks saying things like: I'll never use GitHub again if they do this, instead of just remarking to themselves privately - gee, that was a bit harsh of Github, and moving along with their day.
First of all, I assume that most people DO move along. After all you don't hear of those who don't say anything.
Secondly, perhaps those who do feel compelled to speak do so because they are afraid of being part of a silent majority and thus some group A imposing their standards on everyone because that group A is in conflict with group B.
Something like "I don't agree with B's behavior, but I don't agree with A's demands either. I just want to do whatever I do my own way. Please be tolerant, even of things that might offend someone out there".
Nobody is running into anywhere and "yelling 'retard'", the equivalent of which would be more akin to posting "RETARD" on comment threads all over GitHub. If that's what was happening, most would regard it as spam and would probably agree that the user should be banned (at least temporarily). That's not what happened.
So, while I agree that using "retard" in a lighthearted manner is offensive, and I wouldn't do it myself, I don't decide what others are allowed to say, because I don't want others to decide what I'm allowed to say[1]? Instead, I'll make a choice about who I want to be friends with.
GitHub making value judgments on the political correctness of speech in the repositories they host makes me extremely hesitant to continue to use them. I want my service platforms to be neutral to content, so long as it's legal. This isn't some complaint about "freedom of speech" or some whine about how GitHub can't do this, but their doing so has substantially harmed my faith in them as a platform and as a company that I want to be dependent on.
I'm voting with my wallet, and I've just deleted my private repos and downgraded from my paid plan. I don't wish to support these kinds of actions with my dollars.
I agree completely. Why the hell should Github care about this? These sorts of decisions reduce my confidence that Github won't make even worse decisions that actually materially effect me. Without confidence in them, I'll start hosting my code elsewhere.
This obsession with making every single website a hugbox these days is moronic. The word retard/retarded is seldom associated with actual retardation instead it's just a synonym for moron.
Even if you dissagree with that you should still be able to see that even if we did s/retard/moron/ or replaced it with git, idiot etc it would still violate the TOS.
No, they aren't. Git means "bastard", which I find awfully discriminatory towards people brought up by single parents. How will they ever feel comfortable in contributing to open source if all open source development happens on Github?
You're a bastard - in the strict sense - which is uncommonly used nowadays, other than mischievously - if born out of wedlock. Being brought up by a single parent is a separate matter.
I misspoke when I implied that all children brought up by single parents are bastards. In any case, my point stands. Github makes children born out of wedlock feel unwelcome and they should change their name.
Git may be a synonym (sort of) for "bastard", but not for all of its meanings. I doubt anybody would link "git" to birth out of wedlock.
(Judging by this particular hoohah though it may be true though that Github might eventually turn out unwelcoming to those fitting definitions #2 or #3 from the above link.)
It's not about meaning, it's about usage and impact. Slurs like "r@t$rd" are used against people with mental health issues and make it hard for them to participate in such spaces.
Offence is meaningless. White people are occasionally offended by 'cracker', rich people by other terms, but they don't cause material harm to them. But people of colour are hurt by words like 'n$@!%r".
Words themselves have no meaning. The meaning is derived by the intention and context. It is perfectly correct to use nigger in some context. Just look at Louis CK or George Carlin. Actually George Carlin made a bit about the word nigger and he made pretty good arguments against the American obsession with "bad" words. The Americans have a very childish attitude towards this, I haven't seen any country were adults refer to words by their first letter.
As if somehow euphemism make everything ok, even though you say 'n$@!%r", you are still saying nigger.
Linguist here: you haven't seen much, this "obsession" is inherent to language itself and has a name of its own: connotation. Connotation is everything associated with a word, denotation is what the word actually means. But denotation doesn't override connotation, they coexist. If anything, connotation can change denotation, while connotation changes independently from denotation.
So what's the difference between saying nigger and meaning nigger? When you're saying nigger, you give away the option of not meaning nigger, because you cannot use the word free of its connotation: it's there, no matter how you use it. Dogwhistle terms used instead of nigger do not have that universal connotation to them, which is precisely why they are used: they can slip under the radar.
So what to do? Honestly, this is extremely simple: don't say nigger if you don't want people to equate what you're saying with the connotation your words carry. And the same goes for retard: if you don't want people to equate your words with the hate directed at people with mental health issues, don't use words whose connotation is limited to that hate. The denotation of "Sieg Heil" is completely harmless, but you have no problem with understanding its connotation and you don't go around saying it when the denotation fits because you know that only Nazis say "Sieg Heil".
Well, only assholes say retarded or retard. That's the connotation you're associating yourself with and no matter how much you complain about being misunderstood and people being too PC, you just messed up by not paying attention to the connotation of the word.
Oh, so when someone calls me a totally racist and offensive slur against white people it causes no harm, but when white people call blacks what they call each other all the time it hurts them... definitely makes sense.
They are not alone. I know many people who would find this offensive. It isn't like they shadowbanned them or deleted the repo outright. The maintainers were given 24hrs and instructions to fix it.
-- @ybur-yug
No, what actually happened is that somebody reported the original upstream of this fork (WebMBro/WebMConverter) but since @WebMBro himself left a while ago (which prompted me to make this fork in the first place), GitHub couldn't get a response from him, so they shut down that repo
along with all forks, with seemingly no communication towards other fork developers.
I had to contact GitHub myself in order to even get a notification of what was going on, and it took them about 3 days to restore any kind of access to my fork of the project.
They didn't just threaten to shut it down, according to their email (https://imgur.com/QC51FZz) they did disable it at the same time they disabled the parent repository a few days ago. (https://archive.is/XiTS9)
github is within their rights to do this but it's horrendous that they are doing it. The corpus of offensive speech (or code in this case) is getting out of hand. The code is clearly humor. Not everyone appreciates the same humor but humor is _meant_ to be offensive. So, the policy will proceed to be no humor in code that isn't bland. But, then, all of silicon valley is moving toward this. A github founder got into a lot of trouble for "objectionable" humor. I'm certain I'll get lots of downvotes for this. But remember the old tale that "first they came for the Christians and I didn't complain because I wasn't a Christian..."
Martin Niemöller's quote[1] is an important one, possibly even more so today than when he first said it. We're so caught up in our own selfish bubbles, we're failing to consider those around us.
There are many variations of the saying - several from himself, but the best known version goes:
First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
There's an enormous difference between banning things with direct links to the murder of more than 6 million people, in the hope that no-one gets hurt in the years immediately after the event, and the banning of a word which hurt tens of people's feelings over the internet.
I'm Jewish, but I think banning Nazi symbols at this point in time is counterproductive and unnecessary. All speech, no matter how odious, should be allowed.
The Christian parable only applies if the puritans are in the minority. Judging by the comments in this HN thread alone, more people are in favor of whitewashing language than against.
I, for one, do not look forward to an internet where the only allowable form of humor is some combination of popsicle stick jokes and regurgitated memes.
IMHO as far as offensiveness is concerned, 'retard' is pretty far down the scale... and regardless of whether they have the right to do this, I think this whole "politically correct" movement is a pretty disturbing trend. It's basically encouraging people to become offended more easily, and turns straightforward easy-to-understand conversations into watered-down vague doublespeak-ish verbiage. (If you've worked in any large organisations with similar policies, you'll know what I mean. I left that culture behind years ago and don't regret it one bit.)
Are there any GitHub equivalents that support the ideas of free speech and expression (within what the law allows)?
I agree that the word may be down on the offensiveness scale, but it is still offensive to some people.
Large organisations have such policies because they are aware that they are composed of people from diverse set of backgrounds. Unless you know exactly who the message is intended to, the delivery will always sounds vague / generic.
Before coming to Australia, I never knew that showing picture(s) of a deceased Aboriginal person is a cause of offense. If, say for example, a fatality occurred and the last group photo with the deceased Aboriginal was circulated (e.g. in memoriam memo), they would regard it as an offense even with the best of intentions.
TL,DR; Let's just be respectful and not call each other names.
>I agree that the word may be down on the offensiveness scale, but it is still offensive to some people.
Who gives a shit? 'fuck' is offensive to some people and it's all over github. This enforcement is completely arbitrary and this is what is causing the backlash.
But, as I mentioned in some other comments, GitHub is made up by many individuals that holds different values (just like you and me), thus it is nearly impossible for them to be 100% consistent.
I think the backlash happened mainly because there is a disagreement on the conduct. Just so happened, someone who stumbled upon the repo thought it was inappropriate, reported it, and the reviewer agreed (my speculation).
Is it unethical for Github to take it down? Not at all.
But should they? I don't know, I don't think I would have. It's kind of scary to use cloud services where it's hard to tell if your content might be judged in violation of some rule and might suddenly disappear as a result. If the offensiveness were more extreme (say, a repo dedicated to making fun of the mentally disabled), then yes, remove it... but the actual case here looks pretty benign to me. A poor choice of words, but with no intended malice. Coming down hard in this case looks arbitrary and unexpected, and arbitrary and unexpected rule enforcement is scary.
Certainly, though, it's Github's choice what kind of rules they want to enforce and whether or not they care if this scares users.
Why should one group of people acquiesce to another group of people's demands just because they claim offensiveness.
Should everyone live to the strictest thinkable standards because somewhere out there is a semi-large group of people who find your behavior offensive?
Such semi-large groups might be religions for example that take various kinds of behaviors you take for granted as offensive.
It's not that you have to. It's a social grace to not offend people. If you really want to, you are allowed to. But when society says to fuck off -- well, you got what you paid for.
People getting offended is not the issue. If everyone chose to never offend anybody else, my mother would never know that she makes bad pasta and we'd all have to eat bad pasta 3 times a week.
You want to draw the line at marginalizing a group of people or trivializing something serious like racism. But you want to make sure you are doing it in a way that isn't inhibiting legitimate thoughts, studies, projects, etc. from making it into the public sphere.
Every time you censor speech you stifle legitimate dialog because people will be uncertain whether their thoughts are legitimate or just offensive.
Millions of people find all kinds of things offensive. One half of the political spectrum finds the other offensive. That doesn't mean we just ban everything.
Or they could go "It's open source, go submit a pull request". You know, the human approach instead of the PC Police approach where they appeal to authority and have a faceless one Demand the PC filter to be applied.
I agree with what you're getting at, but at the same time it's reasonable to say that a non-trivial number of people are offended by the term.. So even while most people don't take offense, I don't think it's wrong to describe the word as offensive.
Your first three questions/answers, summarized, is that "Github ethically and legally removed an offensive word"
Should they? Yes.
I feel slippery slope arguments get brought up way too much sometimes. Every issue is turning into a binary all-or-nothing ordeal, with no room for nuance or context.
As long as what Github did is 1. ethical (removing a generally accepted as offensive word), 2. legal, then I see no problem with it.
If, IF Github starts making more arbitrary calls, then I think its the time to be angry or worried.
I'm not making any slippery slope argument. I'm saying that if it's hard to predict what minor infractions might result in 24-hour ultimatums, then that's going to make users uncomfortable, and that a lot of users wouldn't have predicted that this particular case would lead to a 24-hour ultimatum.
If the ultimatum were, say, 30 days, then I think it's in the realm that I consider sensible. That's long enough to get back from vacation without finding all your stuff is gone. The file had been there over a year, so surely it wasn't that urgent.
Maybe they could have sent an auto-generated pull request to make things easier.
It was worse than a 24 hours ultimatum. The original got the notice and apparently never replied (due to abandonment?) which caused GH to disable the repo AND THE FORKS. The Fork owners were NOT notified. In fact, the problem was only resolved when a fork owner contacted GH and got the repo enabled 3 days later.
It would also be ethical and legal to comb through their hosted content to remove any other words, but I'd argue it's a ret...er...wasteful use of their resources.
Also, I must have missed the memo when 'retarded' became "generally accepted as an offensive word". Are "stupid" "moronic" and "idiotic" also offensive? I guess I need to keep up with the times--as soon as I think I've figured out the list of everything that could possibly offend someone, we come up with something else.
Merely clarifying parent's post on what is construed as offensive (when it is directed at someone, especially to incite a reaction).
As I've mentioned in my other comments, I get that the author is just having fun... But:
- not everyone will see it that way
- it will reflect poorly on the author and GitHub
So, in short, just be careful of what you put out in public. If we can all agree on a code of conduct (and maintaining civility), then we shouldn't be having this conversation ever again :)
You are quick to summarize how Github is justified in doing this in an utterly benign case and yet are talking about nuance. I don't see any nuance here at all.
1. This itself was an arbitrary call.
2. So the issue needs to escalate to a certain arbitrary number in order for you to be worried? One person's repo getting fucked over is not enough, you want it to happen to 20?
I think the slippery slope argument is justified here. Things like "offensive" and "arbitrary calls" are fairly subjective. Of course GitHub can do what they want, but it is quite noteworthy to point out that they are policing offensive words now. They have a lot of work to do[0].
That word is not generally accepted as offensive. If you believe that, you live in an echo box dominated by politically correct SJWs. You also completely forget the world isn't limited to the US and other cultures consider the equivalent of the word entirely differently.
'The Dummy guide to ...' can be more offensive than 'The retards guide to ...'.
It depends. Maybe to you and maybe to me (it isn;t). But we are both english speakers. Github has a global presence. What if I am a french speaker and I want to say something is delayed or running a little slow?
They have every right to do it, but that doesn't make it productive. Is github really going to anoint itself word-police and comb through the source code of every project they host looking for words they [currently] consider potty-mouthed? Is that really where we have ended up? Do they have nothing better to do?
What if the word "fail" offended somebody at github? Should they take down projects that have that variable name in their source? (Not asking whether they have the right to do it--asking whether they SHOULD do it)
EDIT:
A couple more things to point out:
1. Think of yourself as an investor who has put money into GitHub. Someone drawing a salary using your money is sending out a message telling a developer not to use a potty-mouth word on the Internet. Do you feel they are putting your investment to the best possible use?
2. As a developer, I now have a new attribute to use to compare GitHub with competitors. I wonder if I have potty-mouth words in my source code. Maybe BitBucket wouldn't put my project in jeopardy because of it...
3. GitHub's own "remove sensitive data" link (referenced in the takedown E-mail) suggests their users use a tool called "BFG Repo-Cleaner". I'm sure they don't think BFG stands for Big Friendly Gun....
> 1. Think of yourself as an investor who has put money into GitHub. Someone drawing a salary using your money is sending out a message telling a developer not to use a potty-mouth word on the Internet. Do you feel they are putting your investment to the best possible use?
Someone drawing a salary using my money is also: playing foosball in the office, buying a foosball table in the office, probably watching cats on Youtube. This is a silly line of reasoning.
1) Yes, absolutely; they're creating a more friendly community, and that's a hard problem.
3) Profanity and derogatory language are not the same thing; the difference is critically important. Similarly, if you tell someone to FOAD, the FO isn't the most offensive part of that statement.
There's nothing wrong with it. I find the term offensive as well.
But it's worth noting because decisions like this are somewhat arbitrary, and we invest in this platform (the visibility/monoculture of github and your "stars" are what make it sticky). So what happens when your repo doesn't conform to their interpretation of social norms?
It's a relatively obscure repo (and I'm sure we all have a few of those ;)), that adds to the whole "arbitrary" narrative.
Another reason it's worth noting: it runs against what Github has made headlines for in the past couple of years: fighting pressures to censor content. What happens if/when leadership changes at the company (it already has over its lifetime): will the policy won't be relaxed even further? Thought exercises like this help us appreciate how invested we are in the monoculture that is Github
Here's my concern. Let's say I forked a repo and started contributing to it. I built an app that depends on that repo. Suddenly that repo vanishes because GitHub found it some word in it offensive, and my fork and all my contributions vanish. All because of some line like:
var x = getX(); // this is retarded, needs fixing
I didn't write the said offensive code nor did I even know it was there, and GitHub possibly doesn't even tell me why the repo was deleted. At this point my trust with GitHub of keeping my code is safe is broken. When users lose trust in GitHub or feel they've gone big brother then users will jump to newer, emerging alternatives.
..but it's git. Github don't host your repo - they host a copy of it. You still have all your work in your local checkout. What are you concerned about?
Gettin' real tired of people parroting this. Anyone who has used Github knows there is plenty of data (issues, labels, wikis) that aren't forked when you clone a GH repo.
But, in this case, GitHub made an effort to get in contact with the repo owner and warn them of their violation of the TOS before taking action. Why do you believe they wouldn't do the same for you?
Yes, you should be. The problem is that people (perhaps you) are elevating something marginally offensive to something hateful and worth shutting down at all costs. The dragging down of minor offenses to serious offenses is a dangerous thing.
It's surprising how little intellectual honesty there is in modern society. It's even more surprising here that some people (perhaps you) are willing to abandon any rational thinking in favor of their feelings. You seemingly can't comprehend (or are willing to ignore) the logical conclusion to where we're headed.
It's ridiculous for GitHub to police the content on their site in this way. Where does it stop? Will they block commits with "trigger" words?
Oh wow -- this is actually a comment which IMO points out the real issue here.
This sort of censorship/filter/whatever-you-call-it is bad because it add way too much value to words. So it's not about what is actually said or the context but only about words.
By that logic it's completely PC if someone is actually offended but in such a way that no bad words are used. But as soon as a Bad Word (TM) is used -- bam.
This is really really dishonest, shallow, and disgusting.
Yes. It incentivizes loudly taking offense to things. Regardless of whether or not you care about the use of the word 'retard' being taken offense to, there are many things that you do care about. It's trivially easy to find examples - millions of Americans care deeply about violence in games and media. Should GitHub police the language a violent open-source video game uses to market itself? By setting itself up as the arbiter of what is and isn't acceptable language, GitHub will be petitioned by people who want to make things unacceptable to say.
Edit: Also, people can decide to find something to take offense over in order to attack a targeted individual. This should be very concerning to you - are you sure you've never committed anything that an uncharitable person could take offense to? Imagine a few dozen very angry people combing through your work, trying to find something to get outraged about.
Because "retard" may not be the last time, but the first. A precedence would be set that a repository may be shut down due to an arbitrary(not the word I'd use here, but for the sake of argument) reason.
Because they are either wholly capitulating to a vocal minority or feel they are part of that minority. In both cases they are stepping on a slippery slope to insanity. The criterion used for this decision is necessarily wholly arbitrary, as what is deemed offensive differs with time and community. Now you have to worry whether your repo with a fortune file with some offcolor jokes is going to be banned. Whether your use of 'retard' for its original meaning is going to cause problems. Whether any other words I use may have connotations I don't know about
In the future, if they decide not to take down some other repository, there will be an implication that they find the content less offensive than this.
"Dummy" is very pedestrian term. Compare "shit" and "poo." One is more offensive than the other, even if they are used to mean the same thing in the same context.
I don't know, I guess I'm supposed to consider it censorship and be outraged or something?
Some people feel entitled to say what they want on any platform they choose and cry "censorship" when their offensive speech is removed.
My guess is GH doesn't actively monitor things like this, but someone complained. So they're removing it, and it's just a matter of time before we hear a thousand "slippery slope" arguments.
Oh sure, but that's not the context it was being used here, and there's no indication that this was some sort of automated email that was sent purely because a use of the word was detected.
I don't think anyone's out there trying to ban the word "retard" for its non-derogatory usages. Seems like a weird straw-man to worry about.
Yes it is the context! "retard" is a short form of "mentally retarded". Which means slowed down developmentally. The spark plug gaps being a little too wide in the old noggin to fire reliably.
This is not like a completely separate context like "fag" (cigarette) versus "fag" (homosexual).
The long form "mentally retarded" isn't offensive, yet "mental retard" is so offensive that it violates terms of service and gets you a shutdown threat?
Absurd.
> there's no indication that this was some sort of automated email that was sent purely because a use of the word was detected.
I would find the action less distasteful if it was such a bot. That would still leave open the possibility that the bot isn't expressing its author's intent.
Quac^H^H^H^HMedical professionals also don't use "stomach" to denote the abdomen. So what?
> any more
I.e. they did! Lay people still do.
Anyway, what matters here is not the standard used by the medical community. I suspect that if a github project had some code that "assists the mentally retarded", it would not bring on the TOS violation police.
Quick biology lesson: stomachs and abdomens are different things. The stomach is an organ inside the abdomen, and the abdomen is a region of the body.
>I.e. they did! Lay people still do.
As do rude people.
Here's what you can do: invent a time machine and go back to a time when the term wasn't offensive. Then your statement that the term isn't offensive will be true. Right now, it isn't.
>Anyway, what matters here is not the standard used by the medical community
If you notice, what I said was "there is a reason [...]." My point, then, was about the reason, not the medical community. It doesn't matter what the medical standards are. What matters is that the term is offensive, a fact which prompted the medical community to stop using it.
The URL has "retarded" in it! And Google's index still has the original article text, which uses the term in the body. They changed it to "challenged".
"Officers are looking for a mentally retarded man they say walked away from a supervised group home where he was ordered to stay."
"Mentally retarded" isn't so offensive that a TV station in America wouldn't initially use the term in July 2015, only to be corrected by some PC people into changing it.
It's just kind of a very direct term for something that is delicate. There is (or should be) some range of separation between "insensitive" and "offensive".
The line between insensitive and offensive is so blurry, it would be extremely difficult to make any consistent distinction between the two. It would effectively reduce the discussion to definitional pedantry.
The term ‘autistic’ was endorsed by a large percentage of autistic adults, family members/friends and parents but by considerably fewer professionals; ‘person with autism’ was endorsed by almost half of professionals but by fewer autistic adults and parents.
So to explain myself a lot of people tell me my brother is 'autistic'
Well my brother is not autistic. My brother has issues with understanding language and expressing himself. That does make it had for him to relate to ordinary people. But it doesn't mean that he has issues with socialization and emotional attachment. He desperately wants to fit in with people and have meaningful relationships with people.
As such I find the term Autistic, which assumes that he doesn't care about human emotional attachments. And assumes that he's somehow 'sick' to be extremely insulting.
I'd much rather people use the term retard because at least that just generally says that a person has one or more learning deficits and picks certain tasks slower than normal.
And frankly you're never going to get off the euphemism treadmill. That said for the reasons above, the concept of 'retard' is better than autistic by a long shot.
When you say "people tell you" do you mean everyday people in the street, or medical professionals?
If you're talking about people in the street then I agree with you. That must be infuriating. If that's what you're talking about please do ignore the rest of this post because it's not relevant at all.
But if you're talking about medical professionals, especially those with LD and autism specialism:
Your lack of understanding of autism isn't a particularly good reason to chose to use a word that doesn't fit just because it makes you feel better. ASD is not learning disability, although people with austism can have learning disability as well.
Your stigma around autism is a poor reason to chose to use the wrong word for a condition.
Importantly there is no cure for autism, but there are treatments. By rejecting the autism diagnosis you risk rejecting useful treatments.
> As such I find the term Autistic, which assumes that he doesn't care about human emotional attachments. And assumes that he's somehow 'sick' to be extremely insulting.
There's quite a lot bundled here. About the word sick - what's the difference between retarded (a medical condition) and autism (a medical condition)?
About the social stuff: That's not true, where did you learn that? That's a caricature of autism.
People with autism have trouble with human interaction; they can have trouble understanding emotions in other people. That does not mean that they do not care about other people or that they do not crave friendship and relationships.
One of the reason that suicide is higher in people with autism is because they desire human interaction but haven't been given the skills to acheive those.
> And frankly you're never going to get off the euphemism treadmill.
Retard is an imprecise euphemism. It has been used to deny people segregate people from society; to experiment upon them without their will; to deny them medical treatment; to kill them. Learning disability (or autism, if that's what someone has) are more precise, and more neutral, terms.
Feel free to call your brother what you like. Just don't be surprised if it causes strongly negative reactions in people you meet.
I'm rather concerned by this. Removing content for using the word 'retard' invites those who want to police behavior to try to do so by taking highly vocal offense. Furthermore, GitHub can't defend user content by falling back to free speech principles, since the obvious follow-up is to ask what the difference is between the next topic of contention and this one.
This should be concerning to anyone who enjoys things that are at risk of social sanction. Here's a short list of vaguely-plausible examples from both sides of the political spectrum:
Aaron Swartz's last interview is really apropos. [1] He discusses how speech has changed and why we should be concerned over private companies' suppressive actions now rather than just governments.
Also, those arguing that governmental assertions of free speech rights only apply to government actions are not familiar with the relevant case law in the US. [2]
Similarly, those claiming that censorship can only be done by state actors are using an incredibly idiosyncratic definition that basically anyone other than a hardcore libertarian would disagree with. [3][4][5] Say it is the 1980s and a college newspaper prints something that upsets someone. They then steal and destroy all copies of that issue once they are printed. How is this action by a non-state actor different enough to be put in another category?
Scott Alexander also has a good read on these issues. [6]
> Also, those arguing that governmental assertions of free speech rights only apply to government actions are not familiar with the relevant case law in the US.
Note that that ruling does not establish that the first amendment provides the protection of free speech from a private company. It ruled that the California constitution did so, and was in fact allowed to expand upon the rights provided by the US constitution.
That means Chromium could not be hosted on GitHub anymore. The source contains 42 instances of "retard". So do probably many massive codebases.
Example: predictor.h line 537: "The queue is a priority queue that will accelerate sub-resource speculation, and retard resolutions suggested by page scans."
// HACK: I'm at a loss about how to get the syntax checker to get
// whether a template is externed or not. For the first pass here,
// just do retarded string comparisons.
if (TemplateDecl* decl = name.getAsTemplateDecl()) {
std::string base_name = decl->getNameAsString();
if (base_name == "basic_string")
whitelisted_template = true;
}
As somebody who has multiple sclerosis and thus the prospect of disability (both physically and mentally), I find this trend worrying.
I have other things to worry about than "bad words",
I could spontaneously loose my vision,
my ability to walk, type, speak, swallow or to breath,
in addition to a variety of cognitive impairments.
What keeps me up at night is wether that tingling in my hand is just because I lay on it
or because my immune system destroys my brain again,
not wether or not somebody used "retard" or "spastic" online.
It makes me sad and angry that people can act and feel as if they've done something for the handicapped
by being offended at some word, while they have literally done nothing to improve the lives of
those affected.
I wish more people would put their time and energy into
improving medicine, wheelchairs & exoskeletons, and social-programs.
I have a spinal condition and there is a distinct possibility I'll end up in a wheelchair at worst and crutches at best.
I also couldn't give a fuck about retard/cripple or anything else anyone else says, It offends me more that someone would get offended on my behalf as if I need protecting.
This mob justice shit is getting ridiculous really fast.
Github has seriously harmed their reputation for me. Who is to define what's offensive? I'm reminded of someone who found the method "Hijack" offensive in the HTTP golang package, and the amount of animosity this created:
It is so hard to decide where to draw the line. At GitLab.com we face decisions like this too and it is impossible to please everyone. We have a code of conduct https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/blob/master/CONTRIBU... for contributing to GitLab but not for the SaaS service. You can't allow everything and you can't ban everything, so everything always is a judgement call. It would be nice to vote on these things, but a community vote might generate more problems that it solves. Maybe leave it up to the core team https://about.gitlab.com/core-team/ but this group is more concerned with technical decisions. Having a committee for these things seems heavy handed too. In summary, no ideal solutions and I don't have a strong opinion about what GitHub is doing here. The advantage of GitLab is that people that don't fit in can always run their own server https://git.popcorntime.io/groups/popcorntime
I'm sorry to hear you feel this way. Staying out of other peoples' business was not an option with GamerGate, and I'm afraid it will not be an option in the future. I would love a clear choice in these matters but I don't see one.
So, why on earth are similarly 'offensive' repositories like https://github.com/meh/retarded (may be NSFW based on language) still available? This seems either a very selective policy, or there is something else going on beyond the mere use of the word 'Retard' here.
I found the example above with a simple Google search, and I'm sure there are many more that can be picked out, depending on the choice of obscenity or slur; so it seems like GitHub could be policing this fairly easily and automatically if desired (modulo obvious issues with false positives). Is it perhaps more likely that this is in response to a third party notifying them about the repo?
'retarded' in this sense could easily be due to someone's poor command of English. In this case, the use of 'faggotry' in commits makes it clear that it's not but it's not obvious from first glance.
It's clear that GitHub aren't embarking on a mass censorship campaign (probably because it's expensive), but "WebM for retards" and "you retard" aren't open for interpretation, even from a brief glance.
Like every site, GitHub acts under safe harbour. It can't and doesn't police every piece of content uploaded. But it can respond to reports. That's what's happened here.
This brings up a point that's been nagging at me for a while: does making a community more inclusive necessarily mean making it less distinctive? GenderDetector (formerly SexMachine [1]) is another example of this process, wherein what was formerly considered within the norm of politeness is now sufficiently far outside to cause outcry. I'm curious what other people think -- this has been on my mind for a while, and although I like parts of the predicted conclusion (more people for me to share my hobby with!) others frighten me (genericization to the point of losing meaningful cultural identity).
All i thought when reading the linked thread was "What a horrendous waste of so many developer hours".
Tolerance is a two way street. It also means accepting minor things you necessarily don't agree with. These topics are blown so far out of proportion that they are actually hurtful to workplace and gender equality.
You can make your project distinctive by yelling "NIGGERS NIGGERS NIGGERS" or by actually being creative, innovative, interesting, useful, etc.
Not yelling "NIGGERS NIGGERS NIGGERS" doesn't mean your project turns into homogenous gray sludge, indistinguishable from all the other projects. If anything the projects that fling slurs are less distinctive - they're all so stupid that they limit themselves to English slurs so they end up with a very limited set of insulting terms. If they want to be hrave they could see all the stuff that's illegal in various countries and include those concepts. They should start insulting the ruling family of Kuwait, for example.
Who says that it's the same set of people? Personally, I have no problem with Facebook choosing what not to host on their platform either. And I'd certainly love to see them exercise that a little more often when it comes to personal attacks, especially those directed at specific people.
Probably because facebook is by design a mechanism of human communication. Github is a mechanism for sharing code. The words used and then rejected were useless, and substituting them did not affect the communication in any meaningful way.
Calling vocabulary subs like this "censorship" greatly glorifies the users of said language, as unless they're deliberately trying to be offensive there is always an equally useful word at hand.
I personally feel that offensive language should be censored because they’re intended to be offensive and hurtful to people, while OTOH if its obviously not purposely offensive but just a method of expression, it should be given a pass. Leave that to self-censorship / the readers / users.
Also, given the semi-monopoly that these sites have, I think that they have some sort of responsibility to not exploit network effects and alienate users just because they can.
There is no right answer to this question, nor no clear line. We all have to decide where we draws the line between accommodation and self-determination.
And the line moves over time, not always for the better.
Not at the same level. There are many concepts Facebook is optimized for that code is very poor at expressing. Like fear for one's life at the hands of SWAT teams spuriously called in, for example.
The insult used as a replacement here - 'git' - is also problematic.
'git' itself literally means 'bastard' i.e. a person born of unmarried parents.
We can claim to be an enlightened society which does not discriminate on the basis of parentage, but that doesn't bear out on so many levels, not least that single parents do not receive effective support.
You can say I could make the same argument about 'dummies' as an insult, and I won't really complain. The brand name '...for dummies' was originally a bit shocking: that's part of its marketing strategy. This is not a strategy that I particularly like.
I would not bother to censor here, I will continue just to privately think less well of this and other projects.
I think GitHub should stop policing language and the reason why is simple: it never ends. This is our future, people. Endless discussions about particular words, what they mean to particular people and particular groups of people, second guessing, and endless discussion threads.
This is our future and it's not software development.
On the first couple pages, yeah. Skip 10+ pages and you get stuff like "nigger stole my bike" etc.
As a side question, shouldn't it be fairly easy to flag those repositories and then sort through those who have it as an offensive word list and those who are just being derogatory?
I don't understand why they don't filter it on upload stage ("push"). "git push" > "sorry, can't push because of words: [list of words here]". Is it more difficult than later disable whole repo because of one stupid joke?
Isn't the name "git" (and therefore "github") itself considered pejorative? IIRC, Linus did name the tool after the British slang word.
"Git is a mild pejorative with origins in British English for a silly, incompetent, stupid, annoying, senile, elderly or childish person. It is usually an insult, more severe than twit or idiot but less severe than wanker, arsehole or (redacted)."
Those aren't typically derogatory descriptions of people, though. Profanity isn't necessarily an issue; derogatory language is. I'd expect Github to take down repositories containing slurs of any kind, while leaving up things like https://github.com/nvbn/thefuck/
That doesn't explain why they were seemingly allowed to replace "retards" with "gits" which is obviously still being used with the same derogatory meaning.
And it would take you another 2 to report them, and github a few moments to act on it. They don't necessarily proactively search for it, they act on reports.
In 20 years, next Github will be taking down projects that have "cognitively impaired" in it, because that's what we're going to be using to insult each other.
Github is a private company and they have the right to do that. However, as their customer (I pay them a little every month myself and I also work for a company that pays them a lot), I don't like that behaviour and I would start think about switching to other company's services if they continue to do that.
For those defending Github by pointing out that threatening to shut down this repository was not an act of Congress, and therefore not illegal: you would need many km/s of delta-V to miss the point any more than you already have. Your argument sucks.
> Git is a mild pejorative with origins in British English for a silly, incompetent, stupid, annoying, senile, elderly or childish person. It is usually an insult, more severe than twit or idiot but less severe than wanker, arsehole or twat.[0]
There has, for several years, been a campaign[1] promoted by the Special Olympics to end the r-word. I have signed on, and I encourage others to do so as well. I've known a lot of awesome people with intellectual disabilities who have had this label applied to them in the past. It's amazingly hurtful. No matter how you feel about Github's decision, I encourage all of us to consider how the r-word lingers in daily usage and pledge to stop using it ourselves.
> I've known a lot of awesome people with intellectual disabilities who have had this label applied to them in the past. It's amazingly hurtful.
Applying it to someone is hurtful. Using this word is not.
It doesn't matter if you substitute "retard" with "r-word" everywhere, nothing will change. Even if you change the name of the condition, you don't change the condition.
If someone wants to be offensive, I'd bet saying "Hey, you're r-word" will do the job just fine. If it was said with an intention to be offensive, it is offensive. And trying to censor certain words doesn't change it. Because words aren't the problem, people are.
I'll quote George Carlin here:
"They're only words. It's the context that counts. It's the user. It's the intention behind the words that makes them good or bad. The words are completely neutral. {...} For instance, you take the word 'nigger.' There is absolutely nothing wrong with the word 'nigger' in and of itself. It's the racist asshole who's using it that you ought to be concerned about." [1]
I'll just have to admit to a difference of opinion with you on this. I believe there is something inherently wrong with the n-word. I took the time to seek out its etymological roots via the Oxford English Dictionary, and the earliest evidence of its use is entirely negative and demeaning to those being described as such.
You don't need any additional context when the word itself was contrived as a convenient brush to disparage a people. It is, to its very roots, a bad word.
I also think you missed the point of the r-word campaign. They are not trying to get people to say "r-word" instead of the r-word. They want people to be more thoughtful and stop using the term altogether. Most people in polite society have stopped using the n-word, and they didn't substitute the literal phrase "n-word" for it as you suggest might be done. I would like to see these same people do this for the r-word. For example, I've heard a few of my coworkers use the r-word on numerous occasions when I know they would never dare use the n-word. The r-word campaign is simply asking for the same type of consideration.
Even if every single human being using it was meant to be insulting, it still wouldn't make it a bad word.
Because there are no bad words. Just like there are no bad numbers or bad colors or bad images. Information can't be good or bad. It has no such property.
A message becomes offensive only when its sender said it with the intention to be offensive. And the same message could be offensive in one case and not be offensive in others. Context matters.
> They are not trying to get people to say "r-word" instead of the r-word. They want people to be more thoughtful and stop using the term altogether.
It doesn't work like that. There will always be a word for mentally ill people. And there always will be some asshole who will try to use it against anybody who he doesn't like. Then it becomes derogatory. And it starts all over again.
They ("r-word campaign") will just change one word with another word (and burn a bunch of books containing the old word in the process). They will never change how people think.
Well, actually... you can remove all negative words from the language like it was suggested by George Orwell in 1984 novel [1]. Then "bad people" will have no words to express what they're thinking. But I really hope you aren't intending to go that way.
> Well, actually... you can remove all negative words from the language like it was suggested by George Orwell in 1984 novel [1]. Then "bad people" will have no words to express what they're thinking.
The idea that that works seems to depend on linguistic determinism, which is far from established.
Wow, I'm hoping you misspoke here, but I'm a bit concerned by the way you confused people who are "mentally ill" with those who have intellectual disabilities.
Also, this line is dangerously incorrect:
"A message becomes offensive only when its sender said it with the intention to be offensive."
If you've ever taken respectful workplace training in the US, you've likely learned the difference between intent and impact. What matters, in the US at least, is the impact of the message, not the intent of the person speaking [1].
So it became common usage as slang against people who were considered dumb, when it started to get callous it was used as slang against the mentally disabled. But it has just about universally not ever meant mentally disabled and I have literally never heard it used for that ever. I've seen it on some memes.
You're advocating for the banishment of a word that doesn't mean what you are advocating banishing it for.
It isn't really necessary to define words on HN. I think most of us have a good idea of what common English words mean. It appears as though you genuinely, by your own admission, have no knowledge of the r-word's history of use in the latter half of the 20th century. My uncle was born in the late 1940s and has intellectual disabilities that were severely exacerbated by years spent in "mental health" facilities. Before that fate befell him, my grandmother founded one of the first schools for children with intellectual disabilities in her state. It was known then as the County School for Retarded Children. This was the appropriate term back then. Doctors, researchers, teachers, and legislators all used the r-word to describe people with intellectual disabilities. It took decades for that to fade from use, yet the stigma remains. This is how the term came to be conflated with people who are "considered dumb" as you say. That only makes it worse. People with intellectual disabilities are certainly not dumb.
Now, you claimed that the r-word has "not ever meant mentally disabled." That's simply not true.
For me the main issue is not that github removed offensive content, but the politicization of the concept.
The most glaring discrepancy to me is that even though the word "nerd" is used to incite physical violence, that word is not considered inappropriate. The reason is that progressive political ideology asserts that violence that is perpetrated by "powerful" groups against "powerless" groups has an additional significance and importance, and violence against nerds falls weakly into this category, if at all.
What worries me the most in this thread is the quantity of GIFs, memes, and blatantly useless "me too, lol" comments. Can you relate how A MESSAGE WRITTEN IN CAPS makes you feel the author is shouting? Well, in the exact same way, those ridiculous pictures and messages feel to me like teenagers joining a conversation with childish jokes adding nothing to the debate, except noise.
Honestly, this looks more like a YouTube comment thread than a community of professionals discussing grown-ups issues.
For those people (like myself) not wanting to be dependent on github and similar hosting services, there are alternatives to git+github that can do distributed bugtracking and are easily self-hosted, such as Fossil ( http://www.fossil-scm.org ).
Is there any evidence that this is even real? The repo in question is a fork of a repo that's still up, with the word "retard" still in it. There's tons of foul language on GitHub, why would they single out this one relatively minor instance?
Anybody could fake that imgur picture in about 30 seconds. Does anybody know for sure that the repo was actually unavailable? Has anybody from GitHub responded?
This does remind me I wanted to clone my repos somewhere else, though.
Yeah, when you host all your code with a 3rd party, and you run all your services with a 3rd party, and you depend on another 3rd party for significant chunks of your functionality, you will find that starting up is a lot easier, as long as you don't mind giving up a very significant chunk of your independence and freedom to do as you wish.
I don't understand the obsession with github, google, amazon and the like. Well, I understand it, but I don't understand why people fall for it. Hosting is dirt cheap these days, really very easy, and you can set up pretty much any environment you need in less than a day, for very little money.
Maintaining things is hard. Even for relatively simple stuff, things fall over all the time and suddenly your job is "make sure your mail server is up" instead of "accomplish your core business task". I don't have that sort of free time anymore.
Case in point: Ran update && upgrade on my server that runs a mailinabox container. Whoops, something broke and now the container doesn't recognize any of the owners or groups. Your family mail server is down while your wife is waiting on replies to job applications. Thankfully, it was fixed within a day, but I've had stressful weeks where I've considered just moving to fastmail instead of spending my limited time at home pounding on config files.
Same here, Ubuntu dist-upgrade updated Apache, now none of my configuration works anymore and I need to figure out how to make the LAMP stack work again.
The old shared / virtual hosting was easier and a bit cheaper in that respect, but at the same time it was horribly limited (CPU limits).
Yeah - I am serious. Correct, maintaining things is hard, but for the right person, it is easy. I would rather pay the right person and retain independence over being beholden to a bunch of corps that have time and time again shown to simply "end-of-life", kill due to "ToS violations" or whatever. In most cases, if you have any kind of meaningful turnover, it is also cheaper. You are happy doing what you do the way you do it? Good for you!
Mail is something I would rather keep private, and outsourced mail providers also have issues. Running a mailserver, when you actually know what you are doing, isn't difficult, and keeping it available isn't either.
Are you really trying to make this about "a very significant chunk of your independence and freedom"? Yes, when you host with people who have standards of conduct and civility, you have to respect those standards. Get over it, or host derogatory content on your own dime.
In the case of github, they can and have taken down/blocked repos that foreign govt have found objectionable. So its not the odd offensive word here and there. Luckily, git makes it easy to have multiple copies of a repo lying around all over the place.
And yet they're hypocrites about that: they have instructions about how to circumvent the Chinese firewall on their site, which is clearly intended to have the Chinese break Chinese laws. It's not the fact they do censorship, it's the fact they measure with two measures (?) - yes to git and fuck, no to retard, yes to removing illegal stuff, no to respecting Chinese content laws, etc.
heh, with some clever social engineering and timing this could actually become a new form of attack. A lot of scripts (and Gemfiles and other things) point directly to projects on Github. Imagine an attacker managing to sneak a subtle offensive thing into a PR and get it merged in, then later complain to Github at a time when the repo owner is busy/unresponsive/on holiday. Then all the scripts or Gemfiles trying to pull down the repo fail.
I disagree with this in principle, however as a private company Github has the right to do as they please. Just make the rules clear and apply them fairly and consistently and you'll hear no complaints from me.
This kind of thinking will retard the development of web communities.
Did that sentence above offend anyone because it contained the word retard? certainly the appearance of a word could offend someone. So what. doesn't mean the word doesn't work, doesn't mean the word was even directed at them, doesn't mean the word was used with the same vibrancy or harshness as another time in their past that same word was used by someone else in some other context.
Frankly with words and being human you have to just deal with them. You have to develop muscles, use some fresh mental gymnastics to get on with your life. If this personal ritual of being offended is hurting you, look at where that comes from internally the core mechanism. Get some counseling, don't force thousands of other people to try to relate or modify just because of your narrow experience.
People who get offended need to grow up and engage with a society with a personal strength. Focusing on real problems not imaginary ones helps a lot. Lately you see more coddling over supposed hurtful words than any victim of a real aggression gets from the public. "Oh a word hurt you?" let's put it on national TV. "Oh you were assaulted and blugeoned and put in the hospital?" well sorry we can't fit you in on the local news unless there's a real story here.
don't let society continue to turn this direction. Solve real problems and ignore imaginary subjective ones.
This goes down the social justice warrior, feminism, and racism avenues, so it of course had to change.
Now, why is Meritocracy bad?
"By discarding the difficulties inherent in being both objective and humanistic, leaders in the open source community ignore the moral impact of their value system and focus solely on the potential value of their creations. The comfortable elite benefit from the status quo and never have to question the circumstances that keep them in positions of power."
Should I interpret the article as content based upon its merit, or should I take the fact a white (-3 points), female (+5 points), lesbian (+2 points), computer programmer (-4 points) wrote this article? Look at the bright side, if she can claim black (+10 points), then we have to view her content even more positively.
My answer is that I should evaluate the points and content on its merit. I'm sure she would be appalled that I would want to give her "fake minority points" to falsely increase/decrease her perceived score... Then again, I may be wrong.
But this, fellow programmer, is what we are having to fight against. I may be male. I may be female. I may be transgender. I may even be a nullo(just.dont.ask.). Or White. Or black. Or Asian. Or have a disability. Or be intellectually superior. Or completely average. But what I do have is my words, and how others read and interpret the content and worth of my words. It reminds me a document I read long ago...
"We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias... and you call us criminals...
...Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like. My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me for."
Are you saying that bullying and shunning people who don't behave according to social norms is healthy? Isn't that essentially the root of all racism, bigotry, sexism, etc? That's what already happens with large scale trolling of celebrities who become disliked and it can be quite harmful.
These people were saying silly things publicly and they should expect some backlash. Of course any extreme behavior is bad, but I don't know how this is the root of all racism, bigotry, sexism, etc. In this case they are judged by their action, not by their looks/belief.
edit: judged by what they said -> judged by their action
Everyone is offended by something; every snowflake has a trigger. If we start censoring because someone might be offended, ultimately everyone will be silent.
The irony here is that GIT is British english for idiot. Github is therefore the network of idiocy.
Anyone related to a person with LD probably somewhat cares about it, especially if their relative has been the victim of hate crime or life-risking stigma.
"Hate incidents" (not necessarily crime) are very common. In the UK a person with LD is more likely to experience a hate incident than someone who is gay, or someone who is a member of a religion.
That's not a real Hitler image, it's a photo of a wax figure at "Madame Tussauds" in Berlin. While I don't think this is the right place to use such a photo, I don't think it should be censored.
You probably know the movie "Der Untergang" and all the fake-dub videos on youtube. Guess someone uses an angry Hitler face out of this movie? Most people know that it must be ironical, however…
to cut it short: It's probably unprofessional, maybe childish. But that's not illegal.
It might be worth mentioning here that Launchpad.net (Owned, Operated by Canonical Ltd of Ubuntu fame) recently launched (rudimentary) Git support [1]. They obviously need to integrate it better, but that is on it's way.
Launchpad.net might be a (more?) suitable option to consider if you're mainly developing Free and Open Source Software.
Why didn't the maintainer just take it down? Why comply to such a stupid request?
Github profits from people going to their service because it makes them more popular. Complying to the request is encouraging them (even if it's the switch between retard and git).
I'd just have deleted the repo saying "We moved to * (ex. GitLab) with a screenshot of the email as a reason. If they don't want your content on their servers, fine, too bad for them
GitHub is not a public benefit organization. They are not public infrastructure. They are a for-profit company that does what's best for Github. Just because they have free (as in beer) hosting doesn't make them trust-able public infrastructure. It's worrying that so much of today's free and open source software development community doesn't seem to understand that.
If someone was interested in moving their content off of GitHub, how would they go about doing so? Doesn't popcorn time use something else? Asking for a friend, of course... :3
If you are only interested in the repository itself, then you are already done, as everyone who cloned it would have a local copy of it. If you want to use a similar workflow (as in, an always available publicly addressable git server to push and pull to), you can do that with "git remote set-url origin <new repository url>".
If you want to move the wiki, you can also 'git clone' that, although I believe github uses a slightly nonstandard markdown language.
I do not believe their is a good way to migrate your issue tracker.
3.2 You agree that you will not transmit, distribute, post, store, link, or otherwise traffic in Content, information, software, or materials on or through the Service that (i) is unlawful, threatening, abusive, harassing, defamatory, libelous, deceptive, fraudulent, invasive of another's privacy, tortious, offensive, profane, contains or depicts pornography that is unlawful, or is otherwise inappropriate as determined by us in our sole discretion, (ii) you know is false, misleading, untruthful or inaccurate, (iii) constitutes unauthorized or unsolicited advertising, (iv) impersonates any person or entity, including any of our employees or representatives, or (v) includes anyone’s identification documents or sensitive financial information. DigitalOcean may permit, in its sole discretion, adult websites that abide by state and federal law and regulation.
There's something odd about this. The repo in question is 'nixxquality/WebMConverter' which is where the GitHub notice was sent. However, this is a fork of another repo - https://github.com/WebMBro/WebMConverter - and that parent repo seems alive and well (that is, not disabled, and unchanged, so still titled 'WebM for retards') so why the discrepancy? Did the WebMBro account get suspended initially, and then reinstated, and only the fork felt the need to change the text? If so, this seems like a lot of overreaction based on what may well have been a (well intentioned) mistake on GitHub's part?
According to the link in the commit message, this repository (nixxquality/WebMConverter) was disabled as a consequence of the parent repository (WebMBro/WebMConverter) getting disabled by GitHub. Presumably the parent repository owners also got a message like this when their repository was disabled.
Also, as you've observed: Neither repository is currently disabled.
Didn't they read the TOS? I guess not, because otherwise they wouldn't realize that they can do this.
They're a private entity and it's up to the customers to react. If more people are in favor of this action (which it seems so), why would they not keep doing this.
Lots of misuse of the word "censorship" here and any time this subject comes up generally, not just on this site but anywhere the topic is discussed.
What is/are the root issue(s) of this mistaken belief? I typed a few possibilities but they sounded preposterous so I just deleted all that.
Could someone who thinks this is censorship please explain why Github doesn't have the right to control its own privately owned website, and how one single website monitoring the language used there is equivalent to a government "universally" (well, within its borders) coercively prohibiting all such content, such that the person in question is prevented from publishing it anywhere else, even by themselves?
Personally I think this is censorship because Github holds power in the development world. Basically every developer is on Github. I switched from Bitbucket to github not because Github is better, but because it's basically open source suicide NOT to be on Github.
Disabling a repo because they don't agree with a word in it seems like an abuse of that power to me.
So basically, I feel it's censorship because Github holds enough power over its users.
Why is the word "censorship" the problem here? Of course it is. Github is censoring what it is willing to host. This is roughly akin to you or I selecting which papers we'll read tonight, or which speakers we'd like to hear in a conference, or which links we'd like to include as related work on a blog post. Or which book we'd give to a friend.
The western world has a lot of implicit censorship going on that we think is unfairly applied en masse, and that's where we start to see a problem. Women, for example, are consistently and provably discriminated against in a variety of ways in these subtle decisions. This creates a general vacuum of their input in our field (and many others!).
Actions like this help to remove said implicit bias and apply the censorship principles we use in our daily lives more fairly, giving us a more accurate picture of the world without having to listen to every single voice.
Github certainly has the right to control its own privately owned website. That doesn't mean they have the right to stop people from complaining about how they control their website, or from deciding they don't want to use Github because of it, and neither of those things is an infringement of Github's rights no matter how much the "it's not censorship" brigade want to spin it that way.
The Comics Code Authority was not part of the government, but it was a censor.
Can you explain your use of the word censorship to only mean when the government does it?
And sure, it's just one single website, it's in their rights to do that. And then another website. And suddenly it's the entire industry, and if you dare oppose it you will be blacklisted and boycotted.
The definition of censor is "to examine books, movies, letters, etc., in order to remove things that are considered to be offensive, immoral, harmful to society, etc.", right?
Github is censoring content on their site according to their TOS. They have a right to.
It's not a First Amendment issue. It's still probably worth considering if it's a good thing. Especially, if you plan to host a project that has content that might be objectionable to someone.
The definition you gave appears to be from Merriam Webster [0]. This is a good starting point, but it's crucial to note that the word "censorship" predates the modern web, with publicly read-write websites. So the word publish [1] has been radically altered as well. As for publishing, have a look at the MW examples: they all cite books or magazines. That's an old conception of publishing that clearly needs to be updated.
And censorship is intimately tied to that definition.
Is your objection here based on just the denotation of the word? What's your preferred definition? Are you coming at it from a legal definition (e.g. Black's) or other specific context?
I think the word broadly works in this situation although
certainly the leap in context it suggests (from private legal act to illegal governmental action) is unwarranted.
I would never use the word retard as an insult to someone with disabilities. I would use the word to describe things I find stupid. Even if I did find the word retard offensive, I wouldn't like what github did here.
Yes, they have the right to remove words they don't like.
Yes, I have the right to not use their platform.
Github's time as a central source for code is limited anyway. If you don't like what they do contribute to projects that make the web more decentralized.
It's in GitHub's TOS that they maintain the ability to remove content they find offensive. So they asked a user to remove something that GitHub found offensive.
Literally nobody is claiming that this is illegal or against the GitHub ToS. The question is whether what they did was reasonable, and how this action impacts people's perception of them.
Can't say I am. People should be free to use the language they wish.
The words that were offensive 200 years ago are laughable today. It's just such a superficial thing, almost arbitrarily deciding which words are 'sensitive' and which ones aren't, I cannot stand behind efforts to censor the world.
Once upon a time 'idiot' was the more common word for the mentally disabled. Has GitHub banned 'idiot,' too? Good long while ago people would've been pretty offended by that.
I get that we're more concerned with what people are offended by TODAY rather than 200 years ago; my point is that we SHOULDN'T be concerned.
> The words that were offensive 200 years ago are laughable today.
Even if we take this at face value, we are not living 200 years ago. We're here now, and your words can have impact beyond what you realize.
You're lucky that words don't affect you so. That's your good fortune. Some words evoke experiences and implications that can drive people to depression and suicide.
Basic. Civility. Is. Not. Unreasonable.
> my point is that we SHOULDN'T be concerned.
Then you won't be concerned when I tell you your basic set of inalienable rights you take for granted has, by and large, been won on the backs of slaves and economic disparity for thousands of years. You are at the tip of a pyramid of privilege that expands backwards in time. Have some good grace about it and stop using useless and hurtful words just because you technically can.
Would it actually bother you if you couldn't use those words in those contexts? You're arguing over a principle while dismissing the real harm people have suffered. The word that got banned has no meaning or use outside the most base kind of interactions.
It's not like you can no longer say the word "eggplant" at the supermarket to refer to a vegetable.
A foreshortening of "developmentalluly retarded" that became its own derogatory noun.
Again for someone who beat the drum about the fluidity of language you seem to have a tough time seeing it in action or accepting that new words can emerge via the context.
Would it be alright, then, if it said, "WebM for Black People?"
It isn't important to quibble over what words we consider offensive in the past, present, or future. The real problem is speaking about a classification of human being as being less than fully human or using those classifications as shortcuts for "inferior."
A person with darker skin is no less human than one with lighter skin. Similarly, two people with differing sets of abilities are both also fully human. Just because someone else is made of slightly different stuff doesn't make those differences fair game for ridicule.
Normally, I don't argue with people on the internet. Tonight, I'm bored and I'm making an exception.
That being said, this isn't an argument about how we should treat people. This is an argument over whether we should be allowed to say what we wish and let others react how they will. If people don't want to use this individual's code because of his questionable mentality, let that be their choice. Instead we're now papering over it and making him perhaps look nicer than he is.
Would you also like to halt publication of Mein Kampf? It's available in bookstores near you, and I assure you there are many people who are offended by its content, myself included.
Shall we reword the sections of the Bible chastising homosexual behavior?
While I did not speak to censorship, nor did you in the comment I replied to, I do agree that blanket censorship is not good for anyone. That does not mean that casual discriminatory speech shouldn't be considered foul in general.
Insert bit here about it not being illegal or immoral to police discriminatory speech on a private service.
Say whatever you like. Do it on your own resources. And when you run a server, boot off whoever you like for acting against whatever standards or lack of standards you choose to have. And if you run a bookstore, you're welcome to carry or not carry whatever books you like.
GitHub is not the center of the world. They are not establishing law. You can publish Mein Kampf if everyone else decides not to. You can edit the bible if you wish.
Or you can try to foster the development of a professional community by taking steps to prohibit needlessly offensive language.
You can publish whatever you like on your personal website and link to it from anywhere. I don't see how this is an over-reach of censorship.
It's not, and this isn't a big deal. I agree. But I'm bored and I hate seeing people censored over little things, drops in an ocean, so I'm sharing my opinion, which is that this doesn't accomplish anything useful in any way.
Some ( many! ) years ago there was a popular how-to entitled something like 'Kerberos for Imbeciles' which I had to save to disk and edit to retitle before printing it in work.
It was a useful guide but several people were offended by the original title.
>It's just such a superficial thing, almost arbitrarily deciding which words are 'sensitive' and which ones aren't
This cannot be further from the truth. Words that are deemed offensive are deemed so because of the attitude and the meaning behind using these words
The reason white people get yelled at for using n (don't know if I can post it on HN) is because it represents hundreds of years of oppression by white people that has basically continued. People who were "retarded" used to be thrown into asylums or abandoned as small children because they were just a pain to deal with
The thing about words is that they have context and actual loaded meanings, and trying to ignore that is to ignore how language works
Good Lord, I have heard so many different takes on 'what makes something offensive.' My favorite was a teenager telling me only one person has to find something offensive before we have to all consider it as such and stop saying it.
The fact that words "have context and actual loaded meanings" is besides the point. I am saying that these things come into fashion and then pass away.
I'm sure you know it was only in the past 70 years that 'gay' took on its new meaning.
> I am saying that these things come into fashion and then pass away.
If words can come INTO fashion for various reasons, then some must be allowed to LEAVE fashion for other reasons. Letting them pass out of empathy is probably one of the most noble and equitable reasons we could have to change our language.
Your argument is so strange. You argue that language is fluid then get angry, confused and dismissive when people use that fact to change the world around them.
The meaning of the word retard has drifted. It used to be a totally acceptable word, a polite alternative to Mongoloid, used by doctors and societies.
Now outside the US it's pretty much only ever used as hate speech. The US is a bit different because the word still has some small pockets of acceptable use (although I can't see those lasting much longer).
Have a nice look at this list and let me know if you'd like to ban all of these too. After all, they have context and actual loaded meanings, and in many cases represent hundreds of years of oppression.
It's as if we as humans have some kind of context-sensitive language recognition capability, and can tell when a word is being used as a slur or if it has entirely unrelated meanings. We're slightly smarter than regular expressions. And yes, I'd fully expect Github to ban those too.
I'm sorry, but I believe that allowing even one idea to be banned from discourse is the first step towards a system where someone like Edward Snowden has to find asylum in Russia.
I don't believe in censorship or hiding away what was really said or done. If anyone has a problem with this developer's language, they can boycott his repo.
Slurs aren't discourse, or even the start of discourse. And removing them has nothing to do with pervasive surveillance.
> If anyone has a problem with this developer's language, they can boycott his repo.
Github did, and they did. And then someone decided to stir up trouble by posting it as though people should be offended by what Github did, rather than applauding them.
Github can do as they like on their own resources. If you don't like it, host your own, and welcome everyone who doesn't like to be decent to other people. See how it goes.
No matter what you do, you'll exclude people and silence ideas. Either you exclude hateful people, or you exclude people who don't enjoy hatefulness. Pick one.
Oh, is there a threshold? How many people have to be offended by it before it counts? Can you give me a number? I find 'idiot' to be a derogatory slur, does that mean nothing to you?
And note what I said in a previous commend about the elder meaning of 'idiot.' Pretty much means the same thing as 'retard' but people don't think of it that way anymore. You're taking such a traditional mindset about this, kind of "just what your parents told you."
You don't have to agree with a criteria to be able to apply it objectively; it just has to be something that can be evaluated by anyone to come up with the same answer. You can't objectively evaluate whether art looks good; you can only get subjective answers and attempt to find consensus. You can objectively determine if a word is a noun, verb, adjective, etc (given context, as some words can fall in several categories). And given context, you can objectively determine if a word is a slur. (Personally, I avoid both slurs and insults, but github only bans the former, not the latter, and that seems like a reasonable position to take.)
So, to be clear: there's an objective criteria for "what is a slur"; there's no objective criteria for "what is acceptable" or "what is offensive". But in any case, a hosting company is hardly required to provide an objective criteria for what they accept; it's nice if the rules they supply can be objectively evaluated, but that doesn't mean their choice of which rules to apply needs to be objective.
In any case, I have no further interest in arguing with you; I doubt you're going to stop being outraged that someone won't give you a free platform for hatefulness.
It's easy to go on the internet and virtue signal.
What sacrifice have you ever made toward the right of no race, person, or condition to not be offended?
What makes you so holier-than-thou, you can think it's ok to sit behind the keyboard like God and quash whatever idea runs contrary to your psyche?
There is a whole website called Twitter, where people act very pompous, very pious, but seldom have the fortitude to trouble themselves to help what they "fighting for". Kind of like how Occupy Wallstreet drank Coca Cola and brought iPhones to protests.
Yes, I would like to ban the use of the word "ape" to refer to a black man (at least on Github), keeping in mind the Use-mention distinction and "common sense" to realize that the person was actually using it as a slur.
People are free to use the language they wish. They are not necessarily free to host said language on other people's websites. This isn't a legal ban or something, GitHub is a private company and they have the right to limit what content they want on their website.
Yes, the developer had every right to say retard. 100% correct. And if they said it in front of me, I'd have every right to kick them, hard. Both of us will have paid a price, sure, but hey, freedom of speech wasn't violated.
You're free to call me a retard. I'm free to kick you for doing it. Everybody wins. But your calling me a retard isn't a divinely bestowed right to get away with it without a response just because you had the right to say it. GitHub chose to respond. The author chose to comply with the request. Done and done.
Just to nitpick... Battery is the physical act. Assault is telling someone that you're going to kick them, hard, and giving them the impression that you intend to actually do so. Both of these things are criminal, obviously.
You're not free to kick someone that calls you a retard. That is assault, which is a crime in most places on earth. I thought every adult would know that, but here we are.
The funny thing is that words differ based on context.
So if Github wishes to get into the game of automatically banning repos based on "bad words", they'd need to consider it in the context of each language.
For example "retard" in French means "late", so should a repo from a French dev be banned because he used "retard"?
As a non-“git”, I personally find the association of “git” with “retard” appropriate, correct, and a fair use of free speech.
However, as a private company, GitHub has every right to define their own house rules and enforce them. It might even be mentioned in the Terms of Service somewhere.
Is there a code hosting solution that a) lets me self host code b) has identity system (common to all self hosted instances) c) has pull requests whose origin can be verified with the identity system?
You can self-host git repo. It's quite storage- and transport-agnostic - you can host it over HTTP, SSH, NFS, SMB/CIFS and even FTP if you're into perverse things.
Every commit has your name and email address, and if you want authentication you can sign those with your public key.
And, well, you can send and receive patches using any means you want. The patch is just a text (usually) file.
Good job GH. It's sad this is shocking to some people. Perhaps they haven't dealt with anyone with mental disabilities or seen what their families deal with, and that's not their fault, nor is it an excuse. It's called empathy.
For the downvoters: some developers may think it is funny, but for others with relatives with intellectual disability, it will make them really uncomfortable.
My point is, the language is unnecessary. Especially for a public repo that might get thousands and / or tens of thousands of views.
1) A person uses an "offensive" word (without intent or without directing it at a particular person) but only to highlight a dislike of an idea or way of doing things.
2) A person uses an "offensive" word to make somebody else feel bad by directing their language at their victim.
I feel these two are in fact different uses of the word and I don't have sympathy for the "victim" in the first scenario. In the second scenario there is clear intent to hurt an individual. In the first scenario something like "Library for retards" is doing what exactly? The retarded reader sees the word retarded, remembers that they are retarded, and then feels sad because they are in fact retarded? Insulted by proxy. It, unfortunately, clearly implies that being retarded is bad. Lets be honest though. How many people here would switch their current level of cognitive abilities for that of somebody who is mentally disabled? Nobody. It is a terrible state of human suffering (I would say). But then again I am biased in thinking that life is "better" on the right end of most bell curves.
- If somebody is actively trying to hurt another person physically this needs to stop. Full stop.
- If somebody is trying to emotionally hurt another person because of who they are that should stop. So calling somebody retarded to their face? Not a good thing.
- If somebody is trying to emotionally hurt another person by calling them names arbitrary names ("you fag" when the person is in fact hetero etc) is not a good thing.
The above are based on intent and are targeted towards a victim.
- If somebody tries to insult another persons beliefs or ideas? Perfectly ok. This, of course, isn't what is happening in this case on github, but since this thread seems to be talking a bit about slippery slopes, I would rather not see our society fall so far at to make criticism a punishable "offense".
At the end of the day changing one single word is just fine, but I wish it had happened in a more positive way rather than github using the heavy hand of their "policy" (an undefinable totally subjective ambiguity that isn't applied uniformly to the whole site).
By the way, I am looking forward to the day when an "offensive word" registry is kept that bans language from use on the internet. If a word is found to be offensive by 10,000 or more individuals anywhere in the world, we have to be sure to purge it from everyday usage (good luck keeping up with malicious grade school kids) /s ...It is a stupid idea.
"Sticks and stones will break my bones and words will most certainly kill me." The new mantra.
The individuals who threw their childish temper tantrums and caused the explosive issue will:
1) Never be back other than to "report" the original offender if they ever catch him violating the COC that they so proudly forced on an otherwise harmless community.
2) Never have and never will contribute anything to the code base. Ever! Talk about entitlement.
It is the worst type of third-party drive-by policing ever.
For those arguing that they are within their rights, and free speech laws don't apply there: that's not the point. (Like most of similar situations by the way.)
It's about a company acting in a way that is alienating to its userbase. Now, many people might think retard is offensive and would prefer a sanitized environment... but many people don't. Saying "we disagree with what you did" is a way to the users to tell the company that they might be drifting away from what made them interesting in the first place.
You can be legal AND an asshole.
If every time your friend was being an asshole to you, he'd stop listening and said: "Well, it's legal.", he probably wouldn't be your friend for long.
It's about a company acting in a way that is alienating to its userbase.
Wouldn't that depend on the userbase? If there are more people using Github who would prefer it was a sanitized environment than people who think anything should be allowed then Github removing this content would be them acting not to alienate its userbase. The majority of users probably don't care either way, so we're only talking about the two extremes - and I'd hazard a guess that there are far more people who would rather Github didn't have an "anything goes" policy than did.
How do you know that the majority of users don't care? Did you or anybody else run any surveys or was that thought pulled out of your ass?
I'm hearing this argument a lot on HN, yet it is never accompanied by numbers and because it's always contrary to my experience. Would you say the same thing about Sourceforge? Of course, there's a difference between piggybacking on the work of others to distribute malware and censoring some words, however there's also similarity. GitHub censoring content means they are not a neutral platform for hosting public repositories and they are showing their potential for becoming the next Sourceforge.
GitHub censoring content means they are not a neutral platform for hosting public repositories and they are showing their potential for becoming the next Sourceforge.
In the same way that because I punched my brother as a child I might go on to be the next Stalin.
As you say, punching your brother doesn't make you Stalin, just as requesting a repo changes it's name doesn't mean you'll go on to infect all the downloads with malware.
I don't like framing this debate in the prism of government versus private company policing. Freedom of speech is not mutually exclusive to the government.
Consider a programming club meeting once a week that is open to the public. You get there and it's 6 dudes and they are accepting of you as a coder but completely at odds with you on the social justice spectrum (using words like "gay" and "retard" as examples). You have two choices at this point. Either accept the group for who they are or leave.
This is the context in which I see Github. There's a reason why Linus can run his mouth. It's because to the old "boys" club of programmers only results matter and not the social context of the group.
They have no problem with Linus using their service while running his mouth. Why are they picking on this group in particular? It's quite simple. They are small and not important.
Let me be clear. This is very very bad for open source. Github was once considered the automatic public place to share your code. For the most part most projects live in the world of a few singular coders who put their code out to the world for sharing sake and maybe to possibly intrigue others to join their project. Many of these guys are sitting in their bedrooms or garages hacking away and not looking to open themselves up to the SJW crowd when publishing their code. Regardless of what you think of the people doing the coding (which is reflected in the comments) the point of Github was to improve the accessibility of code. I fear this move will take that mission in the opposite direction.
Successful software is almost always filled with expletives. The device you are browsing this very site almost certainly had at least one fuck in it's source code somewhere in the stack.
"Lookie here, your compiler does some absolutely insane things with the spilling, including spilling a constant. For chrissake, that compiler shouldn't have been allowed to graduate from kindergarten. We're talking "sloth that was dropped on the head as a baby" level retardation levels here .... Anyway, this is not a kernel bug. This is your compiler creating completely broken code. We may need to add a warning to make sure nobody compiles with gcc-4.9.0, and the Debian people should probably downgrate their shiny new compiler."
GH already has set a precedent for favoring people based off their political tastes.
- OpalGate: LGBT has been used as an excuse to harass people outside of GH for twitter messages.
- C+=: satirical repository called C+= mocking feminism in tech was Shut down.
- GGAutoBlocker: specifically targets a manifest of twitter targets users based off political persuasion. It's alive. (https://github.com/freebsdgirl/ggautoblocker/blob/master/sou...) This blocker is literally based off targetting people because of their political beliefs.
If you don't fall in line with the politics of certain people, they claim harassment - report your to these services - and get you shutdown.
It's kind of scary how many people here consider the word retard offensive.
I assume words like "fucker" or "dicks" would also trigger you?
I get that Github as a private corporation gets to decide what they want or don't want but that's driven on how many people genuinely get offended so I'm assuming a large portion of people genuinely got bothered by this compared to all the other shit happening in the world.
I actually find it slightly depressing how many people here don't find it offensive, and are comfortable with it. Maybe it's a US vs. UK thing?
Many people in the sixties said 'coon' or 'spade,' and many people in the seventies said 'paki' or 'poof;' and you could argue that those words weren't directly offensive insults, but - to me - there is still some undercurrent of the different and qualities of 'I'm superior and this is my mocking little word for those different to me.'
I don't know. Everybody has their own opinions, of course, but were I running a service and somebody reported that to me, I would have done the same thing.
You don't get to impose words that trigger you without historical contortions on the rest of us. Please understand that. Comparison 'retard' to hate crime and racism is just obnoxiously weak and reeks of modern privilege.
I'm based in the UK, and was assuming - perhaps incorrectly - that many of the commenters that weren't bothered by the word 'retard' were based in the US, where I believe that word has less of a stigma.
I honestly don't understand your comment regarding historical contortions, I'm afraid. However, I'll stand by the argument that the word 'retard' is used as an insulting term for a section of society - at least here in the UK - and, from that point-of-view, does echo words used in a racist context, or the context of hate crime (while acknowledging that using the word is clearly not a crime in itself).
This repository doesn't belong to you.
For all intents and purposes this is a private conversation in public. Not to mention going out of their way and report it to the Githapo to have them take it down. This is insane. I'm I the only one who sees the insanity of grown adults shitting their pants over vulgarity?!
Got the reference to the dongle-gate now, and for the record I don't agree on public shaming.
The fact that this got into the HN front page and received hundreds of comments means that some people do care and this is an actual issue(?), censorship or what not.
Which is sort of my point. You never know when your repository will become popular for reasons good or bad, but it will reflect on both the author and GitHub.
GitHub will probably get the flak either way: for censorship if they try to force the author to change it, or they might be seen condoning the behaviour if they do not do anything.
Just an aside. I'd like to think that anything people put on GitHub is going to become somewhat like public record. It will stay there long after the project has been abandoned.
If it's just a commit message, then I can see why you would think this construes as a `private` conversation (i.e. message between committers). But, it's also in the README which, by default, the first thing you see when you open up the repository.
The better analogy perhaps, is the author is standing with a signboard containing some offensive language in some corner of a public space.
Search my post history. I use words like cunt or fuck. I don't use the word retard because I recognise that it is frequently used by people committing a hate crime (an actual crime, like violence against the person, or sexual violence, or theft); and I recognise that use of the word contributes to a culture that de-personalises people with LD and makes it easier for doctors to murder them with the justification of "retards have no quality of life".
You're right about the numbers of people who see this use of the word as offensive. That's something that seems to be missed: this isn't a fringe view, it's mainstream opinion. For a lot of people it's not a border case. It's as obvious to a lot of people as eg banning ZippoCat would be.
> Is that why you relate a world that essentially means "dumb" (not physics) it to hate crime.
Perhaps this is a cultural issue, especially for people who do not speak English as a first language and especially if they watch US media where the word is more used.
Retard does not mean "dumb". If you want to call someone dumb use dumb, stupid, idiotic, etc. Avoid retard. Because retard is not much of an insult to the person you're using it for, but it is to people with LD or their carers. By using the word retard you're not particularly insulting your target, but you are insulting a wide range of people who you probably don't mean to be insulting.
Retard historically means person with a learning disability. It will continue to mean that for a while, although the use is gradually changing, and it's not officially used apart from one narrow situation (A US user group).
Hate incidents based on disability are very common.
The UK crime survey is part of UK national statistics. This means they use robust methods and that the numbers are reliable.
> The number of disability hate incidents (not all necessarily crimes) is higher than the number of homophobic hate incidents and religious-based hate incidents. The Crime Survey for England and Wales – the most authoritative picture of crime in the country - estimated that there were 124,000 disability hate incidents in the past two years alone.
MENCAP, a charity working for people with learning disabilities did some survey work in 2000.
> Almost 9 in 10 people with a learning disability surveyed had experienced bullying or harassment in the past year - an incredible 88%
> Of these, two thirds (66%) of people were victims regularly and one third (32%) were being bullied on a daily or weekly basis
Three quarters (73%) of people had experienced bullying or harassment in a public place
> Half (47%) of the people surveyed had suffered verbal abuse, and a quarter (23%) had been physically assaulted.
I'm puzzled sometimes that the ACLU can defend the despicable behaviour of actual Nazis and yet still be lauded as a liberal force for good yet so many of the people online fighting the authoritarian SJW menace so often just come across as assholes.
Best I can come up with is that one actually fights governments and doesn't seek to undermine people's concerns about Nazis or condone their actions, whereas online the bile seems reserved exclusively for those who wish to censor.
