Are people really that uncomfortable with the idea that the words they use affect people?

We have real problems to care about. I have had people at work team up to give me a beating (got away by getting hold of a weapon and finding a corner, 15 years ago).

I've seen girls been judged harder, backstabbed by project managers (she did a great job). I tried to defend her.

And so on.

SJW however are all about telling me what words to use or not. They are happy to get people evicted from PyCon for nothing more than they have provably done themselves. They make it hard to have a normal conversation because all of a sudden a word you use is offensive (sorry, not a native speaker so I don't know every connotation.)

In this case it even seems obvious that someone is poking fun at the very thing. Basically they are on the same side only someone must use the opportunity to try to derail and others must upvote it so it ends on top of the comments :-|

Agreed! Here's the thing, though: it takes such a tiny amount of effort to solve this particular problem.

What happens instead is people get outraged and a whole debate ensues, when literally all that needs to change is a couple words in a readme.

No! No! No!

Removing everything that anyone might find annoying is not a tiny effort.

And it is not one that I even want to participate in!

Even for stuff that still annoys me like unneccessary swearing I don't even care about it after I finish reading because I find this correctness more harmful than the alternative.

When I know that people have historically and are now getting treated unjustly (denied legal protections, murdered, discriminated against, etc) due to gender, race, religion, etc, I wonder how someone could possibly get offended by "bruh". There's some perspective that is missing there.

Bruh itself is not even directly offensive, it's just loosely connected to fratboys which is loosely connected to frat culture. What is there to be offended about?

What you are suggesting is that people should change their behavior to avoid the outrage of the mob. Now, historically, do you see the problems with mobs, do you see the contradiction in supporting mob justice with your aim of inclusivity?

Do you have the same opinion about the use of AAVE?

You're trying to make other people follow your social standards when the easier thing to do would to be not offended by innocuous language.

I'm not bullying anyone. My "cultural prescriptions" are just not using language that excludes people.

If people are so attached to that language that they won't stop using it even though they know it makes people feel unwelcome, then people will be excluded no matter what. I'd rather exclude people who care so little for the feelings of others that they can't bother to not use a word, rather than people whose only transgression is to not be part of an in-group.

Yes. They are. You are trying very hard to tie up anyone who has a different sense of humour than you.

And if we don't stop you know next time you come to tell ys that our straightforward explanation isn't good enough because "he" or "she" was mentioned somewhere.

We have accepted writing (s)he or he/she.

But you will never ever stop will you?

And if we don't stop people like you next time we know we are expelled from PyCon because we told a joke.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryYETmi9lNA

"Because anything that has a status has a kind of power, and power always corrupts. It must be allowed for it to be subjected to ridicule, when that is not possible anymore, you get nasty situations, a dictatorship or something. That's why ridicule is important."

"Furthermore, an insult is to some people a truth they are rather not confronted with. And this could mean that we can't talk about this or that because someone might be offended."

Obviously insulting people directly is bad and no one on HN would allow that all. If the readme said everyone was a shitty developer because they had unnecessary updates, that's clearly not very nice.

But the readme has a couple of non-directed words used in a completely harmless way. If we police this sort of text then we may as well just shut down the internet entirely. People will be too scared to say something because society decided to take offense to the english language.