But on a serious note, this is the core of bullshit that powers progressive identity politics, and progressive cancel culture.
I understand RMS' comments on "them/they" as a pedantic, semantic, technically correct grammar nazi argument. But then, the authors of the demand letter to cancel RMS argue, because a trans person took offense with his statement, RMS is a transphobe.
And this kind of smearing is only possible if you subscribe to the postmodern notion that intent doesn't matter, and that "x-phobe" simply means that you offended a person of group x, regardless of your intent.
It's a quote from the article that's key in presenting the principles of their open letter. If the poster had gone to Molly's website and found it for themselves, and posted it here I'd certainly contest it's flamebait.
This seems different, because we're accepting that this article has a place here, I don't see how you can not quote key segments of the article.
The rest I definitely agree with.
Snarky one-liners on flamewar topics are flamebait, which the site guidelines ask you not to post: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
(Edit: I made a mistake in the following bit because I missed your initial ">". Sorry! Quoting the OP is obviously legit.)
Hauling the most provocative thing you can find on someone's personal blog into a thread on a flamewar-prone topic is guaranteed to make things worse. We're trying to avoid the online shaming/callout culture here: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&type=comment&dateRange=a...