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A comment on The Power of a Pronoun. Parent comment

Re:The Power of a Pronoun by cdcarter on Saturday November 30, 2013 @05:04PM (#6824834)
It's crazy.

The whole event reads to me like Ben was having a bad day and rejected a minimal patch, and then it exploded and he was grumpy. I imagine that on a normal day, a good F/OSS leader would accept patches that improve or make the codebase more consistent, even if they are fairly minimal. That's how code grows.

I'm giving Ben the benefit of the doubt that he was in a mood, which is why he behaved as a bad project leader. If this became a regular occurrence, then there's a problem.

Ben's behavior isn't about the gendered pronouns. I think it's great that the project is committing to using appropriate language. But I don't think this is what made this incident occur.

EDIT: removed some poorly chosen words that didn't reflect the point of my comment.

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Re:The Power of a Pronoun by escaped_hn on Saturday November 30, 2013 @05:09PM (#6824861)
I too am giving Ben the benefit of the doubt here. If the OP of the patch had gone through and consistently changed all He|She -> Them|They im sure Ben would have merged it in as a consistent change.
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Re:The Power of a Pronoun by msmillie on Saturday November 30, 2013 @08:18PM (#6825572)
> If the OP of the patch had gone through and consistently changed all He|She -> Them|They

If they missed any gendered pronouns in the now-landed PR, surely they would be discoverable in the current source:

  - https://github.com/joyent/libuv/search?q=him&type=Code
  - https://github.com/joyent/libuv/search?q=he&type=Code
  - https://github.com/joyent/libuv/search?q=his&type=Code
  - https://github.com/joyent/libuv/search?q=she&type=Code
  - https://github.com/joyent/libuv/search?q=her&type=Code
  - https://github.com/joyent/libuv/search?q=hers&type=Code
To a reasonable approximation, it turns out the author of PR did consistently change gendered language in the project, there just wasn't very much of it to begin with. That wasn't my assumption either (I thought there'd be more such language somewhere), and the biases that created that assumption are surely an interesting "this is how these problems happen" sort of side topic.

Anyway, definitely a lesson in where we choose to direct the benefit of the doubt. In this case, the author of the PR was the one who deserved it, but wasn't the one who received it.

(edit - link formatting)

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Re:The Power of a Pronoun by teacup50 on Sunday December 01, 2013 @02:35PM (#6828827)
> Anyway, definitely a lesson in where we choose to direct the benefit of the doubt. In this case, the author of the PR was the one who deserved it, but wasn't the one who received it.

"Benefit of the doubt" isn't such a finite resource. If anyone escalating this chain of tomfoolery had applied it, you would have likely found that there was more than enough to go around.

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Re:The Power of a Pronoun by vezzy-fnord on Saturday November 30, 2013 @05:12PM (#6824883)
As someone who works with a lot of people in social justice, I can say for sure this is not what social justice is about.

No True Scotsman there.

It may not be to you, but social justice has been diluted to an insane and incoherent pseudo-academic political correctness that goes to such extreme lengths it becomes equivalent to the very thing it opposes (as per the principle of the horseshoe theory).

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Re:The Power of a Pronoun by cdcarter on Saturday November 30, 2013 @05:14PM (#6824895)
Well taken, and admittedly that line didn't contribute to my post at all. Writing quickly and without precision is something I should avoid.
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