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.

So now graffiti removal is a nightmare scenario.

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.

Yeah, but they said even a "slight" amount of censorship is a nightmare scenario. It's pointless hyperbole.

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?

Welcome to HN. The new motto around here is "we're actually worse than reddit."

I love you.

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.

Censorship is not OK. Period.

>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.

I don't see that split happening right now and I often browse /r/kotakuinaction, which is one of the central gamergater hubs.

Also user Snesker, you have been hell-banned.

The fact there are two camps (GG and anti-GG) means there was a split. What's the difference between the two camps? Ideology and nothing else.