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 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).
Of course, I can see that this is done for laughs, but not everyone sees that.
It's dongle-joke between two friends in the open. Who the fuck are you to act on that? I don't mean you personally, I mean in general.
Don't compare this to racism or hate-crime like someone else did. That's just watering down words.
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.
Now there's an unwarranted assumption if ever I saw one ;)
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.
Did you have to endure much of it growing up? 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.
https://www.mencap.org.uk/blog/four-things-you-probably-didn...
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.
The "Living in Fear" report is here: https://www.mencap.org.uk/sites/default/files/documents/2009...
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.