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Comment by clbrook | Hacker News Reader

I do.

I was pleased when I opened the comment section to see this as the top comment.

I want to live in a world where being kind, respectful, understanding, and caring are the highest of virtues. In that world, hopefully all people will work toward working together to understand others and appreciate our many wonderful differences instead of insulting them, even in a micro-aggression, this might be funny, yet deprecating sort of way.

Although I personally don't often spend much time being offended by these culturally accepted deprecating statements, I have recently started to wonder if it is contributing toward the public policies that attempt to marginalize and discriminate against any group of people.

Moms build things. Girls build things. Women build things. I build things.

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Does being kind & understanding mean allowing someone to make a joke about you? I often allow jokes at my expense if the intent was not malicious.

Also, I perceived the joke to be making fun of the elderly, not women. Honestly, you post seems like you were primed & ready to be offended by the slightest thing, which has more negative social impact than the light-hearted title of the linked article.

Interesting. I think it is unlikely that most people would consider me easily offended.

If it wasn't historically pervasive, yet false to declare that women are not tech savvy, I likely would not have said anything, however, this is a technology focused community and thus it seems relevant to not promote that unfortunate typecast.

I was unaware that Moms were considered elderly - I had my first child at 25, is that old? I guess that's another case in point why not to use 'Mom' in this sense, it comes off insulting to some and also is perceived to mean multiple, possibly unintended things.

I make a point to attempt being offended only when I am sure that offense was intended.

Look for ways to be offended, or look for ways to understand. You seem to be doing the former, which is wasteful.

I think your assessment of my intent and approach are incorrect.

I fear we are entering the spiral of pointing fingers at one another.

As a mother and thoughtful human being, this is when I would suggest to my children they walk away from the situation at hand and I will thus follow my own advice.

Your comments here have been both graceful and extraordinarily polite, given the circumstances. Thank you!

Why would it be OK to make fun of the elderly? Why would you stick up for that?

Also, the person to whom you're responding had, when you wrote this, one carefully worded comment on the thread. "Primed and ready"? Clearly, the person on the thread most fitting that description is you. Please stop doing this.

We make fun of all sorts of people in life. I even do so at my own expense. Its not a big deal; it's even referred to as fun.

My comment about the elderly was intended to show that the poster was overly focused sexism when the title may have been referencing ageism or perhaps something else or perhaps nothing negative at all.

> I want to live in a world where being kind, respectful, understanding, and caring are the highest of virtues.

That's cool and stuff, but the humankind as a huge organism doesn't work like this and will never as long as we don't start genetically modify humans at scale to be engineered that way when hatched. We're still just "animals" or low-power carbon based computers if you prefer that phrasing.

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