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Comment by eyelidlessness | Hacker News Reader

Is anyone else bothered by the repeated, completely out of context reference to murdering women with a hammer?

The author was being cheeky, but it definitely dates the piece. People are a lot more sensitive about that sort of thing today than they were 10 years ago. Back then it just came off as dark and sort of funny.

I think the last ten years, unfortunately, accentuated the need for reasonable men to actively distinguish themselves from the openly, violently misogynistic people online.

So comments and jokes that were never before conceived of as having any serious import, even subliminally, now map so closely onto serious threats and harassment, that they seem completely inappropriate.

People in relationships killing each other has always been a subject of humour, exactly because it really happened. In a way that hasn't really changed. What's changed is what is OK in specific mediums: especially in online written form (twitter, comments, blogs) where the context is full of the real hateful deal.

That's an incredibly enlightened way to reconcile that, while it sounds wrong today, it doesn't nesscesitate that Joel is a misogynist.

I've never really understood it as an increasing impetous to distinguish ourselves from the morons that, once the light has been increasingly shown on misogyny, hold firm to it.

Thanks for that, it's really help me better grok how to feel about these increasingly more common situations.

The post isn't even by Joel. It's a forum (or more precisely an ex-forum). Random people were allowed to post there...

Wait... you do know we're not all Paul Graham... right?

Nice try, PG.... You still haven't replied to my emails btw

Is there any evidence that "hateful" (by whatever metric) comments have actually increased, as opposed to people just becoming more sensitive? Subjectively it seems like a lot more of the latter.

In the context of his post, it seemed like a pretty obvious joke to me. Maybe not that funny, but killing your girlfriend is so far out of the bounds of remotely reasonable that I didn't register it in the broader conversation about gender in society.

Maybe in order to update the joke to today's sensibilities you might say "killing your ex" instead, but it's still so clearly out of the bounds of reasonable that it's clearly just a joke about how you don't really see ball peen hammers used for anything else in movies/TV.

I thought it was a reference to the Beatles song Maxwell's Silver Hammer[1] from the Abbey Road Album.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell%27s_Silver_Hammer

In the past 10 years the definition to humor changed a lot. What is considered to be acceptable AND funny today is a very small subset with an increasingly self-censored filtering. With different words, you have no sense of humor.

I just assumed the author had split up with his girlfriend, she turned out to be insane (poisoned his cat, set fire to his car, accused him of all manner of unspeakable things, etc.), and he was still a bit sore about it.

Joel Spolsky is openly gay so I think it's just a dated joke

Sure, but the post is by some random guy on his forum.

Yup.

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