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Comment by erikpukinskis | Hacker News Reader

I think you’ve fallen prey to propaganda that paints proponents of social justice in a certain way.

The social justice warriors I know _are_ part of the general population, and mind their business, and work hard every day to help people in need.

I am always disappointed when I see people write off the entire cause of social justice as pointless meddling. You’ve been duped if you think that’s all that’s going on.

The “general population” you aligned yourself with is chock full of SJWs who you have had only positive interactions with. But you would never know it...

Like trans people who pass... how would you ever realize they exist? And yet there they are.

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While I’m in agreement with a lot of their causes, I have to say all SJW types I’ve met have been an very particular slice of the population, almost all educated, urban dwelling millennial age people. As a contract worker I see lots of job environments and I kind of enjoy the less upscale more down to earth (ironically more racially diverse) jobs where you don’t have to remember whose pronouns are “they” this week. I can’t even remember what pronouns are supposed to be modified so I messed up last time saying mine were “he/his”.

After saying your preferred pronouns are “he/him/his”, would you feel offended if people intentionally ignored that and instead referred to you as “her”?

Dismissing an entire class of people with pithy comments about “they/their” pronouns might seem fine to you, but it sure as hell doesn’t feel good when you’re on the other side of it. Be respectful to all people and not just the ones that don’t inconvenience you.

> Be respectful to all people and not just the ones that don’t inconvenience you.

This is a good ideal to strive for. However, people should not be getting fired, banned, excluded, ostracized or otherwise sanctioned over this. For example:

https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015

https://www.joyent.com/blog/the-power-of-a-pronoun

What happened in that pull request is completely disproportionate. These reactions and punishments will cause chilling effects. People are watching.

If anything is disproportionate in your examples, it’s the reactions of those against merging the pull request. Using “he/him” in technical documentation is as tone-deaf as using “she/hers” when writing recipes. Men, women and non-binary engineers exist and we should not hold principles that prevent entirely innocuous changes like changing “him” to “their” in a readme, period. The only reason that GitHub PR thread and the Joyent blog post escalated as they did was the strong reaction by the individuals who were against the change. If the PR was just merged, there would’ve been no controversy.

There were valid reasons to reject the change:

> Us maintainers tend to reject tiny doc changes because they're often more trouble than they're worth.

> You have to collect and check the CLA, it makes git blame less effective, etc.

Even if you don't agree, nothing in there even comes close to justifying the abuse leveled against the developer. A small documentation change led to the departure of a core developer. Was it worth it?

It led to Ben's departure because he abjectly refused to listen to the user community, encouraged a tremendous amount of public debate over his personal decision to go against the community's wishes, then single-handedly reverted Isaac Childers' commit accepting the change with the following pithy comment[0]:

> Revert "doc: Removed use of gendered pronouns"

> @isaacs may have his commit bit but that does not mean he is at liberty

> to land patches at will. All patches have to be signed off by either

> me or Bert. Isaac, consider yourself chided.

Do you feel that this is acceptable behavior that should be encouraged? Ben was fully in the wrong here, and if this was instead about Tabs vs Spaces instead of something political in nature, we wouldn't be having this debate. Ben acted childishly, was called out on it, and then _decided to leave of his own volition_ because he felt he was unwanted, which was true given his behavior.

Was it worth it? I don't know, ask Ben.

[0]https://github.com/joyent/libuv/commit/804d40ee14dc0f82c482d...

> encouraged a tremendous amount of public debate

I don't think "debate" is the right word for what happened in that thread.

> then single-handedly reverted Isaac Childers' commit

A perfectly good reason for reverting the commit was provided in the message itself: "All patches have to be signed off by either me or Bert." It looks like the patch didn't meet that criteria. He also cited other valid reasons for rejecting it: "have to collect and check the CLA, it makes git blame less effective, etc."

Is this change so overwhelmingly important and urgent that it overrides the aforementioned policy and concerns? I don't know.

Does the fact he rejected the patch excuse the way people reacted to his decision? No.

I agree with respecting everyone and would never, for example, intentionally call a trans woman “he” because I can see by looking what to say. My issue is with people who are asking to have all of us remap language to remember a special exception for them (ie she looks female but feels nonbinary so wants to be called they) and gets offended if you don’t remember. It just feels like a highly politicized exercise, and though I try to comply it feels awkward.

I absolutely disagree, you are making a major incorrect assumption about why I have the opinions I do. I readily engaged with SJW activists and helped organize/participated in numerous events and protests. I know EXACTLY what they are like, and it isn't propaganda that causes me to think of them in this light, it was being around them and trying to work together with them in common cause that caused me to have this attitude.

Normal people can hold social justice opinions and go about their business normally like you say, but these people are not at all what I'm talking about in this discussion. And yes I would say that the general population is NOT chock full of the type of SJWs I hung out with in college. I would know.

Cite me a statistic if you want to convince me otherwise.

I am not trying to discount your experience. I have met people like that too.

I’m just saying, that’s not the entirety, or even the majority of people who are fighting for social justice.

And there are powerful media campaigns working hard to get you to think that they are.

What you’re saying is a little like sating “I’ve been to every Taco place in Chicago, I am speaking from experience, tacos are trash.”

And I’m saying, there are a lot of other tacos out there.

> What you’re saying is a little like sating “I’ve been to every Taco place in Chicago, I am speaking from experience, tacos are trash.”

It's more like saying "I've been to every Taco Warrior place in Chicago...".

While I think the term SJW is often used too broadly to include "reasonable people who care about social justice", I also think the term SJW quite often is specific enough to be used as a label for people who take the issue of social justice a little too seriously, often to the point of making it a (seemingly) core part of their identity.

Personally I'd say let's be reasonable and stop using the overloaded term 'SJW', but at the same time I do agree that there are certain people for which it would be nice to have a label, where SJW (emphasis on 'warrior') is kind of the right one.

I guess I would ask you: why do you want a special term for the shitty version of this specific category of people?

Do you have other terms for the shitty people within other specific groups? Do you have a term you use specifically for the shitty business people? Do you have a term you use specifically for shitty athletes? For shitty politicians? For shitty women?

We have a word for the shitty version of a gay person. We also have a word for the shitty version of a black person. Worth noting. Louis CK says he has nothing against gay people, but he wants to use the F-word to connote a special kind of shitty gender nonconforming man.

Have you thought about where this SJW label came from and why it exists in the first place?

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