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Santa is about as non-religious as you can get. IMO, I think Microsoft really put their foot in their mouth on this one.
Edit: Because I can't let this go, it's important to point out that what we find offensive is subjective. I wonder if whoever wrote that is really just trolling Microsoft, or just has an axe to grind.
Someone could go stalk their account to check, I can't be bothered with that right now.
[0] https://github.com/Christian-Schiffer/servicelayer.chat/issu...
Appearances can be deceiving... even the profile photo could be generated and not a picture of a real human, as this other item currently prominently on the front page reveals:
> it's not something an engineer should ever do.
But what if it wasn't Santa but it was like a different religious icon - like a menorah? I feel like literally thousands of American christians would have banned using VSCode or even Microsoft products for something like that.
A) It ignores entirely the modern day usage of the Santa hat (it is not really a religious symbol, it is more like a general holiday symbol)
B) Even if it were, say, a menorah, it could mean that the developers are Jewish. Why would someone of a different religion celebrating the holidays offend you? That would imply to me that you're intolerant of other religions.
C) It was obviously not placed there with bad intentions. It is clearly intended to be festive and fun.
D) It is a waste of developer resources to remove something they just added in.
E) It devalues issues that people with genuine offenses might raise in the future, i.e. the boy who cried wolf.
That reminds me of another "cultural artifact in software" with an interesting backstory --- T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM.
He's literally a saint in every form of Christianity that has saints.
People like to be offended and will ruin things for other people. It's sad that we're in such a sensitive society but tolerance isn't what is practiced, sensitivity is.
As a Christian I find the idea of Santa offensive, honestly. Santa and his powers (as presented in media) are a replacement for God. I'm not going to go crying to anybody because they have Santa as an icon.
In the US, sure. In many other countries the related symbology is still heavily linked to "Saint Nicholas", not "Santa Claus".
I don't think that Santa Claus, the mythological person who lives at the North Pole and has elves to make toys, is venerated by any Christian denomination.
Don't forget getting children drunk on rum eggnog made from molested cows and unfertilized dinosaur descendant's ovums.
Of course he's religious, it's a mascot for a Christian holiday. Don't confuse American commercialism's exploitation of Christmas & Santa with its religious roots.
I guess you could use a snowflake or a cornucopia or something as a generic 'winter holiday' thing, and people have been doing that for awhile; "Happy Holidays" usurped "Merry Christmas" decades ago. Or you could use a bevy of emojis representing the holiday's secular roots, but would it have been better if they added emojis for St. Nick's mythological companions like Belshnickel, Zwarte Pete, and Krampus next to the santa hat? Maybe if they really wanted to polish this essential feature for production use, they could have different emoji sets for different holidays and a modal to choose which one you wanted.
I dunno, I feel so bad for people who haven't had the drive to do anything fun or playful beaten out of them yet. "Cry, the beloved country, for the unborn child that's the inheritor of our fear."
There are people who find "Happy Holidays" offensive, as they consider it part of the manufactured war on Christmas.
I guess this is why politics and holidays don't mix!
Gift giving around the end of the year has been around since before 0 BC.
(And before someone screams "citation needed," I'll just say that it's well known, and if you didn't know it by now, there's a thing called Google and Wikipedia that you can go look at.)
Lots of beliefs are "well known" and nevertheless wrong. Just look at all the people, even in this thread, claiming that Santa Claus was invented by Coca Cola, even though a simple google image search will reveal illustrations of Santa from before Coco Cola was founded. As for the pagan traditions around new years they are not very well documented and a lot is speculation.
Of course gift-giving is known throughout history, but the figure of Santa Claus is associated with the Christian celebration. I'm pretty sure you wont find any reference to Santa Claus or Father Christmas from before Christianity!
So? Most religious traditions were stolen, whoop de do. What matters is how they're practiced in 2019, in which case Christmas is almost synonymous with Christianity.
> I'll just say that it's well known
There is no actual confidence in how all of this stuff came to be, just a lot of conjecture - and so no, it's not well known at all.
Christianity has no monopoly on Christmas.
You see similar things going on for Valentine's day, Easter, Saint Patricks day, etc. Sure, there is a religious aspect, but the non-religious celebration is dominant.
My colleagues in India had a Christmas celebrations in their office. I asked them if they celebrated it growing up, and they told me they first started celebrating it in University.
We have Diwali parties in our US office. Everyone has fun.
As a symbol of American capitalism it's rather fitting that Microsoft are using him.
St Nicholas (sinterklaas) is celebrated in The Netherlands on 6th of December. You may remember it from The Daily Show and other US TV outlets who were covering the archaic tradition of black face in the celebrations.
"Dear <user>, We apologize if you found the icon offensive. Please be assured that no offense was intended. Thank you for bringing up the issue so we could clear things up."
Was not a sufficient response and an end to the conversation? Leave the icon where it is. Now that the user knows that the icon wasn't meant as an offense, he can move on with his life.
If he finds the swastika offensive, he shouldn't visit India. Swastikas are everywhere. The context matters.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-apology_apology
>Saying "I'm sorry you feel that way" to someone who has been offended by a statement is a non-apology apology. It does not admit there was anything wrong with the remarks made, and may imply the person took offense for hypersensitive or irrational reasons. Another form of non-apology does not apologize directly to the injured or insulted party, but generically "to anyone who might have been offended".
>Ifpology: Attorney and business ethics expert Lauren Bloom, author of The Art of the Apology, mentions the "if apology" as a favorite of politicians, with lines such as "I apologize if I offended anyone". Comedian Harry Shearer has coined the term Ifpology for its frequent appearances on "The Apologies of the Week" segment of Le Show.
On a more serious note though. It is cool that there is a label for something like this, but to me it is just a polite way of de-escalation. You could be confrontational and say "I didn't do anything wrong, you're the one who is wrong to think what I did was wrong!" or you can say "I'm sorry you thought what I did was wrong, but my intention was not to wrong you or anyone.".
There is nothing wrong with being polite and tactful.
Can someone fill me in on what this is referring to. I know my history knowledge is a bit lacking but I normally am able to get references like this so I must have missed something.
Whether or not the complaint is genuine is also much harder to figure out than "is it sufficient to replace this with a snowflake"
The complaining person is displaying abusive behavior and should be treated as such. Warn them. Then ban them if they persist. You stand up to bullies or you drown in them.
Mods can trivially and entirely disregard the non-problem (as it actually is). They're choosing not to and are making a community handling mistake in the process.
The only proper response is to ignore the complaint as not meaningful enough to warrant action. Otherwise you'll eventually have to remove every possible symbol. Somewhere, someone's mother was murdered by a cog and they feel very, very sensitive about the matter.
Abusive behavior in communities occurs at both extremes. You can be too sensitive in social situations in fact, to such a degree that you abuse other people with your need to control your environment specifically to your aggressively selfish satisfaction.
Not really, see https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2018/12/131219-santa... and https://www.sefaria.org/sheets/51928?lang=bi for very different perspectives.
> To adhere to our values and the Code of Conduct, we had to delete a handful of comments, which is unfortunate but not uncommon. Our responses triggered more responses. Bots were being employed to create issues and comments. Temporary accounts were being created to spam the system. Offensive issues were being created. The repository was filling up with issues which, frankly, were uncalled for, and we needed to do something, fast.
Every person who felt the need to comment and create github issues (and even write spam bots to do so!) about a santa hat being removed is not a person that should be trusted with any sort of responsibility or employment in the software industry. The absolutely staggering lack of maturity here boggles the mind.
This is not how sane adults should act. On either side.
For commenting to point out contradictory standards on what is considered offensive enough to remove? Really?
Edit: One satirical (per my own assumption) comment I read was complaining about calling the main branch master. The idea that using terminology such as master is offensive to some people seems at least as plausible as the santa hat being plausible. Perhaps more so as there have already been some discussion about the use of the term master in tech lingo. That is the kind of comment I'm thinking of, but want to be sure we are thinking of the same ones.
I saw this story about it being removed as well, and I thought to myself "well, that's pretty silly, but whatever" and then five seconds later I had moved on with my life. The very idea that an grown person could be so upset about it that they would actually expend the mental energy to go to the github issues page and voice their opinion with an angry comment is mind-boggling to me. It is, in my opinion, an even more absurd reaction than the original complaint.
You've commented twice on the incident now.
They should be punished, shouldn't they? Put to jail?
I don't know about their part of the world, but this person would not make it 1 meter through a shopping mall in Europe from November to January. Swa... Santas everywhere!
On a more practical note, I find it hard to reason on how deal with issues like this. It's like if you try to be level headed, avoid conflict, and try to see things from the other side you already lost, because there is no corresponding empathy coming from the other side. The only solution is to give in, or deal with an offended internet mob.
The reality is that if you were one of the people that is sidelined, you would feel it too. It's part of the reason we need to keep at it.
So while PC'ism may have changed your companies end-of-year greeting cards from "Merry Christmas and Happy New Year" to "Happy Holidays and Happy New Year", or even just "Season's Greetings", you can probably imagine that's helped 10 to 20 percent of the workforce (that are likely atheist, agnostic, jewish or muslim or whatever feel more included in the greeting.
If you feel like this is getting worse compared to those times, it might be because you belong to a demographic which is losing cultural power.
There are so many dimensions to this. No one is forced to sit and watch it. It’s not front and center in the community forums (making the community itself exclusive) and so on.
One person being hurt is one too many, but one person being offended for what the absolute majority probably have decided is for the sake of being offended can’t be the cause of this.
We have come a long way when it comes to having more inclusive communities especially for miniorities. I‘m sure there are trans people in OSS now that wouldn’t have felt welcome ten years ago. I just fail to see the parallel and believe there is a minority somewhere longing to get into online communities but that don’t feel welcome because of Santa hats?
I’m too sensible to get offended by things like this (cynical amusement is more my style), but as a southern hemispherian—
People from the north hemisphere regularly seem to describe things in terms of seasons (e.g. “coming this summer”), completely disregarding the fact that such seasons don’t hold in most of the world: in the southern hemisphere they’re back to front, and nearer the equator seasons are just all-round different. Southern hemispherians don’t seem to describe scheduled things with seasons much, and only ever in local matters, not global.
(Then you get things like Microsoft’s use of “Fall” in a Windows 10 release which makes it not just northern-hemisphericentric, if I may coin a term, but downright American by virtue of not using the word “autumn” that everyone else uses.)
Back to the snowflakes. Australia’s on fire now, from the heat. (And a town near me was under direct threat of burning down from a bushfire last night.) Even if we ever got snow where I live (we don’t), this would not be the season for it!
> We’ve added a new setting to Insiders that lets you choose the icon. If you like the red hat, go for it! Maybe you live in the southern hemisphere or you are heading to the beach during the holidays, there’s an icon for you too.
https://www.themarysue.com/world-population-latitude-longitu...
Wikipedia notes it higher: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Hemisphere
But, I agree. Even though they adhere to the tropical model, don't they still know what "season" it is?
Vscode GitHub issue next year: "X people died of heatstroke in Australia in 2020. Please remove snowflake icon out of respect for climate change and those that have died"
Seriously?? Take a stand against extremists, that's what I say. If you cave to the demands of individual offended people, prepare to waste a lot of time catering to trolls...
I'm not optimistic about the future of Free Software. Especially with the new tendency of some projects to consider that people can be offended about pretty much anything, especially if it is completely trivial, and that the utmost priority is to attempt to not offend anybody on Earth.
Because like we saw here, attempting to not offend by modifying trivialities is actually going to offend way more people.
And this is exploited by trolls.
"because it all comes down to the root cause:
the attack on an area which until now couldnt care less about politics. now in the context of "free speech" we try to brake the last known union out there in the world. developers, who have only let code speak so far."
we will see more and more attacks on free speech (in the name of free speech), open source and companies and people who contribute to open source.
A snowflake for all the offended snowflakes - how fitting.
This is an exceptionally professional response and the discussion regarding PC, wokeness etc belongs elsewhere.
The proper even more professional thing to do would have been to not react to the initial troll in the first place.
It's also worth mentioning that the original issue violated Code of Conduct as well, but for some reason MSFT only applied the Code to posts following it.
How on earth is that offensive? It's literally just a Santa hat on a cog...
> To me this is almost equally offensive as a swastika
Sigh.
I think some folks need to watch some Steve Hughes comedy on being offended.
I don't understand the idea of being offended at what is essentially a happy time for many people where they are celebrating something that matters to THEM. Again, they're not pushing it on anyone.
Maybe it's my polytheistic upbringing (grew up Hindu by name in India, with many relatives that also prayed to the infant Jesus alongside their Hindu Gods).
The Santa hat is about as harmless a sign of the holidays as I can imagine (it's not like they showed a cross or something). To borrow from the Reddit phrase, this is the most boring kind of dystopia where a completely harmless sign offends people.
As a very curious kid, I used to ask my grandpa and others the same question but never got a satisfying answer.
That's a disappointingly defeatist philosophy. I really like VS Code and this won't change that, but it's a shame that they let a single crazy person destroy what was a nice gesture for the vast, vast majority of their users.
Slippery slope, VS team.
The symbols and traditions surrounding the midwinter feasts (Yule etc) go back way longer. It’s not even called Christmas or anything with “Christ” e.g in Scandinavia. Because no way we’d let the church change also the name. No sir.
The church just had to adopt the festive period. Santa Claus is an even later addition.
And famously the red Santa is thanks to Coca Cola.
So basically the red Santa hat is a symbol that Coca Cola put on top a legend of a saint that was in turn adopted onto pagan winter rites. It’s not exactly bibles all over it.
> "even a single person being offended is one too many"
false, in my book
Where do you draw the line?
Was there a way to politely respond to this person without kowtowing to them?
Maybe by adding an option to disable the santa hat, where it's on by default, but you can turn it off?
Google has been sprucing up their search page for years now; Many a santa hat has been present, and people were both annoyed and happy, and also apathetic. Would Google have responded similarly, if some random person had a pipeline right to their developers?
It feels like even though some random person with a complaint got his wish, everyone else lost something. Like the ability to put something fun in your software without being overly concerned about offending one person.
* https://www.google.com/doodles/happy-holidays-2011
* https://www.google.com/doodles/holidays-2018-northern-hemisp...
* https://www.google.com/doodles/holidays-2018-northern-hemisp...
* https://www.google.com/doodles/holidays-2018-northern-hemisp...
* https://www.google.com/doodles/holidays-2018-southern-hemisp...
They should have responded "No" to the crazy person who equated a santa claus hat to a swastika.
This honestly would have been the best solution, I'm Muslim and I'd like to switch it off but I'm not going to go out of my way to complain about someone else's program that I have voluntarily placed on my computer when it's clearly a valuable part of people's traditions and I can patch it myself.
I am not sure there is that many people offended by Christmas for the reasons given in that article. I am inclined to change my mind though.
Is VLC next ?
I think the response from Microsoft should have been somethjng like "it's unfortunate to are offended by this but this absolutely wasn't our intention". If you dont wish to use vscode during the holiday season then that's up to you but the vast majority of our users saw the hat as we intended and we aren't going to have one user dictate to us how we run vscode"
I mean, isn't vs code essentially open source? If the guy was so offended couldn't he just remove it and build hus own inoffensive version? Presumably if he's using vscode he is a developer...
It's the request to remove it as a top priority that I find strangest. The ego of someone must have to think they can dictate to everyone else what to do just to make sure they themselves get a perfectly comfortable existence. I genuinely don't get it. It must be just an exhausting way to live?
Is this sort of perpetual offence/ victimhood more prevalent in IT than other industries? Is it just a by product of the sort of people out industry attracts?
I am offended by snowflakes. Go find something more inclusive, you insensitive clod!
We need to learn to use less divisive and accusatory language when making requests like this.
[0]: https://www.amazon.com/Corporate-Cancer-Miracles-Millions-Co...
- virtue-signaling about how diverse they are and
- demanding conformity with some impossible standard of innocuousness.
The Roman alphabet and English language are bastions of intolerance and H8, after all: any one employing these instruments of oppression must be. . .oh, wait. . .
There's someone I know who tells me Halloween offends him though, but I don't really understand why. Even some churches celebrate Halloween, passing out candy and stuff... Then Easter I'm sure offends people too, brainwashing children that a bunny comes around laying eggs.
Basically sounds like his entire online presence is being roasted by 4chan.
I don't think this person understands that part of the internet...
This is how you make things bland, soulless and ultimately inhuman.
For example the rule of "if religious, then don't include in product" is usually pretty sane.
But near a decision boundary, you will always get disagreement. A certain portion of programmers would've arrived at the conclusion that isReligious(santa) == False while some will be dead set that the answer must be True. Both side are confident that the other side is making a fatal mistake because they are confident in their logic skills. But the real problem is that binary logic can't handle these sort of high context fuzzy situation at all.
That is, Christian in name only, and actually interested in leveraging woke / victimhood culture and microaggressions to generate a political reaction.
All these what ever religions, something -ism, politics is getting ridiculous.
I'm sure if we continue to cave to these people they will eventually stop.
My personal test for when it comes to offending people is if there was any malice. And if the person being offended is using being offended as a form of control.
Or heck, how about one of the few icons used for Hinduism if you want to go for popularity.
Good job
This is absurd.
it just seems that we can't agree on anything anymore. i mean that's okay, but it starts to become worrisome when we can't agree on civility, decency, or even science in some cases!
The snowflake is an equally bad idea.
In the same theme of google changing their logo doodles. I really love and respect that.