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Comment by grimgoldgo | Hacker News Reader

Is saying "the blood never washes off" the hands of this DoD employee really a personal attack? I mean, it certainly seems like a consistent and reasonably widely held belief that military industrial complex jobs cost lives.

There's of course the opposite opinion too. I'm not interested in trying to demonstrate that one opinion is right or wrong, just that like, is this really an attack?

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Yes. There's a difference between saying "I would like to avoid you because your industry costs lives" and "I'd shake your hand, but, y'know, the blood never washes off". They're both basically statements about the same thing, except one is an attack while the other is merely expressing disapproval.

It's rude, sure, but I still fail to see how that rises to the level of attack? What harm is intended or possible from a comment like that? Are all rude comments attacks?

Accusing someone of having blood on their hands is generally an attack to mean that the accused has caused unjustifiable death. To contrast, if person A saves person B from a mass shooter by killing said shooter, it'd be odd for person B to say to A "You have blood on your hands!" (unless it's literally true).

"You have committed unjustifiable harm." is clearly an attack. People who commit unjustifiable harm are generally supposed to be shunned, penalized, or killed according to how human societies have operated across the world (various things can get in the way of this, but this is the baseline).

So now we're at "My employer's client is someone who should be shunned, penalized, or killed. (and I'm going to post it publicly in a way to make it possible for said client to be able to see it!)".

Finally, a lot of business runs on vibes. Having employees that attack your clients in public sends bad vibes. Even if it's just a 'rude comment', why endanger your business for someone who so deeply fails the vibe check?

Intentionally saying something rude when there are better way to convey the same meaning is a kind of personal attack.

Of course it is an attack, and they tagged him in the tweet too. There were plenty of opportunities to keep the job after this point (deleting the tweets, not being a massive douchebag in every interaction with the company) but they gave the company no choice.

> Of course it is an attack..

I mean the question I was raising was basically, "it's not clear this is an attack?" specifically because it's not "of course" to me.

Can you explain a bit more why it's obviously an attack?

Use common sense. "[..] blood on your hands [..]" implies he's indirectly a murderer at least. Calling someone a murderer is in the best case defamation or an insult.

Considering the previous tweet said "fuck you", yes it is an attack.

"Fuck you" has so many different tones, and is so ubiquitous. It can be playful, jocular, intense, deadly serious, all over the place. Fuck you is not, by default, a personal attack, imo.

It's also almost certainly culturally different on different coasts, online, in person, etc. A tweet is like, nothing.

Let me guess, you're of those people who say that phrases like "kill all men" do NOT mean "kill all men", but something <wall of text here>?

At best this is extreme playing with words, and at worst this is just mental gymnastics

Fuck you is fuck you, this is rude and as personal as it gets.

It's really, really not. Fuck you has a huge range of meaning. Carlin built several comedy bits around the word Fuck specifically because it was used colloquially so many ways.

Did he took some person, in audience or otherwise public and built entire bit around saying "Fuck you" addressing that person?

Carlin's sketches (at least ones that come to my mind, as I really loved to watch Carlin about 10-7 years ago) is irrelevant. When Carlin said "fuck you" he was speaking about phrase, not to someone in particular https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDqaOLThPg4

There could be different Carlin bits that I don't know about, and I'm sure that he said a lot of fuck yous to all presidents at a time in same way as op did to DoD guy, but no, I don't buy your comment saying that Carlin's fuck you and screenshot from the post are same things. Especially given what followed.

Very rough analogy, just to illustrate the point and how I see your arguing (as, at this time, I'm already believe that you're arguing in bad faith). You cannot say: "this guy is not guilty in a murder, as murders are happening in nature all the time. Dragonflies are killing flies, birds killing dragonflies, humans killing birds, humans killing humans, ergo no one is guilty, those are just facts"

I do believe I'm at least attempting good faith here, I just do not find "fuck you" as a tweet, even levelled against me, to be particularly aggressive. Especially such a short message.

I'm likely more terminally online, more cynical, or more desensitized, but I see the two word "fuck you" to be such low effort that it doesn't even rise to the level of notice.

Like, an insult that specifically called out my behaviors or appearance or something and said fuck you? That feels meaningful, that's personal. But like, autocompleting two words flippantly into a tweet is like... Nothing?

But could you accept that other people can take that differently, especially if those people represent paying customers and getting such message from people who represent a vendor?

I find it very hard to believe that you are arguing in good faith at this point.

I have had a different life from you. I've been homeless, I've been wealthy, I've lived in many cultures and communities from suburbs to communes. I've worked tech I've worked as day labor moving soil by hand. I guarantee you that language (and especially the use of curse words), varies wildly.

I have lived in many countries and had a wide variety of jobs and life situations as well. You are not impressing anyone with your knowledge about cultural nuance, everybody knows that any sentence can be interpreted in many different ways. And everybody that argues in good faith also knows that saying "fuck you" on Twitter, to someone that you don't have any rapport with, is going to be interpreted as an insult.

I disagree, I think of tweets as nothing - air, fluff, someone expressing themselves without thinking. If someone tweets fuck you at me I'm not insulted, it's such a low effort post why would it ever even be parsed by me into anything meaningful?

It's like being insulted because someone farted at the hotel you were staying at. It's of so little consequence it cannot possibly be an insult.

It's incredible to see HN lose their minds because someone sent a two word tweet with a curse word in it, lol. A tweet.

Fuck you.

EDIT: Just to clarify, I didn't mean that pejoratively, I actually meant it in the supportive context as in: "Fuck you, I support you."

Heh, rules.

F___ you.

EDIT: Sorry again. This time, I did use it pejoratively, so I edited it out for possible vulgarity.

Heh, still rules.

You're not even wrong, but the problem is that when you post on Twitter, any and all context and nuance is immediately lost and all that's left is a string of ASCII spelling out "fuck you".

That's fair, but also, Twitter culture is definitely it's own culture, and I've largely seen quickly slammed out "fuck you"s to be emotionally equivalent to the rolling eyes emoji or the "wanking" hand gesture.

This is incredible mental gymnastics. Unless it's clear otherwise, especially in public, it's a personal attack.

I am truly astounded.

It certainly reads like an attack, and that's to someone who agrees with the sentiment. And as an observation, in professional contexts you can generally be poetic and figurative when talking about good things ("Gary is such a godsent and a genius for showing us the way to restructure our department"), but it's in bad taste to do it to express negative things ("I worked with Gary and he's an absolute mouth-breather and defecated all over our infrastructure").

The author has some captions on the screenshots of the tweets if it helps you here:

"I don’t even usually swear much"

"Anger does not really become me, but boy was I mad."

Incredible mental gymnastics

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