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Comment by lolinder | Hacker News Reader

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Give up 70% of the way through the hyperstitious slur cascade

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/give-up-seventy-percent-of-...

I've yet to see anyone put this quote in context to show that the user of it meant it to be racist or offensive. Absent that context I take issue with people singling it out as an example of toxicity.

I'm not even convinced that we've hit the 70% mark on this hyperstitious slur cascade. I know a lot of people take offense at it, and if this keeps going then we'll certainly hit 70% within the tech world very quickly as people drop the phrase like a hot potato, but as of right now I'm not comfortable with the way that this maintainer is being attacked for a single phrase.

If they've demonstrated a pattern of toxicity, let's talk about that pattern, not about one hyperstitious slur.

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It seems to be a largely American thing to think the phrase is bad (reasonably so, given how it has started to be used) and many others seem to not know what it means, evidenced by only understanding the current law enforcement use or their admission that they had to read wikipedia.

That said, for many people, it is a hostile phrase that refers to privileges that law enforcement provide for each other and those close to them but not others. Things like letting people out of tickets, misapplying situational judgements to make a victim look like the perpetrator, lying on the stand about it, etc.

In that context, it’s a phrase with bad optics. I see presumably why they chose the phrase but that also presumes they were not aware of how it’s used by many American police officers. It would otherwise seem incredibly tone deaf; well past the 70% figure among those circles.

But "those circles" is not "the entire Linux community", and it's unreasonable to expect the entire community to keep up with a small circle's latest slurs.

For most of the US for most of history, "the thin blue line" has been an unequivocally positive phrase describing people who stand up for what's right and protect against chaos. Whether we should have seen it that way is irrelevant to the question of whether we can reasonably expect an average Linux kernel maintainer to both be aware that some people take offense at it and adjust their language accordingly.

This kind of language policing is inherently discriminatory against older people who spent their early lives immersed in mythology surrounding police and haven't been exposed to the cultural shift, not to mention against people who live outside the US, were exposed to US media, but can't be bothered to keep track of US politics.

Ted Tso is an american, living in America. He was born in California and had worked in the us for most or all of his career.

I find it highly unlikely that he isn't aware of what meanings that idiom carries with it. It's possible but I'd need some serious convincing to believe he didn't.

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