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Comment by ryan-c | Hacker News Reader

My existence is not political. If someone doesn't think I should have rights and/or exist and/or thinks I am inferior because of who I am, then no, we cannot write quality software together.

If someone disagrees with me on tax, foreign relations, government services, defense, etc policy, sure, we can disagree and still work together.

What gives rise to people like Lunduke is not a simple thing, and something I don't think society fully understands.

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In a way, "someone doesn't think I should have rights and/or exist and/or thinks I am inferior because of who I am" is pretty much the definition of (some kind of) politics. All sides play this game, e.g. many extremists these days argue that the "intolerant" shouldn't have rights or even exist by definition, but then the political football becomes who gets labeled as "intolerant" to begin with.

(And maybe it's true that those on opposite sides cannot work together on good software, but that's easily addressed since all FLOSS licenses include the right to fork and merge changes.)

Not agreeing with a particular description or categorization of you is not the same as thinking that you don't exist and not agreeing that you should have certain non-universal rights based on that categorization or that you should be able to force others in agreeing with your views isn't the same as thinking that you shouldn't have rights period.

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