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Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

I'm as capitalist as the day is long, but some of the Can't Get Your Degree Without Learning Applied Marxism memories are getting pinged a bit by the naked use of economic power to punish thoughtcrime. This impression is further strengthened by the not insignificant detail that Capital is here asserting the right to punish Labor even though Capital has negative a billion desire to ever cut Labor a check.

Another thing reminding me of university: "The fights are so vicious because the stakes are so small" was originally said about academic infighting but could also be applied to drama over the social functioning of a commit bit.

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Thoughtcrime is a great way to describe this.

I haven't seen any (comprehensive) explanation for why the original patch was rejected, but it might be as simple as that he wasn't interested in his project becoming part of someone else's fight. That doesn't mean he's sexist, it might be as simple as that he isn't interested in feminism's battle to redefine acceptable language. Reasonable people can disagree on that sort of thing without being women haters.

Read the issue and the revert in particular. Once committed, it took deliberate desire to be provocative to remove it and threaten someone else's commuter status.

You might want to read up on the term "thoughtcrime."

Ben was an ass and very poorly represented the Node.js community. A "thoughtcrime" is a crime that is a crime because of the thoughts of the perpetrator.

Every country, essentially, has crimes based on your thoughts. It's called "intent to XXX", where XXX is some actual criminal act that you didn't do. "Intent to commit murder" is a crime for planning to kill someone.

Thoughtcrime is the criminalization of thinking or speaking one's thoughts. Ben acted.

Thoughtcrime is a great way to describe this.

Thoughtcrime is an absolutely incorrect way to describe this; check your dictionary.

> it might be as simple as that he isn't interested in feminism's battle to redefine acceptable language

Huh? Singular they has been in use for over five hundred years (it shows up in Shakespeare) and is standard for modern technical writing and in most other contexts. It is not a conspiracy of some sort.

So being a poor representation of the company sponsoring the project is relegated to being merely a thoughtcrime?

Even if the company espoused your wild viewpoint, not responding as such has toxic consequences for the company itself, which ultimately has negative consequences for all the people employed by Joyent. At the very least, it was a business move.

firing people for immature, nigh-bigoted behavior is not "naked use of economic power to punish thoughtcrime", sorry.

He's not getting "fired" for behavior, he's explicitly getting fired because the decision maker believes that the behavior must be motivated by an attitude the decision maker disapproves of. That's the thoughtcrime. This is not the subtext of the post. It is the explicit text. Also in the explicit text is the decision maker praising an actual employee for probably being free of the thoughtcrime that is a firing offense at his employer. Does that ping your Ominous Sentences radar just a little bit?

Let me try a different tact. Suppose for the moment that you and I have the same politics with regsrds to the underlying issues. It is very very dangerous to endorse employers doing this. Think whose ox is going to get gored more often. It is probably not well-paid cisgendered white men who hold opinions which are widely representative of those in the tech community.

Maybe I missed some context in the linked post, I didn't see much explanation of anything Ben did other than reject a pull request.

Personally I don't think the fight over the use of "he" as a gender neutral pronoun is over and done so without additional context it seems rather extremist to declare Ben as the next Hitler, let alone to imagine what Ben's reasoning was.

Edit: I went back and read the comments on the pull request and the revert and I'm not seeing evidence of misogyny or even anything that could be a firing offense. Yeah Ben was a jerk and who knows maybe his reason for rejecting the pull request was actually misogynistic. Getting rid of a contributor seems like the worst possible solution to the problem though. Remonstrate with them and explain that using gender neutral language is a valid change and that they shouldn't be passive aggressive with their VCS actions if they want to continue to be part of the project. Giving them the boot for perceived thought crimes is just horrible in every aspect.

"He's" not getting "fired" at all. The annoying thing about this post is that Joyent's representative is taking a facially absurd hardline position about a stupid intramural developer pissing match (one that just happens to have a faint aura of gender politics) so he can use the nil-stakes of totally hypothetical drama to position himself and his company politically.

This isn't "capital" punishing "labor" for "thoughtcrime". It's just posturing. If the "accused" had actually worked for Joyent, one assumes the whole issue would have been settled in a couple email round trips, tops.

> the behavior must be motivated by an attitude the decision maker disapproves of

people get fired for attitudes all the time: "not being a team player", "having a giant ego", etc. being against hiring assholes is not being the "thought police".

> Suppose for the moment that you and I have the same politics with regsrds to the underlying issues

this is not a political issue for any reasonably scoped definition of the word "political". supporting gender neutrality in technical documentation is not some political stance.

he's explicitly getting fired because the decision maker believes that the behavior must be motivated by an attitude the decision maker disapproves of.

But that happens all the time, and is OK! If an employee made a hiring decision by being motivated not on finding the best candidate for the employer, but by being motivated by wanting their child to get the job, that's an fireable offence. If someone made an internal promotion by being motivated by bribery, that's a fireable offence. etc.

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