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Comment by austinz | Hacker News Reader

Here's his revert message, copied from below, in the full:

"@isaacs may have his commit bit but that does not mean he is at liberty to land patches at will. All patches have to be signed off by either me or Bert. Isaac, consider yourself chided."

Refers to a procedural matter, kind of snarky. Hardly 'threatening'. Does not discuss the pronoun, content of the revert, or any content related to gender issues at all.

By the way, it's rather fatuous to refer to my comment as a 'spin attempt' just because I didn't reflexively grab my pitchfork and torch and run out to join the mob trying to crucify this developer as a incorrigible misogynist, but asked for evidence and clarification instead. Food for thought.

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I would really appreciate it if acdha could explain how they view this comment as a threat. acdha made the same claim elsewhere in this thread as well.

It appears that some people are attempting to lower the bar for something to be a "threat" to be any statement made by someone they don't like (or they've been told not to like).

Just in case you didn't see my sibling comment, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6834047. The IRC comment was where I saw the most threat:

   bnoordhuis> isaacs: ^ don't ever fucking pull a stunt like that

Even with that, however, I probably shouldn't have described it as a threat – it's aggressive and confrontational but there's no explicit threat.

Between the commit wording and his comment on IRC (https://twitter.com/ArmyOfBruce/status/406802499014627328) I read that as implicitly threatening Isaac's commit bit but that was wrong. I shouldn't have stated that: it would have been more accurate to describe it as confrontational rather than a threat.

> By the way, it's rather fatuous to refer to my comment as a 'spin attempt' just because I didn't reflexively grab my pitchfork and torch and run out to join the mob trying to crucify this developer as a incorrigible misogynist

I described it as spin because it focused on the initial commit & the grammar issues rather than the way Ben chose to escalate it. Your choice of quotes and commentary focused on the beginning rather than what happened afterwards, neatly omitting the actual focus of the discussion. Perhaps that was accidental but it sure looks like an attempt to minimize the offense before criticizing the response.

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