Did GitHub break your trust censoring the Feminist Language Parody?
bitbucket.org
bitbucket.org
I don't really understand the reaction to this. People are saying it's harassment, and it makes fun of rape victims, but that is not at all what I took from it.
It's simply making fun of ideas and reasoning in radical feminism, and applying them to concepts in programming. This is partly in response to a feminist talking about a "feminist programming language", and also a satire on what happened on Node.JS about the use of a gendered pronoun.
I am aware that they mentioned rape, but I think this is a reference to the feminists loose classification of rape. One thing that immediately stands out to me is the contradictions, which again seems to be a reference to many radical feminists. I recall a "I need feminism because..." picture with a woman holding up a sign which read "I need feminism because no means no, but yes doesn't always mean yes."
I think a lot of people just don't 'get' it, because they don't like being made fun of.
Even if it was the most vile, distasteful, and offensive thing I have ever read, I still would condemn Github for taking it down, as free speech is binary - either all of it is okay, or none of it is okay. You don't get to decide what's okay, because once you decide something isn't okay, there's a billion reasons why everything else isn't okay that remain consistent with your original reasoning.
https://twitter.com/search?src=typd&q=github.com%2FFeministS...
Examining the fork on BitBucket, I see a clear and obvious parody and one that accurately parodies and mashes up both feminist jargon and programming concepts in a way that is both funny and insightful.
I understand GitHub may not like this repo. I do not understand how it deserves a takedown.
If GitHub can takedown this repo, why would you trust them not to take yours down?
Maybe it's code that threatens politically GitHub's preferred political leaders?
For future reference, here is a screencap of the current thread: http://i.imgur.com/drkmtUA.png?1
It's also not terribly funny. Or rather, it would have been funny in the heyday of the constellation of academic disciplines now colloquially known as 'subaltern studies'. But that heyday was some time ago now, and it survives only in the Republican trust of bogeymen. Sorry, bogeywomen. Trust me, I have unemployed professor friends.
But let's be honest. Read the thing. It's not feminism that is in question, it is the dictum that your freedom to swing your fist ends at my nose -- or in this case, the right of you and your brethren to swing your d*cks in the face of the female colleagues you work beside.
May the universe drill a single functional mirror neuron into one of your empathy-free heads. But I get to pick which.
Should that be taken down too? If not, why does it differ?
What if they're hosting a website for someone, and that someone makes a public statement which is interpreted as misogynistic and wrong - e.g. Todd Akin uses Github Pages for his general campaign, and posts a defense of his nonsense about "legitimate rape". Should Github take that down?
You would probably like to think that you believe men and women are equal, but you clearly do not, because you insist on treating them like overly-sensitive children.
As a guy, if you feel the need to tell people whether or not to be offended you can scratch that itch by going to tell these guys to stop being offended or annoyed by the stereotype of idiot dads on tv - http://www.cnn.com/2012/06/12/living/dumb-dad-stereotype/
Women taking offense, just in the tech industry over the past 2 years alone has 'accomplished' quite a lot. Here's a few:
-Gotten a man fired from his job (Adria Richards) -Raised $160,000 in exchange for a series of youtube videos on video games made from other youtube videos by a woman who has admitted she isn't a gamer (Anita Sarkeesian) -Gotten a repo on github taken down (This whole Feminist Software Foundation thing)
And who knows what else?
Do you honestly think that men taking offense carries as much weight? So many men are willing to bend to your every whim, just because they think you being a woman makes you less capable, and if that isn't sexism, then I don't know what is.
THATS NOT FUNNY.
Deleted comment
Is it rude to name your program/repo god[1]?
Is it rude to use foul language[2]?
Is it rude to write code in something that isn't ruby?
Who decides whats rude enough to be taken down and what isn't? Why should I believe my text is safe when someone found another text rude enough to be taken down.
[1]: https://github.com/mojombo/god [2]: http://programming-motherfucker.com/
Also, I am always a bit stunned by comedians and other performers who encourage censorship of speech they dislike. That goes double for comedians speaking for groups that have been traditionally marginalized by society.
A repo seems the perfect implementation of speech, where as the fist nose swinging metaphor has always up until now been about physical real world actions involving ... your nose.
And stuff like calling the "echo"/"print"-command "yell".... Really? Wtf?
Can you point to things in the repo that as a whole indicate any hatred of women?
As an example, take former congressman Todd Akin. He opined some pretty ridiculous opinions about biology and "legitimate rape". Many found those opinions divisive and hurtful. Suppose that he set up a Github Pages account to use for a hypothetical 2014 election campaign, and repeated his opinion on that site. Should GitHub take his site down on principle as well? How about if he didn't repeat that particular opinion, but did post information supporting the same policies that he supported as a result of that opinion?
But to answer your question, Github did not break my trust by removing this, because this is what I would expected Github to do. I'm not naive enough to think that most people have enough common sense on this planet.
Long Live GNU, Stallman, The Great and Powerful
No they haven't. They've only violated our natural right to freedom of expression. The Constitutional part of our right to freedom of expression only applies to government control of that right.
These are things that become more apparent as you mature. I honestly can't fathom why someone would waste time creating such a crude concept instead of something genuinely useful.
second - Your attempt at a straw man argument with equitating the vitrio that 4chan generates into something worth defending as freedom of speech in order to discriminate an entire group of the population is absurd.
What 4chan did was pretty much make the equivalent of racial hate speech from the 60's against women. They might as well have told all the female programers to go back to the kitchen and code in there.
You cannot use the constitution to defend hate speech. What classifies as hate speech is open to debate.