Pretty sure nobody has been driven to suicide by being told to "learn to code". If you have evidence that supports this assertion then I would be happy to see it. It sounds exaggerated at best.
As to the actual claims: the first article you posted includes a tweet that has many examples of articles which emphasize how the "heartland" can switch to coding as a viable alternative to coal mining and the like. The issue is that there is an underlying implication in those articles that such skills can be learned and applied by coal miners at large. But many / most coal miners probably aren't suited to being coders. Just like many journos are not suited to being coders.
Both your statements are just incorrect. The articles are reporting on efforts in coal mining towns to actually teach unemployed blue collar workers how to code. None of these articles were prescriptive, they were all describing events taking place.
These articles did not say, "Hey why don't these guys just learn to code." The articles say, "Hey, there is an effort on the ground to teach unemployed blue collar workers some technical skills. Will this work, we don't know yet. But it interesting and worth reporting on."
The other comment is clearly a misreading of what I wrote. I never said journalists have killed themselves from this harassment. I said the goal of this harassment was to make the journalists lives so miserable that they want to kill themselves. Feel free to take a trip in to /pol/ and check for yourself what the sentiment is but here are a couple quotes from the articles I linked that demonstrate that.
“I’m not ready to declare victory until these maggots are killing themselves with a live stream”
"Making them a hero is goal anon :)"
Please quit pretending like this is some harmless game. Be bold and take a real stand. This isn't about teaching journalists a lesson for being flippant about the problems of blue-collar workers.
If it were, why are they targeting journalists who didn't write articles about coal miners learning to code.
And furthermore, why does this rest on easily disprovable claim that the articles were somehow prescriptive in nature, and not simply reporting on experiments underway in some of these communities?
For example, Taila Lavin, the author of the New Republic article never wrote anything about miners or any other blue collar workers learning to code. If this was about punishing people who were dismissive of blue collar workers, why target her? Clearly that's not the goal. The goal is to target journalists as a group, regardless of what they have written.
If you believe journalism is not a worthwhile profession, and people who write things that don't align with your personal belief system should just shut up or face harassment, why don't you just come out an say it? Why hide behind code words like this?
Spamming a stupid joke at someone on twitter is far right harassment? Good lord, all that's necessary is to not look at your notifications for a week until the meme passes and you'll never even notice anything happened.
