Exactly. Being offended in and of itself is worthless (I'm sure we can find that Stephen Fry quote somewhere in this thread), it is not a motivator for a behavioral change, at least for me, unless I care about the person being offended.
When I do offend people, I often like to probe as to _why_ they're offended. In my experience, most people seem to be incapable of defining any concrete reasons as to why a given statement is offensive other than circular, "it's offensive because it's offensive" reasoning.
You're placing entirely too much importance on particular categorizations, "comfort" has much more to do with "what you're used to", than the idea that people are constantly fretting about how population densities in their environment match up to their own self-identification.
As a bi-racial male of the darker persuasion (which in America is basically "not-white"), I find myself much more comfortable around predominantly "white" groups because that has been the most common environment for myself throughout my life.
Why do you believe the github style guide to be the authoritative source for JavaScript style? There is no benefit for avoiding use of semicolons other than not writing semicolons, whereas there are several detriments for their omission.
> It gives Twitter, or whatever other start up, an opportunity to replace an outdated piece of software by a nut case!
I don't know where this ad-hominem is coming from, but Douglas Crockford is hardly a nutcase.
While I disproportionally use Ruby and JavaScript on a daily basis, this statement is referring to a specific type of (common) error, which is largely alleviated by the use of static typing, and therefore not exactly untrue.
I didn't take it as a disparaging of dynamic typing.
My guess is that rather than give an exhaustive list, the author wanted to give an example of a familiar language _without_ static typing. As Haxe is more similar to ECMAScript than Python, Ruby, Lua etc. - it's the most appropriate comparison.
As a person who likes (the good parts of) JavaScript, I read it as trying to appeal to me with promises of less debug time.
This way it will fallback to a local copy if Google's goes down.
[Edit: simonsarris replied with something similar as I was replying, however, the advantage of using unescape is that you don't get invalid markup warnings]
And what if you both sit in a life drawing class drawing the same model? What if for some odd reason you decide to sit behind one of the participants and draw a portrait based off their drawing?
I certainly understand what you're getting at, but everything that we do today is based off of some idea that came before us. Is a certain level of indirection required for an expression to be considered appropriately unique?
From the article, "..there is a line between copying ideas and copying the original expression of ideas...", I would consider that opinion to be both myopic and absurd. We stand on the shoulders of giants - nothing created today can ever be considered to be truly "original".
> From the article, "..there is a line between copying ideas and copying the original expression of ideas...", I would consider that opinion to be both myopic and absurd.
Society needs to draw that line somewhere, to balance the free dissemination of culture and the possibility to make a living off creative works. As long as you are living in a democracy that needs to balance different opinions and make compromises, you'll never be able to get rid of this (unless you simply ignore the law, of course).
As individuals, we don't act the same way around our peers, our friends or our family. While we certainly present ourselves differently in different contexts, I wouldn't call these different "identities", rather the same identity applying the rules of the given context to their behavior.
Where it becomes tricky is when one is strips away the context isolation. For example, at your friend's bachelor party, some behavior might perfectly normative within context and participants, but the next day when people outside of that context can watch a video of your behavior - you might feel a little shame/embarrassment/regret/etc.
The internet, for better or worse, allows a complete breakdown of context isolation. While the rules of posting on 4chan or HN greatly differ, a person adhering to rules of a given context, will still be judged across both contexts by outside viewers.
The solution here is to create context isolation - which is very easy to do with anonymity.
You're completely missing the point. Nobody is saying or implying that people are perfect. Rather, it's the opposite - we acknowledge that people are imperfect - and that's exactly why we need anonymity and different identities.
moot also made another very good point about total anonymity once before: the reason 4chan (and by extension, other image boards) became such a success is because there is no personal cost of failure, which allowed almost boundless creativity - which is why most of the internet knows 4chan mainly as a meme-generator.
Unless you have a specific example, merely omitting mention of both genders hardly qualifies as "sexism" to me? There are plenty of gender-specific magazines for females that do the same thing all the time. I don't see why everyone must now pepper their prose with "he or she" and use an exact 50/50 proportion of examples using both male and female names (actually, you wouldn't need an equal proportion, as it seems that sexism only applies to men) lest they be labeled sexist?
Secondly, just because it's popular today to think of men differently than the "old-fashioned way" doesn't mean that modern thought is "more correct" as to what defines a man, nor does it mean that people who disagree with the modern idea are "wrong" (I'm not suggesting that the "old-fashioned way" is in anyway correct either, but still people have different opinions - and the popular modern idea is just one more).
But I digress, the blog is quite self-aware and I've always read it with a sort of tongue-in-cheek sense of humor; the "gratuitously" throwing in of "man" and "manliness" is part of the writing style.
It's ironic that many authors resort to using the blatantly sexist 'she' to avoid being called sexist.
I would love to see any evidence that the usage of 'he' somehow harms females, and I would support any evidence-supported solution that is suggested (for one thing, I wouldn't want it to harm my wife and daughters), but so far this whole issue seems to be completely locked in the realm of hypothesis, and it's without the feeblest suggestion of evidence.
It's not that using "he" is sexist, so much as it's an indicator of a society where being male is the "default" setting, and it's always a little bit surprising to see a woman doing something. So I would argue that no, it's not really sexist to use "she" as a pronoun, if you're doing it to be rebellious. It isn't about putting down men. It's about encouraging the visible presence of women.
The pronoun thing is probably a minor issue in the gender wars, though. That "he" is the default pronoun isn't a problem so much as, say, that the vast majority of scientists are men, which sends the message to young girls that science is not for them.
Why is the small number of women in science a problem? To call this fact a problem good evidence is needed.*
Usually when this is called a problem it is done along with making the implicit or explicit suggestion that men in scientific fields are sexist and somehow discriminate against women. But I, like most men in science, would severely reprimand anyone who treats women unfairly. Therefore I find it extremely unwarranted and unfair that feminists think it is OK to accuse us of sexism without evidence. And I find it saddening that not more men have the courage to speak up against these accusations.
I'm sure there have been cases of discrimination against women in science, but this in no way proves that it's widespread, or that it's affecting the number of women in science.
[* The logic goes that since men and women are identical, there should be just as many women in science as there are men. But this conclusion is unwarranted because the premise is unsupported by evidence.]
If it were actually the case women were inherently less interested in science, sure, I wouldn't care, but discrimination exists. Much more subtly than it used to, but it's still there, and hence still a problem.
The burden of proof would be on the photographer to prove that it was a "copy" of their work rather than an independent creation.
At a certain point it comes down to this intangible idea of intent and process.
When I do offend people, I often like to probe as to _why_ they're offended. In my experience, most people seem to be incapable of defining any concrete reasons as to why a given statement is offensive other than circular, "it's offensive because it's offensive" reasoning.