cotelletta

In a pandemic, we make weird friends. I much prefer some pro conservative anti abortion org asking for less censorship than a dozen woke newspapers and rumor mills calling me a fascist or antivaxxer because I don't treat science as an unquestionable holy cow. Or while propping up corrupt politicians because they're on the same team.

I don't need to agree with someone 100% in order to agree that doing X will make the world more like what i want it to be like.

In this case, if this org is wrong, the answer is counterspeech based on facts, not shooing people away from afar without a chance to listen. Because that is the tic of the authoritarian who is intellectually bankrupt.

Just because Wikipedia says it, doesn't mean it's widely known or accurate. Labeling things as denialism is itself a common trick in misinformation. It flattens whatever the original argument was.

There is a common conflation today where criticism of X policy is confused with being anti-X.

The medical censorship is getting so bad that organizations like this now seem pretty useful and on point. I don't need to agree with all their claims to have common ground with them.

Certainly more than the people who see covid as an endless license to control what others are allowed to read or hear.

I had the same impression. Kory vs his detractors gives me a persistent sense of street-smart vs book-smart.

The same kind of thing that made some people realize that lying about masks early on in the pandemic was an irreversible mistake and breach of trust.

The real generational divide is people who feel this post in their bones and people who will nitpick at it because it's not in fact an unbiased survey.

The point about focus is very true. The socialization of development via online tools means people think sticking their nose in other people's code is a virtue instead of a bother. If you're not going to contribute, why are you interrupting me?

Speak for yourself. The rest of the world mostly did not look, because the American media refused to objectively cover those protests.

I only know about it but following local independent outlets in Portland.

Which of these principles demands you let a cabal of intersectionalists flag their enemies off the front page? Just curious where the intellectual curiosity and lack of reflexiveness comes in.

I ask because if there's one thing I've noticed, it's that these people are unable to tell the difference between low quality arguments and low status arguments. Consistently.

If you truly believe abortion is wrong but is better than the alternative of bringing unwanted children into the world, then you should also support fathers having the right to opt out from supporting a child they didn't want.

This would act as a strong incentive for women to think twice before bringing a child into the world by themselves, with a father who resents them. Fatherlessness and a lack of positive male role models is a real issue in certain communities (cough black America).

Funnily enough, this argument never flies, because "the interests of the child" is the excuse for why "the interests of the mother" take precedence.

Your attempt at couching your comment in disclaimers is hilarious. You don't just give supremacists ammunition, you make everyone laugh at the absurdity.

"Part of the culture" is bad... And "correlated with the culture" is good. But "exude pathological behavior" is where you end.

Have you figured out yet that language policing is just tiptoeing around the things you're not supposed to notice?

It also allows for plausible deniability to surgically remove certain viewpoints without anyone noticing. This is not an acceptable trade off if you value freedom of expression and have an understanding of how bad ideologues are at impartial moderation, confusing disagreement for low effort, lack of intelligence or insincerity.

HN has had a problem for years that heterodox views and facts on culture war issues are censored. The enforcement mechanisms are abused to do this. The mods deny it.

So either the mods are lying about their own actions, or they are not in control of their own site and sufficiently sophisticated flagging works to ban certain viewpoints.

If the latter is true, then shadowbanning is not getting rid of trolls, it is entrenching an elite of them.

This very site does the same, and is proud of it.

The more you do the more they will rely on you. But this is on contributors too.

They start out hanging out in their clubhouse, working on their hobby, and people join in. Then a few years pass and you realize your chat is now a support channel for people who do not care and don't wish to care. Tough luck. Maybe it was never about building software after all, and more about learning, socializing, being valued, and pride.

That said, this part:

>the offer of the fellowship stipend for being a trans person in tech

It sounds like this person has made ample contributions, but they get a fellowship because they're queer. And they're happy with that? Okay. Personally I'd feel insulted.

Women were not pushed out of CS or discouraged. Just go look at the evolution of degrees by gender and pay close attention to the absolute, not relative numbers.

What happened is that as personal computing took off in the 80s, men's interest in the field soared permanently while women temporarily showed interest and then dropped off again. The same happened with dotcom.

The article you linked is a giant exercise in selling the same tired old narrative, even as it debunks itself. They even spell it out: when Grace Hopper "invented the compiler" it was actually what we'd call a linker today, and the work was in fact mostly clerical and rote because there were no abstractions to compile.

As soon as tooling for that came around, that changed, and we started architecting something we would now consider code. Which men appeared to enjoy more.

I have a much more convincing argument though. 15% of CS degrees are given to women, a number that has remained mostly flat for two decades (but only because men dropping out of college during that time, otherwise it'd be lower). Half the top 25 programming languages on stack overflow's survey were created in that time.

None of them have female creators. Not one. Where are all those genius female programming language designers we keep hearing about? If women are just as capable, are they just too lazy then? Or is creating a good programming language and making it successful such a stubborn gamble of both abstraction skill and confidence that women fall out of the distribution?

Oh no it must be because people tell them they can't do it. Nevermind that gender orthodoxy has sung only one song for the last 40 years, while being amply funded, and they all prefer to go study third rate sociology instead of getting a real STEM degree...

"The UVA rape was real" - Rolling Stone

"That ESA guy's shirt is sexist." - Too many to count

"That nobel prize winner made inappropriate jokes because one person said so and should be sacked." - The BBC

"That Covington kid is a nazi and is guilty af." - Too many again, even after contradicting material came out.

"Jussie Smolliez was nearly lynched by MAGA hats!" - A US presidential candidate.

"Zoe Quinn is a credible game developer with no track record of either scams or BPD at all, and certainly no blood on her hands." - The Guardian

None of the people behind these lies were anonymous, in fact they were quite proud they got to broadcast then.

And their audience loved being given permissable targets for their 2 minutes hate.

Almost no one wants to acknowledge that before the right radicalized online, the left radicalized both offline and on and pretended this was civilized.