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GitHub Takes Down Satirical 'C Plus Equality' Language
FooAtWFU writes "Some clowns and jokers over at 4chan thought it would be a funny idea to put together a web page for a programming language named 'C Plus Equality' as a parody of feminism, dismissing OOP as 'objectifying' and inheritance as "a tool of the patriarchy". But this parody was apparently too hot to host at Github, which took down the original Github repository after receiving criticism on Twitter, prompting a backlash and inquiry into the role of free speech and censorship on Github's platform. The project has since found a new home on BitBucket, at least for the time being." Comments on an article describing the research which sparked the parody call the parody's language "fake," and compare it to the 1996 Sokal affair. (It also reminds me a bit of Jesux.)
Is that Github also killed off all the forked versions of the repo as well, not just the main one.
I'm a little bit annoyed that they both have this power and used it in this wya.
Its not the government. Its a private entity and thus not bound by the first amendment.
But it does bring up an important point- GitHub is a private entity, a for-profit company. Right now, they provide a useful service if you like git. In the future they may not. Many companies have helped the FOSS community then turned their backs on it. Use them, but don't ever fully trust them.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Well. Github's Terms of Service clearly identifies that "We may, but have no obligation to, remove Content and Accounts containing Content that we determine in our sole discretion are unlawful, offensive, threatening, libelous, defamatory, pornographic, obscene or otherwise objectionable". I assume they used that discretion to find it either "offensive" or "otherwise objectionable". And clearly Github is well within their legal rights to take down this content.
But it does illustrate the limits of Github's commitment to freedom and openness: if it offends Github's staff, or if Github thinks it offends people who could get them in some level of trouble, they'll take down your content. So, you can still use Github as a platform to effect change in the world, but only insofar as Github&co agree with you.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew/pull/8253
I am sorry, but C+= is not the first parody language.....
GitHub is a place for code, not political activism. If your project is more the latter than the former, it deserves to be removed. Put it on your own blog instead.
The difference is that mindfuck isn't targeting one group of people with a demeaning "parody".
The only relevant issues I see here are:
1) Is this parody within the scope of GitHub's reason-for-existance?
2) If it is outside of this scope, how has and how will GitHub treat similar repositories?
Unless GitHub has had a similar situation in the past and treated this repository differently, save the outrage until someone else comes along and pushes the boundaries in a similar way and GitHub reacts in a significantly different way without explaining why.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
No, that's the point of postmodern language.
The purpose is to allow practitionors to show off verbal proficiency without requiring any intellectual rigour, or indeed saying anything falsifiable at all.
Given this community's gender troubles (e.g. http://www.livescience.com/9772-geeks-drive-girls-computer-science.html), does mocking feminists do anything other than confirm the boy's club. Yes, misapplying feminist critiques of male dominated society to programming languages is amusing, but really lads, time to clean up the house.
Considering their platform is mainly closed-source, I'm not sure this is the first place we've spotted that they are not fully committed to freedom and openness. They're a business that sells project hosting space, using the free accounts as a marketing & onboarding tool, not some kind of free-culture advocacy group.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Well. Github's Terms of Service clearly identifies that "We may, but have no obligation to, remove Content and Accounts containing Content that we determine in our sole discretion are unlawful, offensive, threatening, libelous, defamatory, pornographic, obscene or otherwise objectionable". I assume they used that discretion to find it either "offensive" or "otherwise objectionable". And clearly Github is well within their legal rights to take down this content.
But it does illustrate the limits of Github's commitment to freedom and openness: if it offends Github's staff, or if Github thinks it offends people who could get them in some level of trouble, they'll take down your content. So, you can still use Github as a platform to effect change in the world, but only insofar as Github&co agree with you.
Change in the world? Thefuck? Github is not some public square for satirical commentary on everyday life. Its for code. Its for code that people want/need to share with others. Its a waste of bandwidth and resources for a project on there to not be even remotely pursuant to the purpose of Github. They removed it because it did not further their mission of hosting CODE. Jesus christ already. If it were a satirical pro-feminism project and it got tossed, you would probably be clapping. Shut the fuck up and go write some code.
Mindfuck is also an actual interpreter for an actual programming language. It may not be the most useful programming language, but it is one. The interpreter's source code is what's hosted on Github: it's code, in a code repository, pretty much the kind of thing GitHub intends to host. C+= was not a language implementation, not even an implementation of a parody language.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
As a matter of being polite, free hosting services like GitHub should have a "standard practice" of providing an "easy download of all data" for discontinued accounts.
For collaborative projects, this might be either putting the thing in "read only" mode for several weeks or bundling up the whole thing in a tarball-like dataset (in a non-proprietary format of course) and letting anyone who previously contributed download the thing for a reasonable period of time.
This would be "standard practice." There would be case-by-case exceptions for things which cannot be hosted in this way, such as material that would put an undue burden on the hosting service or which is otherwise infeasible or impossible for the hosting service to provide this kind of "graceful exit."
In short: To maintain good public relations, services should make reasonable efforts to assist those who uploaded data or who participated in collaborative projects can get their data back if the account is suddenly terminated by the hosting service.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
THAT'S NOT FUNNY!
As a potential customer, I want to know the reason for a provider's behavior. It is a rather basic enterprise's communication 101 teaching. To some extend, you can hardly respect a rule you know nothing about. It's just like a State arresting people without any law to back up the arrest. I know, this is a private company, but it does not mean it should not be explicit about this sort of stuff.
Indeed. As I said above, their attitude towards offensive content is basically the same as the attitude of organised religions.
"It offends me and challenges my beliefs, so it must be removed"
Lets say it together one more time, because feminists like you still don't seem to get it.
"An ideology is not a race"
Criticizing feminism is in no way comparable to having a go at someone for their ethic origin. Your ideology gets no such protection, and trying to claim that it does simply advertises the world that you cannot defend it on a level playing field. This is the exact same tactic used by people who try to deflect valid criticism on Islam on the grounds of racism. Ideas that have to shield themselves from criticism so are almost universally bad ideas.
women==people
This seems to be an exceptionally hard concept for many people to grasp.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Stop judging all feminists by a handful of extremists. I guarantee that WHATEVER your beliefs on ANY topic, I can find some one with an extreme version, and then use that to write you off as an idiot.
It's intellectually dishonest, it's bigoted, don't do it.
Yeah dude, the guy followed her into a lift at 4am and invited her back to her room for coffee after she had announced she was going to bed, it being 4am and all in a foreign country and that. I don't know if you're at all familiar with the fact women get raped quite a lot, but they do, so being in an enclosed space with a stranger might make a woman a bit uncomfortable. So she mentioned it, in passing, as an example of what not to do. Then an angry horde took exception to the idea that their attention might not be welcome, any time, any place. And you're still bitching about it a *year* later?
[FUCK BETA]
It is my firm belief that verbal bullshit should be taught in high school as a semester-long subject. It would lead to a less gullible public, a public more skeptical of their politicians -- because, as everyone knows, you can't bullshit a bullshitter.
I think it was called "rhetoric" back in the day, and it was indeed taught in schools. We need it now more than ever.
While I absolutely agree with you that rhetoric should be taught as a standard subject in schools (perhaps along with a course on "how [NOT] to lie with statistics"), equating "rhetoric" with postmodernist obfuscation is a little misguided.
The whole point of traditional rhetorical training was to teach people how to be good public speakers and debaters. Doing so required precision and clarity in language in order to persuade an audience to accept the speaker's argument. Most "rhetorical flourishes" are about taking ordinary ideas and making them sound more lofty, often to move the emotions of an audience in the right direction.
Lincoln didn't say: "Men died here for a cause, and there's little meaning we can add to that." Instead, he said: "we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract."
The rhetoric here serves to heighten the meaning, not obfuscate it. Stereotypical postmodern language that avoids clear argument and sprinkles in jargon for the sole purpose of making meaning more vague will be almost useless in a public speech made to persuade and move the audience, which is the point of rhetoric.
Certainly there are rhetorical constructions used to obscure inconvenient counterarguments in debate, avoid difficult topics, and even mislead. But if you only used such language, you'd never actually accomplish the main goal of rhetoric, which is to successfully communicate your ideas to an audience in a persuasive fashion. Unless your model of successful public speaking is the director of the NSA trying to avoid saying anything useful at all, I don't think the comparison of "rhetoric" with stereotypical "postmodernism" is fair.