Slashdot Mirror
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.....
The difference is that mindfuck isn't targeting one group of people with a demeaning "parody".
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
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.
The problem is that misogyny is seen as offensive where misandry is treated as non-offensive and acceptable behavior for women to have :-/ Whereas it should either be both unacceptable or both acceptable.
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.