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Comment by StavrosK | Hacker News Reader

What a disrespectful tweet. If this were about a minority group, there'd be outrage.

> If this were about a minority group, there'd be outrage

People don't get a say on which race or gender (edit: sex) they're born as. That's partly why race and gender are protected classes. "People who own Bitcoin" isn't a protected class.

You consider "paranoid dorks" and "people who own Bitcoin" to be the same set? Even then, would you consider something like "you fatasses need to shut up and leave us normal people alone" fine?

You're really going to double down on this argument?

May I suggest thinking about what he's saying?

Sure, it might feel upsetting. But is it true?

It seems true. And that has merit.

But so does your side of it. So it's a balance.

I mean, fine, if you consider being a jerk to a group people just because <arbitrary justification>, I guess there's nothing left for me to say.

I'm not sure why "don't be an asshole to whole groups of people" is so controversial, though.

I agree; her tweets were overly pointed. But calling an individual names, a group of people of voluntary association names, and an entire race or gender names are three very different things. Her core point, that a knowledgeable minority padded with a zealous, clueless majority, the latter on a roll misinforming the public, stands.

Are you sure gender is determined at birth?

Edit: My comment was tongue in cheek. It’s kind of funny that not only genders are like the twin towers, but even saying that sex is determined at birth can be a sensitive issue.

> People don't get a say on which race or gender (edit: sex) they're born as. That's partly why race and gender are protected classes.

The basis of protected class is more visibility and history of non-germane discrimination than innateness, which is why religion is a protected class.

... but... it's not... so...

Sometimes I like to point out that without any form of meaningful static typing, writing code in Ruby requires huge numbers of unit tests to verify what would be basic properties of a better programming language, where no such test would be needed. It's true: if I said that about Serbians, I'd get in a lot of trouble.

I agree, "Javascript is an inconsistent language" and "all you smelly nerds go back to your caves and leave us normal people alone" are pretty much equivalent.

Please don't make up quotes to attribute to other people, especially when it's not at all clear --- because you'd have to go read through a whole Twitter thread to find out --- that you invented the quote.

The first quote is paraphrased, so by implication the second quote can be assumed to be paraphrased. I think it's fairly clear.

It's not only not clear, it's deliberately deceptive. 'StavrosK would have you believe Jeong is poking fun at nerds in general, and making comments about their personal hygiene.

My impression was she was making a statement about some nerds, yes, but people may interpret it as entailing a general slur.

Was it also deliberately deceptive to interpret Trump's famous statement about Mexicans as a slur on the whole group? I don't think so.

I observe people of all sorts making ambiguous statements deliberately in order to express bigoted opinions while not engaging with those who may be offended.

None of this implies I think defending "nerds" as a class is important - but I don't think being offended is necessarily "deliberately deceptive".

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