Linus Torvalds responds to Ars about diversity, niceness in open source

"There's a lot of talk about gender and sexual preferences and race, but we're different in so many other ways, too"

Love this quote.

"I don't know where you happen to be based, but this 'you have to be nice' seems to be very popular in the US,"

I observed the same thing. I've lived in 4 different (Europeans) countries before moving to the US and I have never seen such a PC trend around "being nice", "don't offend people", "be sensitive" etc. As an anecdote, I remember trying to explain the whole "pronouns issue" with trans/cis-gender to my friends back home, they had no clue what the hell I was talking about.

As a non-US born, it's been (and still is) really hard to really understand and navigate all the implied PC rules. I'd like to understand why the US is such an exception when it comes to liberal views.

An idea would be that the US is also an exception among developed countries when it comes to the importance of religion. Societies are, to an extent, composed of groups opposed to each other, maybe the fact that so many people pay attention to religious beliefs and take religion so seriously pushes "others" even further on the other side of the spectrum. I don't know, I'm no phd :)