Subject: Re: bug#38002: Please remove this joke

From: Marcin Borkowski <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 01 Nov 2019 17:23:08 +0100

On 2019-11-01, at 16:24, [email-masked] wrote:

> Deleting any jokes (including the one you're acquiescent to removal),
> after accepting the persons work (the code that came along with the
> joke) is extremely disrespectful to the person who did the programming
> work along-side it.

I haven't thought about it this way, but it seems to make sense.  On
closer inspection however, it only _seems_ to make sense, but it
actually does not.

Consider a bad joke a _bug_.  We _want_ to remove bugs from Emacs (or
any other software for that matter).

The problem is, this one particular joke isn't bad at all, quite the
opposite - irrespective whether one laughs at women or hacker's
stereotype of women.  (I think both interpretations are valid, and none
is too offensive for my taste.  The previous joke in the file is
definitely more offensive, for instance.)  IOW, I consider it a feature,
not a bug.  (And I repeated it to many of my friends, and we all had
a good laugh.)

> (And I mean /that/ person, including a time-period element (people
> change, sadly, they're always better when they're younger: when
> they're old they simply give up and obey).)

This, too, is plainly false.  In general, I would rather expect older
people "better" (for some very specific meaning of "better", definitely
not the moral one), due to experience.

> If we liked them we would not waste our lives programming: we would
> chase the women. There is a reason we have the time to do the free
> software programing and media creation. The fact is we tacitly reject
> them because they are tyrants (they would say they rejected us: just
> as they attacked you, RMS, in the past saying you would "never get
> laid" when you asked them to stop sending birth announcements to the
> list), slave drivers, and banned everything we /actually/ wanted
> (marrying /girls/ not /women/).

This is not only false perspective, but it is plainly dangerous.
Pitting men against women (or women against men) is exactly what
feminists do, and it is one of the reasons feminism is such a poison for
the society.

I have a loving wife.  I am a programmer.  I can't see any contradiction
here.  (Happily, my wife is not a feminist - I wouldn't marry one,
anyway.)

BTW, I also know some female programmers.  Not many, but still.

Just my few cents.

Best,

--
Marcin Borkowski
http://mbork.pl