I'm just sad

Posted Oct 3, 2025 0:02 UTC (Fri) by prokoudine (guest, #41788)
In reply to: I'm just sad by josh
Parent article: NixOS moderation team resigns

> "bigot", for instance, is a descriptive term. It's not "impolite" to describe someone that way; it's a problem for people to act bigoted.

Let's not muck about. There's a whole range of words, "bigot" included, that are casually used today for name-calling, well outside their original meaning.

This little game of calling the other party bigoted or nazi or other interesting words to establish one's own moral superiority has become quite tiresome. There's a saying where I come from: in an asylum, whoever is first to grab a white coat gets to be the doctor.

I wish it didn't feel like we are all in an asylum. Alas...

I'm just sad

Posted Oct 3, 2025 0:36 UTC (Fri) by koverstreet (✭ supporter ✭, #4296) [Link]

It's quite indisputable that bigots (and others of even more dangerous persuasions; i.e. fascists) do in fact exist in real life; that the words may be used as "name calling" doesn't mean that they're no longer subjects of serious conversation.

We might wish to be free from hearing "impolite" discourse, but that can lead in very dangerous directions when taken too far. Martin Luther King Jr. had a lot to write on the subject awhile back.

Unusual for this stuff to come up in tech, but I think there's enough going on in the NixOS world re: Arduril that looks perhaps not entirely proper that we should be careful not to dismiss out of hand.