OSCON keynote: Standing out in the crowd

I haven't the impression from the (admittedly somewhat cursory) googling around that I did that "often-problematic" was the proper characterization; certainly CI surgery doesn't always provide what the non hearing impaired would call "good hearing", but you're correct in that the analogy with this handicap is probably not all that good.

I have, though looked into the arguments made by the Deaf community on CI surgery (capital D on purpose), and I have to tell you, as what I consider to be a reasonable man (yeah, yeah, don't bother :-) I have to say that someone who can *afford* CI surgery for a child, whose physician tells them that it has an excellent chance of allowing that child to function in the "real world" (where sound is, y'know, pretty common -- like car horns?), and deciding consciously not to allow that *because they want their child to grow up in the Deaf Community -- for me, that's so close to child abuse that you have to talk me down off the ledge...

and I'm about the most liberal 40 year old I know.

Hence my choice of wording; I apologize if you took it personally.

(I'll note here, for what it's worth, my view that if you are not deaf, you're not really *entitled* to be offended by what I said...)