Taming STIBP

Posted Nov 30, 2018 8:40 UTC (Fri) by dgm (subscriber, #49227)
In reply to: Taming STIBP by unixbhaskar
Parent article: Taming STIBP

Absolutely. The parent comment insinuated that Linus was in fact calling everybody an idiot, all the time. This is, of course, false.

The question really is, is it permisible to call someone "idiot" when you think it is deserved? If it is not, then what we are effectively doing is censoring the word "idiot". Censoring words is an idiotic (sorry, I mean much less than adequate), way to proceed, because people will find ways to "politely" be as much offensive.

Better than censoring, we should promote communication styles that add to the *content* of the conversation.

Taming STIBP

Posted Nov 30, 2018 11:12 UTC (Fri) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

The question really is, is it permisible to call someone "idiot" when you think it is deserved?

I don't think people actually deserve being called “idiots” if they write ill-advised code. I've done that for sure, you've probably done it on occasion, even Linus Torvalds has probably done it once or twice. If it happens, by all means call our code bad, or even idiotic if you must. But don't call us idiots. Certainly not over the Internet. If you want to call me an idiot, do it to my face or don't do it at all.