I agree because it is incongruent to target symbolism towards "Christmas" when every day of our week is a reference to Norse religions. So in this case we don't know if someone was offended by recognizing Christmas symbolism at all due to the Santa hat on the gear, or if someone that likes Christmas was offended because Santa's hat has nothing to do with their Christian God - we'll never know! But something like this happens every season leading into the end of the year, while other religious symbolism equally as prevalent in our society is completely ignored. This makes me lean towards not reacting to "random offended person" at all.
> "even a single person being offended is one too many"
Can we just start ignoring people whose sense of reality is so out of touch? I'm offended they took someone seriously with this BS. Millions dead versus a myth of someone delivering gifts, wtf?
I think some folks need to watch some Steve Hughes comedy on being offended.
I'm offended you took Trump's and Putin's "fake news" BS about the Washington Post so seriously that you parroted it without proof. Please answer my questions and provide proof of your accusations that the Washington Post's article about David Gelernter is inaccurate, specify exactly what those inaccuracies are, and provide proof that all the other facts and evidence that I posted are wrong, or else admit that you're wrong and spreading misinformation. Because based on what you posted, you're dead wrong, your sense of reality is totally out of touch, and you should be ignored if you can't prove what you said.
Oh goody, my very own personal stalker. You are pretty much acting like the example I dearly hope folks ignore. I'm not sure where you get your conspiracy theories or how people who don't like a certain newspaper are suddenly some grand part of said conspiracy. The proof is in the full video, and that article actually did damage because people in a minority community who made statements assuming the truth of the report, plus their misunderstanding of an individual's status was problematic. I don't like them because they caused damage, and that has nothing to do with some international conspiracy theory.
Plus, more importantly, it had the potential to be such a nice technical discussion, but I guess some folks need to add scarlet letters to people. I do hope you know all the people that ever contributed to any idea or software that you use daily, they might be evil.
So you have no proof that there was anything inaccurate in the Post article about David Gelernter, you can't even identify a single inaccuracy in it, and you have no proof or suggestion that any of the other evidence I posted about him, including quoting his own words, is inaccurate. So because you don't have a leg to stand on, you bring up some totally unrelated article that the Post has already long since corrected and apologized for.
As for the nice technical discussion:
You asked why nobody has gone down the path of Mirror Worlds, and I told you: Because David Gelernter is a patent troll sell-out, and you will be sued if you attempt to use any of the ideas he claims he originally invented, but are actually not remotely original or unique.
He sued Apple and Microsoft and other companies for millions of dollars over his unoriginal idea of listing documents in chronological order. That's one good reason people don't use or respect his ideas.
And another reason people don't take him seriously is that he is an anthropogenic climate change denier, he doesn't believe in Darwinian evolution, he promotes Intelligent Design, and he is fiercely anti-intellectual. All of that is true and well documented, I provided the evidence, and your non-sequitur story about the Covington kids has nothing to do with it and refutes none of what I said.
You should be more like the Washington Post, and admit when you make a mistake.
Sorry, I must have had Christmas confused with Halloween, because DEC 25 = OCT 031. I only wish Gelernter was as afraid being known for patent trolling, denying global warming and evolution, and promoting intelligent design, as protomyth was afraid of being asked to justify his bizarre argument attempting to whitewash Gelertner's reputation by citing the Covington kids. ;)
> "The Santa Hat on vscode insiders and pushing of religion is very offensive to me, additionally xmas has cost millions of Jews their lives over the centuries, yet even if that was not the case, pushing religious symbols as part of a product update is completely unacceptable," the user wrote. "Please remove it immediately and make it your top priority. To me this is almost equally offensive as a swastika."
Santa is about as non-religious as you can get. IMO, I think Microsoft really put their foot in their mouth on this one.
Edit: Because I can't let this go, it's important to point out that what we find offensive is subjective. I wonder if whoever wrote that is really just trolling Microsoft, or just has an axe to grind.
Are you sure Santa and Saint Nicholas are the same? In Germany we celebrate Saint Nicholas on December 6th, while Santa brings presents on December 24th (Christmas Eve).
We should be relieved that the Visual Studio Code icon didn't feature one of Sinterklaas's "Zwarte Piet" subservient, gaudily costumed, large gold earring wearing, afro-style wig sporting, red lipstick smeared, childishly clown-like acting, naughty-child-kidnapping, Spanish Moor originating, full blackface wearing assistants, whose traditionally racist hooligan fans throw eggs, shout racist insults, wield clubs and fireworks, storm peaceful meetings and protests, trespass on property, assault people, and vandalize cars, all in the name of traditional celebration of the birthday of Christ Our Lord.
>The act of terrorism at our national conference (8/11), where hooligans armed with clubs and heavy fireworks barged in on the meeting, formed a dangerous and all-time low in the list of hostilities perpetrated on KOZP. The school building, which was the venue of the conference, and cars (including the car of one of the organisers) were severely damaged. We were lucky that no one got physically hurt.
>[...] How would you have reacted if a group of hooligans with clubs had stormed a congress of the VVD or another political party?
Saint Nicholas is hardly the same as "Santa", which has his own wikipedia page [1]. Modern day Santa has some partial roots in Saint Nicholas (as well as a few other figures), but other than the sometimes-used moniker of "Saint Nick", has very little to do with the actual saint. Santa is the one associated with the red hat, while Saint Nicholas has no such association. The only real link between the two is that Saint Nicholas was known for gift-giving and so is Santa, but I hope we aren't about to label gift-giving as a religious activity...
I'm not sure it makes sense to ask if Santa Claus is "the same" as Saint Nicholas. It is a mythic figure which have developed over time. It is like asking if Dracula is "the same" as Vlad Tepes.
The red hat has nothing to do with Christianity though. It was created in the late 1800s and then popularised by Coca Cola in the 1930s. If the VS Code team had put a bishop's mitre on the update cog the complaint would be more reasonable.
The red hat is clearly associated with Christmas which is a Christian holiday. The complaint is silly, but we should not counter that by ridiculous claims like saying a Santa hat has nothing to do with Christmas. I think the red had originates from "Father Christmas" rather than Sct Nicolaus, but in any case it is clearly associated with Christmas.
And so what if it is (even if slightly)? What's offensive about that? Who is hurt by that? (I'm an atheist, so I’m hardly a defender of shoving religious values down people’s throats)
Saint Nicholas, the bishop who lived in ancient Greece, is a saint, venerated in every form of Christianity that has saints.
I don't think that Santa Claus, the mythological person who lives at the North Pole and has elves to make toys, is venerated by any Christian denomination.
Protestants in Germany introduced the tradition of "Kristkind" (Baby Jesus) bringing gifts at Christmas because the tradition of Saint Nicholas was problematic for protestants.
Was that the tradition of St Nicholas, the saint, or "Saint Nicholas"/Kris Kringle/Father Christmas = Santa Claus, the cookie-eating guy with a red hat thatdeveloped mostly after the 18th century?
I'm not sure I understand what you are asking - are you considering St Nicolas and "Saint Nicholas" two unrelated figures? Obviously the figure developed over time.
Though he was a saint the symbology has been non-religious for some time. It's not just Christians that celebrate with Santa. In fact, most of the non-religious people I know celebrate with Santa. Even when you tie it to a saint the overall meaning of Santa has nothing to do with God or Christians.
People like to be offended and will ruin things for other people. It's sad that we're in such a sensitive society but tolerance isn't what is practiced, sensitivity is.
As a Christian I find the idea of Santa offensive, honestly. Santa and his powers (as presented in media) are a replacement for God. I'm not going to go crying to anybody because they have Santa as an icon.
Of course he's religious, it's a mascot for a Christian holiday. Don't confuse American commercialism's exploitation of Christmas & Santa with its religious roots.
Christmas's roots are from pagan traditions around the new year's. They were christianized for many reasons.
Gift giving around the end of the year has been around since before 0 BC.
(And before someone screams "citation needed," I'll just say that it's well known, and if you didn't know it by now, there's a thing called Google and Wikipedia that you can go look at.)
So? Most religious traditions were stolen, whoop de do. What matters is how they're practiced in 2019, in which case Christmas is almost synonymous with Christianity.
> I'll just say that it's well known
There is no actual confidence in how all of this stuff came to be, just a lot of conjecture - and so no, it's not well known at all.
They call it Christmas though. So it is not your version of Christmas but theirs. Also you can't be certain it is commercial exploitation. What if some you are referring to give mostly homemade and charitable gifts. Certainly would be the minority but you are lumping a lot of people together.
It seems contradictory for you to say in your previous comment that Christmas as practiced in 2019 by Americans doesn't matter when discussing Santa because of the religious roots, and then follow that up by saying the history of the religious roots don't matter because they're practiced differently in 2019.
> (And before someone screams "citation needed," I'll just say that it's well known, and if you didn't know it by now, there's a thing called Google and Wikipedia that you can go look at.)
Lots of beliefs are "well known" and nevertheless wrong. Just look at all the people, even in this thread, claiming that Santa Claus was invented by Coca Cola, even though a simple google image search will reveal illustrations of Santa from before Coco Cola was founded. As for the pagan traditions around new years they are not very well documented and a lot is speculation.
Of course gift-giving is known throughout history, but the figure of Santa Claus is associated with the Christian celebration. I'm pretty sure you wont find any reference to Santa Claus or Father Christmas from before Christianity!
Modern Santa was invented by Coca Cola based very loosely on St Nicholas. In American Gods he'd be the God of Capitalism I guess.
As a symbol of American capitalism it's rather fitting that Microsoft are using him.
St Nicholas (sinterklaas) is celebrated in The Netherlands on 6th of December. You may remember it from The Daily Show and other US TV outlets who were covering the archaic tradition of black face in the celebrations.
It's a holiday widely celebrated by non-Christians. People mostly care about the gift giving bit, alcohol, and food, rather than any religious angle.
You see similar things going on for Valentine's day, Easter, Saint Patricks day, etc. Sure, there is a religious aspect, but the non-religious celebration is dominant.
My colleagues in India had a Christmas celebrations in their office. I asked them if they celebrated it growing up, and they told me they first started celebrating it in University.
We have Diwali parties in our US office. Everyone has fun.
But St. Nicholas et al. did not start with Christianity - isn't the myth of 'Santa' an amalgam of all kinds of different pagan cultures and traditions? It seems like the whole 'Christmas' holiday is mostly an artifact of the church trying to tie together wide and diverse groups of people under their umbrella.
I guess you could use a snowflake or a cornucopia or something as a generic 'winter holiday' thing, and people have been doing that for awhile; "Happy Holidays" usurped "Merry Christmas" decades ago. Or you could use a bevy of emojis representing the holiday's secular roots, but would it have been better if they added emojis for St. Nick's mythological companions like Belshnickel, Zwarte Pete, and Krampus next to the santa hat? Maybe if they really wanted to polish this essential feature for production use, they could have different emoji sets for different holidays and a modal to choose which one you wanted.
I dunno, I feel so bad for people who haven't had the drive to do anything fun or playful beaten out of them yet. "Cry, the beloved country, for the unborn child that's the inheritor of our fear."
My IMO is that if you're getting heat from users over the equivalent of an easter egg it doesn't really matter whether they're trolls or not, it's much easier to just remove or tone down the egg to make the problem go away. Having arguments about it is a waste of energy. Yes, it's kind of depressing or frustrating, but this is the nature of online discourse in 201x.
Whether or not the complaint is genuine is also much harder to figure out than "is it sufficient to replace this with a snowflake"
It's entirely unnecessary to make the problem (Santa hat) go away.
The complaining person is displaying abusive behavior and should be treated as such. Warn them. Then ban them if they persist. You stand up to bullies or you drown in them.
Mods can trivially and entirely disregard the non-problem (as it actually is). They're choosing not to and are making a community handling mistake in the process.
The only proper response is to ignore the complaint as not meaningful enough to warrant action. Otherwise you'll eventually have to remove every possible symbol. Somewhere, someone's mother was murdered by a cog and they feel very, very sensitive about the matter.
Abusive behavior in communities occurs at both extremes. You can be too sensitive in social situations in fact, to such a degree that you abuse other people with your need to control your environment specifically to your aggressively selfish satisfaction.
>xmas has cost millions of Jews their lives over the centuries
Can someone fill me in on what this is referring to. I know my history knowledge is a bit lacking but I normally am able to get references like this so I must have missed something.
They guy hasn't actually created much, though the account is fairly old. Most of the repos are forks of others with no changes. It looks like a real person, but his name is Christian, which is not a likely name for a Jew. His repos got brigaded and he claimed his grandfather fought for the Germans on the Eastern front after "kick[ing] some Gestapo ass" [0]. This part is obviously malarkey, and convinces me he's a troll.
Appearances can be deceiving... even the profile photo could be generated and not a picture of a real human, as this other item currently prominently on the front page reveals:
I am an Eastern Orthodox Christian and I am offended by Santa, which has nothing to do Christianity and it's nothing but a blatant display of overconsumption, wastefulness, not to mention the environmental impact of all this, which, against, goes well against Christianity, modesty, and actually conflicts with the Nativity Fast. Will I file an issue? No, never. It's childish, it's silly, it's not something an engineer should ever do. By the way, I'm offended by the plastic eggs and bunnies around Easter as well. None of these holidays are religious and here in Orange County, Southern California, I see many Muslims and Jews decorating their houses with the pseudo-Christian symbols as well. Every act will affect at least one person - I expected Microsoft to think about this starting this tradition and ending it. You can't make everybody happy, period!
I disagree with you. What's childish about filing an issue with something that offends you?
> it's not something an engineer should ever do.
But what if it wasn't Santa but it was like a different religious icon - like a menorah? I feel like literally thousands of American christians would have banned using VSCode or even Microsoft products for something like that.
But what if I am offended that somebody finds my beliefs offensive?! I am not offended by other religions in any way whatsoever - I respect their rights as much as I want them to respect mine. The whole America is decorated for Hellowing, Christmas, and Easter - VS Code is people's least problem! And, as I stated, I can feel totally offended, but I'm not. I feel offended by Helloween, which all liberals celebrate, although it's has Roman-Catholic origins, it's against Christianity's principles, it has a huge environmental impact, and it greatly disturbs me personally, but I honor the rights of others to enjoy it. Should I be offended by nowadays Germans because in the past they killed my ancestors? Please, grow up! History is to learn from it, not to avenge for things way back in the past. Enough snowflakes among the engineers! I can't forget that master-slave "offensiveness" still!
A) It ignores entirely the modern day usage of the Santa hat (it is not really a religious symbol, it is more like a general holiday symbol)
B) Even if it were, say, a menorah, it could mean that the developers are Jewish. Why would someone of a different religion celebrating the holidays offend you? That would imply to me that you're intolerant of other religions.
C) It was obviously not placed there with bad intentions. It is clearly intended to be festive and fun.
D) It is a waste of developer resources to remove something they just added in.
E) It devalues issues that people with genuine offenses might raise in the future, i.e. the boy who cried wolf.
You know what's even better? Not getting offended. Let people do what they want. And specifically for vscode, it's a button that makes the editor snow. Just enjoy it. Or don't. But definitely don't make it worsr for anyone else. Lot's of other apps do similar things. Lot's of people decorate. I hope no one goes around reporting apps and people for what they put on display.
"Dear <user>, We apologize if you found the icon offensive. Please be assured that no offense was intended. Thank you for bringing up the issue so we could clear things up."
Was not a sufficient response and an end to the conversation? Leave the icon where it is. Now that the user knows that the icon wasn't meant as an offense, he can move on with his life.
If he finds the swastika offensive, he shouldn't visit India. Swastikas are everywhere. The context matters.
>Saying "I'm sorry you feel that way" to someone who has been offended by a statement is a non-apology apology. It does not admit there was anything wrong with the remarks made, and may imply the person took offense for hypersensitive or irrational reasons. Another form of non-apology does not apologize directly to the injured or insulted party, but generically "to anyone who might have been offended".
>Ifpology: Attorney and business ethics expert Lauren Bloom, author of The Art of the Apology, mentions the "if apology" as a favorite of politicians, with lines such as "I apologize if I offended anyone". Comedian Harry Shearer has coined the term Ifpology for its frequent appearances on "The Apologies of the Week" segment of Le Show.
I am sorry you find non-apology apologies offensive, but that is all we have to offer. We're sorry we couldn't do better. ;)
On a more serious note though. It is cool that there is a label for something like this, but to me it is just a polite way of de-escalation. You could be confrontational and say "I didn't do anything wrong, you're the one who is wrong to think what I did was wrong!" or you can say "I'm sorry you thought what I did was wrong, but my intention was not to wrong you or anyone.".
There is nothing wrong with being polite and tactful.
> "Please remove it immediately and make it your top priority. To me this is almost equally offensive as a swastika."
I don't know about their part of the world, but this person would not make it 1 meter through a shopping mall in Europe from November to January. Swa... Santas everywhere!
Also he appears to be someone that doesn't know the difference between what people wearing red bobble-hats have done compared to people wearing swastikas.
This is a very professional and level headed response by the VS Code team. I hope people reference this in the future to learn how to handle and respond openly to divisive issues.
You're being downvoted, but I agree that Microsoft did the best they possibly could have in this situation: getting the off-topic (and potentially offensive on their own) threads and comments on the issue tracker out of view, making the Santa hat a configurable choice, and still maintaining a decent standard of transparency.
I would personally love to add a response along the lines of "professional yes, but they should have..." regarding their stance, but no - you are right.
This is an exceptionally professional response and the discussion regarding PC, wokeness etc belongs elsewhere.
This is not a divisive issue, the account that raised the issue is most likely fake, the person behind it intended to trigger and divide people and they succeeded at that. The world is no paradise, you will never satisfy everyone nor should you try to. Microsoft's response is cringeworthy.
By us being here, that so many people objected to the removal of an easter egg in a developer channel release, to me, indicates there is a serious schism. I expect people are using this as a proxy for concerns about PC culture and "the war on christmas". This written description of what happened, and how the team is handling what happened going forward is transparent and respectful, that is what I am attempting to comment on.
I disagree. This wasn't a divisive issue, this was ONE troll who raised an issue. MSFT should have simply said "No" to this troll.
It's also worth mentioning that the original issue violated Code of Conduct as well, but for some reason MSFT only applied the Code to posts following it.
Github should ban all these accounts and try to track the real accounts for the fakes to ban these too. These intolerant people should not have the right to use this service.
>One would think that developers at the very least would have some deductive reasoning, so using the n and k word against me, when my profile picture and name clearly show I am neither
I don't think this person understands that part of the internet...
> even a single person being offended is one too many
Seriously?? Take a stand against extremists, that's what I say. If you cave to the demands of individual offended people, prepare to waste a lot of time catering to trolls...
If they had balls they would tell that user to STFU and go so something useful. If you worry about such things and oppress others by pushing your feelings like a spoiled child, you have way too much time on your hands...
A lot of people are piling on the original complainant for a ridiculous complaint, and rightly so. But they are not the only offender here, and arguably not even the worst one:
> To adhere to our values and the Code of Conduct, we had to delete a handful of comments, which is unfortunate but not uncommon. Our responses triggered more responses. Bots were being employed to create issues and comments. Temporary accounts were being created to spam the system. Offensive issues were being created. The repository was filling up with issues which, frankly, were uncalled for, and we needed to do something, fast.
Every person who felt the need to comment and create github issues (and even write spam bots to do so!) about a santa hat being removed is not a person that should be trusted with any sort of responsibility or employment in the software industry. The absolutely staggering lack of maturity here boggles the mind.
This is not how sane adults should act. On either side.
> Every person who felt the need to comment and create github issues (and even write spam bots to do so!) about a santa hat being removed is not a person that should be trusted with any sort of responsibility or employment in the software industry.
They should be punished, shouldn't they? Put to jail?
It's the extremes that caused this. Putting to jail, or calling for it, is just another one. They all acted poorly. That being called out is of itself the condemnation. Answers or responses don't have to be dialed to 10 to be valid.
That was exactly my thought. The pattern of taking exaggerated but vaguely plausible offense to something, and then using any response (positive or negative) to that as an excuse to be hateful, is one that's repeated itself before.
For commenting to point out contradictory standards on what is considered offensive enough to remove? Really?
Edit: One satirical (per my own assumption) comment I read was complaining about calling the main branch master. The idea that using terminology such as master is offensive to some people seems at least as plausible as the santa hat being plausible. Perhaps more so as there have already been some discussion about the use of the term master in tech lingo. That is the kind of comment I'm thinking of, but want to be sure we are thinking of the same ones.
It's harsh language, but honestly: yes. Microsoft had to lock down the repository because it was being flooded with comments like this. For removing a santa hat.
I saw this story about it being removed as well, and I thought to myself "well, that's pretty silly, but whatever" and then five seconds later I had moved on with my life. The very idea that an grown person could be so upset about it that they would actually expend the mental energy to go to the github issues page and voice their opinion with an angry comment is mind-boggling to me. It is, in my opinion, an even more absurd reaction than the original complaint.
I believe this was blown way out of proportion, but I am uncertain how else the visual studio code team should've responded.
Where do you draw the line?
Was there a way to politely respond to this person without kowtowing to them?
Maybe by adding an option to disable the santa hat, where it's on by default, but you can turn it off?
Google has been sprucing up their search page for years now; Many a santa hat has been present, and people were both annoyed and happy, and also apathetic. Would Google have responded similarly, if some random person had a pipeline right to their developers?
It feels like even though some random person with a complaint got his wish, everyone else lost something. Like the ability to put something fun in your software without being overly concerned about offending one person.
>Maybe by adding an option to disable the santa hat, where it's on by default, but you can turn it off?
This honestly would have been the best solution, I'm Muslim and I'd like to switch it off but I'm not going to go out of my way to complain about someone else's program that I have voluntarily placed on my computer when it's clearly a valuable part of people's traditions and I can patch it myself.
> even a single person being offended is one too many
That's a disappointingly defeatist philosophy. I really like VS Code and this won't change that, but it's a shame that they let a single crazy person destroy what was a nice gesture for the vast, vast majority of their users.
Now the VS community knows how to get new features added to the product. Simly say "I'm offended that you are not adding this feature" and they will promptly add it, as not to "offend".
Chap seems to be a troll, in all probability as Christian as his name.
That is, Christian in name only, and actually interested in leveraging woke / victimhood culture and microaggressions to generate a political reaction.
He probably could have been equally as effective by saying "hey, let's make this icon more generic so it's more inclusive" and ended it at that.
I don't think he is wrong in his request, but the necessity people feel to say "This offends me" over just using other more concrete rationale is what causes these kinds of incidents.
We need to learn to use less divisive and accusatory language when making requests like this.
The paradox of tolerance [1] is a PITA. At the end of the day a santa hat is no big deal, but by the logic of "even a single person being offended is one too many", taken to the extreme, all that is left is the lowest common denominator of what all humans tolerate (if there is such a thing).
On a more practical note, I find it hard to reason on how deal with issues like this. It's like if you try to be level headed, avoid conflict, and try to see things from the other side you already lost, because there is no corresponding empathy coming from the other side. The only solution is to give in, or deal with an offended internet mob.
Why is someone being offended such a big deal nowadays? It seems everyone is always trying to make sure no one can ever be the slightest bit offended. Doesn’t necessarily feel like the most important metric we should be optimizing for as a society.
It's the PC (politically correct) movement. PC definitely needed a lot of push in 2000. It has certainly helped correct a lot of language problems, problems that either reinforce stereotypes, gender and/or sexual orientation issues. Indeed it is part of the reason people stopped saying Japs or the N. word or fat person.
The reality is that if you were one of the people that is sidelined, you would feel it too. It's part of the reason we need to keep at it.
So while PC'ism may have changed your companies end-of-year greeting cards from "Merry Christmas and Happy New Year" to "Happy Holidays and Happy New Year", or even just "Season's Greetings", you can probably imagine that's helped 10 to 20 percent of the workforce (that are likely atheist, agnostic, jewish or muslim or whatever feel more included in the greeting.
This is nothing new though. Look at things like the Hayes Code or the Comics Code. It is business as usual trying not to offend or alienate important demographics. But as values and power structures change, the feeling you have to accommodate change.
If you feel like this is getting worse compared to those times, it might be because you belong to a demographic which is losing cultural power.
I think the answer should be “we hear your complaint and we will listen closely to hear if others feel the same way and act accordingly. We will also weigh your feedback when deciding what to do for next holiday season. In the meantime if you find it offensive we suggest you turn it off or use a version that doesn’t have it”.
There are so many dimensions to this. No one is forced to sit and watch it. It’s not front and center in the community forums (making the community itself exclusive) and so on.
One person being hurt is one too many, but one person being offended for what the absolute majority probably have decided is for the sake of being offended can’t be the cause of this.
We have come a long way when it comes to having more inclusive communities especially for miniorities. I‘m sure there are trans people in OSS now that wouldn’t have felt welcome ten years ago. I just fail to see the parallel and believe there is a minority somewhere longing to get into online communities but that don’t feel welcome because of Santa hats?
Christmas is not a Christian holiday. Christianity is young.
The symbols and traditions surrounding the midwinter feasts (Yule etc) go back way longer. It’s not even called Christmas or anything with “Christ” e.g in Scandinavia. Because no way we’d let the church change also the name. No sir.
The church just had to adopt the festive period. Santa Claus is an even later addition.
And famously the red Santa is thanks to Coca Cola.
So basically the red Santa hat is a symbol that Coca Cola put on top a legend of a saint that was in turn adopted onto pagan winter rites. It’s not exactly bibles all over it.
A single troll has managed to create an insanely huge drama and loss of tons of people time.
I'm not optimistic about the future of Free Software. Especially with the new tendency of some projects to consider that people can be offended about pretty much anything, especially if it is completely trivial, and that the utmost priority is to attempt to not offend anybody on Earth.
Because like we saw here, attempting to not offend by modifying trivialities is actually going to offend way more people.
I commented on a similar case (on a gitlab thread) and got downvoted. I dont mind. it wont change the truth. my comment was:
"because it all comes down to the root cause:
the attack on an area which until now couldnt care less about politics. now in the context of "free speech" we try to brake the last known union out there in the world. developers, who have only let code speak so far."
we will see more and more attacks on free speech (in the name of free speech), open source and companies and people who contribute to open source.
> we reverted the gear to something (hopefully) less controversial (a snowflake)
I’m too sensible to get offended by things like this (cynical amusement is more my style), but as a southern hemispherian—
People from the north hemisphere regularly seem to describe things in terms of seasons (e.g. “coming this summer”), completely disregarding the fact that such seasons don’t hold in most of the world: in the southern hemisphere they’re back to front, and nearer the equator seasons are just all-round different. Southern hemispherians don’t seem to describe scheduled things with seasons much, and only ever in local matters, not global.
(Then you get things like Microsoft’s use of “Fall” in a Windows 10 release which makes it not just northern-hemisphericentric, if I may coin a term, but downright American by virtue of not using the word “autumn” that everyone else uses.)
Back to the snowflakes. Australia’s on fire now, from the heat. (And a town near me was under direct threat of burning down from a bushfire last night.) Even if we ever got snow where I live (we don’t), this would not be the season for it!
> We’ve added a new setting to Insiders that lets you choose the icon. If you like the red hat, go for it! Maybe you live in the southern hemisphere or you are heading to the beach during the holidays, there’s an icon for you too.
Vscode GitHub issue next year: "X people died of heatstroke in Australia in 2020. Please remove snowflake icon out of respect for climate change and those that have died"
181 comments
[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 244 ms ] thread> "even a single person being offended is one too many"
false, in my book
How on earth is that offensive? It's literally just a Santa hat on a cog...
> To me this is almost equally offensive as a swastika
Sigh.
I think some folks need to watch some Steve Hughes comedy on being offended.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21846006
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21849787
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21850703
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21851622
Don't even bother answering if you don't have any proof.
Plus, more importantly, it had the potential to be such a nice technical discussion, but I guess some folks need to add scarlet letters to people. I do hope you know all the people that ever contributed to any idea or software that you use daily, they might be evil.
As for the nice technical discussion: You asked why nobody has gone down the path of Mirror Worlds, and I told you: Because David Gelernter is a patent troll sell-out, and you will be sued if you attempt to use any of the ideas he claims he originally invented, but are actually not remotely original or unique.
He sued Apple and Microsoft and other companies for millions of dollars over his unoriginal idea of listing documents in chronological order. That's one good reason people don't use or respect his ideas.
And another reason people don't take him seriously is that he is an anthropogenic climate change denier, he doesn't believe in Darwinian evolution, he promotes Intelligent Design, and he is fiercely anti-intellectual. All of that is true and well documented, I provided the evidence, and your non-sequitur story about the Covington kids has nothing to do with it and refutes none of what I said.
You should be more like the Washington Post, and admit when you make a mistake.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21853745
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21853716
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21853606
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21853538
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21851622
Flamewar Don is scary. The rest of your comments are fabulous.
Santa is about as non-religious as you can get. IMO, I think Microsoft really put their foot in their mouth on this one.
Edit: Because I can't let this go, it's important to point out that what we find offensive is subjective. I wonder if whoever wrote that is really just trolling Microsoft, or just has an axe to grind.
He's literally a saint in every form of Christianity that has saints.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Nicholas
https://www.history.com/topics/christmas/santa-claus
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zwarte_Piet
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/sep/18/netherlands-ba...
https://www.dutchnews.nl/features/2019/12/open-letter-rutte-...
>The act of terrorism at our national conference (8/11), where hooligans armed with clubs and heavy fireworks barged in on the meeting, formed a dangerous and all-time low in the list of hostilities perpetrated on KOZP. The school building, which was the venue of the conference, and cars (including the car of one of the organisers) were severely damaged. We were lucky that no one got physically hurt.
>[...] How would you have reacted if a group of hooligans with clubs had stormed a congress of the VVD or another political party?
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Claus
I don't think that Santa Claus, the mythological person who lives at the North Pole and has elves to make toys, is venerated by any Christian denomination.
People like to be offended and will ruin things for other people. It's sad that we're in such a sensitive society but tolerance isn't what is practiced, sensitivity is.
As a Christian I find the idea of Santa offensive, honestly. Santa and his powers (as presented in media) are a replacement for God. I'm not going to go crying to anybody because they have Santa as an icon.
In the US, sure. In many other countries the related symbology is still heavily linked to "Saint Nicholas", not "Santa Claus".
Don't forget getting children drunk on rum eggnog made from molested cows and unfertilized dinosaur descendant's ovums.
Of course he's religious, it's a mascot for a Christian holiday. Don't confuse American commercialism's exploitation of Christmas & Santa with its religious roots.
Gift giving around the end of the year has been around since before 0 BC.
(And before someone screams "citation needed," I'll just say that it's well known, and if you didn't know it by now, there's a thing called Google and Wikipedia that you can go look at.)
So? Most religious traditions were stolen, whoop de do. What matters is how they're practiced in 2019, in which case Christmas is almost synonymous with Christianity.
> I'll just say that it's well known
There is no actual confidence in how all of this stuff came to be, just a lot of conjecture - and so no, it's not well known at all.
Christianity has no monopoly on Christmas.
Lots of beliefs are "well known" and nevertheless wrong. Just look at all the people, even in this thread, claiming that Santa Claus was invented by Coca Cola, even though a simple google image search will reveal illustrations of Santa from before Coco Cola was founded. As for the pagan traditions around new years they are not very well documented and a lot is speculation.
Of course gift-giving is known throughout history, but the figure of Santa Claus is associated with the Christian celebration. I'm pretty sure you wont find any reference to Santa Claus or Father Christmas from before Christianity!
As a symbol of American capitalism it's rather fitting that Microsoft are using him.
St Nicholas (sinterklaas) is celebrated in The Netherlands on 6th of December. You may remember it from The Daily Show and other US TV outlets who were covering the archaic tradition of black face in the celebrations.
You see similar things going on for Valentine's day, Easter, Saint Patricks day, etc. Sure, there is a religious aspect, but the non-religious celebration is dominant.
My colleagues in India had a Christmas celebrations in their office. I asked them if they celebrated it growing up, and they told me they first started celebrating it in University.
We have Diwali parties in our US office. Everyone has fun.
I guess you could use a snowflake or a cornucopia or something as a generic 'winter holiday' thing, and people have been doing that for awhile; "Happy Holidays" usurped "Merry Christmas" decades ago. Or you could use a bevy of emojis representing the holiday's secular roots, but would it have been better if they added emojis for St. Nick's mythological companions like Belshnickel, Zwarte Pete, and Krampus next to the santa hat? Maybe if they really wanted to polish this essential feature for production use, they could have different emoji sets for different holidays and a modal to choose which one you wanted.
I dunno, I feel so bad for people who haven't had the drive to do anything fun or playful beaten out of them yet. "Cry, the beloved country, for the unborn child that's the inheritor of our fear."
There are people who find "Happy Holidays" offensive, as they consider it part of the manufactured war on Christmas.
I guess this is why politics and holidays don't mix!
Whether or not the complaint is genuine is also much harder to figure out than "is it sufficient to replace this with a snowflake"
The complaining person is displaying abusive behavior and should be treated as such. Warn them. Then ban them if they persist. You stand up to bullies or you drown in them.
Mods can trivially and entirely disregard the non-problem (as it actually is). They're choosing not to and are making a community handling mistake in the process.
The only proper response is to ignore the complaint as not meaningful enough to warrant action. Otherwise you'll eventually have to remove every possible symbol. Somewhere, someone's mother was murdered by a cog and they feel very, very sensitive about the matter.
Abusive behavior in communities occurs at both extremes. You can be too sensitive in social situations in fact, to such a degree that you abuse other people with your need to control your environment specifically to your aggressively selfish satisfaction.
Can someone fill me in on what this is referring to. I know my history knowledge is a bit lacking but I normally am able to get references like this so I must have missed something.
Jesus was killed by the Jews. (Or the Romans egged on by the Jews?)
So Christians historically didn't like Jews.
So anti-Semitism is rooted in Christianity.
And anti-Semitism led to the death of millions of Jews.
Or something. These aren't my beliefs. Hope that helps!
Someone could go stalk their account to check, I can't be bothered with that right now.
[0] https://github.com/Christian-Schiffer/servicelayer.chat/issu...
Appearances can be deceiving... even the profile photo could be generated and not a picture of a real human, as this other item currently prominently on the front page reveals:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21847051
> it's not something an engineer should ever do.
But what if it wasn't Santa but it was like a different religious icon - like a menorah? I feel like literally thousands of American christians would have banned using VSCode or even Microsoft products for something like that.
A) It ignores entirely the modern day usage of the Santa hat (it is not really a religious symbol, it is more like a general holiday symbol)
B) Even if it were, say, a menorah, it could mean that the developers are Jewish. Why would someone of a different religion celebrating the holidays offend you? That would imply to me that you're intolerant of other religions.
C) It was obviously not placed there with bad intentions. It is clearly intended to be festive and fun.
D) It is a waste of developer resources to remove something they just added in.
E) It devalues issues that people with genuine offenses might raise in the future, i.e. the boy who cried wolf.
That reminds me of another "cultural artifact in software" with an interesting backstory --- T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM.
"Dear <user>, We apologize if you found the icon offensive. Please be assured that no offense was intended. Thank you for bringing up the issue so we could clear things up."
Was not a sufficient response and an end to the conversation? Leave the icon where it is. Now that the user knows that the icon wasn't meant as an offense, he can move on with his life.
If he finds the swastika offensive, he shouldn't visit India. Swastikas are everywhere. The context matters.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-apology_apology
>Saying "I'm sorry you feel that way" to someone who has been offended by a statement is a non-apology apology. It does not admit there was anything wrong with the remarks made, and may imply the person took offense for hypersensitive or irrational reasons. Another form of non-apology does not apologize directly to the injured or insulted party, but generically "to anyone who might have been offended".
>Ifpology: Attorney and business ethics expert Lauren Bloom, author of The Art of the Apology, mentions the "if apology" as a favorite of politicians, with lines such as "I apologize if I offended anyone". Comedian Harry Shearer has coined the term Ifpology for its frequent appearances on "The Apologies of the Week" segment of Le Show.
On a more serious note though. It is cool that there is a label for something like this, but to me it is just a polite way of de-escalation. You could be confrontational and say "I didn't do anything wrong, you're the one who is wrong to think what I did was wrong!" or you can say "I'm sorry you thought what I did was wrong, but my intention was not to wrong you or anyone.".
There is nothing wrong with being polite and tactful.
Not really, see https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2018/12/131219-santa... and https://www.sefaria.org/sheets/51928?lang=bi for very different perspectives.
I don't know about their part of the world, but this person would not make it 1 meter through a shopping mall in Europe from November to January. Swa... Santas everywhere!
This is an exceptionally professional response and the discussion regarding PC, wokeness etc belongs elsewhere.
The proper even more professional thing to do would have been to not react to the initial troll in the first place.
It's also worth mentioning that the original issue violated Code of Conduct as well, but for some reason MSFT only applied the Code to posts following it.
A snowflake for all the offended snowflakes - how fitting.
Basically sounds like his entire online presence is being roasted by 4chan.
I don't think this person understands that part of the internet...
Seriously?? Take a stand against extremists, that's what I say. If you cave to the demands of individual offended people, prepare to waste a lot of time catering to trolls...
> To adhere to our values and the Code of Conduct, we had to delete a handful of comments, which is unfortunate but not uncommon. Our responses triggered more responses. Bots were being employed to create issues and comments. Temporary accounts were being created to spam the system. Offensive issues were being created. The repository was filling up with issues which, frankly, were uncalled for, and we needed to do something, fast.
Every person who felt the need to comment and create github issues (and even write spam bots to do so!) about a santa hat being removed is not a person that should be trusted with any sort of responsibility or employment in the software industry. The absolutely staggering lack of maturity here boggles the mind.
This is not how sane adults should act. On either side.
They should be punished, shouldn't they? Put to jail?
For commenting to point out contradictory standards on what is considered offensive enough to remove? Really?
Edit: One satirical (per my own assumption) comment I read was complaining about calling the main branch master. The idea that using terminology such as master is offensive to some people seems at least as plausible as the santa hat being plausible. Perhaps more so as there have already been some discussion about the use of the term master in tech lingo. That is the kind of comment I'm thinking of, but want to be sure we are thinking of the same ones.
I saw this story about it being removed as well, and I thought to myself "well, that's pretty silly, but whatever" and then five seconds later I had moved on with my life. The very idea that an grown person could be so upset about it that they would actually expend the mental energy to go to the github issues page and voice their opinion with an angry comment is mind-boggling to me. It is, in my opinion, an even more absurd reaction than the original complaint.
You've commented twice on the incident now.
Where do you draw the line?
Was there a way to politely respond to this person without kowtowing to them?
Maybe by adding an option to disable the santa hat, where it's on by default, but you can turn it off?
Google has been sprucing up their search page for years now; Many a santa hat has been present, and people were both annoyed and happy, and also apathetic. Would Google have responded similarly, if some random person had a pipeline right to their developers?
It feels like even though some random person with a complaint got his wish, everyone else lost something. Like the ability to put something fun in your software without being overly concerned about offending one person.
* https://www.google.com/doodles/happy-holidays-2011
* https://www.google.com/doodles/holidays-2018-northern-hemisp...
* https://www.google.com/doodles/holidays-2018-northern-hemisp...
* https://www.google.com/doodles/holidays-2018-northern-hemisp...
* https://www.google.com/doodles/holidays-2018-southern-hemisp...
This honestly would have been the best solution, I'm Muslim and I'd like to switch it off but I'm not going to go out of my way to complain about someone else's program that I have voluntarily placed on my computer when it's clearly a valuable part of people's traditions and I can patch it myself.
They should have responded "No" to the crazy person who equated a santa claus hat to a swastika.
That's a disappointingly defeatist philosophy. I really like VS Code and this won't change that, but it's a shame that they let a single crazy person destroy what was a nice gesture for the vast, vast majority of their users.
Slippery slope, VS team.
That is, Christian in name only, and actually interested in leveraging woke / victimhood culture and microaggressions to generate a political reaction.
We need to learn to use less divisive and accusatory language when making requests like this.
I am offended by snowflakes. Go find something more inclusive, you insensitive clod!
On a more practical note, I find it hard to reason on how deal with issues like this. It's like if you try to be level headed, avoid conflict, and try to see things from the other side you already lost, because there is no corresponding empathy coming from the other side. The only solution is to give in, or deal with an offended internet mob.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
The reality is that if you were one of the people that is sidelined, you would feel it too. It's part of the reason we need to keep at it.
So while PC'ism may have changed your companies end-of-year greeting cards from "Merry Christmas and Happy New Year" to "Happy Holidays and Happy New Year", or even just "Season's Greetings", you can probably imagine that's helped 10 to 20 percent of the workforce (that are likely atheist, agnostic, jewish or muslim or whatever feel more included in the greeting.
If you feel like this is getting worse compared to those times, it might be because you belong to a demographic which is losing cultural power.
There are so many dimensions to this. No one is forced to sit and watch it. It’s not front and center in the community forums (making the community itself exclusive) and so on.
One person being hurt is one too many, but one person being offended for what the absolute majority probably have decided is for the sake of being offended can’t be the cause of this.
We have come a long way when it comes to having more inclusive communities especially for miniorities. I‘m sure there are trans people in OSS now that wouldn’t have felt welcome ten years ago. I just fail to see the parallel and believe there is a minority somewhere longing to get into online communities but that don’t feel welcome because of Santa hats?
The symbols and traditions surrounding the midwinter feasts (Yule etc) go back way longer. It’s not even called Christmas or anything with “Christ” e.g in Scandinavia. Because no way we’d let the church change also the name. No sir.
The church just had to adopt the festive period. Santa Claus is an even later addition.
And famously the red Santa is thanks to Coca Cola.
So basically the red Santa hat is a symbol that Coca Cola put on top a legend of a saint that was in turn adopted onto pagan winter rites. It’s not exactly bibles all over it.
I'm not optimistic about the future of Free Software. Especially with the new tendency of some projects to consider that people can be offended about pretty much anything, especially if it is completely trivial, and that the utmost priority is to attempt to not offend anybody on Earth.
Because like we saw here, attempting to not offend by modifying trivialities is actually going to offend way more people.
And this is exploited by trolls.
"because it all comes down to the root cause:
the attack on an area which until now couldnt care less about politics. now in the context of "free speech" we try to brake the last known union out there in the world. developers, who have only let code speak so far."
we will see more and more attacks on free speech (in the name of free speech), open source and companies and people who contribute to open source.
I’m too sensible to get offended by things like this (cynical amusement is more my style), but as a southern hemispherian—
People from the north hemisphere regularly seem to describe things in terms of seasons (e.g. “coming this summer”), completely disregarding the fact that such seasons don’t hold in most of the world: in the southern hemisphere they’re back to front, and nearer the equator seasons are just all-round different. Southern hemispherians don’t seem to describe scheduled things with seasons much, and only ever in local matters, not global.
(Then you get things like Microsoft’s use of “Fall” in a Windows 10 release which makes it not just northern-hemisphericentric, if I may coin a term, but downright American by virtue of not using the word “autumn” that everyone else uses.)
Back to the snowflakes. Australia’s on fire now, from the heat. (And a town near me was under direct threat of burning down from a bushfire last night.) Even if we ever got snow where I live (we don’t), this would not be the season for it!
> We’ve added a new setting to Insiders that lets you choose the icon. If you like the red hat, go for it! Maybe you live in the southern hemisphere or you are heading to the beach during the holidays, there’s an icon for you too.
https://www.themarysue.com/world-population-latitude-longitu...
Wikipedia notes it higher: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Hemisphere
But, I agree. Even though they adhere to the tropical model, don't they still know what "season" it is?
Vscode GitHub issue next year: "X people died of heatstroke in Australia in 2020. Please remove snowflake icon out of respect for climate change and those that have died"