We're excited to announce our support of two independent, open source projects: Ladybird, an ambitious project to build a completely independent browser from the ground up, and Omarchy, an opinionated Arch Linux setup for developers.
I think that kinda weird and bad statement from the ladybird lead makes way more sense when you realize that his first language is german.
German, like other gendered languages, uses the male gender for an unknown person, using a genderless pronoun like “they” in german is a deliberate political stance that would prompt debate and is unusual and, frankly, weird, since the male pronoun is used as a neutral one.
Given that he apologized and changed it to they later, and no other incident of the sort happened since, I personally am willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.
The ladybird contributing guidelines currently read:
Use gender-neutral pronouns, except when referring to a specific person.
i take less issue with him using gendered pronouns by default than i do with him being overly dismissive of someone trying to adjust the language to be more inclusive.
Just remember that from his perspective, you are arguing against grammatical rules that are at the core of his communication experience due to his first language being German.‘so perhaps his initial reaction was confusion because he didn’t understand the angle - he thought he was being inclusive? Maybe?
I dunno I’m probably playin devil’s advocate without all the information here; I’ve just been resisting making jokes connecting grammatical pedantry to Germany the whole time.
It’s actually a very contentious grammatical issue in Germany from what I have been told by a German friend. That there is definitely a contingency of people pushing for more gender neutral language and a large amount of pushback from those who think the entire idea is absurd because of how gendered the language is.
I can see a bit of both sides of the argument. It’s important to make people feel welcomed and not like being a male is the default for everything. On the other hand, language evolves often very slowly and you can’t just force people to change the language entirely overnight. It does sound like much of the pushback is less political in nature and more grammatical as adding neutral phrases to a gendered language becomes quickly a complex task with complex new words. However, some of the pushback is also political in nature, so it’s hard to gauge whether the Ladybird situation was truly political or more grammatical at it’s core.
You might be right. I’m looking at that as a more general issue of what “no politics” implies. E.g. can we use that to predict how the people working on it would handle the project affiliation in the future. That is, for example are they willing to let it be taken over by a large tech corporation? They’re already using the weakest of licences - BSD. The whole point of us supporting another browsing engine by contributing to it, developing for it, or using it is so that we escape the browser-under-ad-company problem. If make Ladybird the next Chromium competitor and the team gets jobs at say Microsoft, then we’d end up back to square one.
It was pointed out and could have been corrected easily, nobody was accusing them of doing it intentionally. Instead they doubled down, which then did show their views and caused the controversy.
He may rejected the pr initially, but he later apologized and changed it. Again, I don’t see the issue, my original comment explains why that doesn’t seem that bad in my view.
It’s all resolved now and I do support the project, we need another browser engine. But to not see the issue at all…? An issue resolved doesn’t mean the issue didn’t exist.
And I explained that I disagree that it “wasnt that bad”. It absolutely was an issue and it was handled poorly. Without the backlash, I highly doubt they would have changed their mind.
I think that kinda weird and bad statement from the ladybird lead makes way more sense when you realize that his first language is german.
German, like other gendered languages, uses the male gender for an unknown person, using a genderless pronoun like “they” in german is a deliberate political stance that would prompt debate and is unusual and, frankly, weird, since the male pronoun is used as a neutral one.
Given that he apologized and changed it to they later, and no other incident of the sort happened since, I personally am willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.
The ladybird contributing guidelines currently read:
Gendered language is stupid and antiquated and I say this as a native speaker of a gendered language. It’s just such a poor communication design.
i take less issue with him using gendered pronouns by default than i do with him being overly dismissive of someone trying to adjust the language to be more inclusive.
are you still alive, Nazi?
Just remember that from his perspective, you are arguing against grammatical rules that are at the core of his communication experience due to his first language being German.‘so perhaps his initial reaction was confusion because he didn’t understand the angle - he thought he was being inclusive? Maybe?
I dunno I’m probably playin devil’s advocate without all the information here; I’ve just been resisting making jokes connecting grammatical pedantry to Germany the whole time.
Pretty much yeah, he thought he was already being inclusive, and I don’t blame him for doubling down initially given how awful that github thread was
It’s actually a very contentious grammatical issue in Germany from what I have been told by a German friend. That there is definitely a contingency of people pushing for more gender neutral language and a large amount of pushback from those who think the entire idea is absurd because of how gendered the language is.
I can see a bit of both sides of the argument. It’s important to make people feel welcomed and not like being a male is the default for everything. On the other hand, language evolves often very slowly and you can’t just force people to change the language entirely overnight. It does sound like much of the pushback is less political in nature and more grammatical as adding neutral phrases to a gendered language becomes quickly a complex task with complex new words. However, some of the pushback is also political in nature, so it’s hard to gauge whether the Ladybird situation was truly political or more grammatical at it’s core.
If it’s written in German, I’d agree. In English, no he is just wrong. But perhaps is English just sucks, I don’t know and I don’t care to find out.
You might be right. I’m looking at that as a more general issue of what “no politics” implies. E.g. can we use that to predict how the people working on it would handle the project affiliation in the future. That is, for example are they willing to let it be taken over by a large tech corporation? They’re already using the weakest of licences - BSD. The whole point of us supporting another browsing engine by contributing to it, developing for it, or using it is so that we escape the browser-under-ad-company problem. If make Ladybird the next Chromium competitor and the team gets jobs at say Microsoft, then we’d end up back to square one.
It was pointed out and could have been corrected easily, nobody was accusing them of doing it intentionally. Instead they doubled down, which then did show their views and caused the controversy.
He may rejected the pr initially, but he later apologized and changed it. Again, I don’t see the issue, my original comment explains why that doesn’t seem that bad in my view.
After a large backlash, yes.
It’s all resolved now and I do support the project, we need another browser engine. But to not see the issue at all…? An issue resolved doesn’t mean the issue didn’t exist.
Did you read my original comment or just skim it? Because it that one I explain why I think it’s not an issue.
And I explained that I disagree that it “wasnt that bad”. It absolutely was an issue and it was handled poorly. Without the backlash, I highly doubt they would have changed their mind.