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There are people who have the mental tools for being in a conversation where someone displays anger and aggression [0], and those who don't. One person's world-

There are people who have the mental tools for being in a conversation where someone displays anger and aggression [0], and those who don't. One person's world-endingly stressful and uncomfortable interaction is another's colorful productive disagreement. The people who don't have those tools control the horizontal, they control the vertical too. If they say your personality is wrong by definition, who are you to question them? Without getting snarky, that's just the status quo right now. In some number of years they'll treat it like a big discovery that their previous assessment of all social interaction wasn't 100% perfect. Let's just hope that when it comes the pendulum swings our way and I get to stop wearing an emotionally-dishonest husk of a personality to the office. [0] For the sake of avoiding predictable tangents, I mean aggression that is obviously not going to escalate to physical responses, or even anything more than rejecting patches.

megaman22 9y ago
For me, it is really the circuitousness that people will go through to avoid saying anything that might be taken as damaging to somebody's feels. It's exhausting, and confusing, and I wish people would just cut the shit and say what they mean. But my dad was ex-military, then a logging contractor, then a heavy equipment mechanic, and I grew up working with him. When there are firearms, chainsaws, bulldozers, or heavy objects dangling from cranes, you don't have the luxury of couching your criticism in weasel-words or crafting the compliment-criticism sandwich. If somebody is fucking up, you let them know in no uncertain terms, because somebody could get hurt.
- digi_owl 9y ago
  Also, it is quite likely that Torvalds would not word it like this in person. He uses it on the mailing list specifically because the written form do not allow body language and other such clues. It is this that gave us things like smilies and Poe's Law.

megaman22 9y ago

For me, it is really the circuitousness that people will go through to avoid saying anything that might be taken as damaging to somebody's feels. It's exhausting, and confusing, and I wish people would just cut the shit and say what they mean. But my dad was ex-military, then a logging contractor, then a heavy equipment mechanic, and I grew up working with him. When there are firearms, chainsaws, bulldozers, or heavy objects dangling from cranes, you don't have the luxury of couching your criticism in weasel-words or crafting the compliment-criticism sandwich. If somebody is fucking up, you let them know in no uncertain terms, because somebody could get hurt.

digi_owl 9y ago
Also, it is quite likely that Torvalds would not word it like this in person. He uses it on the mailing list specifically because the written form do not allow body language and other such clues. It is this that gave us things like smilies and Poe's Law.