every time i'm reading some post on rms' website and i'm thinking to myself "hmm this is a reasonable position" i get to the part where he uses his own made-up gender neutral personal pronouns which nobody else anywhere has adopted and i recall that this seemingly reasonable article came out of the mind of a completely unreasonable person and i have to change the channel and go render something with nonfree javascript to get rid of the gross feeling
@sneak As an aside, most of #SouthAfrica's 11 official languages have 6-9 grammatical genders, not correlated with sex. So when we speak each other's languages, pronouns/prefixes are the first casualties. No big deal.
@lxo the proposal is reasonable. the man who is writing it is not.
not that I'm saying he's reasonable, or that you aren't. being unreasonable is a compliment. all progress depends on people who won't conform to reasonableness standards
@lxo this is 100% ad hominem. that's what this thread is about: an unreasonable person who posts reasonable things.
that's why rms is so hard to cancel: he's right more than he is wrong. he's also a trash person, and a bad leader.
he should be ejected from FSF because FSF having bad leaders is bad for free software.
@sneak Bonus points for realising that as the pronouns "they" and "them" had already been used in the article, it would have been easy enough to re-use them in this context as well.
but yes, it's a very stupid thing and it's weird somebody uses that to support this crap. we had to stop this at the beginning. but we still can stop this plague if we stay sane and reasonable.
@sneak He adopted them from Margaret Atwood who proposed them many years ago, before pronouns became such a thing.