Every time I think LJ-bosses can't piss me off more...

...they say something like this.

In reply to my email objecting to the pending required-gender-binary thing:

thank you for your feedback.
However, the code update that you refer to is not live and did not have any chance to go live. That was a beta release, we always push code to beta to see if everything works correctly. In many cases it does not and we either fix bugs or pull the code from the final release plan.
We were going to add a gender field to the sign up user flow, which is fine, but by mistake it became a mandatory "female/male" field for everyone. This is why this is not going live. And this is what beta releases are for, to see problems and solve them before any user faces a problem.

I would appreciate if you share this information with your friends that are also concerned. I am sorry that you were misinformed.

Best regards,

To which I could only reply:

I am very pleased to see that you have rolled back that code. However, please note, I never thought that it was *already* live. Instead, upon being alerted, I examined the changelog account, and the code in question, for myself and determined that, indeed, that code, which was *already in the repository* and waiting only on the next code push to go live, would do the things I was warned it would.

I am afraid that disingenuous comments about my being "misinformed" only make me more suspicious of LJ's original intentions. I do not appreciate the implication that I do not know what I am talking about, nor such a reinterpretation of my own original message, nor the veiled accusation that Denise was lying. She was not. The repository is not a beta test site, and none of the changes I objected to could have been made by mistake. Please do not continue to misrepresent events to users who may be less familiar with code and the LJ file structure.

Honestly, how low can you get? Well, about that low, I guess.

While we're at it

While we're talking about raising consciousness, bell has a point/post/discussion going on on her journal about the Russian-hating that is so carelessly and copiously flung about, whenever LJ fails again.*

Ever since the SUP buyout I, and I'm sure everyone else who has ever followed the news posts on LJ, have seen a lot of extremely bigoted, ignorant and, frankly, McCarthy-esque things said. One common theme is "In Soviet Russia" remarks; another is to call LJ personnel "commie pinkos". I wish I could even say this were done ironically, which would be offensive enough, but in most cases it appears to be straight-up earnest bigotry in all its brainless glory. I find these especially brainless given that a) Soviet Russia no longer exists as such and b) the fail in question is so often driven by bare-faced market capitalism just like it was under 6A.

Were 6A ever called capitalist pigs? Multiple times in every heated post? Were they referred to at every turn as Americans or San Franciscans as though that somehow explained why they were bad? If you guessed "no" you would be right, which makes the explicitly Russian-nation-hate behind this pervasive name calling nastily clear.

And I could lecture until I'm blue in the face about the fact that the people of Russia have always had minds of their own, or the difference between communism as an economic and political theory of activism and State Communism, or the extremely distinct difference between democracy and capitalism, or the beauty of Mikhail Bakhtin's writing, but all of that is beside the actual point. In fact, my or your opinion of communism or of Russia or of LJ is beside the point.

Because the actual point is: national slurs are just as ugly and inexcusable as any other kind of slur (racial, gender, sexual, religious, physical, whathaveyou). They represent the triumph of parochial ignorance and fear over actual knowledge and thought, and thinking people need to do two things. One, they need to not engage in this themselves. Two, they need to speak up when they see other people doing it.

The capsule version: national, political and ethnic slurs are Not Okay. Don't do it.


* Note that I in no way accuse Syn of this, though her initial phrasing was not as aware of this dynamic as would have been ideal.