this post was submitted on 23 Mar 2025
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"Personal politics" is a vague phrase that generally just means someone's views and priorities. There is nothing pejorative about it, nor in the way he used it.
The build instructions in question follow English language conventions that have existed for hundreds of years (and are shared by more than few other languages). All he did was decline someone's proposed change that would have applied a very new convention regarding pronouns for a hypothetical person. This is not the same as insisting that anyone refer to anyone else in a particular way.
It's also not unreasonable. We can ask people to adopt new conventions, but we don't get to expect or demand it.
Change to a language takes time.
No, it is not.
pronouns are really nothing new. he/him has meant a male person for hundreds of years, didn't it?
Either a male person or a hypothetical person whose gender is unknowable.
Someone with undetermined/unknowable gender would use the pronouns they/them, never he/him.
We're not discussing what someone would use for themselves. We are discussing what someone would use when writing about a hypothetical person.
If you believe that he or him would never be used in this case, then I suggest you do some research on the history of language.
Edit to clarify: And by history, I include recent history, meaning usage by people alive today, who learned it in school not terribly long ago.
And that changes it how? It's insulting to misgender someone, though I can understand how you'd think that there's no harm in insulting someone hypothetical.
Per your suggestion, "they" has been used to refer to a singular person since the 14th century. "He" is currently masculine-only. I apologize if you misunderstood my use of "never" to refer to things around the 18th and 19th century (when it apparently was considered bad to use "they" in the singular) when I presumed that there was an implicit limit to modern usage of English.