Tim Minchin
1 HN recommender · recommended in 6 months, 2015–2026
6:44 · 19M views · Mar 4, 2010
Tim Minchin performs Prejudice, a comedic song about the power of words and the language used to abuse and demean.
HN cites it in arguments about the force of words, including the long debates over the GIMP name and username filtering.
8 comments from Hacker News
On that note, I hope you enjoy Tim Minchin's song "Prejudice", about the power of language: this video Getting offended at illustrations representing black and white people working together is the kind of dead code we need to eliminate.
Speaking of the G-Word, Tim Minchin wrote a brilliant and insightful song about the power of words and the language of prejudice. this video
People who hate GIMP's name are not "FOSS haters". They just hate it when certain people in the FOSS community make the entire FOSS community look bad. Here is a typical attempt to justify the name "GIMP", demanding that society change instead of admitting the name has obviously terrible meanings: [LINK] _c3ag>first thing that pops is a phrase of some biologist regards why evolution made plants green and not blue (physically, blue can absorb way more energy from the sun)... SPOILER: because makes the plantae organisms way more stable rather than performant (which opens up less windows for failings regards evolution). i use Gimp for digital collages, dead simple pixel-art and even composing a poem book for my beloved one! and that tool if it isn't perfect for the job, is probably about adjusting expectations ¶ why society can't re-signify a offensive word? [LINK] DonHopkins on Nov 12, 2023 | parent | context | favorite | on: Is this radical redesign of GIMP possible now? Sorry, but the number of people who have seen Pulp Fiction, plus the number of people who know derogatory terms for disabled people, is much greater than the number of people who know technical biological terms of art. If the GIMP developers really want to score an edgy rhetorical point about how society should get over its uptight wokeness and let them use any word they want whenever they want, and that's the hill they choose to die on, then how about they go all in, and try convincing society to re-signify t
Sorry, but the number of people who have seen Pulp Fiction, plus the number of people who know derogatory terms for disabled people, is much greater than the number of people who know technical biological terms of art. If the GIMP developers really want to score an edgy rhetorical point about how society should get over its uptight wokeness and let therm use any word they want whenever they want, and that's the hill they choose to die on, then how about they go all in, and try convincing society to re-signify the n-word by using it IN ALL UPPER CASE as the name of a hard-to-use paint program with an overly complex incomprehensible user interface, then come back to me after a few years and let me know how well that went. Prejudice by Tim Minchin: this video At least the Blender developers finally listened to reason, admitted they made a mistake, and switched the left and right mouse button behavior, which wasn't nearly as offensive to as many people as "GIMP", whose name makes it kind of hard to evangelize around the school or office without coming off like a flaming MAGA asshole. Donald Trump appears to mock a reporter's disability: [LINK] By stubbornly refusing to change the name, the Gimp developers have lost the right to whine and feel sorry for themselves about how unpopular it is and how nobody takes them seriously. Because in the intervening 25 years since 1998, 4chan and GamerGate and MAGA and Q-Anon and January 6 and Elon Musk have kind of spoiled the coolness and origin
>Yes the common argument is about the UI and which one where that Blender and Krita are both the new kids on the block. Maybe it's a common argument where you come from, but it's a factually false argument. [LINK] >GIMP: Initial release: 2 June 1998; 25 years ago [LINK] >Blender Initial release: January 2, 1994; 29 years ago [LINK] >New Kids On The Block: Years active: 1984–1994, 2008–present So Blender is actually four years older than GIMP, and a decade younger than New Kids On The Block. And over all those years, Blender has continuously improved and evolved a huge amount, especially recently. And the developers listen to and respond to the needs of their users. For in all those years, GIMP has ALWAYS stagnated, and the developers have contempt for their users. >However saying that, nothing is stopping you from spear driving the new GUI design. It's open source after all. That's easy for you to say, but what have YOU actually contributed to open source software? When you trot out that glib old argument (see what I did there: [LINK] ;), you're just admitting you're wrong, have no better arguments, so you're not arguing in good faith (after you post easily fact-checked misinformation like claiming GIMP is older than Blender). [LINK] DonHopkins 12 days ago | parent | context | favorite | on: Is this radical redesign of GIMP possible now? The one worst thing in the universe that you can do to piss off the GIMP developers is to tell them it should be more like Photoshop. It's l