Actually, it's the exact opposite of that.

As Neal Stephenson famously pointed out in The Diamond Age, when you have no shared notion of ethics or morality, the only "sin" is hypocrisy. I can't judge you for not sharing my ideals, but I can judge you for violating your own.

The Barney Frank Rule states that it's okay to out someone for publicly oppressing people for doing what they do in private, no more and no less.

Unless it was military surplus gear, which is where the police get most of their "massive overkill" stuff. It'd be bargain basement prices, then.

Because nobody wants to be the law enforcement agency which downplayed a real tipoff.

Since we're on the topic, how about they not turn themselves into paramilitary organisations in the first place? Calling out the SWAT team is a dangerous waste of money, partly because having a SWAT team is a dangerous waste of money in the vast majority of jurisdictions.

PopeRatzo was making a reference to the Barney Frank Rule. It's okay that you didn't spot it (not everyone knows everything), but now you know.

If Github wanted to be really smart about this, they would issue a press release which said that they were not going to protect idiots like this from the consequences of their own actions. If Randy Hunt wants to do his own damage control, that's up to him. Github is not going to do it for him.

I wish I had mod points, because this paragraph would get all of them.

For me, this whole non-story is straightforward and uncontroversial: It's not Github's job to prevent people from making fools of themselves in public. Now that it's gone viral, their response is simple. They should issue a press release which says "we're not going to protect him from himself", leave the project as-is, and let him live with the consequences.

^ teenager detected

(Fun fact: Anyone who uses the word "beta male" non-ironically is being marketed to.)

You'd hope so, but this is the US tech industry we're talking about here.

Speaking personally, I thought I got what you were saying (and I thought I agreed with it, too), but then I noticed your nick.

I think my formal education is pretty good, but I'm confused as hell now.

A lot of research was done with kids from the Romanian orphanages, too. I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here.

Yes, it does.

There just aren't that many Islamists with violent intent in the USA. There are so few, in fact, that the FBI has to groom them so they have enough. In fact, there were more Jewish terrorist attacks in the US than Muslim ones between 1980 and 2005. And, of course, Americans who claim to be Christians get away with more actual deaths in the USA and elsewhere (through the pretence of the military, the criminal justice system, etc) than Islamists ever could.

Zach Weiner, to his credit, knows the first rule of edgy comedy: never punch down.

Where does one apprentice to become a master Weinersmith?

As I noted elsewhere, we don't actually know if this is true or not, but there is one data point: the overall suicide rate in Australia went down immediately after the gun buyback.

One data point does not a trend make, and even if it was a causal relationship, this doesn't imply that the same would be true in the US. Australia has a real public health system, remember. So yes, we're both presuming. More data is needed.

...good thing, too.

Postel's Law.