Eh, I'll let them wallow in their turpitude

So here's the deal. Linus Torvalds insults people. (Hold the presses...) And bullies them. It's what he does. So it's fine that he does those things.

In case you didn't quite get that: Mr Torvalds arbitrarily insults and bullies people and because that's what he does, it's all fine.

I hope I didn't make you too dizzy.

The easiest way to figure out if it's a circular argument is pretty simple. they always have a large hole in the middle. In this case it's the simple fact that Mr Torvalds has never used anti-Semitic slurs, or racial ones. He's never used the "c" word as far as I can tell (Google is my friend; the one instance that popped up wasn't him, it was one of his acolytes.) He finds the bullying "cathartic".

One person did remind me of his stupid mantra:

“I like offending people, because I think people who get offended should be offended.” 

As I pointed out, that's something I've heard racists say. And anti-Semites. (Although, to be honest, you'll always find that a racist is anti-Semitic, and vice-versa.) Basically the man is giving himself permission to insult all he wants. He's squirming his way to justifying his arbitrary trolling and he's happy to have figured it out. It's a pity he didn't actually think about what he was saying when he said that.

Well, whatever. There's a reason Linux doesn't have many (any?) women in its developer cadre. If there are any, they must hides as thick as rhino's! They definitely have my admiration. Interestingly, projects such as Drupal, Wordpress and Joomla do not have the same macho bullshit going on. If I had to guess, the leaders of those projects aren't interested in proving themselves to be the biggest dick around. They're more interested in creating a project that is welcoming of all. Mr Torvalds isn't interested in such things, and I think Linux suffers because of that. (If he's really interested in being a Big Swinging Dick, he's in the wrong business and Steve Jobs beat him to that title, anyway.)

The Linux community is, I suspect, too far along in its entrenchment of misogyny and belligerence. Such things do start at the top, and Mr Torvalds has never expressed a desire to change his own misogynistic bullying. Pity, really. It could be so much better, but many of its developers seem to prefer to wallow in the turpitude of their community. They really are a tiresome, trivial cliché.

Finally, thank you to everyone who left me encouraging messages. They are appreciated. :-)

Carolyn Ann