Comment by FirmwareBurner
9 days ago
>what is suitable for publication in the public sphere
That's why the persons, intent and context makes all the difference between something being funny and something being ofensive. And you could tell that statement wasn't in bad faith or meant to be derogatory.
>If you had a job interview for a senior position at Microsoft and your interviewer was Satya Nadella, would you make this joke?
Please don't move the goalposts to bad faith arguments, The casualness of the HN comment sections very different than the context of a job interview, hence my comment above on context mattering. Do you talk to your friends the way you talk to HR at work?
And yes, I'm sure graybeard Microsoft employees who worked with Nadella for a long time also make such jokes and banter with him behind closed doors and they all laugh, people are still people and don't maintain their work persona 24/7 or they'd go crazy.
My point is not that the statement was made in bad faith or was grossly derogatory. Personally, I am not gravely offended. However, I do think it's impolite and casually dismissive of an entire nation. In other words, I think it's in poor taste.
You obviously disagree, which is fine - I'm not calling you a racist - but to me, "get a life" is a pretty harsh reaction to someone raising a concern about a joke they find in poor taste.
The point I was trying to make about the job interview and Nadella, which I may have made clumsily, is not that we ought to use the tone we use in job interviews everywhere. My point is that Nadella is an extraordinarily accomplished Indian person and this "joke" would likely fall flat with that sort of audience. I think that's a decent barometer for whether the joke is in poor taste or not.
Again speaking personally, as a white dude, I avoid making jokes about minorities. That used to be pretty much common sense, although I recognize that there's a certain culturally ascendant viewpoint that disagrees with that. But my decision to treat people respectfully isn't about what's culturally in vogue, and I'm still willing to bet that a lot of the people of colour who laugh along when white people make jokes at their expense are thinking something else entirely.