I agree that it's unfair for the VSCode team to have to deal with trolling for trolling's sake. But I imagine many of the fake issues are a form of protest, and a protest is designed to be inconvenient for the sake of raising awareness and making your point heard.
It's like a strike. Is a coal miner's strike "fair" to consumers who are dealt power outages or price hikes? No, but the whole point is to generate inconvenience.
I sympathize with the VSCode team the same way I sympathize with front-line customer support at an airline with striking baggage handlers. But that doesn't make the strike less meritable.
In this way I think the fake reports are like any other market action used to demonstrate dismay with a certain behavior, like strikes, protests or boycotts.
This is actually a behavioral pattern of the masses, and it's very frequent in comedy.
When somebody publicly pokes fun at a group, very often, advocates of the group (who do not belong to the group), will complain, even if nobody belonging to the group actually complained.
I remember a comedian telling how he made a joke about priests, and while a priest actually wrote it was fun, religious associations (not priests!!) went berserk.
Such cases are ego trips, however, I can see how it's difficult to handle them in a politically correct manner (I'd tell them to shut the mouth, but it's not possible in real world).
Come on, this is equally ignorant on your part. First names are decided upon by the parents and that's it. In a lot of places, you're stuck with that for life. Inferring trolling from a user name that is a plausible real name is just ridiculous.
The user is clearly trolling, firstly his name is Christian, he says a Santa hat is a "religious symbol" (???) and display of such religious symbols is almost as offensive as a [nazi] swastika, an offensive statement in itself!
Christian is just a common first name. Having a name that is mistaken to mean something in a different language alone does not constitute trolling. It's just random.
As for the rest, the net result is very much trolling even if it wasn't the original intent.
In both languages (English and German) the name has the same origin I believe, and the same current meaning of a name that doesn't imply the person is of the Christian religion. I think it's wrong to say that there's a language confusion of being too religious, since the name has the same religiosity in both languages.
It doesn't constitute trolling by itself, but it does imply he's not Muslim or Jewish, which narrows down possible reasons why he might be offended by santa hats.
Not to suggest that most Muslims or Jews are offended by Santa hats.
I'm not offended by a Santa hat, I'm just fed up of everything trying to shoehorn Christmas into everything for what purpose exactly?
I'm from a tradionally Christian country, and I'm not in the slightest bit religious and for the last four years I've gone China in December so that I can avoid most of the festive period in peace.
I don't need every single product and service telling me that Christmas is coming, I'm aware of the fact. Stop using it to sell your products!
I find it amusing that someone would recognize the Santa hat as a religious symbol. All that I associate it with is the season of intrusive marketing. Never would I associate it with Christianity itself regardless of my thoughts about the religion.
Of course, thanks to the association with the ads for products I find the image kitsch and repulsive, so wouldn't mind if it disappeared from software as well.
I kind of agree with Christian that the Christmas thing has gone too far, not just the christmas thing really, but the feasting on whatever manages to pass itself for "religion" nowadays, including earth days, and some ideologies, and all. We can agree to disagree in what each of us celebrates and keep it there, it's ugly when they push these commercial festivals through software and design (halloween, christmas, new year's, gay prides, whatever). Religions are insular and thus fundamentally incompatible with the internet's lowest-common-denominator culture. The smaller that culture is , the better it is for everyone. Coming from a christian background, i agree that we need less blinking lights and more actual understanding between people.
I agree, the Santa doesn’t belong in VSCode, or any other tool, but not for the reasons outlined in this issue. I don’t want my editor changing its UI every year for the holidays
I find VLC having a hat raises a smile in me and makes my life a tiny weeny little bit better as if the tool was written by other humans. I can live without it but it's nice
I think the most interesting part of this is we're a few billions on the net now, there's a lot of things we can't and won't get until it blows in our face.
