The Fetid, Right-Wing Origins of “Learn to Code”

New Republic ^ | 2-1-19 | TALIA LAVIN

[dynachrome]

Dozens of jobs were slashed at HuffPost that day, following a round of layoffs at Gannett Media; further jobs were about to be disappeared at BuzzFeed. It was a grim day for the media, and I just wanted to channel my tiny part of the prevailing gloom.

Then the responses started rolling in—some sympathy from fellow journalists and readers, then an irritating gush of near-identical responses: “Learn to code.” “Maybe learn to code?” “BETTER LEARN TO CODE THEN.” “Learn to code you useless bitch.” Alongside these tweets were others: “Stop writing fake news and crap.” “MAGA.” “Your opinions suck and no one wants to read them.” “Lmao journalists are evil wicked cretins. I wish you were all jail [sic] and afraid.”

[TigersEye]

How is it an insult to journalists now but wasn't an insult to miners in 2015?

Jornolists can't learn to code.

[imardmd1]

Coding is good. It's a way to be useful to someone, if only for yourself. That's the way my daughter started after college, having contract jobs like with Computer Task Group and other coding contractors, then transitioning into corporate life. Now she is a high-level vice-presidemt for a highly effective banking group.

But even then, you are challenged to the teeth, and can still lose your job of you're not continually productive. No resting on your laurels or off drinking Starbucks. If these scribbling hacks had learned to be useful when the chips are down, they would still have jobs.

[Psalm 144]

The tears of NPCs are so refreshing.

[RightGeek]

Boo Frickin Hoo

[jospehm20]

Yep. Learn to code was an actual Obama admin program. These a-holes blame always their lame, socialist crap on conservatives.

[\/\/ayne]

“Crazy Lady Spews Hate, Is Laid Off, Spews More Hate” should be the headline. She thinks half the country are Nazis.

[The Antiyuppie]

“Isn’t that what the Left was telling all those out of work coal miners to do?”

I’d say that the modern day US coal miners would have more success. A good number of them are engineers who graduated from real colleges with real coursework.

[\/\/ayne]

How about installing fence posts...

Wow, brought me back. You know those big posts for road side rails? Well, this temp job I picked up for awhile was not doing that - it was moving them 6 inches North because they did them wrong the first time! What a nightmare. I picked up another job two weeks later and was happy to leave them still floundering around. I don't know if they ever got those posts right!

[FirstFlaBn]

Can’t be a victim class without an acronym. Hows about this:

Another
Dumb
Journalist
Unemployed
Says
Trump

[yesthatjallen]

After all, the goal was clear from the start: “Rub it in their f*cking faces. Yell at them, call them names, accuse them of being pedos. DM them pics of nooses or gay porno. Zero f*cking mercy. Make them regret ever standing against us,” one 4chan user wrote in the thread that launched it all. “You know what to do, lads.”

The left thought they owned social media. They believed they controlled the power to destroy people.

They're angry the right learned how to play their game.

[catnipman]

“Isn’t that what the Left was telling all those out of work coal miners to do?”

indeed. this whole “learn to code” totally originated, promoted, and repeated by leftists ..

[catnipman]

this fool fake news writer has no idea that exhorting fired “journalists” to learn to code is nothing more than sarcasm based on the left originating the ridiculous notion that out of work coal miners could learn to code instead of digging coal ...

[clintonh8r]

Exactly. This whole thing was a product of obamabots.

[yesthatjallen]

Her response to the question about ultimate pet peeve:

Talia Lavin: "when people feel compelled to respond to funny apolitical tweets about like, snack food and make it about trump. like let me not think about him for 3 whole seconds"

If you have a twitter account, “You know what to do, lads.”

[Neidermeyer]

Talia Lavin should maybe learn to code.

[Chode]

and the NPC's will have to LTC...

[HereInTheHeartland]

They are not smart enough to code. They should learn janitorial skills.

[Flatus I. Maximus]

I beg to differ. Fortran is not obsolete; not by a long shot. It's still the go-to language for computational heavy lifting.

https://wg5-fortran.org/f2018.html

[thoughtomator]

I suspect that this author herself has origins not American in nature. Ukrainian is not a common language for American nationals, nor is living in Kiev.

And with the Harvard/Fulbright pedigree, I suspect she has been promoted far beyond any hope of her talent in order to have her push domestically divisive narratives.

This person is a spy, I suspect.

[gspurlock]

Well, it is sort of mean, I sincerely doubt that any of them could learn to code. It requires serious intellectual discipline, patience and logic.