This post has been updated.

Last week a slew of journalists and opinion writers from outlets like BuzzFeed and HuffPo were handed pink slips. That's a euphemism for they were laid off. A conflicting thing, as I feel for people who've lost their jobs, but I've also seen some of the trash which comes shooting out of BuzzFeed and HuffPo like explosive diarrhea. As a happy medium, plenty of other writers and critics of both HuffPo and BuzzFeed have offered these newly unemployed journalists three words of advice: learn to code. Which appears to be so offensive to the former intellectual giants of BuzzFeed and Huffpo, the resulting internet tantrums have led the phrase to become hate speech.

UPDATE:

I thought STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) were all valuable in 2019. How is telling someone "learn this skill which is in high demand" abusive behavior?

Okay sure, it's a bit of trolling. I guess it might be like telling a woman to make a sandwich or telling a man to chop firewood rather than complaining about their respective plights. But "Learn to code" is hardly "go fornicate with your mother" or "I hope your children kill you then kill themselves." Also, this guy kind of defines some of the people who got let go:

Twitter thinks "learn to code" is terrible, but doxxing and threatening the lives of teenagers who wore MAGA hats while smiling was completely fine. Related Top Ten WORST Reactions to the Covington Catholic Teen March for Life Video.

Pardon me if all my sympathy hath runneth out.

Speaking of offering no sympathy, our big cheese weighed in with this gold nugget:

Also, not to be a ball buster, but in 2019 knowing a bit of computer language is useful. I taught myself HTML and CSS years ago and advise anyone who works on the internet do the same. This here internet is here to say, so maybe learn how it works. Helps debug many a problem when you're unsure why a video isn't rendering in WordPress. Usually, it's because the video code is surrounded by div tags.

Sound French to you? Learn to code.

NOT SUBSCRIBED TO THE PODCAST? FIX THAT! IT’S COMPLETELY FREE ON BOTH ITUNES HERE AND SOUNDCLOUD HERE.