That's how I do it, it works great that way. I didn't actually set up the gh-pages as a proper submodule, I just cloned the branch to a folder. Then I added the gh-pages folder to the top level .gitignore.
Go might have had less marketing than Java, but it still had a decent amount of support. There were several high quality promotional videos when it was first released. The web page is really full-featured; it has a ton of documentation, including translations for several languages. And all those appearances at tech conferences take time & money (and I'm sure that Google sponsorship helped to secure some of them).
All that stuff adds up in terms of manpower and budget, and it's out of reach of what a small independent team can do. It's not all about technical merit.
There's no crime there. People have the right to say offensive things in the privacy of their own homes. Other people have the right to disagree with the first people, and to even voice their disagreement. What's the problem?
I just happened to see a thread about that. Apparently it will work fine on JVM/Android/iOS since those targets use Java bytecode. It won't work on HTML5/Flash since those use the original Java source.
There is a cost to voting on Reddit, it's the time/attention cost of moving your mouse over and clicking a tiny button. Sometimes you even have to log in! For people browsing a web site, time & attention is a significant currency.
It's true that karma is a flawed as an economic system or a measure of contribution. But, who cares if the numbers are theoretically unsound? The end goal is to generate usage, something which Reddit has been extremely successful at.
If you start depending on reflog just remember that changes in there are subject to garbage collection. Commits can be permanently deleted after they are 2 weeks old (by the default settings), so that's how long you can depend on them staying alive in the reflog.
Of course you can always give a branch name or tag to any commit to keep it alive too.
There's nothing about the US's past behavior which suggests that we're afraid of pissing off friendly countries. :) We're a bunch of international bullies, basically.