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Harassment at Apple: A personal perspective

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Re: Harassment at Apple: A personal perspective

#301

Post by tps5 »

coldtea wrote: post #248
tps5 wrote: post #148

I think commenters who are reacting negatively to this story are reacting to the vocabulary rather than the story. Obviously I'm not a witness, but I tend to believe that these events took place more or less as the author describes them. At the same time, words like "sexism" and phrases like "as a minority..." are a big turn-off to some readers, myself included. This isn't because I don't believe in racism/sexism/xen…

> Obviously I'm not a witness, but I tend to believe that these events took place more or less as the author describes them. Why, though? Because people don't lie, exaggerate, or have strange ideas of what others are doing to them?

People do lie, but that doesn't mean we should assume they're always lying.

I don't believe you can prove anything. I mean to say that's my perspective on the universe: that it is physically impossible to prove anything. At the same time, you can't live your life that way.

If I second guess the way my brain is interpreting light reflecting off objects all the time then I'd never leave my apartment. Of course I'm skeptical of how my brain interprets light sometimes, and not infrequently I was correct to be skeptical.

I view stories like this similarly. Could this story be deliberately misleading? Sure. Could it be accidentally misleading? Sure. Could it be dead-on accurate? Yep. We've each got to make a choice though, and that choice is going to be basically arbitrary despite whichever method we use to justify it. Someone might say "I know she is lying because she used this term which liars always use plus I read this story about a woman making up harassment charges to elicit sympathy." Another person might say "I know she is telling the truth because the same thing happened to my cousin."

In my case, I found myself believing the essentials of the story as I read it. My reasons for that are a black box to me. I suspect they'd become clear if I sat down and thought about it but even if I understood my own reasoning, it would still be arbitrary with regard to the events that did/did not occur. Point being: no one can faultlessly reconstruct the truth about a series of events from X number of words written about that event. And to think that you can is arrogant.

The only thing I'd try to advise is to not get dogmatic about your belief or disbelief (in this and other cases) and be ready to change your opinion if new information comes to light later.

Re: Harassment at Apple: A personal perspective

#302

Post by [deleted] »

geoka9 wrote: post #219
Jtsummers wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A note: Constantly referring to women as girls is a part of the problem. There are certainly women that I know and would use that term to refer to them, for various reason. Familiarity, primarily, as in: "Hey, what are the girls doing tonight?" as a question posed to a female friend about our common group of female friends. But you use girl not just for the specific person (Julie Horvath) but for all women ("If a gir…

Honest question: what would be the equivalent of "guy" in your opinion when referring to a female in a professional environment (assuming that referring to males as "guys" is acceptable)?

[deleted]

Re: Harassment at Apple: A personal perspective

#303

Post by 15charlimit »

wpietri wrote: post #223
edblarney wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I agree. I often call people quite my junior 'boys' and 'girls'. I work with a startup of dudes under 24. I call them 'lads'. I could technically be their father. Is that wrong? No. Neither is using the term Mrs. Ms. or Miss.. In far-left socialist Montreal, where women are not even allowed by law to take their husband's name - people use the French equivalent everywhere: 'Madame' and 'Mademoiselle'. Sam…

> and avoid getting into culture wars Complaining about identity politics is how white men practice identity politics. Your post here is a shot fired in a culture war. You can't do that and complain about culture wars. The phenomenon you're exploiting here is that the status quo is seen as the default state of the system. When women talk about bias, it's easy to say, "Why are women always talking about bias? Why are…

> in the US we only hit parity in the number of medical and law degrees circa 2005; we won't see parity in the number of doctors and lawyers for decades more

It is a flawed assumption that "parity in degrees" has any meaning as a measure of some vaguely-defined "equality" value.

Re: Harassment at Apple: A personal perspective

#304

Post by keymone »

SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #82
keymone wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but by targeting harassment properly you'd help all the groups at the same time.

Isn't that basically the ""everyone should get their fair share" argument? https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3du1qm/e...

thanks for the link, it was a nice read. i still have a problem with this:

> Saying "target all harassment" is dismissing the very problems that the phrase is trying to draw attention to

the problem is harassment. not just women harassment, not just racial harassment. isn't it just as dismissive to say "focus on these kinds of harassment, everybody else will just have to wait because they can consider themselves lucky enough to even be white males"?

they key bit is "targeting harassment properly". of course dismissing is not proper handling.

Re: Harassment at Apple: A personal perspective

#305

Post by kefka »

Jtsummers wrote: post #199
edblarney wrote: post #181

"there was no harassment according to legal definition. " He's extremely lucky. In Canada, and in a growing number of jurisdictions - there is 'harassment' so long as the victim feels as if there was. If a girl feels harassed - then that's it. Guilty. It's a deep breach of our fundamental rights, in that crimes should be determined objectively, and not subject to the whims and feelings of a victim. Obviously, this is…

A note: Constantly referring to women as girls is a part of the problem. There are certainly women that I know and would use that term to refer to them, for various reason. Familiarity, primarily, as in: "Hey, what are the girls doing tonight?" as a question posed to a female friend about our common group of female friends. But you use girl not just for the specific person (Julie Horvath) but for all women ("If a gir…

And this is a great example of derailing a conversation by attacking the specific language used.

This tactic is used to great effect by SJW's. I only need look down the thread to see how much you caused.

Many a times, this type of harassment is mainly what women claim against men. But what exactly is harassment? Well, there's no real good definition. There's a point where any sane individual would agree... But I've also met people that simply asking to go on a date was "harassment". I've also seen cases of obvious sexual harassment (me, when I was sexually harassed by a manager, and then they were subsequently fired). And then I've also witnessed claims of it that one party blew out of proportion.

Except, because someone says " girls", you jump all over that and derail the underlying ideas of harassment and how to develop ideas of what it actually is, and not gut feelings.

Re: Harassment at Apple: A personal perspective

#306

Post by ljf »

geoka9 wrote: post #219
Jtsummers wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A note: Constantly referring to women as girls is a part of the problem. There are certainly women that I know and would use that term to refer to them, for various reason. Familiarity, primarily, as in: "Hey, what are the girls doing tonight?" as a question posed to a female friend about our common group of female friends. But you use girl not just for the specific person (Julie Horvath) but for all women ("If a gir…

Honest question: what would be the equivalent of "guy" in your opinion when referring to a female in a professional environment (assuming that referring to males as "guys" is acceptable)?

Women/woman should work just fine. Or if singular/small group you can just use peoples names.

Or just 'you' - "would you all all like to come for lunch today?"

Re: Harassment at Apple: A personal perspective

#307

Post by zepto »

sanderjd wrote: post #291
zepto wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could it be that you are both living in a bubble and both being condescending?

Yeah, we all live in our own bubble. You're right that I was being condescending. My goal was to point out that things that appear indelibly true to you may not be universally true throughout society. Probably not a fight worth having, oops!

To me? Or to the person you were replying to?

In any case - I agree with you that we are at a time when we need to confront the fact that different social points of view can have equal validity and it's not just a matter of one side overpowering the other anymore.

Re: Harassment at Apple: A personal perspective

#308

Post by justaman »

mikestew wrote: post #244
verroq wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah a term used mostly as a racist perjorative is comparable to the word "girl" with has no negative qualities when used in reference to a young women. Take your strawman home with you.

The only straw man is from the one arguing about the terms used. I was referring to logic used to justify the use of those terms, quoting your post in the process. It's almost the antithesis of the straw man argument.

Ever notice how everyone only ever cites "Strawman" on the internet?

Its because thats the only logical fallacy they can remember because it so often reinforces their own arguments in their own heads by not adding information. Every idiot who never studied logic will cry "STRAWMAN!"

Re: Harassment at Apple: A personal perspective

#309

Post by e5india »

geoka9 wrote: post #219
Jtsummers wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A note: Constantly referring to women as girls is a part of the problem. There are certainly women that I know and would use that term to refer to them, for various reason. Familiarity, primarily, as in: "Hey, what are the girls doing tonight?" as a question posed to a female friend about our common group of female friends. But you use girl not just for the specific person (Julie Horvath) but for all women ("If a gir…

Honest question: what would be the equivalent of "guy" in your opinion when referring to a female in a professional environment (assuming that referring to males as "guys" is acceptable)?

The word you're looking for is 'gals' but people stopped using it for some reason.

Re: Harassment at Apple: A personal perspective

#310

Post by softawre »

smsowmya wrote: post #193
tyingq wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not looking for her to "prove beyond all doubt". But, there's several stories in there where a direct quote of what was said to her would be more enlightening than her interpretation as to the motive behind what was said. Or failing a direct quote...how about just the basis of his "defense" of her. Did he call out the high quality of her work (seems fine), or did he say to lay off because she was fragile (seems not f…

There was no quote because it was him being nicer to me than to the other men thought he should have been - it was actually him not treating me like a second class citizen. It was this "equal" status that made the others feel that I got better treatment. I made no remark about anything else because I do not wish to speculate about anyone else's intentions or motivations - and that is not relevant to the point of this…

What? You did actually say this:

> One day, one of my supervisors jumped to my defense at a team event, in an awkward display of sexism.

He was treating you with respect and you think it was sexist? As a male manager of female employees, what am I even supposed to do?

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