Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Jessamyn Smith: Fighting sexist jokes with a Python bot

geekchick77.dreamwidth.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 392 posts

Re: Jessamyn Smith: Fighting sexist jokes with a Python bot

#321

Post by wpietri »

batista wrote: post #232
scott_s wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems minor to you .

You don't say?! Isn't this true for any statement one makes, that it seems that way to him? Isn't it also obvious that for other people, it might not seem so? What you say is essentially: "other people disagree with that assertion". Well, you can find people that disagree with any assertion. That's not an argument pro or against the assertion.

Not really. There's a big practical difference between "X is minor" vs "I believe X is minor."

With the former, you're suggesting that anything else is false; with the latter, you're leaving room for other possibilities. Statements like the former often lead people astray, which is why some people suggest avoiding them entirely.

If you don't get the difference, try speaking in E-Prime for a month. I did, and it was really educational:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_prime

Re: Jessamyn Smith: Fighting sexist jokes with a Python bot

#322

Post by pjscott »

Cushman wrote: post #282
rayiner wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The jokes I mentioned are funny because it alludes to men being rapists and child molesters. E.g. the joke about me abusing my girlfriend wouldn't be funny if there wasn't the stereotype of men as abusers.

I get that, but I don't think you see the distinction I'm making, and it's pretty important. The defining characteristic of privilege is not necessarily that you are judged more favorably, but that you are judged on the basis of your behavior, rather than on the basis of your group membership. The situations you point out are about mocking behavior , not groups. Your friend said something about a young girl, so you m…

It's strange; I feel like I would be offended by that joke if anybody whose opinion I care about took it seriously, but since they don't, I'm just puzzled by how pointlessly counterfactual it seems.

Re: Jessamyn Smith: Fighting sexist jokes with a Python bot

#323

Post by agateform »

wpietri wrote: post #143
paulhauggis wrote: post #137

She has a huge problem with "that's what she said", but no problem with using the term “brogrammer culture”. If she was a co-worker and used that term, I would go to HR because it offends me. Why? to make a point about the ridiculousness of our society. You get the least bit offended and instead of just ignoring it, you need to make the person go away/get fired. It reminds me of Elementary school. When is this bullsh…

You realize that bro culture and brogramming are actual, existing things started by guys, yes? And you also realize that she intentionally didn't go to HR about the problem? And you realize that women have been oppressed in our culture by men for, oh, millennia?

I agree that a job post for brogrammer might not seem welcoming towards woman.

>You realize that bro culture and brogramming are actual, existing things started by guys, yes?

Please tell us your definition of brogramming and brogrammer.

From watching the initial joke video on brogramers I understood that brogrammer is a prejudice term for male coder which likes to party, drink alcohol, flirting and is usually more interested in main stream culture. There is nothing wrong with any of those qualities but we still talk about brogrammers as bad people. Aren't we also sexist and prejudice?

What would you say about an equivalent sisgrammer term for woman?

Re: Jessamyn Smith: Fighting sexist jokes with a Python bot

#324

Post by readymade »

bmelton wrote: post #320
readymade wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you think is wrong about writing an IRC bot that responds to "that's what she said" with quotes from famous women? I'm curious. Because the only answers I can imagine are (a) you think writing IRC bots is wrong, (b) you think that displaying quotes from famous women is wrong, or (c) engaging in public discourse that politely and indirectly calls attention to sexist behavior is wrong. I'll wait. I'd really lov…

Regardless of what is said out loud, I believe the author's intent was to annoy her tormentors into submission. I do not think that writing IRC bots is wrong (though I would consider them irritating), I do not think quotes from famous women is necessarily wrong (though one could suppose a non-curated list could potentially go awry). I don't have a problem with polite discourse, but I don't think that's what this was.…

You've said at least a few times that you think the bot was designed to annoy, but I'm still curious as to what you think was or was intended to be annoying (let alone impolite) about it. Is there a way, in your eyes, that she could have been more polite without saying nothing at all?

Re: Jessamyn Smith: Fighting sexist jokes with a Python bot

#325

Post by bmelton »

readymade wrote: post #324
bmelton wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regardless of what is said out loud, I believe the author's intent was to annoy her tormentors into submission. I do not think that writing IRC bots is wrong (though I would consider them irritating), I do not think quotes from famous women is necessarily wrong (though one could suppose a non-curated list could potentially go awry). I don't have a problem with polite discourse, but I don't think that's what this was.…

You've said at least a few times that you think the bot was designed to annoy, but I'm still curious as to what you think was or was intended to be annoying (let alone impolite) about it. Is there a way, in your eyes, that she could have been more polite without saying nothing at all?

Well, the intent to annoy is an impolite notion.

Aside from handling it with management instead of escalating the prank war, I don't see a lot of terribly polite ways above and beyond what she'd already done.

As for why I think it was intended to annoy, I suppose from my perspective at least, that's the obvious conclusion.

A bot annoyed her, so she wrote her own. From the text in the blog post, she seems to take pleasure in the annoyed reactions of her co-workers. That she got the annoyed reaction, and then sought to find a way to daemonize the script so that she could annoy them more thoroughly.

Those to me indicate a person who is being malicious, but is trying not to sound like they are.

Regardless, if there's anything I take umbrage with, it's that she thinks that this will help solve her issue, in any small way.

It's hard to look pragmatically at what might seem like justice, but looking for a similar analogy, if you've seen or read "The Help", the actions done to that poor pie were the result of a vengeful woman.

I'm not saying either woman didn't have cause to be upset, or angry, or that they might not have been driven to vengeful acts.

What I am saying though, is what I started off saying. Two rights don't make a wrong. I understand people sympathizing with her. She was done wrong. I get it. As a people though, we're supposed to be better than that.

Re: Jessamyn Smith: Fighting sexist jokes with a Python bot

#326

Post by joesb »

readymade wrote: post #308
bmelton wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In particular, what I'm saying is that "fighting fire with fire" is a far cry from "taking the high road." In another comment, oskarth posits that she "did everything right" by not going to her supervisor, so as to avoid "turning it into drama". How does this not turn it into drama? Isn't that what supervisors are for? I understand the inclination to avoid being the snitch, but all this does is set her up for equally…

What makes you think it was intended to be, or is, annoying?

Then what does it intend to be that she hopes to use such property to fight back at TWSS bot?

Re: Jessamyn Smith: Fighting sexist jokes with a Python bot

#327

Post by geekchick77 »

oinksoft wrote: post #93
3pt14159 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You probably found the wrong person. I know the author personally, she is a great hacker and worked for FreshBooks for years before moving to her current job.

Maybe I did! It seemed the posting account was a "Denise", and recent changelogs on the project website only attributed documentation changes to her. Her approach to "hacking" sure differs from mine ... from using "#!./tbenv/bin/python" (rather than "/usr/bin/env python" which will find the virtualenv link) making the code unusable for most people out of the box, to requiring a bunch of third-party libs to complete a…

I'm not hard to find, if you are interested: http://www.linkedin.com/in/jessamynsmith

I didn't know there was a more elegant way to do the shebang. I've fixed that now. It hadn't occurred to me that there was a particular advantage to being able to reload without restarting, but I am considering that now.

Personally, I prefer using libraries to reinventing the wheel. YMMV.

Re: Jessamyn Smith: Fighting sexist jokes with a Python bot

#328

Post by geekchick77 »

bmelton wrote: post #248
JulianMorrison wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not okay because it (1) assumes a false equivalence - the actual counts are more like "a wrong versus a hundred million wrongs" (2) it puts a burden on the victim of sexism to be perfect, while putting no such burden on the sexists (3) it's a variation on victim-blaming.

I knew when I posted that comment that it would get downvoted, but I honestly don't know when or how "They're bugging me so I'm going to 'take the high road' and bug them back" became acceptable behavior. If it was something my daughter had done, she'd be in trouble for it, but because she has somehow appealed to the vigilante in everyone, while trumpeting the almighty PC agenda of sexism, she's apparently justified…

Every time a TWSS joke went by, I noticed, and it bothered me a little. It seemed to me that it was easier for at least some of the guys to ignore it as background noise. What I was hoping for was to make the joke visible, something people noticed and thought about. - Jessamyn

P.S. And it worked really well, in the sense that we were able to have the conversation I tried to have in the first place but nobody was interested at the time.

Re: Jessamyn Smith: Fighting sexist jokes with a Python bot

#329

Post by JulianMorrison »

agateform wrote: post #316
JulianMorrison wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd accept that from a womanist who feels white women's feminism has failed her, or a lesbian or trans woman fed up of being ostracised, or a poor woman annoyed at middle-class feminism's priorities. But most groups who say "I'm not anti woman, just anti feminism" are flat out patriarchal, whether the flavour is religious or "men's rights", it's the same garbage. And I won't accept it from a man at all.

>But most groups who say "I'm not anti woman, just anti feminism" are flat out patriarchal, whether the flavour is religious or "men's rights", it's the same garbage. Unfortunately my perception is similar to yours. I have seen enough nut case traditionalists and misogyny to not want to get involved with mans rights movement. Traditionalist ideology hurts MRM and I feel they are shooting themselves on the foot by all…

Yeah, patriarchy does hurt men. Gender policing, compulsory sexuality, enforced emotional shallowness, the breadwinner/nurturer split and its side effects in family law, even the classic apologia for the the glass ceiling uses the fact that women demand work/life balance - implying men can be overworked. But I can't see the MRM having an easy time admitting that while patriarchy does hurt men, it hurts women worse.

If they admitted that, they'd be feminists.

Re: Jessamyn Smith: Fighting sexist jokes with a Python bot

#330

Post by fryguy »

readymade wrote: post #317
bmelton wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, no. They're both, in and of themselves, wrong . I therefore look down on both parties almost equally. I'm not saying that what she did is any more wrong than the actions that prompted it, however, it certainly isn't right , and that's why I don't consider it appropriate. Regardless of equating it to 'fire', which I certainly didn't intend for anyone to take literally as it is an idiom, I'd think my synopsis…

What do you think is wrong about writing an IRC bot that responds to "that's what she said" with quotes from famous women? I'm curious. Because the only answers I can imagine are (a) you think writing IRC bots is wrong, (b) you think that displaying quotes from famous women is wrong, or (c) engaging in public discourse that politely and indirectly calls attention to sexist behavior is wrong. I'll wait. I'd really lov…

I'm not the person above, but I have an analogy that might help understand the point he's trying to make. Suppose that you are a software developer that sits in a communal area along with other developers. One day, someone decides to hook up a siren to the continuous integration server to make a siren sound whenever someone breaks the build. Most people think it's funny, but I think the sound is annoying and don't like it. To solve this, what I do is make something that triggers off the siren going off, and turn off the house lights and have a disco ball spin round while the siren is going off.

I think the principle thing is that the trigger condition is the thing that you don't like that is the "wrong" thing in this situation, regardless of the fact that the end result is a quote that is harmless and might even spark good conversation. I think it is a matter of "the ends don't justify the means". The reality is that any kind of bot like this is going to be noise in the channel, even if they are "fun".

Post reply on HN