Adria, if you're reading this, I'm proud of you for standing up for morality. Thank you!
Adria Richards, PyCon, and How We All Lost
201–210 of 395 posts
Re: Adria Richards, PyCon, and How We All Lost
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
Keep in mind that PlayHaven probably sponsored his participation in PyCon and he would have been treated as a representative of the company. If they have standards of conduct (probably codified in some employee manual) there are probably contingencies for this exact circumstance which allow them to fire him.
Actually, sexual harassment laws that actually exist are reasonable and conservative. There are a few women who try to sue over dick jokes, and "men's rights" characters who make a big deal out of it when that happens-- just like people blow the McDonalds case out of proportion (short synopsis: McD was in the wrong for bad cup design and serving over 160F/70C, the court assigned her partial blame, and she originally…
Sincere question -- what if he felt that it wasn't offensive enough to have crossed her threshold and continued making similar jokes? Your assertion is that he would be in the wrong, but isn't that entirely subjective on the level of offensiveness of the joke?
What if the joke were "Why did the chicken cross the road? To get to the other side!" and she said that jokes about chickens made her uncomfortable. Is he obliged to stop telling dumb chicken jokes?
Re: Adria Richards, PyCon, and How We All Lost
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
Discussions like this seem to always come back to a sense of "fairness". It's not about being fair, but about how situations make people feel. Majority-group members tend to brush away the sensitivities of minority-group members. If you're straight, you can walk hand-in-hand with your spouse without issue. You may even be able to embrace publicly, and kiss, hug and display all kinds of PDA. Gay couples can't do that…
And I've always found that self-proclaimed feminists are _always_ offended and loud about it when they are. A few I know go to the point by saying females are better and that all masculine references should be eliminated. They need to vote with their pocketbooks: don't pay for a ticket, and don't attend. I went to a 'con recently: The Midwest RepRap festival. I heard no references to sex, sexuality, race, or anything…
I've always found that self-proclaimed feminists are _always_ offended and loud about it when they are
Have you found that to be true of male feminists as well?
Re: Adria Richards, PyCon, and How We All Lost
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
Who's writing all that content for Wikia (a for profit wiki)? it's starting to rival wikipedia.
The people turned off by overzealous culling at Wikipedia.
Isn't Wikia also created by Jimbo Wales? He's pushing the content off of Wikipeida to his for-profit site! Collusion!
Re: Adria Richards, PyCon, and How We All Lost
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
SendGrid should've been pressured to warn her, not fire her like it happened. Their entire business was under assault. They really had no choice in the matter and really are the biggest victims of the whole ridiculous ordeal. This has all turned into farce.
She also said that sendgrid supported her actions.
She was employed by Sendgrid at that time, so since they were paying her salary, it was obvious to her that she was supported by Sendgrid.
I suspect the realisation that they were employing a time bomb as their developer evangelist caused them to rethink the value of employing her in that role.
This whole incident could have been averted if Adria had followed her own advice: rather than stir up foment on the Internet (the "thermonuclear option") she could simply have turned to the guys and said, "this is not cool."
Adria tries to explain that what was going on in her head was an unfortunate sequence of triggers: she's had a traumatic history, so it's to be expected that some things will "get her goat" and trigger her into irrational behaviour. In this case she apparently believed that telling these men that the jokes were not appreciated would have ended up with her being exposed to ridicule on the Internet.
So she took the obvious (to her) course of action which was a thermonuclear preemptive strike.
Re: Adria Richards, PyCon, and How We All Lost
#206For the life of me I cannot fathom why PlayHaven went to the extreme step of firing the dev in question. What he did was certainly wrong, but certainly not a firable offense. A stern warning from HR would've sufficed. Also, I don't understand the hate and DDoS directed towards SendGrid. I think if any, PlayHaven should've been subject of it and pressured to reinstate the dev in question. SendGrid should've been press…
"What he did was certainly wrong" - why, exactly? Telling a joke to your friend is certainly wrong?
Re: Adria Richards, PyCon, and How We All Lost
#207Aside from the personal stuff between her and Adria, I think she has a good grasp of the situation. (i.e. I agree with her) However, I find one thing troubling: > Adria reinforced the idea of us as threats to men, as unreasonable, as hard to work with… as bitches. (From here addressed to Amanda, should she be unlucky enough to stumble upon this thread) I don't believe you should be worrying about whether what you do…
First of all, I want to say that in absolutely no way are the rape/death threats in any way acceptable or excusable. There are lots of ways to criticize someone without threatening physical violence. Shame on anyone who chooses that route.
That said, I don't think that Adria is making off worse here because she's a woman, or because of inherent sexism in the community - she's making off worse because she was the aggressor, and because she decided to pick a fight and decided to go all-in on it. She's a bully, and if there's anything that the nerdosphere hates with a burning passion, it's a bully.
The guy she photographed privately apologized and then publicly published an apology defending Adria. He's done his make-good on this. Adria, on the other hand, has apparently determined she's going down with this ship, and is riding it all the way to the bottom. If she's not willing to compromise and is instead determined to be a martyr, it's difficult to dredge up sympathy that she's getting a harder bargain than the guy she decided to pick on.
Re: Adria Richards, PyCon, and How We All Lost
#208Aside from the personal stuff between her and Adria, I think she has a good grasp of the situation. (i.e. I agree with her) However, I find one thing troubling: > Adria reinforced the idea of us as threats to men, as unreasonable, as hard to work with… as bitches. (From here addressed to Amanda, should she be unlucky enough to stumble upon this thread) I don't believe you should be worrying about whether what you do…
First of all, I want to say that in absolutely no way are the rape/death threats in any way acceptable or excusable. There are lots of ways to criticize someone without threatening physical violence. Shame on anyone who chooses that route. That said, I don't think that Adria is making off worse here because she's a woman, or because of inherent sexism in the community - she's making off worse because she was the aggr…
Like I said in another reply, and like the author of this submission said in her post, many of the threats and harassing statements were very much specific to her gender (and some of her race.) Why is it that when a woman does something wrong, the hacker/tech community's first reaction is to throw around gendered slurs? Don't give me this crap about how every other community does it. That's not an excuse. We have to start somewhere, and we should be better than this, but we're not.
WRT her not apologizing for posting his photograph: What do you think would happen if she did? She's been fired, she's been threatened with rape and with death, she's been harassed on a constant basis since this began. Do you think her apology will have any effect? Look at how her (rather benign and polite) comment was received: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5399047 Scroll down and look at all those dead comments. Do you think her coming out now and saying, "I'm so sorry for publishing your photograph" would do anything?
I'd like to add, where is the lynch mob against these guys that their photograph was supposed to cause? I see a lot of people saying "you're publicly shaming them!" and "you tried to get a witch hunt going!" but... there wasn't one. She was just posting their photograph, and nothing in the public sphere happened to them. Only one guy was fired, and no one knew about that until he went and made an account on HN himself and said it.
Re: Adria Richards, PyCon, and How We All Lost
#209Aside from the personal stuff between her and Adria, I think she has a good grasp of the situation. (i.e. I agree with her) However, I find one thing troubling: > Adria reinforced the idea of us as threats to men, as unreasonable, as hard to work with… as bitches. (From here addressed to Amanda, should she be unlucky enough to stumble upon this thread) I don't believe you should be worrying about whether what you do…
First of all, I want to say that in absolutely no way are the rape/death threats in any way acceptable or excusable. There are lots of ways to criticize someone without threatening physical violence. Shame on anyone who chooses that route. That said, I don't think that Adria is making off worse here because she's a woman, or because of inherent sexism in the community - she's making off worse because she was the aggr…
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Re: Adria Richards, PyCon, and How We All Lost
#210Aside from the personal stuff between her and Adria, I think she has a good grasp of the situation. (i.e. I agree with her) However, I find one thing troubling: > Adria reinforced the idea of us as threats to men, as unreasonable, as hard to work with… as bitches. (From here addressed to Amanda, should she be unlucky enough to stumble upon this thread) I don't believe you should be worrying about whether what you do…
First of all, I want to say that in absolutely no way are the rape/death threats in any way acceptable or excusable. There are lots of ways to criticize someone without threatening physical violence. Shame on anyone who chooses that route. That said, I don't think that Adria is making off worse here because she's a woman, or because of inherent sexism in the community - she's making off worse because she was the aggr…
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