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Adria Richards, PyCon, and How We All Lost

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Re: Adria Richards, PyCon, and How We All Lost

#231

Let's simplify the rules to basic decency. Don't Be a Dick. Oh wait, I guess I can't say that now. Well, fuck me. Whoops, can't say that either. I hope mr-hank gets a huge severance out of PlayHaven. (At-will employment is not as simple as employers like to say it is.) At this point, he has position for something substantial, given that they discussed the termination in the public (disclosing an opinion that he is gu…

In what specific way do you believe at-will employment is likely to be insufficient to allow someone's employers to fire them over a Twitter message?

Well, let's start with the fact that it wasn't his Twitter message.

SendGrid is probably home free on firing Adria Richards, because she did something objectionable-- harassed someone and cost him his job. PlayHaven, on the other hand, doesn't have a defensible cause for firing him. This would be even more true if he hadn't admitted to the comment as Mr Hank. Then he'd have been fired on her hearsay.

Re: Adria Richards, PyCon, and How We All Lost

#232
post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tu quoque (appeal to hypocrisy) is a fallacy, but this annoys me too. The pictures she took at PyCon of her playing a game of Cards Against Humanity are perhaps the most galling: https://www.facebook.com/adriarichards e.g. the one on March 14th where she's holding a card that says, "Eating all of the cookies before the AIDS bake-sale."

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Re: Adria Richards, PyCon, and How We All Lost

#233
post #124
post #59

Earlier 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…

Feminists are people who believe men and women should be treated equally. Nothing more, nothing less. Classifying fanatics as "feminists" and acting like all feminists acts that way is ... well... pretty damn stupid.

Re: Adria Richards, PyCon, and How We All Lost

#234

So what we know now is that Adria Richards' issues are not just with sexism, offensive behavior in general or gender equality, but that she has an ideological agenda that goes well beyond that. Her issues with pornography are ideological, in that they aren't shared by many men and women who would take issue with sexist behavior or gender based discrimination. However, like many ideologues, she doesn't make that disti…

These kind of people will alienate a lot of men too. "Oh no! There's a woman in this conference room! I better just shut up and not say anything just in case she takes offense at my talking about my dislike for DRM dongles. Too bad that this means we'll be shipping a DRM-encumbered product, but my job and reputation are more important to risk being fired over perceived sexist comments, even if it saves the company fr…

While you do have a point, the hyperbole isn't helpful.

Re: Adria Richards, PyCon, and How We All Lost

#235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tu quoque (appeal to hypocrisy) is a fallacy, but this annoys me too. The pictures she took at PyCon of her playing a game of Cards Against Humanity are perhaps the most galling: https://www.facebook.com/adriarichards e.g. the one on March 14th where she's holding a card that says, "Eating all of the cookies before the AIDS bake-sale."

Did she go find random attendees and drag them over to her game and force them to hear her read out her cards? No? Oh, I guess it isn't the same thing at all then.

She was playing it in the hallway, at the conference, by the washrooms, posting about it on her public Facebook page, and tagging it #PyCon.

Nobody dragged Adria anywhere and forced her to listen to the penis jokes. She just overheard them behind her. The chances of me overhearing that group of people on my way to the bathroom are comparable to the chances of me overhearing the penis jokes. It might be even more likely that I'd overhear the Cards Against Humanity game.

Although her hypocrisy has no bearing on the sexism question, it doesn't stop it from being hypocrisy. Granted, her name probably doesn't need any more smearing, but boy did she keep asking for it - ass clowns? Really?

Re: Adria Richards, PyCon, and How We All Lost

#236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 obli…

If someone speaks up to tell another human being that what they are saying is offending them, they're going out of the comfort zone of a shared public space to express their opinion. It's not an easy thing to do, and it should carry some weight. If this guy continues telling sexually offensive jokes after being asked not to, it doesn't make him a misogynist, in the same way that continuing to tell uncomfortable chicken jokes in the presence of the chicken-adverse doesn't make him anti-poultry. It just makes him an _asshole_. Public spaces are about trying to find a common ground among a diverse group of people, and it's the reason we as strangers usually just fidget and talk about the weather to one another.

I see this case as two people and two companies who acted like children and both lost their jobs and look bad in the community, respectively. Some unfunny man made a joke to his co-worker because he thought it might have eased the social tension that comes from traveling, lodging, and attending a conference with another person over so many hours. An overzealous woman took offense to an overhead comment and saw it more constructive to bring attention to the public conversation that happens on twitter rather than the public conversation happening in that room because it was a more comfortable way to make sense of how she felt.

We're humans and we naturally want to surround ourselves with people who think, act, joke, argue with, and support other people like we do. It's pretty easy to never have to deal with groups we don't agree with on the internet. It's the reason swarms of misogynists got together on the internet to hate Adria and say she represented all the other women that they hate, and to call her awful names and issue a DDOS attack against her parent company.

Both of these companies looked past the human error in all of this, and enforced their zero-tolerance policies, and just fired both of them. This whole thing is a big deal because the other people we align ourselves with and allow to represent us (be it as employees, or pythonistas, or dirtbag misogynists) are making it really hard to connect on personal levels, and really easy to generalize and dehumanize issues into meaningless black or white distinctions.

Re: Adria Richards, PyCon, and How We All Lost

#237
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Even though I'm sure Adria has been putting up with tons of real sexism over the years in the tech industry, and that this may have been the figurative straw on the camel's back, this is definitely the wrong thing to focus on. Sex jokes are definitely not necessarily sexist. These guys were perhaps a little crude, and their puns maybe horrible, but they were essentially harmless and at worst, just annoying. W…

" There is horrifying sexism in the comments that have been posted over the past 24 hours, and it just brings to light the pervasive sexism in our industry." Exactly. Which is why I'm happy this is playing out now, because I haven't seen the industry introspect on gender issues in a long time.

I don't know if i'm missing something, but I've seen very little introspection in the responses to the situation. The guy who was called out's apology notwithstanding, out seems like there's just been a mass venting of anti-feminist attitudes all around.

Re: Adria Richards, PyCon, and How We All Lost

#238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMHO, sexualized epithets are sexual. It's more productive not to muddy the waters though: it's not like there are only a handful of ways to insult someone.

I don't know. Some words are just attached to each sex, and that's just a part of language. We don't say waitperson over waiter or waitress. Something that is both attached to a gender and insulting is by no means insulting someone for their gender or insulting a gender overall. English is definitely one of the least sexualizing languages of the Romance Languages. In French or Spanish, everything would be attached to…

English is not a romance language. It acquired quite a lot of French words and a few grammar patterns after an unfortunate event in 1066 but remains a distinctly Germanic-family language.

Most of the French grammar bits have been discarded in quotidian speech long ago; how often do you hear the subjunctive voice used in English?

English is distinct from other Germanic languages, though, in the same way. Most European languages of any stripe are gender-heavy while English mostly applies grammatical gender mostly only to vehicles and individual sexually dimorphic animals.

Re: Adria Richards, PyCon, and How We All Lost

#239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I mean, she tweeted that she was specifically supported by Sendmail in this circumstance.

Re: Adria Richards, PyCon, and How We All Lost

#240
post #127

Let's simplify the rules to basic decency. Don't Be a Dick. Oh wait, I guess I can't say that now. Well, fuck me. Whoops, can't say that either. I hope mr-hank gets a huge severance out of PlayHaven. (At-will employment is not as simple as employers like to say it is.) At this point, he has position for something substantial, given that they discussed the termination in the public (disclosing an opinion that he is gu…

Apparently it's ok to post offensive jokes/sexual innuendo if you're a woman ( http://www.flickr.com/photos/adriarichards/sets/721576169418... ) or ( https://twitter.com/adriarichards/status/312265091791847425 ), just like you can only be racist if you're white ( https://twitter.com/adriarichards/statuses/6039856858 )

> just like you can only be racist if you're white (https://twitter.com/adriarichards/statuses/6039856858)

I see people post this a lot without understanding the point of what she's saying. Adria subscribes to the belief that "racism = prejudice + power", which is basically to say that, yes, black people can be hateful towards white people and yes, racial discrimination does occur within the black community, but RACISM is the result of systematic oppression over hundreds of years.

The reason this distinction is made is because black people discriminating against white people is a response to the racism that they face every day, which is very different from white people thinking that blacks are inherently inferior and should have their rights stripped from them.

Please, educate yourselves on what Adria's saying. I know it all seems so foreign, but beyond the fog, there is a very real and very true message that should be heard and studied.

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