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

Adria Richards, PyCon, and How We All Lost

amandablumwords.wordpress.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 395 posts

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

#291

Post by FlemishBeeCycle »

bmelton wrote: post #263
straws wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 chick…

Maybe this brands me an asshole, but if I'm doing something that I find to be not offensive, and somebody complains that it is offensive to them, I don't honestly know that I would stop doing it. To what extent does one go to accomodate? If someone finds my breathing offensive, am I an asshole if I keep breathing? I'm specifically ignoring the action of the companies, the firings and all that, because honestly, while…

Exactly. Being offended in and of itself is worthless (I'm sure we can find that Stephen Fry quote somewhere in this thread), it is not a motivator for a behavioral change, at least for me, unless I care about the person being offended.

When I do offend people, I often like to probe as to _why_ they're offended. In my experience, most people seem to be incapable of defining any concrete reasons as to why a given statement is offensive other than circular, "it's offensive because it's offensive" reasoning.

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

#292

Post by dspeyer »

bmelton wrote: post #263
straws wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 chick…

Maybe this brands me an asshole, but if I'm doing something that I find to be not offensive, and somebody complains that it is offensive to them, I don't honestly know that I would stop doing it. To what extent does one go to accomodate? If someone finds my breathing offensive, am I an asshole if I keep breathing? I'm specifically ignoring the action of the companies, the firings and all that, because honestly, while…

Breathing is a bad point of comparison. Stopping breathing is much, much more costly to you than making a certain sort of joke.

I think if someone said "Could you stop using words containing "e"? Such words hurt my brain." I think I would.

If someone said "Quit your "e" words, you bad guy!" I'd be less inclined to. "Words with the letter "e" are bad words, and you need to stop using them" even less (the difference between these two being hypocrisy).

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

#293

Post by dspeyer »

brador wrote: post #104
ChuckMcM wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was hilarious: http://bigbangtheory.wikia.com/wiki/The_Beta_Test_Initiation

Who's writing all that content for Wikia (a for profit wiki)? it's starting to rival wikipedia.

Wikia is a for-profit supplier of wiki hosting. bigbangtheory.wikia.com is a (probably not-for-profit) fan group that uses wikia's product.

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

#294

Post by EwanToo »

_delirium wrote: post #197
zeteo wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I hope mr-hank gets a huge severance out of PlayHaven It's interesting that the story is about Adria and mr-hank when, in fact, it should be about their respective companies. There are probably thousands of tweets posted everyday by people who got offended with inappropriate jokes - many of them at work. The real story is about the decisions of the respective HR / management to fire them. Aria didn't overreact more…

I was honestly surprised by those decisions. This feels like the sort of risk-averse, old-fashioned line that I'd expect an Intel or IBM to take. Someone said something in public and it was controversial; fire everyone involved on all sides!

The legal advice that companies like IBM and intel would have gotten in these situations would almost certainly precluded firing people over it, conservatism runs both ways.

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

#295

Post by [deleted] »

girvo wrote: post #165
georgeorwell wrote: post #162

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."

I honestly didn't know Appeal To Hypocrisy was a fallacy! Probably one I'm going to continue to make; hypocrisy is the one thing that drives me insane.

[deleted]

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

#296

Post by belorn »

ceol wrote: post #163
belorn wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Before you accuse everyone on HN to be sexists, please provide evidence that her gender is the cause of the comments. If a guy would had overheard two women, and found what they said to be offensive and hanged them out on twitter, would people send him roses instead? Say one of the women got fired. Everyone would cheer right? The DDoS and the personal attacks are horrible, wrong, and just plain bad, but I serious dou…

I don't have the effort to link every single comment, but please go into any of the major discussions (that have since been removed from the front page) and ctrl+F "feminist". Go and look at the vitriol being directed at her, look at the specific insults used (that Amanda mentions in her post.) If it didn't start because of her gender, it most certainly became about her gender.

> If it didn't start because of her gender, it most certainly became about her gender.

So what you are saying is that the insults did not start because of her gender, but the type of insults used are.

Peoples vocabulary when it comes to insults are limited. The average west person's vocabulary when it comes to insults are built on sexism, racism, agism, religious hatred, and homophobia. If we go east, nationality also pops in. If we go middle east, religious hatred starts to take a more prominent form. This is quite a large social problem, and is no where close limited to the technical crowd. People on hacker news a people too, and they are thus limited in their insult vocabulary like everyone else.

Thankfully, people who use such insults are commonly down voted and/or removed. That's the community, dealing with bad behavior with the tools given to us.

Last, I thought I would go and check and do some searches for feminist in those threads. The three largest thread are 5419071, 5415256 and 5410515. Neither one has a single comment calling Adria a feminist. Not a single one. Maybe you should go and re-read them instead of throwing down false statements?

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

#297

Post by gdwatson »

geoelectric wrote: post #186
Draco6slayer wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Well, no, we say server, because server is gender-neutral. Compare steward/stewardess with flight attendant. And some servers will get mighty angry if you call them a waitress. I don't necessarily think that response is justified when no offense is actually meant. But the point is that there has been an identifiable trend in our language towards moving away from gender-specific terms for roles that shouldn't otherwis…

That's always seemed an odd quirk of the restaurant industry to me. Server to refer to a person sounds stilted to my ear; a server is a computer to me, but a waiter or a waitress is a person.

So a sincere question: Why would someone be offended to be described as a waitress?

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

#299

Post by justin66 »

bmelton wrote: post #263
straws wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 chick…

Maybe this brands me an asshole, but if I'm doing something that I find to be not offensive, and somebody complains that it is offensive to them, I don't honestly know that I would stop doing it. To what extent does one go to accomodate? If someone finds my breathing offensive, am I an asshole if I keep breathing? I'm specifically ignoring the action of the companies, the firings and all that, because honestly, while…

> Maybe this brands me an asshole, but if I'm doing something that I find to be not offensive, and somebody complains that it is offensive to them, I don't honestly know that I would stop doing it.

I imagine you're capable of understanding why they might find it offensive and acting accordingly depending on the context, which is the real issue. Whether YOU find it offensive is just beside the point, as it's a given that a person doesn't stand around saying or doing things that they find offensive. Whether you're capable of evaluating the other person's point of view is the key. (I bet you probably are)

If you can see why they'd find it offensive and continue doing it, you're pretty much by definition being an asshole. That's not a moral judgment, I think it's just descriptive...

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

#300

Post by honri »

michaelochurch wrote: post #45

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…

Too bad the "77 cents on the dollar" feminist mantra has been debunked ad nauseam. If you're looking for real sexism to fight, you might want to start from the morally bankrupt and misandric family court system...
Post reply on HN