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The fight against sexism is not a free pass

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Re: The fight against sexism is not a free pass

#91

Post by ben0x539 »

riffraff wrote: post #64
mcv wrote: post #34

This article misses the point. Before it goes on to speculate about hypothetical situations, it says: > The reality is that probably Ben is not a sexist, maybe he believes simply that “him” does not make a difference in sexism. Everybody has his fight, and changing “him” is not the Ben fight And that's okay. It doesn't have to be Ben's fight. The problem is that Ben denies this fight to others. The problem is not tha…

but apparently ben didn't revert the commit on the basis of its content, he reverted it on the basis of a bad process (lack of review). So we should criticize "people who don't accept these commits", or "people who revert commits because of bad process", but the case "people who revert these kind of commits" is not valid.

He initially rejected it on the basis of its content, and then reverted it on a basis that didn't hold up to scrutiny, as one the first comments on the revert commit demonstrates. Seems like that meets both your criteria?

Re: The fight against sexism is not a free pass

#92

Post by yeukhon »

stephp wrote: post #66
yeukhon wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am just afraid there is going to be a retaliation against Ben. Remember what happened early this year at PyCon? Honestly, people need to stop acting like animals and stop bash him out. There are other contributors who can rule him out and we don't need those hash comments. Sexism is not about woman. When we call a country "she" we are making a female description of what a country is: nurturing her citizens. And sin…

Saying "your average uncle joe" does not ring sexist to me? You're drawing a comparison, to whomever you want to, and not making any radical assumption about a specified group of people. As for your rape anecdote... I hope you'll give the mechanics of that a bit more thought? And also consider the type of physical injury. (Many rape victims suffer damage to their internal organs and/or lose the ability to conceive.)

Here is one. Not very long ago did our definition changed the way we interpret male rape. Of course how we rule male rape in court is a different story.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/justice-dept-expands-...

Re: The fight against sexism is not a free pass

#93

Post by ben0x539 »

jnbiche wrote: post #26

Oh dear God. This is what we've sunk to? Saying we'd love to fire some "asshole" because he chose not to pull a pull request changing two instances of "him" to "they"? First, let me get it out of the way that I actually agree with the pull request. In this day, the personal pronoun "they" makes a more inclusive pronoun that just "him". Zed Shaw's suggestion of "you" is also a good alternative, particularly if you're…

This is not a witch hunt.

This is a blog post. Taking away a man's livelihood by firing them is widely accepted as perfectly normal and reasonable, and hn posters regularly talk about how they wouldn't want certain people working for them.

You're making a tone argument about calling someone a vulgar name, as if that is somehow worse or more important than them insisting on contributing to the pervasive exclusionary effect of gendered language.

Re: The fight against sexism is not a free pass

#94

Post by ben0x539 »

yeukhon wrote: post #35
jnbiche wrote: post #26

Oh dear God. This is what we've sunk to? Saying we'd love to fire some "asshole" because he chose not to pull a pull request changing two instances of "him" to "they"? First, let me get it out of the way that I actually agree with the pull request. In this day, the personal pronoun "they" makes a more inclusive pronoun that just "him". Zed Shaw's suggestion of "you" is also a good alternative, particularly if you're…

I am just afraid there is going to be a retaliation against Ben. Remember what happened early this year at PyCon? Honestly, people need to stop acting like animals and stop bash him out. There are other contributors who can rule him out and we don't need those hash comments. Sexism is not about woman. When we call a country "she" we are making a female description of what a country is: nurturing her citizens. And sin…

> I just thought this is a legitimate question to ask: any difference between an anti-sexist and a feminist? Do feminists prefer gender neutral or do they prefer to have "she" instead?

Feminism is about equal rights, don't worry.

Re: The fight against sexism is not a free pass

#95

Post by jrockway »

ben0x539 wrote: post #89
jrockway wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So here's the problem. English doesn't have a gender-neutral pronoun that refers to a single person. So you have to pick "he" or "she". If you switch it around every sentence, the text is hard to follow. If you pick one and use it for the entire text, you're sexist. What's your solution to this beyond trolling HN?

Singular 'they' has been a thing for centuries.

And it's sucked for centuries. If it were clearly better, the gender-specific pronouns would be gone, right?

Re: The fight against sexism is not a free pass

#96

Post by yapcguy »

smtddr wrote: post #84
yapcguy wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not talking about the pronoun issue, I'm focusing on the hypothetical firing. It's completely unreasonable to fire someone over what in essence is reversing a commit. It might warrant a discussion with a manager, it might warrant an official warning, and perhaps some other measure but summary dismissal? No way. In my opinion, this is Bryan backing Isaacs, perhaps in a clash of egos with Ben, and grand-standing ov…

And I'm focusing on what you wrote: >> What we have learnt is that the CEO of Joyent is prone to over-reacting and will fire people over nothing. If you think what took place in that github thread was nothing, you represent exactly the dismissive attitude of sexism the tech-industry needs to get rid of.

I don't see anything in that Github thread to warrant summary dismissal of an employee.

A good CEO would ask the relevant manager to sit the two parties down and resolve the situation. If it were not possible, human resources could be brought in to assess the situation and perhaps administer training and/or disciplinary action. A sign of a bad CEO is knee-jerk firing and to write a blog post, boasting about such a hypothetical firing, shows incredibly poor judgement.

Let us imagine though that Bryan was right. So why doesn't Bryan fire Isaacs too? Isaacs broke commit rules by not getting his patch signed... what if this was some other commit which made it into deployment and brought down services for paying customers? Shouldn't Bryan view Isaacs as a bad employee who disregards rules and is thus a dangerous liability to the company?

"@isaacs may have his commit bit but that does not mean he is at liberty to land patches at will. All patches have to be signed off by either me or Bert. Isaac, consider yourself chided." https://github.com/joyent/libuv/commit/804d40ee14dc0f82c482d...

Re: The fight against sexism is not a free pass

#97

Post by ben0x539 »

jrockway wrote: post #95
ben0x539 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Singular 'they' has been a thing for centuries.

And it's sucked for centuries. If it were clearly better, the gender-specific pronouns would be gone, right?

Just-world fallacy much?

Gender-specific pronouns are fine for gender-specific use cases. They're not fine if they serve to exclude people using other pronouns for no reason.

Re: The fight against sexism is not a free pass

#98

Post by ben0x539 »

CrLf wrote: post #15

I'm sorry to invoke Godwin's law on this, but this is beyond absurd... Stating that defending that pronouns should be gendered is a fireable offense is more than just ridiculous political correctness, it's criminalizing opinion. It's the Holy Inquisition.

The holy inquisiton, noted gender equality fanatics.

Re: The fight against sexism is not a free pass

#99

Post by vezzy-fnord »

rosser wrote: post #51

It is so incredibly, profoundly frustrating to watch (mostly) male nerds grapple with sexism. Guys (and I mean that specifically and gendered-ly), you don't get it. You kinda can't, and I say that as a cis male person. I don't get it, either, except maybe intellectually, and even then only occasionally. To get a little meta for a moment, I think a lot of the disconnect that happens in these discussions (to, admittedl…

your perceptions of how Othering should feel don't fucking matter if you aren't the party being Othered in that specific circumstance.

This is the exact same attitude that leads to such things as affirmative action and pampering.

You also make the fallacious assumption that all "nerds" (what a vapid and pointless label) have been socially ostracized during their lives, thus begging the question.

Your entire argument basically revolves around accommodating to the feelings of others, consistently. There are cases where this should be taken into account, but it is not a rule of thumb. Sometimes a triviality is a triviality, a ridiculous expectation is a ridiculous expectation.

I think this is the main reason of our present misfortune: we just can't handle getting offended. If we stopped being so emotional about the most minor of annoyances, we'd be much happier. In some ways, technology has contributed to this. We now have too much convenience, and not enough annoyance. It has made us brittle, weak and sensitive.

Re: The fight against sexism is not a free pass

#100

Post by sliverstorm »

forgottenpass wrote: post #81
sliverstorm wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Minor detail: your summation makes it sound like Joyent would fire over reversing a change, when in fact Joyent appears to be saying they would fire over reversing the change because the change was removing two masculine pronouns . It's a pretty extreme reaction by Joyent; I wonder how much further away "We would also fire whoever used the gendered pronouns in the first place" is.

Minor detail: It was misleading in the Joyent blog post, the fact that it also reads as misleading in the parent post isn't the poster's fault. When I read the Joyent post, it doesn't seem like they acknowledge any other possible motivation for revert. When I later saw the revert message regarding sign-offs I was quite surprised that the blog neither mentioned it, nor was written in a way that indicated they had read…

I'm confused as to what exactly you are saying, but I wasn't assigning fault to my parent.
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