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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

#121

Post by thescribe »

ceautery wrote: post #118
thescribe wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Citation needed.

Just about anything by bell hooks. But if you want a specific starting point, try "Feminism is for Everybody".

Ok, on your recommendation I found a copy of the book and read it for the last three hours. I am significantly less convinced of the thesis "Feminism is about equal rights" after reading this book.

"Most women in the United States do not even know or use the terms colonialism and neocolonialism." I found this statement to be emblematic of the issues this book has, it is right around 125 pages of assertions and 0 pages of proof, data, reasoning, or any sort of factual grounding beyond the implicit goals of the author.

"Future feminist studies will document all the ways anti-sexist male parenting enhances the lives of children" This is a second thing the book frequently proposes, while feminism doesn't have an answer today, we're sure we'll have an answer tomorrow.

The book itself had a deceptive title, it should be titled "Feminism is for marxists who claim to have all the answers but hand wave giving any".

Re: The fight against sexism is not a free pass

#122

Post by mercurial »

smtddr wrote: post #59
yapcguy wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any reaction should be towards Joyent - not Ben. What we have learnt is that the CEO of Joyent is prone to over-reacting and will fire people over nothing. So don't work for Joyent as there is no job security when you can be fired for a commit. If you're a Joyent employee and you're not part of the Node.js groupie love-fest, better spend your holiday looking for a new job. Imagine a lunch-time conversation over the A…

I don't agree with you at all. Ben's dismissive attitude, and yours, is exactly the issue tech-communities needs to tackle & extinguish. No, sed 's/him/them/' isn't going to suddenly make the world a better place but it's the thought that counts . Every small step counts. Ben's attitude about it, just closing the PR and claiming not to be concerned with trivial matters is something that at least needed a serious HR s…

Wonderful. We need tags on HN. You could tag this #pointless_open_source_drama.

What happened: a maintainer refuses a pull request changing a pronoun in a doc on the grounds of "triviality", without giving more context. Joyent at this stage had two options:

a) reach out to him to stress why they thought it was actually really, really important, or at least get his deeper reasons b) act as if somebody peed in their coffee and write an angry blog post talking about firing people, because Open Source doesn't have enough drama already - it's just missing some more good keywords like Pulseaudio to trigger the best flamewars

It's fascinating to see how supposedly smart people behave with the emotional maturity of a toddler.

Anyway, as of a couple of hours ago, Ben posted this comment on the Github issue:

Hi all, let me try to clear up a few things.

Why I rejected the pull request. Us maintainers tend to reject tiny doc changes because they're often more trouble than they're worth. You have to collect and check the CLA, it makes git blame less effective, etc.

That's why the usual approach to such pull requests is 'no, unless' - in this case the 'unless' should probably have applied. To me as a non-native speaker, the difference between 'him' and 'them' seems academic but hey, if it gets us scores of female contributors, who am I to object?

Why I reverted the commit. In hindsight, I should have given Isaac the benefit of the doubt because I don't doubt that he acted with the best of intentions. On the other hand, if another committer jumped the line like that, I would have done the same thing. We have procedures in place and no one is exempt from them.

To the people that felt it necessary to call me a misogynist: I volunteer in a mentorship program that gets young people - especially young women - involved in technology. How many of you go out and actively try to increase the number of women in the field?

I'm probably going to step back from libuv and node.js core development. I do it more out a sense of duty than anything else. If this is what I have to deal with, then I'd just as rather do something else. Hope that clears things up. Thanks.

Well, thanks Joyent. Hope the extra publicity was worth it.

Re: The fight against sexism is not a free pass

#123

Post by mcv »

CrLf wrote: post #72
mcv wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not criminalizing anything. It's pointing out that it goes against that company's policy. Is it really so bad for a company to have a policy to prefer gender equality? I'm rather amazed to see people rushing to defend sexism. Please tell me: what's so great about sexism? Why is it so wrong to fight it? Because I really don't get it.

But where is the sexism in this? And since when did companies earned the right to fire people over matters of personal opinion? Or stating they would do it when the person isn't even an employee? This is a witch hunt, plain and simple. I'm amazed that people don't understand that this doesn't help the fight against sexism, at all...

Stating they would fire someone over this seems a bit unnecessary, but since he's not an employee at all, it has no direct consequences. But it does make clear what their company policy is: they would fire someone over this had it been an employee.

It seems a small thing to fire someone over, but if gender equality and using gender neutral pronouns are important parts of their company policy, then someone actively resisting company policy and reverting the work of people who improved the product according to company policy, would be pretty serious.

Also note that a female developer was ready to quit the community over Ben's behaviour. Ben directly contributed to a hostile atmosphere where an often excluded minority is likely to feel more excluded. That is definitely serious.

You consider it a witch hunt because you don't care about gender neutral pronouns. Probably because you haven't felt subtly excluded all your life by gendered pronouns referring to other people. Fighting that exclusion is an important part of the fight against sexism.

Re: The fight against sexism is not a free pass

#124

Post by mcv »

jnbiche wrote: post #54
mcv wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If he's overwhelmed, why would he go to the extra effort of reverting the commit? He didn't just not pull, he reverted it when someone else pulled it. That means he does care. He cares enough to enforce gendered pronouns in the face of others who prefer neutral pronouns.

>If he's overwhelmed, why would he go to the extra effort of reverting the commit? For a possible answer to this (admittedly rhetorical) question, please re-read my comment, particularly the lines "...doesn't want to encourage this kind of contribution to the project." Some developers cleverly attach their name to famous project "Contributors" lists by making small grammar changes to the documentation, and then put i…

Excluding contributors simply because you want to feel like you're part of some exclusive group, is possibly even more harmful to open source projects than insisting on gender-exclusive language.

People who improve the code or documentation, even if it's in some really minor way you don't care about, are vital to any open source project. If you exclude them, you're voting for your project to remain small and irrelevant.

Re: The fight against sexism is not a free pass

#126

Post by yeukhon »

mercurial wrote: post #122
smtddr wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't agree with you at all. Ben's dismissive attitude, and yours, is exactly the issue tech-communities needs to tackle & extinguish. No, sed 's/him/them/' isn't going to suddenly make the world a better place but it's the thought that counts . Every small step counts. Ben's attitude about it, just closing the PR and claiming not to be concerned with trivial matters is something that at least needed a serious HR s…

Wonderful. We need tags on HN. You could tag this #pointless_open_source_drama. What happened: a maintainer refuses a pull request changing a pronoun in a doc on the grounds of "triviality", without giving more context. Joyent at this stage had two options: a) reach out to him to stress why they thought it was actually really, really important, or at least get his deeper reasons b) act as if somebody peed in their co…

I wish I had the gut to scream at the people who were commenting on the pull request and the reverted action page. But they are scary. Anyhow, I don't think Ben should continue contributing. There is going to be some distrust between Joyent and Ben. Though I am surprised they haven't taken his privilege away yet.

Re: The fight against sexism is not a free pass

#127

Post by pessimizer »

jrockway wrote: post #71
moocowduckquack wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They or their as singular has been part of recognised English for a very long time. "God send every one their heart's desire!" - Much Ado About Nothing, Act III Scene 4 "There's not a man I meet but doth salute me, As if I were their well-acquainted friend." - Comedy of Errors, Act IV Scene 3

That's a fair point, and "they" certainly does work well in some places. But if you took every use of "he" or "she" from Shakespeare and replaced it with "they", then we'd have a problem. And that's what this post is hinting at doing.

It's harder to write non-gendered stuff in English than to write gendered stuff, but I'm sure Shakespeare would have been pretty easily up to the job if he had cared.

Re: The fight against sexism is not a free pass

#128

Post by dec0dedab0de »

smtddr wrote: post #59
yapcguy wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any reaction should be towards Joyent - not Ben. What we have learnt is that the CEO of Joyent is prone to over-reacting and will fire people over nothing. So don't work for Joyent as there is no job security when you can be fired for a commit. If you're a Joyent employee and you're not part of the Node.js groupie love-fest, better spend your holiday looking for a new job. Imagine a lunch-time conversation over the A…

I don't agree with you at all. Ben's dismissive attitude, and yours, is exactly the issue tech-communities needs to tackle & extinguish. No, sed 's/him/them/' isn't going to suddenly make the world a better place but it's the thought that counts . Every small step counts. Ben's attitude about it, just closing the PR and claiming not to be concerned with trivial matters is something that at least needed a serious HR s…

EDIT: Stories about sexism & racism, minor or major, in the tech-scene almost always disappear off HN's front page in like 2 minutes. That's another symptom of a problem as far as I'm concerned.

That is for anything 'controversial' There was a post the other day that found it was any story that has more comments than likes, and atleast 40 comments will be penalized. So, if you want stories like this to last on the front page longer do not comment on them as much.

Re: The fight against sexism is not a free pass

#130

Post by 4ad »

yeukhon wrote: post #126
mercurial wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wonderful. We need tags on HN. You could tag this #pointless_open_source_drama. What happened: a maintainer refuses a pull request changing a pronoun in a doc on the grounds of "triviality", without giving more context. Joyent at this stage had two options: a) reach out to him to stress why they thought it was actually really, really important, or at least get his deeper reasons b) act as if somebody peed in their co…

I wish I had the gut to scream at the people who were commenting on the pull request and the reverted action page. But they are scary. Anyhow, I don't think Ben should continue contributing. There is going to be some distrust between Joyent and Ben. Though I am surprised they haven't taken his privilege away yet.

Node.js is not a Joyent project. They just pay a bunch of developers to work on it.
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