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http://www.shakesville.com/2015/02/the-falsest-of-false-equi...
TL;DR; Yeah he got fired, but he didn't get fired because of an internet backlash.
> He noticed ruefully that a few days earlier the woman – her name was Adria Richards – had herself tweeted a stupid penis joke. She’d suggested to a friend that he put socks down his pants to bewilder TSA agents at the airport. Lot of hypocrisy here! Neither person deserved to lose their job, the whole situation seems to have gotten completely out of hand. Funny how even the smallest hint of acknowledgement or respo…
This guy is doing a great job promoting his book. I guess the discussion here won't be real different than this recent one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9085680 It will certainly be interesting to watch the mechanics of internet mobs evolve as people get a better idea of the potential consequences of them.
I don't think there's an easy solution to the downsides of viral publishing.
About Jon Ronson's writing, I pretty much detested "Them" because of how he ridicules the conspiracy theorists at the start of the book. He goes on to spy on the Bilderburg group and the Bohemian Grove and comes away with a "so what" conclusion. At the start of the book his attitude was ridicule, that no such meetings take place.
Maybe I'm just mentally unflexible, but maybe if he stayed around for a bit longer for meat and bones discussion instead of engaging in idle chit chat he'd have a different opinion.
Also similar to "so what" attitude in Four Lions the film, he badly underestimates the Finsbury Park mosque crowd.
Say what you like, but Hank didn't do anything wrong here. In fact, he only expressed everything that had happened to him, and it just so happened that many people decided to stand up for him in what seems to be a situation of very, very poor judgement. On the other hand, great and naturally flowing writing by the author, really enjoyed swimming through the story!
(I thought her reaction was wrong, pretty much from the first step, but it wasn't something uninvolved people needed to pay much attention to either.)
I remember when this incident happened. I can't remember what my reaction was at the time (probably a combination of "let's not alienate women in tech further" and "sexual jokes are OK in the right context, and a conf is propably not it") but reading this excerpt - particularly reading about Adria's continued anger(?) at Hank - really shocked me.
> “Somebody getting fired is pretty bad,” I said. “I know you didn’t call for him to be fired. But you must have felt pretty bad.” > “Not too bad,” she said. She thought more and shook her head decisively. “He’s a white male. I’m a black Jewish female. He was saying things that could be inferred as offensive to me, sitting in front of him. I do have empathy for him but it only goes so far. If he had Down’s Syndrome a…
Tech reporting in a sentence.
Firing someone in Europe for some minor issue like that would probably be a major legal issue here.
I remember when this incident happened. I can't remember what my reaction was at the time (probably a combination of "let's not alienate women in tech further" and "sexual jokes are OK in the right context, and a conf is propably not it") but reading this excerpt - particularly reading about Adria's continued anger(?) at Hank - really shocked me.
In my view no one should have been fired here and that’s that.
We are facing a huge problem. Abuse and harassment run rampant and I bet that’s one of the reasons why some women are very, very sensitive to some things. That’s the problem to solve here.