"If you write an angry rant about sexism in the workplace, it may never leave the bubble. But a thoughtful piece may plant some ideas at the edge of the bubble that will escape"I've been on Hacker News a while, and have noticed across many posts that raganwald often writes well meaning, but sexist comments. He seems like a nice guy, and I've actually considered writing him a polite email about it.
But I end up not doing it. For no other reason than it's really hard and time consuming. When you criticize someone, it's understandably met with resistance. And if you make any kind of rhetorical mistakes whatsoever, people will take the opportunity to discount your entire position. It's a minefield. And there's so much sexism in the world, there's not enough hours in the day to write "portable" responses to all of it. Writing an "angry" blog post is often as far as one can get.
And so while I appreciate raganwald's point, that it's incredibly powerful when you can write a gentle, persuasive, portable argument.... I just don't think that's enough of a strategy for us, as a group.
I think when someone calls you out on sexism, you have some responsibility to wade through the anger and rhetorical mistakes and try to understand what their beef is..