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Adria Richards, PyCon, and How We All Lost

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

#151

Post by michaelochurch »

ghshephard wrote: post #116
michaelochurch wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Repo forking is kid stuff. Back in my day, we fscked and we meant it.

I'm curious - did you consider whether mentioning the name of that filesystem check utility in a public forum might be considered inappropriate? I'm really (honestly) not judging either way, I'm just curious as to whether you checked yourself before posting?

I'm just curious as to whether you checked yourself before posting?

Between the anti-authoritarian and cynical writing, the 2002-10 trolling habit (long story; kids, don't fucking troll), the leak of Google's "calibration score" mess, the liberal use of profanity, the knowledge of altered consciousness (looked into doing a startup helping treat addictions w/ binaural beats), the blog post that cost VC-funded startups millions, and the fact that the CEO of a prominent startup made a personal campaign out of ruining my reputation (for, one year ago tomorrow, refusing to perjure myself on his behalf)... I don't think Michael O. Church is worried about saying fsck on the Internet.

Chaotic good FTW. Except for the trolling, which was halfway between chaotic neutral and chaotic stupid.

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

#152

Post by cbs »

recoiledsnake wrote: post #39
mhurron wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For the life of me cannot fathom why PlayHaven went to the extreme step of firing the dev in question. The appearance of bringing negative publicity to your employer will often get you fired. Make the complaints sexual in nature and you can probably kiss that job good-bye, this is how society handles these things basically everywhere. She brought negative publicity on her company, so she also risked her position. >…

>Oh pull your head out of your ass Do you really need to use abrasive language like this to get your point across? This isn't Reddit. >People acted angrily with the tools they knew best. Yes, the people who were looking to get her fired did so, and succeeded very well. Do you seriously believe the female or feminist tech community has the resources to perform DDoS?

Do you seriously believe the female or feminist tech community has the resources to perform DDoS?

Take a good hard look in the mirror my friend. You're calling "take your head out of your ass" abrasive, but that is downright tame compared to the sexism on display in your presumption that female(s) couldn't possibly have the necessarily tools and ability to launch a DDoS attack.

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

#153

Post by belorn »

ceol wrote: post #135

Aside from the personal stuff between her and Adria, I think she has a good grasp of the situation. (i.e. I agree with her) However, I find one thing troubling: > Adria reinforced the idea of us as threats to men, as unreasonable, as hard to work with… as bitches. (From here addressed to Amanda, should she be unlucky enough to stumble upon this thread) I don't believe you should be worrying about whether what you do…

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 doubt to the point of disbelif that all this is because the gender of the twitter user.

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

#155

Post by reinhardt »

samiur1204 wrote: post #105
WalterSear wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not puns - just one pun. The repo forking was, though informal, a thoroughly unpurient and non-sexual comment that she read meaning into.

She's allowed to be offended with those comments (or single pun), but the method of communicating her offense was definitely not called for. And honestly, even if it were sexual, it isn't sexist. I think that's a distinction that certainly needs to be made. Calling Adria a c*nt and other horrible things online definitely is sexist though.

I am offended by the "c*nt" word. I don't mean cunt. I mean literally "c-star-n-t". Louis C.K. explains why: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuLrBLxbLxw

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

#156

Post by [deleted] »

rdl wrote: post #127
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…

Apparently it's ok to post offensive jokes/sexual innuendo if you're a woman ( http://www.flickr.com/photos/adriarichards/sets/721576169418... ) or ( https://twitter.com/adriarichards/status/312265091791847425 ), just like you can only be racist if you're white ( https://twitter.com/adriarichards/statuses/6039856858 )

[deleted]

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

#158

Post by aangjie »

pyre wrote: post #63
sammyd56 wrote: post #8

"Because of my experiences growing up, I have triggers. This means that I’m always scanning for danger; for situations that seem like something from the past that could hurt me. When I recognize something that matches, I can overreact and feel intense fear, anger or anxiety. This is something I’ve worked on a lot. It’s much better now than 10 years ago but there are some things that send me over the edge." http://but…

I've tried to keep a pretty neutral opinion of her. It just seemed like she made a misjudgement. This is the first post (Amanda Blum post) to reasonably say something that makes me question that a bit. Now, combine Amanda's post with this info and it's just possible that Adria hasn't suffered enough of a negative response to her past actions (and maybe even benefited from them a bit in blog traffic, etc), so she didn…

> Just that there was never a reaction that caused her to question her way of responding to these things.

If only human minds worked that way.. sigh..

Edit1: Oops just realized out of context "reaction" is pretty neutral, but along with the rest of the passage it reads "strongly negative enough reaction" i was replying with that in mind.

In my experience, some of these triggers are impossible to eliminate in one's lifetime and usually one just develops strategies around it. perhaps one of those strategies failed in her case at this event. Granted, it failed and affected one developer personally, and created some strong* opinions among the rest of the tech/developer community, but am not sure a stronger negative reaction is going to help future incidents. infact i believe it will just exacerbate such reactions.

*-- Am deferring judgement on the effects on these..

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

#159

Post by vellum »

incongruity wrote: post #149
niggler wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" There is horrifying sexism in the comments that have been posted over the past 24 hours, and it just brings to light the pervasive sexism in our industry." Exactly. Which is why I'm happy this is playing out now, because I haven't seen the industry introspect on gender issues in a long time.

FWIW, PyCon and the PSF have really tried over the last five years or so to consider gender issues and I think they've had a good start – I believe I heard PyCon had women accounting for around 20% (edit: corrected thanks) of total attendance. That's pretty cool considering how much lower the numbers were a decade ago.

It was 20%.

https://twitter.com/doughellmann/status/313319682943905793

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

#160

Post by Draco6slayer »

WalterSear wrote: post #126
Draco6slayer wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is insulting a female inherently sexist? I wouldn't call someone a sexist if they called me a d ck or a son of a b tch. Obviously the response here is sexist, but calling somebody bad names is not sexist, regardless of their gender.

IMHO, sexualized epithets are sexual. It's more productive not to muddy the waters though: it's not like there are only a handful of ways to insult someone.

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 a gender, but that doesn't mean that the words define the gender themselves. Nobody in Spain thinks that chairs are 'where women belong' or anything like that.

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