Live data from Hacker News

'Sexual favours were the norm in music industry'

bbc.com

581–590 of 643 posts

Re: 'Sexual favours were the norm in music industry'

#581
post #558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Tumblr had a lot of LGBTQ "diversity hires" Out of curiosity, what is your basis for thinking that they were hired only for being LGBTQ? As a gay man I wonder how I can avoid my colleagues thinking this. (It sounds like it's not just the gay folks who were engaged in inappropriately sexual behavior, so it can't be that.)

> As a gay man I wonder how I can avoid my colleagues thinking this. Diversity hiring has the same vibe as nepotism. Sometimes you look at someone's output (or even job description) and can't help but think that this guy wouldn't have a job here if he wasn't someone's nephew. Unless this is something that can be said about you (with "gay" replacing "nephew") you have nothing to fear.

>Unless this is something that can be said about you (with "gay" replacing "nephew") you have nothing to fear.

The OP's post makes me doubt this is the case, as it seems unlikely that he was very familiar with the work of all the people he's referring to as "diversity hires".

Most of us have one or two colleagues who we perceive to be performing badly. It's all too easy to weave tales about why they were hired without any evidential basis. If your equation is "bad at job + gay = diversity hire", then I think you're going to get an awful lot of false positives.

I suspect that there are at least as many people who've been hired in tech companies because they fit in with a bro-ish predominantly male culture. But of course that's just "culture fit", whereas any attempt to avoid falling into this trap is often referred to dismissively as "diversity hiring", and linked to disparaging remarks about people's job performance.

Re: 'Sexual favours were the norm in music industry'

#582

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They got downvotes because it's not relevant to the point of the saying. Which this little flap just underlined, because asexuality is defined as a lack of interest in sex, once again demonstrating that everything is indeed about sex (or lack thereof).

This is hilarious. 'Everything is about food.' 'Well, an iPhone isn't food.' 'Well, you had to mention that an iPhone wasn't food, therefore everything is indeed about food, or lack thereof!' ... There's a term for this type of fallacious reasoning, I forget what it is - anyone?

> 'Everything is about food.' > 'Well, an iPhone isn't food.'

That's just absurd, of course an iPhone is not food...

However,

- You can use your iPhone to take pictures of your food

- You can look up how to cook food

- You can order food

- You can use it in jobs, that help you earn money to buy food

- The people in china who assemble them do it, so they can buy food - etc...

Everything is about food, just like sex, because those two are among the most important things for survival of an individual and the species.

Re: 'Sexual favours were the norm in music industry'

#583
post #558

It depends on the company. I worked at a large international bank where we had a couple dozen project managers that would travel abroad for 2-6 weeks at a time. We had server set up in a storage closet with a huge porn cache. When the project managers came back to the US we would copy all the porn they had collected to the server, replace the porn on their laptops with new porn from the cache, then send them back abr…

>Tumblr had a lot of LGBTQ "diversity hires" Out of curiosity, what is your basis for thinking that they were hired only for being LGBTQ? As a gay man I wonder how I can avoid my colleagues thinking this. (It sounds like it's not just the gay folks who were engaged in inappropriately sexual behavior, so it can't be that.)

Because everyone else at Tumblr more or less young, male, single, caucasian, straight, European ancestry. The Office manager was female, one of the HR reps was African American, head of security had kids, PHP developers were always blowing through so occasionally someone diverse would slip in there, but in large LGBTQ was the only category where there was diversity and they hired a lot from that category. If you were LGBTQ and had a cat it was more or less impossible to not be hired. All this would come up occasionally in the Friday company meetings and David would always promise to do better but the demographics never shifted much.

One of the Unix admins was allergic to dogs if that counts towards diversity.

Re: 'Sexual favours were the norm in music industry'

#584
post #558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Tumblr had a lot of LGBTQ "diversity hires" Out of curiosity, what is your basis for thinking that they were hired only for being LGBTQ? As a gay man I wonder how I can avoid my colleagues thinking this. (It sounds like it's not just the gay folks who were engaged in inappropriately sexual behavior, so it can't be that.)

Because everyone else at Tumblr more or less young, male, single, caucasian, straight, European ancestry. The Office manager was female, one of the HR reps was African American, head of security had kids, PHP developers were always blowing through so occasionally someone diverse would slip in there, but in large LGBTQ was the only category where there was diversity and they hired a lot from that category. If you were…

I wasn't always a software engineer, and in my previous career (academic linguist) there were lots of gay men. This wasn't because linguistics departments were making a concerted effort to hire gay men. Nor are linguistics departments in the USA particularly diverse in other respects (e.g. race). In general, it's a mistake to conclude that any 'diverse' people you see around must have been hired according to some special diversity criterion. There are probably lots of contributing factors – tumblr's large LGBTQ user base being an obvious candidate.

It's not super helpful to LGBTQ folks to spread unfounded rumors that large numbers of us are just in our jobs because we're LGBTQ. Unless you've got some really strong evidence, I'd have to say that your remarks on that point were somewhat misjudged. I understand that you mostly wanted to tell a colorful story, but at the same time, it's annoying to see these ideas spread, even in a somewhat flippant context.

Re: 'Sexual favours were the norm in music industry'

#585
post #577
post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the book is really good, I'd say the villain should be applauded. I would applaud Hitler and recommend Mein Kampf to everyone if it was good (it is not). It doesn't excuse the murder, but I think talent should be rewarded, doubly so if the person is a villain. The problem with most criminals is that we can't think of them as other than criminals, and it is a vicious circle because it drags people deeper in the wor…

> I think talent should be rewarded, doubly so if the person is a villain Why doubly so, it is literally rewarding the bad behavior? A person that does not abuse people should be rewarded as much as those who do abuse them. And it seem to me that current culture or at least culture last twenty years was rewarding abusers more then non-abusers or their victims. And it just leads to more abuse.

I am not saying that we should double the reward for villains, but that it is twice as important. Everyone should be rewarded the same way, otherwise, sure, it rewards bad behavior and we don't want that, we don't want to excuse the bad behavior either.

But you rise an interesting point about victims. A criminal shall pay damage to the victims, and a successful author can do it. A worthless thug or someone perceived by society as such can't, not just that but he will continue to be supported by society for as long as he lives.

The reason I think society today is more "lax" towards criminals is that we focus on rehabilitation. That's the only way for criminals to repay their debt to society. We used to have them do slave labor, but modern society doesn't need slaves, it needs skilled workers. We can also kill them all, but that's extreme and carries a whole lot of other issues.

Re: 'Sexual favours were the norm in music industry'

#586
post #403
post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I don't understand the massive cultural obsession over KPOP. It's one of the grossest abusive industries, and anyone who wants to know is able to do a simple google to find out. Those fans? They could use their collective economic impact to help those folks they "love". Instead they just let them get used and abused for their fantasy.

I don't see that changing. I see K-pop fans worshipping the companies as much as they worship the artists themselves. It's a bit dystopic. As much as the old music industry sucks, at least established artists had power.

"at least established artists had power."

Really? Prince's right to his own (stage) name? Taylor Swift and the rights to her early albums? And even if we're just talking about royalties, it looks like half of established artists have had lawsuits about labels defrauding them in some way, and the other half seem to have similar issues settled out of court.

Re: 'Sexual favours were the norm in music industry'

#587

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whenever discussing Polanski's late career and the acclaim or scorn he has received, it must be mentioned that the girl in question has (later, when she grew up) expressed that she does not wish that Polanski be prosecuted or further punished by the industry.

> the girl in question has (later, when she grew up) expressed that she does not wish that Polanski be prosecuted or further punished by the industry. I think Samantha Geimer has been doubly victimised – first by Polanski, then by a legal system which cares more about itself than about the interests and wishes of the victims it is supposed to protect. I think Geimer feels, that as Polanski's victim, she should have s…

The problem is we can't yet map a person's neurons well enough to know their motivations as to why they don't want to see the other person punished.

Is it a genuine desire to forgive? Or is it out of fear/undesire to relive the experience?

I honestly don't know and it's not my place to guess, but it's a problem that we see in other areas too. This line of reasoning is part of why DV cases move forward even if the victim doesn't want to.

Re: 'Sexual favours were the norm in music industry'

#588

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps because the music industry is so dependent on personal connections and because talent is very subjective? In academia, doctorate students usually do not have to sleep with their supervisors to get their degree.

Sleeping with a professor for academic advantage is definitely not a common trope, so this makes sense. /s

That it is a common trope in Hollywood movies doesn't mean it is common in the real world.

Re: 'Sexual favours were the norm in music industry'

#589

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For saying it’s okay for pedofiles to be recognized for their other work There is disagreement on opinions and there is outright immorality.

No, there isn't. What is and isn't immoral is subjective, hence open to opinion. The best basis for "outright immoral" is universal agreement - I don't know that there is on this topic. Recognition of a work isn't the same as praise of the individual - good work can come from bad people. And in the case of a work like a film, there are multiple stakeholders. I'd also like to note that "paedophile" in this case is pro…

The quote is as follows: Yes, pedophile are other things than pedophiles. If they happen to be good at those things, which dont happen to be pedophilia - there is no reason why we should deny them recognition for taking humanity two steps forward, one step back.

At least from my understanding, society takes a hard line on pedophilia so this is universal agreement on its immorality.

Re: 'Sexual favours were the norm in music industry'

#590

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I don't think so. That's a 1980s era explanation. There are people who aren't especially attractive in all industries. Even in Hollywood, look at what Weinstein got up to, and he isn't exactly Adonis reborn. I think the explanation is simpler: music and acting jobs are easy. Lots of people can sing, dance, semi-convincingly repeat lines written for them by other people, or even write scripts. It's just not a very…

I'm not sure where to start with this, so I'll start with the broad strokes: You've underestimated the difficulty of creative work (or what is traditionally seen as creative) and overestimated the difficulty of "tech" (which I would argue is also a creative field). If anything, tech is ridiculously easy to get into even if you are patently and demonstrably unskilled. The same is simply not true for other creative wor…

Also, young naive tech people are consistently and often financially exploited by startups in the valley all of the time. It’s just a different kind of exploitation.
Post reply on HN