Comment by swampangel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by swampangel | Hacker News Reader

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First, tweeting the anti-CoC article was only one of the issues listed, but some of them were on the private issue tracker so I can't speak to those.

The article was definitely what brought it to a head because it prompted some people to say publicly they had bad interactions with Rod Vagg.

There were also a number of thoughtful responses to Rod's tweet where people spelled out why they thought his attitude towards CoCs was unhelpful. As far as I know he didn't engage any of these authors, which makes me suspect he was not actually looking for "interesting discussion".

Overall it was inflammatory in the same way another article complaining about missing generics in golang would be inflammatory here. The article doesn't seem to respect existing work and doesn't bring a new or evidence based perspective.

I agree it would be nice if all the complaints, responses, etc were laid out plainly. But I can also understand why this is not the case, given tweets like https://twitter.com/ag_dubs/status/887785046320480256 and the understanding that there's little benefit for the women involved to gain by re-litigate these interactions in public.

Why would an article on missing generics in Go be inflammatory? Repetitive, wrong, tiresome, whatever, sure - in your view. But inflammatory? Please. This is symptomatic of the general abuse of language that I have come to associate with social justice related conflicts. Absurd over the top language and imagery is used to try and justify absurd and over the top responses.

The tweets by ag_dubs seem like a good example. She starts by saying up front her problem with Rod is that he "criticises social policies in node" and she can't handle that so she lessened her participation. Presumably she means policies like the CoC.

Then she goes on to assert that he "engaged in targeted harassment against me personally". Because of his "unrestrained antagonism", she often has to have "other people speak on my behalf to sidestep his derailing responses".

Having read that set of tweets, put simply, I don't believe her. I do not believe she has been harassed. I think she can't separate someone disagreeing with her on social policy issues with "harassment". The logic leap from "he harassed me" to, "that's why I ... avoid his derailing responses" clearly isn't rooted in any conventional definition of harassment. And what does it even mean, getting others to speak for her?

> The logic leap from "he harassed me" to, "that's why I ... avoid his derailing responses" clearly isn't rooted in any conventional definition of harassment.

Um, yes it is. A harassing response which does not address the substance of your points is clearly a derailing response. That you can't "clearly" see this says more about you than it does about her.

> And what does it even mean, getting others to speak for her?

Literally, it means asking a colleague to say the exact thing that she wishes to say, because she knows that if she says it he will try to ad hominem it. This is standard English.

I would also point out that some of her vocabulary, "Beyond ____, also ____", is also standard English and it forbids your egregiously malformed interpretation of her comments. That is, you seem to think that the "targeted harassment" is "his constant, unproductive criticism" when in fact the criticism is clearly, in context, the "what he has done to the health of the project" which she has just been talking about -- and she has saying that "beyond" that, he "also" has targeted her with harassing statements. That construction explicitly forbids your sophomoric armchair psychoanalysis which can't separate someone who happens to disagree with you on social policy issues as "she can't separate someone disagreeing with her on social policy issues with harassment." (I don't actually believe that you are this way -- I don't know you -- I just think that your comment reeks of it and I would observe in passing that paradoxically we all accuse ourselves of our own sins. I mean, I'm terribly guilty of the latter, at least.)

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