I realized I was part of the problem that night — a woman’s safety in her career environment shouldn’t require credible threats of violence.
I could understand saying she wasn't part of the solution, but to me "part of the problem" makes a non-zero contribution to the problem. What she did was at worst neutral, no?
It's similar to what I teach the kids: He started it doesn't make it right, you know it's not ok to hit your brother.
What she did was what she felt like she needed to do at the time. What she's doing now is second guessing it, and trying to turn it to a generally more positive approach on all sides in the future.
To attempt to explain it: One of my criticisms of Cheryl Yeoh is that her BATNA wrt to sexual harassment was that she has a black belt. So, I think she did not feel compelled to try all that hard to make sure to avoid trouble and misunderstandings. She felt safe, even if the worst came to pass. I think that was a contributing factor to the incident in which Dave McClure sexually assaulted her. *
That does not make Dave's behavior okay. It in no way excuses it. But if you take the position that women are simply victims who have no power at all to influence the social environment in which they participate, I think you do more harm than good.
Most discussions of "rape culture" assume that only men can do something about it. It assumes that only men create "rape culture" and only men can work to stop it. This is an incredibly disempowering way to view women. I think it actively reinforces the problem in insidious ways.
That said, I am totally okay with Quinn Norton successfully enforcing her boundaries with Scoble by stating clearly and unequivocally that if he touched her again, she would break his nose. He was drunk. She had just met him. He was in the midst of trying to rape another woman, then sexually assaulted Quinn at first introduction in spite of witnesses. This was not a situation where more polite, respectful measures were going to work.
But I also understand her mixed feelings about expressly seeking permission from the organizers to break his nose, should push come to shove.
(Edit: In case you did not know, I am female and very open about being a rape survivor.)
* https://cherylyeoh.com/2017/07/03/shedding-light-on-the-blac...
I blogged about it. I can point you to that series of posts if you are interested. I don't intend to rehash it at length here.
http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/search?q=yeoh
Edit: plus this http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2017/07/not-drinking...
At worst. I'd argue it was strongly positive.
There are definitely many of those in the comment threads on Eric's blog. But are you saying that ESR is himself one of those? Because I've seen no evidence of it myself.
[Edited to remove the 'gun nuts' bit, because ESR proudly self-identifies as same; it was the racist / MRA thing I was questioning.]
The best evidence is all over his blog and Google+ account, but I refuse to link to it. Google for "esr", "Is the casting couch a fair trade?", "low IQ" and "Blacks are lazy" yourself. You're probably going to want to take a shower afterwards. ...Unless that kind of stuff appeals to you.
I _do_ disagree with his 'casting couch' position, though, and will post there to that effect.
Or, from a different post:
"... The minimum level of training required to make someone effective as a self defense shooter is not very high... unfortunately, this doesn't cover the BLM crowd, which would have an average IQ of 85 if it's statistically representative of American blacks as a whole. I've never tried to train anyone that dim and wouldn't want to."
Here, or we can just do this in bulk:
https://twitter.com/tqbf/status/780839196231630848
Fun fact: these quotes come from just one ESR comment thread.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disengaging_from_an_abuser_usi...
I'm subscribed to his blog, I've chatted with him on email ... perhaps I'm missing something here?
I mean, it's possible I was mistaken, and he is in fact racist. Certainly the casting couch post is wrong, and I plan to call him on that.
But I don't get your position here at all.
Then, there's the really-not-as-smart-as-he-thinks biologism trying to explain "why women are different than men". It's actually funny how there's this never-ending supply of people posting those arguments, promoting them as some sort of intellectual revolution, completely unchanged from ESR's heyday (early 80s?) to today's google-memo-writers.
Re. McVeigh, do you mean http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/reflections-on-mcveigh.html? Because that doesn't seem like a defense of McVeigh to me.
From the article:
> This seems to me like a way to avoid facing the really hard questions. Questions which begin with this one: where and when and how did Timothy McVeigh learn to think of taking the lives of innocent women and children as acceptable "collateral damage"?
http://www.agjohnson.us/glad/is-affirmative-action-racist/
"But the most important reason to reject the argument that affirmative action is racist is that it ignores what racism actually is. The whole point of any racist practice is to preserve and enforce the privilege – the dominance and unearned advantage – of the dominant group by systematically excluding and oppressing members of the subordinate group. This has never been the purpose of affirmative action, either in theory or in practice. It has been just the opposite – a modest attempt to shift the odds away from being so heavily loaded in favor of whites in an environment that is still overwhelmingly white dominated, identified, and centered."
Actually, I'm not totally confident that ESR is really a racist. I think it's possible that he might just be profoundly, narcissistically insecure. The more you read him (I've read every ESR G+ post, every ESR blog post, and every ESR-authored comment on every ESR blog post for the past 2 years), the more you come to realize the truth that every kind of person that is not ESR is somehow intrinsically flawed, while ESR himself is one of the most important people on the planet, almost singlehandedly (if you don't count Dave Taht) responsible for the security of the Internet and of revolutionary movements in Iran, plugged directly into the most sensitive sources in law enforcement (wait 'till you read what he's learned about the Las Vegas shooter; it'll change forever what you thought you knew about ANTIFA, BLM, and Islam).
I think it might be tough to reckon with that kind of overwhelmingly disordered view of the world, and that white nationalism and mens-rights-ism and similar ideologies offer him a mental framework in which his weird belief of himself at the center of the world might just make sense.
I'd be sad, except, seriously? Fuck that guy. In the eye socket, forever.
ESR's schtick: He's always trying to show off how intelligent he is by making a totally outrageous asinine statement he knows isn't true and is totally offensive, and then trying to prove he's so clever that he CAN justify it through mental tricks, verbal gymnastics and gerrymandered taxonomies. He does it again and again. Every one of his posts is just like that.
And his minions eat it up, because he appeals directly and systematically to their prejudices and hatred.
So technically, in a certain sense, no, he's not racist, because he doesn't believe a fucking thing he says. He's something much worse than racist: Eric the Flute is a Pied Piper of racism, someone who feeds and thrives from other people's racism, sexism and hatred.
Hmm, can you think of anyone else who's mastered this technique?
I'm reminded of this post: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=6839. Here he declares himself the most famous programmer ever. Even by his own criteria, notch of minecraft fame is significantly more famous.
When I knew him during the 80's, he would go on and on ad nauseum about his beloved "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle NetNews Reader" and how so much better than every other netnews reader. But he never collaborated with anyone, and he never released it under any license. Much more Bizarre than Cathedral.
For your next act, will you clean up a breached nuclear reactor core by hand?
I think the thing about the hindbrain and the fecal people probably settles that although it is older than 2 years.
† (he knows this because his Kung Fu instructor, who consults with "the Feds" on "counter-terrorism", informed him of this --- this is presumably a different source than the one that reliably informed him that Iran had dispatched a death squad to kill him)
If you're right about that position - about firearms instruction - I'll gladly apologise, and withdraw my support for ESR as a non-racist.
https://twitter.com/tqbf/status/816449724127608833
Also, and with the maximum sincerity it is possible to imbue an HN comment with, from the bottom of my heart? Fuck that guy.
Since duncan asked for citations:
Here's ESR having a tantrum and throwing down the gauntlet during Russ Nelson's "Blacks are lazy" scandal that embarassed OSI and rocked the open source community: he insisted OSI get into a mud-fight against political correctness, and he called people in the open source community who disagreed with Russ's "Blacks are lazy" blog posting "fools and thugs":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Russ_Nelson#Blacks_are_la...
Note that although Russell withdrew the article, and admitted it was badly written, Eric S. Raymond is on the record as having defended it by accusing people asking Russell to step down as being "fools and thugs". Note that "thug" has been called a "dog whistle" term for "n*gger".
https://aattp.org/thug-just-a-dog-whistle-for-n-word-says-nf...
http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Linux-and-Open-Source/New-OSI-Presi...
Eric S. Raymond wrote: “The people who knew Russ as a Quaker, a pacifist and a gentleman, and no racist, but nevertheless pressured OSI to do the responsible thing and fire him in order to avoid political damage should be equally ashamed,” Raymond said. “Abetting somebody elses witch hunt is no less disgusting than starting your own.”
“Personally, I wanted to fight this on principle,” Raymond said. “Russ resigned the presidency rather than get OSI into that fight, and the board quite properly respected his wishes in the matter. That sacrifice makes me angrier at the fools and thugs who pulled him down.”
https://twitter.com/tqbf/status/769730601872044032
We could go on for quite some time about women if we really wanted. Or we could just look to the front page of his blog, where he's posted a long, arduous defense of "casting couch" sexual harassment.
Jesus fuck. You read that stuff regularly??! I would throw out my blue highlighter after marking that up. I haven't read any of his filth in years -- he's gotten much worse than I remember. It looks like he's metastasized.
Maybe Iran dispatched a death squad to kill him, as revenge for the time that he threatened Bruce Peren's life. Wooooooooo!!! Be careful: you can laugh yourself to death reading his blog.
Having read through the material posted, though, it's clear he supports the idea of racial profiling and similar; literally judging individuals in part by their membership of a racial group, which is the very definition of racism.
I'm in the process of penning a blog post which will go into this in more detail, and which I'll invite him to comment on. I like to think (Don Hopkins' fearful warnings to the contrary) that he is a mostly reasonable person who could be convinced to change his opinion.
It will also contain a strong rebuttal of his points around agency and consent in the casting couch article, which are dangerously wrong.
So yes. With the caveat that it applies to only a subset of his stated opinions on race - I apologise and withdraw.
Have you also written a strong rebuttal of his racism too, or are you going to let that slide? Is it your opinion that ESR and Trump and Hitler are not racist and shouldn't be taken to task for it, because only a subset of their stated opinions on race are racist and incorrect?
Precisely where do you draw the line where that subset of someone's stated opinions being racist becomes intolerable -- 10%, 50%, 99%?
Is it perfectly OK with you if Scoble and Weinstein and Trump only sexually assault a subset of the women in their respective industries?
Categorizing people who disagree with you as irrational is in itself a behaviour that has no place in rational discussion.