Adria Richards, PyCon, and How We All Lost
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Her issues with pornography are ideological, in that they aren't shared by many men and women who would take issue with sexist behavior or gender based discrimination. However, like many ideologues, she doesn't make that distinction herself.
And what is also typical for ideologues, she doesn't have any issues with saying or doing things that disproportionately harm people who disagree with her, because they are "the enemy". They're not interested in change, they are interested in winning.
These kind of people will do more harm than good when it comes to fighting sexism in tech. They will actually alienate a lot of women.
(I do however find it inappropriate and borderline sexist to call her a prude. Being against pornography doesn't make you a prude, just like enjoying pornography doesn't make you a sexist pig.)
"Oh no! There's a woman in this conference room! I better just shut up and not say anything just in case she takes offense at my talking about my dislike for DRM dongles. Too bad that this means we'll be shipping a DRM-encumbered product, but my job and reputation are more important to risk being fired over perceived sexist comments, even if it saves the company from financial ruin in the long run."
When every perceived slight ends up triggering thermonuclear war, people will stop interacting with each other.
We don't know why PlayHaven fired the dev in the first place.
Sure, the controversy undoubtedly played a role. But we don't know if the dev was on the ropes, if he wasn't pulling his weight, or if his boss simply didn't like him. This may have been a gross overreaction, or it may have been the straw that broke the camel's back.
As story-driven creatures, we constantly seek to form narratives around events. As sensation-seekers, we inherently care more about emotional impact than veracity when we craft the mental stories that tie events together and give them meaning. This is not to say that we are incapable of detached, rational thought, but rather that our brains don't default to that mode.
One of my biggest personal takeaways from this sordid tale is just a reaffirmation of that fact: that even smart, rational people, who get paid to be smart and rational, will blindly abandon reason in pursuit of a good story. This incident blew up into a tabloid-like frenzy because smart people abandoned reason in favour of sensation. Moreover, this is not due to some personal flaw on their parts: it's simply how we, as human beings, are built.
If anything positive comes from this, I hope it's simply a greater recognition on the parts of all concerned of our propensity to engage in this kind of behaviour, and the mental processes that lead to it. Maybe we can be a little more measured in our appraisal of future incidents like this.
Many, including myself, have raised the question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5418714 1 hour ago
(NB: I pulled the name Bob out of thin air.)
Pray tell, how does a plebeian joke about dongles signal that a developer is good?
"dev's interest in attending a conference and his company sponsoring it"
And as for his presence, it's not uncommon for a company to send a key developer and a friendly coworker to conferences, especially when it is far away (so he may just have been a friendly coworker of Andy Reid)
I will testify, brother. ;-)
It think what the gp post was saying is that usually (in most companies) developers who are not very good or are not pulling their weight, are not sent to conferences. What is the freaking reason to send someone to a conference to learn and bring new ideas if they are about to be sent out of the door?
I don't know about friendly coworkers. Maybe other companies do that, we don't. In my experience it is not about friendliness but about who deserves to go and who is passionate about programming.
And, yeah, I agree, I don't see any correlation between him making dongle jokes or being or not being a good programmer.
PlayHaven adressed this directly. They are blaming it on the incident at PyCon.
All I get from that is that it played a role. In fact, their statement is tacit support of the argument that the controversy wasn't the only factor in their decision.
PlayHaven had an employee who was identified as making inappropriate comments at PyCon, and as a company that is dedicated to gender equality and values honorable behavior, we conducted a thorough investigation. The result of this investigation led to the unfortunate outcome of having to let this employee go.
Notice the result of this investigation part. Maybe this guy has had issues in the past, or maybe they just didn't like his code, but by all appearances, he would not be jobless if this investigation had not been started.
The fact that they state employee privacy is of importance yet clearly outline he was dismissed also sends flags up for me. To specifically say their decision goes beyond privacy when he is clearly identified through the picture and other channels is to say "we fired mr-hank" a point that is already covered within this thread of discussion. To say "we have investigated the complaints and taken appropriate action" is a safer bet legally.
These are just speculation, but my interpretation is that the response was a hasty PR damage control rather than a rational response.
This. We just witnessed a snowball turn into an avalanch. I know I've experienced this in personal relationships more than once. Emotions make us great and they make us terrible. Which gave me an idea: A bug tracker for relationships. Addressing a problem immediately sounds good on paper, but we often need time to distance ourselves to be able to think critically. If couples started using a bug-tracker for relationship issues, you could log the issue in detail when it happens, sit on it for a few days, and address it up when both parties are level headed. I doubt I'd ever want to use this product, but if anyone else wants to..
I hope you don't include me in that category. It was never my intent to disparage the dev; I simply found the statement that we don't know the whole story behind his firing to be a compelling one.
People get offended for all kinds of things, nobody can claim a monopoloy on that. (http://imgur.com/EX5v4 stephen fry quote)
- If they would both have been gay and talking about a homosexual topic, someone in that room would be offended.
- If they were creationists dismissing darwin, someone would be offended
- 2 women discussing ‘shades of grey’, someone would be offended.
- A dongle and forking, and Adria is offended.
To me it seems she is offended by the sexual overtones. A pruder man might be offended by that too, or many a religious man. I just don’t see the link to sexism.
I get it's lowbrow humor. It's not professional. It's probably not suited for a public event like that. The dongle joke was men comparing their 'dongles' and the suggesting they wanted to "fork" the male speaker.
How are women being put down or belittled at all here. How is it sexist?
Majority-group members tend to brush away the sensitivities of minority-group members. If you're straight, you can walk hand-in-hand with your spouse without issue. You may even be able to embrace publicly, and kiss, hug and display all kinds of PDA. Gay couples can't do that without fear of reprisal, sometimes violently.
Minority-group members are only "safe" in certain places.
At a tech conference, women are in the minority, and so crass comments about/towards women are not perceived in a safe way. It's not your buddy making a funny joke, it's the majority-group members expressing oppression.
Whether you personally agree with that is not the point; it's how minority-group members feel.
Be aware of that.
It was when a bigot tried to explain why gay people shouldn't make public displays of their sexuality because they made him uncomfortable.
I think the original comment is raising the point that the comments were crass, but did not appear to be about or towards women in the slightest.
Which didn't happen in this case.
Recently local pop star was tried and sentenced because she said that Bible was written by heavily pissed and baked blokes and some people got offended.
Protecting the offended can be a tool for bullying people that speak their mind or behave true to themselves.
One might think that in this age of intense communication people would grow thinker skin. But Americans got more fragile instead.
I went to a 'con recently: The Midwest RepRap festival. I heard no references to sex, sexuality, race, or anything of the sort. One sales person came around, got argumentative once we said we were not interested, and started to try to argue religion. That was perhaps, 10 minutes tops. Everybody else stayed absolutely professional about everything.
Now, the last thing I want to hear at a tech conference is another tiring sex joke. It may be funny, but that's not why I'm here.
Have you found that to be true of male feminists as well?
<added> I live in Indiana, and had this haopen to me: I went into a car dealership, looking for a used car. Dealer walks up asking if I wanted to test drive or ask questions. Later on in negotiations, he went hardcore slimy. Along with that, said ,"You can trust me, I'm a good Christian."
That was enough to get me to leave on the spot. Usually people with self-proclaimed titles are to be distrusted, or t least listened to with a very critical ear. It's also similar if I run around calling myself "Ub3r Haxx0r". Most of you would justly call BS.</added>
Then, I have also met many who fight for women to be equal with men. They usually aren't much for the labels, yet will fight ferociously for the rights to be equal. Equal pay is the big one right now, considering pay parity is apart by 20%.
Best said by a friend: when a woman hits a man, and the man hits back, and nobody gasps in astonishment, we shall be equal.
Also, look up the definition of feminism.
The concern with "offensive" discussions/jokes at developer conventions is it can give the sense that some people are not welcome there - if you don't like it, go somewhere else.
The subtext is "women must be shielded from the world".
On the other hand, for people who have actually met women raised, say, post-1940, it's pretty bizarre.
https://twitter.com/adriarichards/status/312265091791847425
And the company she was envangelising for on that twitter feed thinks that a visual joke about photocopying your genitals is not inappropriate for their jobs pages:
http://i.imgur.com/uWc8P39.png
I understand that speaker and context make all the difference, but she made a joke about sexual humiliation, and then, at the same conference, got offended by a joke conflating dongles to genitals.
PyCon determined the guys had said something offensive.
So, either PyCon lives in fear of Adria, or other people also found the comments to be overtly sexist/sexual.
Unless PyCon publishes an investigative report, I doubt we will get the entire story.
If you personally don't find the things they said offensive, that's fine, but they were there in a professional representation, not a personal one. If PyCon and their employer both felt the guys said something clearly outside the guidelines represented to them by PyCon, that's the issue. Whether it was about dongles or donkeys doesn't matter.
EDIT: Originally I stated PyCon removed them from the conference, as a followup pointed out this was incorrect.
Dick jokes are perceived to be almost exclusively a part of "guy culture". Want proof? Watch how fast a group of guys making those jokes suddenly clams up and changes the topic the moment an unfamiliar woman walks up. (And when a woman joins in and shows that she's comfortable making those jokes, too, watch how glad everyone is that she can be "just one of the guys".)
So when guys at a conference routinely make dick jokes in public, that contributes to a sense that the conference is a male space. It's not a conscious thing, but it's a real thing, and it would be good for it to change. I don't know that the public shaming in this case was the right way to go about that, but I'm not sure that I have a better alternative to offer, either. (Women are all too aware that quietly saying "Please don't act that way" tends to have no impact at all, apart from the guys thinking she's a humorless busybody.)
It doesn't mean we actually think it's offensive or understand why anyone would be offended.. honestly I find it kind of baffling, but nevertheless, I will watch my tongue around unfamiliar women just in case. The other thing is that the potential outcome from offending a woman is much worse than offending a man. I would hate for what I said to be misconstrued as sexual harassment, and it could potentially lose me my job if it was (as it has done for an unfortunate developer in this case).
As far as "one of the guys" goes.. I think that's a perhaps unfortunate way of phrasing a well intentioned message: you are someone we are happy to relax around. My girlfriend is a female developer and quite happily refers to herself as one of the guys and doesn't see it as a problem or sexist. What she does find a little annoying is having to reassure men that she won't be offended by their non-harassing sexual innuendos in order for them to relax around her.
There's probably not really an absolute solution to this.. people take offense at different things. It's nearly impossible to offend me, but other people are offended by the colour of the sky.
My actual point is that in practice, whatever the reason, guys typically only make those jokes when they consider themselves to be in an environment where such jokes are welcome: what I called a "male space". So what does it imply when guys at tech conferences feel comfortable making dick jokes in public? The message that "this is a male space" comes across loud and clear to everyone who hears them: men feel a bit more comfortable making off-color jokes of their own, and women feel like outsiders.
Again, all of those implications are entirely independent of whether anyone actually finds the jokes themselves offensive, and independent of the reasons that guys typically self-censor. In this case, I rather suspect that Richards herself was not offended by the joke, but was upset that the guys were (unconsciously) sending a "male space" message simply by being willing to say it out loud.
Any crude comment relating to sexuality would fall into this category. I am not attempting to justify the response here, just explaining the rationale.
A phrase like that is called a 'trigger'. The same reason you don't say the n-word around a person of color, because you don't know what kind of experiences that person has associated with that. Same for rape, because you could have a victim or a rapist nearby and you don't know how it will affect them (harming or reinforcing them, respectively).
Gender, race, sexuality, and many other topics make people feel very strongly, and sometimes can cause people to dwell on those bad experiences and have the same feelings of angry/inadequacy/self-loathing/whatever that they did at first. My perspective is: I don't know how this really charged term has affected the lives of the people around me, so...maybe I'll wait to make the joke? Or I won't make it?
The dongle thing is silly to me, and the "forking" thing was immature. But that's how I could take offense at that statement. Hope that clears it up? Just my perspective. I don't know if that's how Richards felt...if she didn't, I don't know what the sexist overtones could be either.
The alternative seems to be that we all become humourless drones, just in case any of our humour offends someone. Maybe I'm biased though, as a Brit: if we didn't have sexual innuendo, we couldn't get up in the morning (wink wink nudge nudge). It's as essential as our morning breakfast tea.
In the underlying argument "What makes it sexist", you seem to imply if the person set off by the trigger is a woman, then the initial statement was sexist. Which is a little broad for my liking.
As for sensitivity, Imagine for a second a victim of prison rape (of which there are unfortunately many cases). I could imagine someone like that having an extremely sensitive reaction to any 'gay' word or image. Should we therefore limit the right of gays to express their affection, out of fear they might offend said people.
I perceived the comic as two women:
Allegedly offensive comic: http://jenmylo.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/screen-shot-2011-...
Deep link to Adria's comment: http://jenmylo.com/2011/08/03/wcsf-shirt/comment-page-1/#com...
I would be curious to learn Adria's rationale for the presumption of gender she made. Seems as though she'd find Rorschach tests offensive too.
One can argue against what she did and not be a "mysoginist man-privelaged pig". (<--- I've seen women write that against people who spoke against Adria Richards)
There were and are a lot of people who see this issue through exactly one lens: is the man right or is the woman right? They caught hold of this issue and made it part of their long battle. This issue got reposted to those various blogs and subreddits that represent those armies. (And they each monitor the other so summoning either army summons both.) I suspect that, had those armies never been involved, neither person would be fired today. Not that those armies care. The two people who got fired were acceptable casualties in their war on The Other.
Ugh, this comment turned into pop-psychology, sorry.
I haven't bothered personally to fact-check whether Adria hijacked a newbie talk at a conference to push an anti-porn crusade based solely on another (female) presenter's presentation title, on the grounds that Amanda could get called out on that in an instant if it weren't true.
I know which of the two has come out looking fair-and-balanced, and which has come out looking borderline-unhinged here, at least from my point of view.
"I imagine in an alternate future, Adria just turned around,
smiled and whispered, “Hey. No offense, but I’m not all that
interested in hearing about your dongle, you know?’. The men
would have become momentarily embarrassed, and then reflexively
defensive before letting their rational neurons fire in that
crowded room and say, “yeah, dude, no problem”. Maybe one of
them would have approached Adria later in the day and pulled her
aside to say “hey, I really didn’t mean to offend you, I’m
sorry. Hope there’s no hard feelings.” In this alternate future,
at a future conference that developer quietly steers a
conversation amongst friends away from this territory, without
making a big deal of it."http://butyoureagirl.com/13871/success-against-the-odds-fill...
(site is currently down, may need to view cache)
I'm surprised nobody has picked up on this yet.
This is a person who knows she's prone to overreacting, but not only does she apply to and accept a job that puts her in overwhelmingly male-dominated situations, she continues to both overreact and fail to recognize or address it.
For someone who claims to have gone through truly traumatic things (and I certainly don't doubt that), she's done an unbelievably poor job of restraining herself. If this is better, I imagine she must have been totally unemployable (not to mention incapable of normal human interaction) for a long time.
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't really 'learn her lesson'[1] on the way she should approach these situations. Unfortunately this time the negative reaction was extreme.
[1] This doesn't imply that her reactions were malicious or self-serving. Just that there was never a reaction that caused her to question her way of responding to these things.
When the dust settles, SendGrid, PlayHaven, affected developers, women in tech as a group, and our industry as a whole will end up with some reputation damage and setbacks in the struggles on equality front.
But Adria personally will probably benefit from her newfound celebrity status in one way or another. There's no such thing as bad publicity, that's the most likely lesson to be learned [again].
| no such thing as bad publicity
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..
I'm fifty. I could put together two blog posts about myself, one of which would make me seem like a saint, the other a demon, and both would be factually correct. Which one you read right after I got into some hot water could seriously skew your feelings about my role in events.
I agree there is rampant sexism in tech, and in society in general. I've seen it, lots. I'm not convinced a couple of guys chuckling at "Big Dongles" is sexism, though it is inappropriate for a professional event.
But now we get the picture of Adria Richards and it does seem to be one of someone looking out for ways to be offended and publicise herself with them.
And then there's the DDoS and the threats. Utterly un-fucking-acceptable.
There's not really anyone that comes out of this looking good.
In my opinion, the PyCon organisers handled things well. They acted on the complaint, explained to the jokers why it was inappropriate, got an apology, and left it there, without publishing names.
Unfortunately for them, popular perception of PyCon is probably somewhat tainted by this whole messy incident anyway.
This is a great article with which to start a discussion, not end one. Hopefully the tolerance for less nuanced and more reactionary discussion will abate. I wouldn't put money on it, but I can hope.
When women in this industry are hurt, we’re all hurt.
No. No. It's exactly this kind of thinking that got us here in the first place. It's this kind of thinking that perpetuates the very dissonance inherent in stereotypes. There is so much anti-racism/anti-sexism/anti-everything-slightly-inappropriate recently that some days I don't want to get out of bed. I don't want to watch what I say at every turn. I don't want to limit my vocabulary when there are so few English words in the first place. I don't want to change what I find funny because society has all of a sudden deemed it possibly inappropriate under certain situations. So what's the solution?
People need to start recognizing others as individuals--people need to start recognizing themselves as individuals. I'll admit it: I make inappropriate jokes all the time around my friends: every sort of inappropriate joke you can imagine. Why? Because the whole concept of shock humor is poking at things that are obviously not true. Why would people laugh if women actually were bad drivers (I am a terrible driver)? Why would they laugh if Asians could actually all do backflips (I broke a finger trying). If forking someone's repo was actually sexual, why would it be funny? "I'm going to fuck her" surely isn't funny.
The moment we all recognize that people are individuals, and not just subsets of classes, is the moment where all this ridiculousness will go away. Thinking that a blow to one woman hurts all women is as ridiculous as thinking a blow to one Asian hurts all Asians - or a blow to one person in tech who has large muscles is a blow to all people in tech who have large muscles. The association is ridiculous.
I don't know any women in tech. I know people in tech, and some of them just happen to be women.
http://www.amazon.com/Trust-Me-Lying-Confessions-Manipulator...
For what it's worth, I've seen and partaken of a great deal of reasonable chatter here on HN. I don't doubt a fair amount of "unreasonable" chatter has taken place elsewhere, but for the life of me I can't find a single example of it coming from any person that could be said to be reasonably representative of the community as a whole.
I mean, if all it took was one penis joke for one man to be fired, one would think that there would be industry-wide layoffs every time one of these incidents occur.
Now, guys will feel compelled to check themselves every time they are in public. When being victim of actual harassment, girls will think twice about denouncing it.
And the worst part is that all the actually sexist guys will be able to point to this incident as a justification for why sexism in the tech industry is "not a problem".
Thanks, Adria. Thanks, Internet. You all did a terrific job.
I was just browsing through her YouTube account and it's now spammed with tons of overtly racial and sexist slurs against her. These aren't "dongle" jokes. They're the real deal.
This is really just a tragedy. Adria Richards is not the only one who is showing her sensitive, human side here. I think she made a mistake, a big one, and I agree with the decision of SendGrid. But, oddly enough, I think some of the reactions are showing that maybe she was right all along. Her example of sexism and racism in the developer community was a terrible one, but ironically it has led to lots of legitimate examples.
I hope that this discussion helps us get closer to a good answer to that question.
When you are employed, particularly in a PR or role or any other where you speak for your employer your speech is not fully free. Even when in your own time on private accounts if you claim views and opinions as your own rather than your employer's it can still have an impact. Anonymity is valuable if you have something that you want to say without bringing your employer into the issue.
This is not to deny that there may be sexism or that it may be right to publicly stand against it but when in controversial territory speak for yourself and let PR or the CEO back you publicly if they want to and do consider the affect on ability to fulfil role and then balance the need to make a societal impact against that (or quit and speak freely).
As for the matter of the loss, I think the article is spot on. I personally would be horrified if I learned that somebody who made a silly joke I didn't like lost his/her job when if I just handled it a bit differently everything could be fine and nobody would be hurt. Now two people are out of jobs and amount of misery and bad feelings in the tech world is clearly increasing. And that's in open source where the thing that brings people together supposed to be helping each other and making the world better together. Everybody lost here, big time.
> 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 reinforces someone else's preconceived notion of your gender. Do you really think someone who already sees women as uppity b-tches would suddenly change their tone just because you don't adhere to their stereotype? No, they're going to write you off as an exception. "No no, you're not like them! You're one of the good ones!" But as soon as you do something they don't like? "What a fucking b-tch. This just proves women don't belong in tech. etc etc"
However, I'm a guy. I don't really have the right to tell you how you should think about your own oppression, much like how no one has the right to tell Adria how she should have handled calling those two guys out— aside from doing something illegal, which posting a photo on Twitter most certainly is not.
I guess what I'm saying is that I agree everyone lost, but one person lost a hell of a lot more than anyone else. That guy whose name we still don't know? He's gotten job offers. Play Haven, the place that actually fired him? Unscathed. Adria? Constant harassment, rape and death threats, and now presumably fired from her job while her former employer is being DDoS'd. All because she posted a picture of some guys on Twitter.
Think about that the next time a thread comes up about the sexism women face in the programming community. You can't write it off as a bunch of trolls this time, because a lot of the backlash was directly from HN.
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.
If it didn't start because of her gender, it most certainly became about her gender.
So what you are saying is that the insults did not start because of her gender, but the type of insults used are.
Peoples vocabulary when it comes to insults are limited. The average west person's vocabulary when it comes to insults are built on sexism, racism, agism, religious hatred, and homophobia. If we go east, nationality also pops in. If we go middle east, religious hatred starts to take a more prominent form. This is quite a large social problem, and is no where close limited to the technical crowd. People on hacker news a people too, and they are thus limited in their insult vocabulary like everyone else.
Thankfully, people who use such insults are commonly down voted and/or removed. That's the community, dealing with bad behavior with the tools given to us.
Last, I thought I would go and check and do some searches for feminist in those threads. The three largest thread are 5419071, 5415256 and 5410515. Neither one has a single comment calling Adria a feminist. Not a single one. Maybe you should go and re-read them instead of throwing down false statements?
That said, I don't think that Adria is making off worse here because she's a woman, or because of inherent sexism in the community - she's making off worse because she was the aggressor, and because she decided to pick a fight and decided to go all-in on it. She's a bully, and if there's anything that the nerdosphere hates with a burning passion, it's a bully.
The guy she photographed privately apologized and then publicly published an apology defending Adria. He's done his make-good on this. Adria, on the other hand, has apparently determined she's going down with this ship, and is riding it all the way to the bottom. If she's not willing to compromise and is instead determined to be a martyr, it's difficult to dredge up sympathy that she's getting a harder bargain than the guy she decided to pick on.
WRT her not apologizing for posting his photograph: What do you think would happen if she did? She's been fired, she's been threatened with rape and with death, she's been harassed on a constant basis since this began. Do you think her apology will have any effect? Look at how her (rather benign and polite) comment was received: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5399047 Scroll down and look at all those dead comments. Do you think her coming out now and saying, "I'm so sorry for publishing your photograph" would do anything?
I'd like to add, where is the lynch mob against these guys that their photograph was supposed to cause? I see a lot of people saying "you're publicly shaming them!" and "you tried to get a witch hunt going!" but... there wasn't one. She was just posting their photograph, and nothing in the public sphere happened to them. Only one guy was fired, and no one knew about that until he went and made an account on HN himself and said it.
both parties have had time to inspect their actions, both appear to be sorry, i believe that adria owes the developer an apology for an internet level attack - because thats what it is. she does not owe an apology for objecting to the comment and mr hank has made it clear he's seen his error.
i hope we all learn from this, and move on. our profession might be younger than most white collared professions, but have to be better than this, we all have to be.
If programming teaches anything, it's that common sense is not something that actually comes easily. The better term perhaps is 'good sense'. And with changing environments, it's easy to lose sight of what is good sense, in different situations. Anyway, if the net result will be that a lot of people will be talking to people first if they have issues, and being more careful about their conversations, and more sensitive generally, then there might actually be a kind of hidden, but great, good outcome to it all.
That's not gender equality though, that's positive discrimination. I think conferences should try to get the best speakers available regardless of their gender.
"She didn’t get the developer in question fired"
She is clearly partly responsive for the company's reaction to the "incident".
"How it Could Have Gone"
The best alternative future is of course clear: act like an adult in a conference. If you think an overheard joke about "dongles" is not to your liking, then too bad. It's rude trying to control other people.
So, yes, I suspect strongly there was a good reason for Adria Richards to be offended.
The firing by her company and the reaction of the community just left me speechless. Just plain sad. Why the dev in question needed to be fired is also questionable to me.
Ashamed to belong to this crowd. Unfortunately.
The situation resolved itself in a way that demonstrated that the community is tolerant of political correctness slip ups, and intolerant of those that blow them up out of proportion. But please, y'all... don't take it as a license to make puerile jokes. A little bit of extra sensitivity may be appropriate for a while.
What a cowardly overreaction.
Wait... what? is that sexist? or ironic? I can't tell anymore these days. Should I be offended by that?
As simple as that.
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 guilty) when he is a non-public employee. He should not just focus on termination (long odds) but also defamation of character and, unless they give the best of references, tortious interference. He ought to play hardball. Oh, whoops. Not sure I can say that either.
This nonsense about "offensive jokes" is ridiculous and distracts people away from the real sexism. I think we should care more about women earning 77 cents on the dollar and having an unfairly hard time recovering their career progress after maternity than about an occasional dongle joke. There are real problems and whatever Adria just tripped on is not one of them.
If they have standards of conduct (probably codified in some employee manual) there are probably contingencies for this exact circumstance which allow them to fire him.
No court would consider him guilty of anything for a joke about a dongle.
I doubt his company had a sexual harassment policy that was substantially more aggressive than what the law provides.
If she asked him to stop, and he kept going, then I'd say that he did something wrong. If he made a dick joke, then no. People make dick jokes in semi-private conversations. Women do, men do, because dicks can be funny. If she says "I wish you wouldn't make jokes like that around me", then he should have stopped and would be in the wrong, but I've seen no evidence of that.
The termination suit is uncertain. It's far from a slam dunk, obviously, especially since he admitted making comments that he considered wrong and embarrassing. Bad move to discuss this in the public so soon. He should be able to get defamation, at least with good enough odds to get a settlement that'll cover him till he gets his next job, given what PlayHaven's management said about the termination and about him.
I'm not an employee of playhaven, but I'm sure new employees sign employment agreements. Usually those agreements reference standards of conduct and that violations can result in termination. The court would have to establish that the employment agreement is null and void, which is a much harder challenge.
"I doubt his company had a sexual harassment policy that was substantially more aggressive than what the law provides."
What we don't know is if employees of playhaven complained about his banter. If they did, and he was informed and asked to stop, then it's his fault.
"He should be able to get defamation"
He might get defamation from her but not from PlayHaven.
(a) mr-hank did or said something sexually inappropriate. (He lost ground by admitting some degree of guilt on HN. Otherwise, it'd all be hearsay and he could say he was just talking about a literal dongle.)
(b) mr-hank's conduct was so bad that there was no choice other than to fire him: "having to let this employee go". It wasn't we decided to fire him. It was we had to fire him. Important distinction, and quite likely, technically false. They probably fired him to save face, not because of an objective violation of any law or ethical principle that left them no other option.
It's not a clear-cut case, and it's less so in the light of his HN admission, but he can certainly argue that the press release (a) misrepresents his behavior, (b) in a way that will damage his reputation and future employability.
He has a lot of options here. He may settle for an amazing reference and introductions to investors. Or he might get a six-figure sum out of it. Or he might walk away. Depends what he wants.
PlayHaven fucked up big time. These companies (especially PlayHaven; SendGrid has more of a case) should be more embarrassed than the people involved.
Honest question: if you essentially blackmail someone for an "introduction to investors" what makes you think the person introducing doesn't pull them aside before or after and say "this guy basically threatened to sue me if I didn't introduce him to you"? I have to imagine anyone in that position would likely do that, you could never prove they did it, and the investors would likely in no way take you seriously. That seems like the worst possible parlay I can imagine.
You get that in the settlement contract, two-way non-disparagement including your right to see any communication about you, that must be furnished in writing.
That's impossible to perfectly enforce, but if you suspect he's talking off the books, you trap him and hit hard for breach of contract. He should know that you intend to be checking. He should expect that and be careful. It's your job to make that so. You might not be able to catch all cases (he might say things to people he really trusts but not to everyone) but you can have some degree of a chilling effect on negative communication of the sort you described.
Also, what's better for him, once the contract is signed:
1. Make the introduction and leave it alone, or:
2. Make the introduction, then backtrack, making himself look inconsistent and weak to that investor? ("Yeah, I wasted your time, and here's why...")
He cares about his image in front of that investor, and will probably prefer (1). This assumes he doesn't hate your guts, which he might. That's a danger of doing the right thing.
What if the joke were "Why did the chicken cross the road? To get to the other side!" and she said that jokes about chickens made her uncomfortable. Is he obliged to stop telling dumb chicken jokes?
I see this case as two people and two companies who acted like children and both lost their jobs and look bad in the community, respectively. Some unfunny man made a joke to his co-worker because he thought it might have eased the social tension that comes from traveling, lodging, and attending a conference with another person over so many hours. An overzealous woman took offense to an overhead comment and saw it more constructive to bring attention to the public conversation that happens on twitter rather than the public conversation happening in that room because it was a more comfortable way to make sense of how she felt.
We're humans and we naturally want to surround ourselves with people who think, act, joke, argue with, and support other people like we do. It's pretty easy to never have to deal with groups we don't agree with on the internet. It's the reason swarms of misogynists got together on the internet to hate Adria and say she represented all the other women that they hate, and to call her awful names and issue a DDOS attack against her parent company.
Both of these companies looked past the human error in all of this, and enforced their zero-tolerance policies, and just fired both of them. This whole thing is a big deal because the other people we align ourselves with and allow to represent us (be it as employees, or pythonistas, or dirtbag misogynists) are making it really hard to connect on personal levels, and really easy to generalize and dehumanize issues into meaningless black or white distinctions.
If someone finds my breathing offensive, am I an asshole if I keep breathing?
I'm specifically ignoring the action of the companies, the firings and all that, because honestly, while I haven't heard the specific joke in question, it really doesn't sound offensive to me, and it seems as though Adria just decided to be offended by it, and while I'm wary of making assumptions (and even mr hank himself seems apologetic), I can't help but be thankful that it wasn't something I said. I was at PyCon, had conversations, and might have even made a joke or two. I don't think I said anything that might have come off offensive to anybody, but given how innocuous this whole thing seems to me, as somebody who admittedly hasn't followed the story, I just can't help but feel some great travesty happened.
When I do offend people, I often like to probe as to _why_ they're offended. In my experience, most people seem to be incapable of defining any concrete reasons as to why a given statement is offensive other than circular, "it's offensive because it's offensive" reasoning.
I think if someone said "Could you stop using words containing "e"? Such words hurt my brain." I think I would.
If someone said "Quit your "e" words, you bad guy!" I'd be less inclined to. "Words with the letter "e" are bad words, and you need to stop using them" even less (the difference between these two being hypocrisy).
Either way, I find it highly unlikely that I would even try to craft e-less sentences, regardless of how offensive someone might find it.
I imagine you're capable of understanding why they might find it offensive and acting accordingly depending on the context, which is the real issue. Whether YOU find it offensive is just beside the point, as it's a given that a person doesn't stand around saying or doing things that they find offensive. Whether you're capable of evaluating the other person's point of view is the key. (I bet you probably are)
If you can see why they'd find it offensive and continue doing it, you're pretty much by definition being an asshole. That's not a moral judgment, I think it's just descriptive...
You're right that there are more serious problems to deal with, but feigning offense isn't helping the situation.
What we should focus on is the terrible response from the tech community towards Adria. 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. Let's focus on that and denigrate those comments, not some random crude comments a couple guys said in private.
The repo forking was, though informal, a thoroughly unpurient and non-sexual comment that she read meaning into.
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.
(I just had to, I'm sorry guys)
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.
It's more productive not to muddy the waters though: it's not like there are only a handful of ways to insult someone.
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.
I don't necessarily think that response is justified when no offense is actually meant. But the point is that there has been an identifiable trend in our language towards moving away from gender-specific terms for roles that shouldn't otherwise have a relevance to gender.
I'd argue this movement is overdue for epithets. I think "asshole," "asshat," "assclown," really anything in the venerable ass family, makes for an ideal gender-neutral epithet. We should use these more often!
Edit: typo
So a sincere question: Why would someone be offended to be described as a waitress?
I find server to refer to a waitress and waiter a really odd term, almost de-humanising but that might just be a cultural difference.
Most of the French grammar bits have been discarded in quotidian speech long ago; how often do you hear the subjunctive voice used in English?
English is distinct from other Germanic languages, though, in the same way. Most European languages of any stripe are gender-heavy while English mostly applies grammatical gender mostly only to vehicles and individual sexually dimorphic animals.
She published this joke about sexual humiliation from the same conference:
https://twitter.com/adriarichards/status/312265091791847425
And the company she was envangelising for on that twitter feed thinks that a visual joke about photocopying your genitals is not inappropriate for their jobs pages:
http://i.imgur.com/uWc8P39.png
I understand that speaker and context make all the difference, but she made a joke about sexual humiliation to thousands, and then, at the same conference, got offended by overhearing joke conflating dongles to genitals.
I agree with you that resorting to sexual slurs is immensely counterproductive and makes one look stupid, but I can also understand why angry people would reach for them, since this is in the line of the discussion. Understand, but not excuse.
Still the point stays - you don't make penis jokes and then get offended by penis jokes.
And yes, sadly this is relevant, because, as much as we all have the right to decide when we are offended and not, there will always be people, consciously or not, who will game the system.
And you aren't offended by people who walk slowly in front of you - you are annoyed.
Similarly, in this context, I'd disagree: No, saying "dongle" in earshot of someone who tweets about "enhancing" the contents of one's shorts by stuffing socks down them does not give the over-hearer any "right" to be offend-ED, since it obviously isn't anything that this worthy regards as particularly offens-IVE. She obviously claimed the right to _maintain_ that she was offended, but by any sensible definition of the word she actually wasn't.
[Edit:] Duh, that's what I get for replying in a browser tab I opened ages ago -- I see someone said most of that already.
I'm not sure. We call other people names, "a dick", "a cunt" etc, all the time, including people of our own sex, if we think they deserve it.
So, if Adria deserves the verbal abuse --and judging by what she did, one can easily think she does-- then there's nothing sexist about it (even if the swear words concern sex. Just as when we call a guy a "jerk-off" there's nothing sexist about it).
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.
I value industry introspection as much as the next person, but these last 24 hours have been actively painful to me.
That's a sign you are doing it right
Besides the larger issue here is should freedom of speech (in the public sphere) include the freedom to offend. One could make a compelling argument that it should.
I still believe (hope?) that those horrible things posted are not from the tech community but rather from a few random trolls and groups like militant mens right people.
So long those posts get down voted, the community is actually dealing with the bad comments.
And much of the resulting furor has been way, way worse than that. It would have been nice to see the original apology/explanation without any firings involved anywhere.
It'll take someone cleverer than me to think how to bring where we are now to a better place. I'm discouraged about how awfully my colleagues are behaving.
It's interesting that the story is about Adria and mr-hank when, in fact, it should be about their respective companies. There are probably thousands of tweets posted everyday by people who got offended with inappropriate jokes - many of them at work. The real story is about the decisions of the respective HR / management to fire them. Aria didn't overreact more than PlayHaven HR, and she was less affected by mr-hank than by the SendGrid CEO laying her off. These people took the real decisions and they're hardly in the public eye.
I'm ashamed of companies that don't let their employees make little mistakes. If I made a mistake and the internet decided to DDoS my employer's site, I'd hope my employer thought the internet needed to cool off.
This was a pretty scary scene she perpetrated, at least to me. You can really do damage to someone with a mere tweet. Over a dumb, overheard joke? Come on. Judging by the public sentiment, it'll probably be okay for this guy. He's been incredibly gracious publicly. But had he gone home and hung himself, what story would we be talking about?
On one hand a person was having a conversation that was over-heard and caused offence. We admonish him and hold him responsible. Is this right and fair? Consensus seems to be yes. Whether it was a private conversation or not, and whether it was intended to cause offence or not is irrelevant. He spoke publicly and whatever the result was was his responsibility.
If this is the standard we want to live by then it is absolutely immaterial whether or not Adria intended for the man to be fired. She spoke publicly and his firing was the direct result of that, hence she is responsible.
What consensus? I find it absolutely horrifying and terrible that this thing happened for a private conversation (that the conversation took place in a public place means nothing. People talk privately in public places: restaurants, city parks, whatever, offices, all the time).
And judging from the comments I've seen, most people agree.
Only Adria spoke in public: on twitter and her blog, and intending the posts to reach a wide audience.
Both are bad, but in the first instance you cause suffering and income loss for the dependent members also (kids).
A guy can even sleep for a while in some friends house (or in his car, or under a bridge) until he gets another shot to paying the rent. A guy with three small kids, not so much.
You single guys supporting your parents or supporting people you're not married to (for whatever reason) or sending money back home to help out, your families are invisible.
One could argue that someone with a spouse has a bigger safety net than a single person -- which is actually true and is a contributor to the fact that married men have higher life expectancy than single men -- but it's easier to make assumptions. I'm sure someone will read this and argue that "on average married men need the job more"; I'd like to remind them that this is so because we (society) make it that way through paying men more, expecting men to be primary breadwinners, making childcare so *&^%ing expensive that it makes sense for the lower-paid parent to stay home, spreading elder-care responsibilities unequally.... The system does have its logic: someone's got to do the work, after all!
I'm a developer who is single making a decent salary in the Bay Area, but I also have sent a significant portion of my earnings last year to family who have not faired as well in the economic downturn of the past few years.
Just because someone is single with no kids doesn't mean nobody depends on them.
I know I might now sound heartless, but I struggle to find any sympathy when a bully gets bullied. And while I don't wish anyone to lose their job nor receive death threats, this isn't the first time Adria has bullied individuals nor organizations. Quite frankly, she has a history of being unprofessional and a bully. So while I don't wish the backlash on anyone -not even her- I also can't help thinking "what goes around comes around".
Sorry if that makes me sound heartless. I generally have a lot of time for people (even those who I don't like). But after a childhood of being bullied for being different (read: nerdy), I have zero respect for those who choose to bully my nerdy peers (be them male, female, American, Indian, Chinese, gay or straight - i couldn't care less about that stuff; we're all nerds. But if they're a bully, then my respect for them ends).
A tweet ratting out people for having a personal conversation she eavesdropped on. With their picture and everything.
And for what? For something that was absolutely not her fucking business.
Also telling is what she didn't do:
1) She didn't complain to them. 2) She didn't ask them to stop (if they were talking loud). 3) She didn't ask the conference organizers to take some action. 4) She didn't post a generic tweet/blogpost with her opinion on the incident without naming names.
So, no, she didn't just "post a tweet". She is as much responsible for the guy getting fired as his manager.
And she didn't even apologize (at least for the getting him fired part).
For all I know this could very well be PR and damage control from her. I have a hard time believing she had no idea this was a possible and probable consequence of her posting of this picture. This is not an uncommon outcome.
Of course this has a significant potential for HR to do PR and distance themselves from their employee in an attempt to save the company image and avoid a potential pro-feminist backlash. Though I agree play haven overreacted, from their despicable business activity it's not that surprising, and past similar experiences points towards this as almost predictable and expected.
But for a dev evangelist, this was highly inconsiderate and irresponsible thing to do, it looks like she didn't care about the consequences of what she did, and got fired over it. Which makes sense too, as explained by sendgrid here: http://blog.sendgrid.com/a-difficult-situation/ she did it all wrong, made her employer look bad, had the opposite effect of what her job position asks for, render herself ineffective at her job in the future, and inadvertently endangered her employer business.
* given the employees a formal reprimand, which would stink up the personnel file but probably be harmless, or
* fired the employee, but with a decent severance package (1.5 * expected job search time for that position) including two-way non-disparagement.
Discussing the termination in a press release would not have happened, as it shouldn't. You should only discuss a termination in high-profile cases of severe ethical wrongdoing by important officers. Otherwise, you shut the fuck up about it.
There was no ethical wrongdoing by mr-hank and he was not an important officer. I don't think he deserved to be fired. In fact, I think it was fucking ridiculous. Adria Richards was in the wrong (I'd call it mild-to-moderate wrongdoing, myself) and in a more high-profile role, so I think the termination was justified, but the public disclosure I am less comfortable with.
Discussing the termination in a press release would not
have happened, as it shouldn't.
https://www.facebook.com/adriarichards
e.g. the one on March 14th where she's holding a card that says, "Eating all of the cookies before the AIDS bake-sale."
It doesn't matter who said the offensive comments. It's true that they're all offensive. It does matter that he apologized, and she didn't. That shows a profound lack of moral judgement, or an inability to be self reflective, or a hostility for the truth.
To further refine the point (possibly what you meant in your penultimate clause), it's not ad hominem when the attack on the man in question is germane.
If I say "I am a good candidate for US President", and you say "You don't even know how many US States there are", it's an attack on me ("the person", that is the arguer), but it's totally relevant, and thus not an ad hominem attack in the sense of the logical fallacy.
To bring it back to the case at hand, if someone says "Adria's wrong that it's offensive, because if she says that then she's a hypocrite, because she says offensive things", that's tu quoque (and yes, ad hominem). Murderers are not incapable of identifying other murderers!
But for one thing, ericb makes a good point that hypocrisy is suggestive that she might not have been genuinely offended, which plays some role in this story.
Moreover, hypocrisy plays a complicated and not-entirely-fallacious role in circumstances where we disagree about acceptable behaviour. If Adria's claim is that double-entendres are inherently unprofessional behaviour, but I disagree, one basis for disagreement is to cite community standards, and Adria's own behaviour seems likely to be behaviour that she will accept as not-abhorrent. She could argue "yeah, it was repugnant of me to do that, just as it was repugnant of this man to make a dongle joke", which would mean she was a hypocrite, but the hypocrisy would not affect her argument (unless some other part of her argument required her to assert that she's a virtuous person). Or she could argue that only privileged groups can offend (as she apparently has about racism, much as this argument disgusts me), and insofar as she was persuasive about this, she might evade the accusation of hypocrisy and also the impact on her argument.
I assert that it's a sign of mental laziness to hold hypocrisy as a great evil, in general. I think evildoers who think their transgression is evil are less evil than evildoers who think it's just fine and facilitate it in others. Even though the former are hypocrites and the latter are not. (And if, at some point, I accuse someone of hypocrisy, it will make the preceding statement by me no less true!)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque
Ad hominem does not require the accusations to be baseless; it's usually more effective if they aren't. It's true that she appears to have character flaws and is apparently hypocritical. I personally don't respond well to blatant hypocrisy either. However, the fallacy is to connect the hypocrisy to the question of whether or not the guys were being sexist and whether her outburst was appropriate. That question can be answered on its own. I'm not standing up for what she did here, but it's more like, if I did the same thing as her but wasn't a hypocrite, would that be okay? I hope not.
Waaaait a second... isn't that http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirming_the_consequent?
(H -> !S) -> (!H -> S) // false (this is what you mean)
(H <-> !S) -> (!H -> S) // true
But besides being wrong, I guess I was also hinting at something else, which is that if you accept this one fallacy (tu quoque), you are probably implicitly accepting this other fallacy (I think it might have a different name than affirming the consequent, but they're related). That wasn't clear with my use of the phrase "subtle implication" and I didn't realize this either.
She argues that the joke was offensive. Her evidence was that she was offended. Evidence that her concept of offendedness is flawed does argue against the offensiveness of the joke.
Had she asked three people sitting near her if they were offended, and they had said yes, then she would no longer be a part of the argument and her hypocracy would not be relevant. But she didn't so it is.
Plenty of people are claiming it wasn't sexism, but it seems like it's not a large enough number of people for you to dismiss her hypocrisy as irrelevant.
The causal network looks like this:
S->O
|
V
D->A
|
V
H
S=sexism
O=other people being offended
A=Adria being offended
D=Adria being dishonest
H=Adria being hypocritical
It's like how flying saucer cultists being visibly crazy is evidence against flying saucers if their statements were the evidence in the first place, but if you had actual radar tracks, then it wouldn't matter.
It does seem to me that when you say A is evidence for S, even though your diagram only has S -> A, that you're just affirming the consequent. That is, given P -> Q and Q, claiming P is true.
So, my position is, she's a hypocrite, she got offended, obvious character flaws, etc. But whether or not there was sexism can only be determined by looking at both sides of the description of events that we have. For the most part, it seems people are saying that it isn't sexism, and that it would have to be specifically degrading to women.
I don't think the flying saucer analogy applies, because nobody is disputing the events that took place, people are only disputing whether there was sexism, i.e. what the meaning of the events was. To me it's more like, crazy person sees something fly overhead, claims it was a flying saucer and the beginning of an alien invasion, and proceeds to escalate the situation, when everyone else who looks at the data after the fact says it was just a plane.
At any rate, barring a conversion one way or the other to the truth of A -> S and !A -> !S, I think this is at a standstill, but it was an interesting discussion, so thanks.
As for concluding !S, most statements aren't sexist. In the absence of meaningful evidence for S, we should conclude !S (or rather, p(S)<.1).
I understand and agree with your analysis except for one point: as I understand it, the exact text of the joke has not been published, sadly preventing post mortem evaluation.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5398681
http://butyoureagirl.com/14015/forking-and-dongle-jokes-dont...
However, if that description isn't enough (it is for me), I'd much rather accept Adria's oversensitivity and injustice-seeking behavior as applicable character flaws. As opposed to her hypocrisy, those things really do make her a bad judge of what is and isn't sexist, because they generate false positives.
Her hypocrisy is also galling because of her response to the events, but that still doesn't affect her claim that she took appropriate action, because it's a generic claim about any woman in that situation, and doesn't rely on any of her character flaws.
Okay, that is as refined as it gets for me, I think. I did come to see how I was implicitly accepting an ad hominem argument without realizing it (the one about oversensitivity), so thanks again.
I think her position, which was originally extremely weak, has been reinforced by the large misogynistic response. She's a public speaker, and once people forget about her offense, she'll roll this into five years of lunches, keynotes, corporate re-education, and books.
This backlash has given her a level of credibility as an expert on gender-based harassment that she would not be able to attain on her own merits. She needs no academic background after this. She needs no list of petty "I thought of a four year old girl..." stories.
Right, like Joan of Arc's [1] was, after she got burned at the stake.
The inconsistency claimed here was an argument against the credibility of the claimed offense. "Offense" is not a objective conclusion of a rational argument, it is a subjective state. Inconsistency in the part of the person claiming the subjective response is a legitimate basis for challenging the claim of offense, and isn't a form of ad hominem fallacy because it isn't challenging the argument being made because of the hypocrisy of the arguer, it is challenging the fact claim in the premise of the argument, by presenting factual evidence.
Remember when we meet the Lion in the Wizard of Oz? Hyper-aggression and hyper-sensitivity go hand in hand. It doesn't make the hyper-sensitivity untrue in some way, but it also doesn't positively or negatively affect any arguments the Lion might have about the existence of abuse - they'll hold water on their own if they can.
I mean, the whole purpose of argument is objective reasoning, right? I thought this was primarily a discussion about whether or not there was sexism involved. All we can really say subjectively is that she got offended and apparently overreacted. Whatever she claims her emotions to be, they are valid claims.
> "That we occasionally violate our own stated moral code does not imply that we are insincere in espousing that code."
You can read the full segment on hypocrisy here: http://steveedney.wordpress.com/2006/11/08/hypocrisy-relativ...
Me too because hypocrisy is clearly a form of intellectual dishonesty in itself and I don't want to lose time with intellectually dishonest people. As simple as that.
If someone I know is a torturer and doesn't know I know it and tells me: "torturing people is bad", I'm not going to argue with him. I'm not going to think: "his point may be wrong because he's intellectually dishonest so torturing may actually be acceptable".
No, actually I'd disrespect this person even more: a first time because he's a torturer and a second time because of his hypocrisy.
I've got zero things to learn from such person, no matter how true or wrong their poisonous words are.
There are way enough knowledgable and honest people out there to learn things from.
Please do continue to use it.
F^ck hypocrites.
I think I understand where you are coming from, but personally, by your definition, I don't know anyone who's not a hypocrite.
It's just a simple fact that the conscious mind is not in 100% control of an individual for every minute of their life, and furthermore, that even if it was in control, that it would never make a decision that was contrary to some position they've espoused in the past.
Point is, maybe ease up on people a little. Hypocrisy should be limited to people who espouse one thing publicly, and espouse the opposite thing privately. Not merely laps in the application of an honestly held belief.
https://twitter.com/adriarichards/status/312265091791847425
I have trouble seeing her shaming behavior as anything more than self-serving drama.
But at a "hacker" thing (DC7-13, etc.), not at a developer conference or professional event. There probably is some evolving standard of conduct now that things which were formerly mostly underground are now essentially big business.
No?
Oh, I guess it isn't the same thing at all then.
Nobody dragged Adria anywhere and forced her to listen to the penis jokes. She just overheard them behind her. The chances of me overhearing that group of people on my way to the bathroom are comparable to the chances of me overhearing the penis jokes. It might be even more likely that I'd overhear the Cards Against Humanity game.
Although her hypocrisy has no bearing on the sexism question, it doesn't stop it from being hypocrisy. Granted, her name probably doesn't need any more smearing, but boy did she keep asking for it - ass clowns? Really?
I see people post this a lot without understanding the point of what she's saying. Adria subscribes to the belief that "racism = prejudice + power", which is basically to say that, yes, black people can be hateful towards white people and yes, racial discrimination does occur within the black community, but RACISM is the result of systematic oppression over hundreds of years.
The reason this distinction is made is because black people discriminating against white people is a response to the racism that they face every day, which is very different from white people thinking that blacks are inherently inferior and should have their rights stripped from them.
Please, educate yourselves on what Adria's saying. I know it all seems so foreign, but beyond the fog, there is a very real and very true message that should be heard and studied.
Racial hatred is despicable in all forms. Those who push for such an artificial redefinition of racism would have us forget this.
One could argue it gives minorities license to say as many racist things as they want to and claim it isn't racist. It's an argument constructed so that one side wins by default.
"Minorities saying racist things", by this theory, doesn't hold a candle to, say, the fact that minorities are more frequently imprisoned, more often pulled over/searched illegally/beaten by law enforcement agents, more often feared, more often treated with bias in the workplace or dating world, and on and on and on and on and on. Racism isn't "the act of saying something bigoted", it's the acknowledgement of a systemic bias based on a person's skin color. And it doesn't deny that bigotry exists in both directions – it just insists that to focus on bigotry is to miss the deeper issue.
This is relevant to this thread, because gender inequality works much the same way. What Adria did was a dick move, and I think her actions were and continue to be rude as hell. But she acts within a greater context of sexism and misogyny in the programming world – hell, in America at large – and to completely disregard how shitty an environment exists for many women is to miss that Adria's behavior stems from a crappy reality. Doesn't make what she did any less inappropriate, perhaps, but it suggests that maybe there are issues here more important than what she did which may be more worth focusing on. I mean, any ills resulting from her behavior have been more than counteracted by the death and rape threats that have been fired her way – she may have started this, but the backlash against her has been obscenely disproportionate.
I think having a definition of racism to be "discriminate against somebody else due to skin colour", as well as a notion of "institutional racism", which is the same thing but on a systemic level, would make more sense than the more academic definition of racism.
The concept you describe is indeed important and should be understood, absolutely, but don't blame the reader for the authors failure to communicate. Especially when that failure is mostly intentional as part of a struggle to redefine a word that has significant power. A very useful tactic when it succeeds, but that battle has been lost in this case for quite a while.
Personally I'm quite happy with the common definition of "racism" because the belief you describe is too tied up with the dated concept of "race" (which doesn't exist in reality) and means that the determining factor in whether an action is "racist" is the skin colour and ancestry of those involved, neither of which is under the control of any participants. The other definition means it is determined by asking if the action was prejudiced and if that prejudice was related to race.
There is a very good point to make here that the more common definition can make it more difficult for people to understand the effects of generations of oppression can have on a class of people, even on that society generally considers overt racial prejudice to be unacceptable. The definition you describe does not have this flaw.
For what it's worth, if I am treated in a prejudiced manner by person A, and I treat person B in a prejudiced manner, and the only thing connecting A to B is race, that too is racism.
Or in simpler terms, two wrongs don't make a right.
Presumably Adria is claiming to be without power. She has the power to get someone fired with a single tweet. She has so much power she's gone mad with it.
Therefore, no, she cannot expect her audience to adhere to her particular definition of racism since it is highly non-standard outside of certain limited circles.
For what it's worth, I also happen to think her "definition" of racism is rubbish. It makes all kinds of assumptions about power dynamics in a given situation and injects motivations into actors where none are known.
SendGrid is probably home free on firing Adria Richards, because she did something objectionable-- harassed someone and cost him his job. PlayHaven, on the other hand, doesn't have a defensible cause for firing him. This would be even more true if he hadn't admitted to the comment as Mr Hank. Then he'd have been fired on her hearsay.
Termination suits often come down to image, especially of the employer's conduct. An employer that's cooperative and fair usually wins. An employer that seems dodgy (by, for example, firing someone on hearsay and not cooperating with proceedings against the person who supplied the information) is at risk, and looks bad even if victorious.
This is a very gray area of law, at least in practice. There are few termination cases that are clearly black or white. That's why severance packages and those hideous PIPs exist.
Firing someone without cause or even for a demonstrably faulty cause is not a tort, Michael.
I haven't seen this in law but I worked for a very large company in a "right to work" state and this is how they behaved in all things. If you were fired you would never be told why. If you called for a reference you would be told the length of employment and last position held. Nothing more. I don't think they went to all that trouble for no reason.
Black: firing those who intend to unionize, firing with discriminatory intent, retaliation (including against protected insubordination such as whistleblowing), firing people because of disabilities that can be reasonably accommodated, firing people because they disclose compensation (anti-unionbusting provision), firing people for making legitimate use of HR or internal-mobility processes (a subcase of retaliation), firing people in retaliation for opposing harassment.
Gray: firing people who fail socially (when there's a record, in the company, of allowing internal transfer), firing people for ethically justifiable (but not explicitly protected) insubordination, firing people whose health issues interfere with the job, firing people you don't like.
In the US, most Gray cases are not considered tortious. You're correct. The burden of proof is technically on the employee to prove that it's a Black case.
If he knows what he's doing, however, the employee can establish enough Gray-Blackness that the company will desire to settle.
Typical firing example: Bob doesn't get along with his boss, Mark, who suspects Bob would rather be on another team. Mark gives him shitty performance reviews and he's flushed out. Looks like a non-tortious Gray case; the performance assessments are inherently subjective, but there's nothing about this that entitles Bob to legal protection. Even an inaccurate performance review is non-tortious managerial incompetence, right? Well, it's not that clear. For one thing, most companies make performance reviews part of the transfer packet. Then, a negative review can be construed as harassment: interference with work performance. Part of the employee's job is to cultivate internal relationships and that makes it harder.
Let's say that the performance review happened on February 1, with Bob being fired on March 15. Bob establishes that, in fact, he met with Alice (manager of another team) on January 24. Bob was, in fact, discussing internal mobility. He has a chain of emails to prove what was discussed.
That's not an uncommon thing for people to do when they don't get along with a boss, nor is it uncommon for bosses to pre-emptively fire flight risks. Now, Bob has a legitimate case for retaliation. He was making legitimate use of internal mobility processes and trying to build relationships within the company, which can reasonably be considered part of his job description, and he was punished for it with a negative review.
If, as is typical, his performance reviews are part of the transfer packet, his negative performance review constitutes harassment insofar as it interferes (tortiously) with his relationship with Alice.
Bob's claim is much stronger, if he has the paper. If he emailed himself (because, after being fired, he's lost access to his work account) copies of the relevant documentation, he has enough paper to initiate a discovery process. Even that, most companies would prefer to avoid.
But your use of the word "retaliation" is also suspect. "Retaliation" in employment law means a demotion or termination in response to an exercise of other employment law rights, like a sexual harassment claim. You can't claim "retaliation" when your boss is an asshole and deliberately tries to screw you. In the US, absent a contract that says otherwise, your boss can do that.
Your white/black stuff looks reasonable, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say that your "grey" category is what you want employment law to be, not what it is. I'm just an employer though, not a lawyer.
At this point I'm settled on the notion that there is no interesting theory of law I was unaware of that would give the fired Pycon dev any leverage in procuring a severance. You can be fired for any reason, a bullshit reason, or no reason at all. He was. End of story.
Thanks for the discussion.
The actual wording is: "The result of this investigation led to the unfortunate outcome of having to let this employee go." It's not explicitly stated what (if anything) they determined he did; just that the end result was firing him.
Actually I am willing to shoulder more, as had been men's ordained role for quite a while (in exchange women risk their lives for childbirth), but to then be derided and spat on is galling.
WSJ: there is no male-female wage gap http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870441510457625...
Why the pay gap is a sham: http://www.businessinsider.com/actually-the-gender-pay-gap-i...
Women in tech earn more than men: http://www.businessinsider.com/women-in-tech-make-more-money...
"People just don't understand how hard it is to be a white male!"
I only learned about /r/mensrights yesterday, checked it out but didn't like their attitudes at all. I think it is important to counter misguided feminism, though.
But that doesn't excuse making a post that could have been word-for-word copied out of mensrights about how downtrodden we are, complete with quotes to claim the wage gap doesn't exist. I'm all for countering misguided extremists from any side.
By the way, you're quoting articles from Rupert Murdoch's WSJ to support your point? Didn't they have an article that claimed that the WHO and Berkley reports were wrong and the US (pre Obama care) had the greatest health care in the world? Yea, not believing anything from WSJ.
And I argue against misinterpreting a statistic here, not particular feminists.
I wonder why you are so emotionally invested in the belief that women are being oppressed? And what is absurd about men wanting rights?
One issue I have with the "discrimination causes the wage gap" theory is that it prevents looking into the real causes. WSJ was just something that came up yesterday. I am not from the US so don't know their history (similar wage gap in my country, though). Using common sense, too - and researching more.
Pretty much everyone who studies the issue concludes that there is a gap. It is likely that if anyone is misinterpreting a statistic it would be a laymen like you or I, not experts in the respective fields.
>I wonder why you are so emotionally invested in the belief that women are being oppressed?
I'm not emotionally invested in anything but the truth.
>And what is absurd about men wanting rights?
Obviously nothing. But /r/mensrights is a well known group of women-haters [1] who love to spout off one-off anecdotes to show how men are "actually the exploited group" and other such nonsense. There are cases where men get a raw deal (divorce court in the US comes to mind) but they are by far the minority.
[1] 2 seconds of searching: http://manboobz.com/2013/01/28/the-mens-rights-subreddit-a-n...
As for /r/mensrights I really can't comment. I do think men have a problem, though.
Divorce court: aren't divorces rather common?
BTW, your post reads like a tour of logical fallacies. You can do better I'm sure.
Says the guy who resorts to name-calling.
White male is the most privileged thing to be
No, being an upper middle-class white male is the most privileged thing to be.
not some down trodden, exploited minority
Think positive, maybe one day a minority might become president.
Notice I said being an idiot. Name calling would be saying that he was an idiot as a state of being. I didn't say that, nor do I believe it.
>No, being an upper middle-class white male is the most privileged thing to be.
If you have to be poor or middle class you want to be white male. Do you honestly think you'd be better off being poor and black or poor and a woman? Maybe some day we'll get there but we're not there today.
>Think positive, maybe one day a minority might become president.
Yes, one half-black person getting elected president means there is absolutely no racism of any sort (never mind all the racial motivated attacks Obama has had to deal with since before getting elected...).
Seems to me more interesting is the risk of being poor. I think you'll find that there are a lot more poor men than poor women. I guess this is the case because 90% of homeless are male, and men tend to be more prominent on the extremes (more rich men and also more poor men than rich/poor women). Feel free to research the actual data, though.
But why do they choose other professions? Do people pressure them into not choosing better paid jobs? Isn't that a symptom.
Most feminists don't "blame men", but "blame gender roles". It's just most gender roles significantly benefit a lot of men (and harm a small amount of other men).
I don't know if people have to be pressured into having more time for their family, though. I think it is more having the option vs not having the option. I'd love to have the option as a man, but in general it is a privilege of women or rich people (not having to work).
Income is just one measurement, health and life satisfactions are others. Are men really so well off if you consider those?
Also, don't know about the US, but in my country women automatically get half of what their husbands earn. So they can go to Yoga class every day and still have a good income. Are they really so bad off? (edit: yoga class sounds snarky, what I mean is: women live longer than men, priorizing health over income might play a part).
Also, if you say "pressured into bad jobs", what is the punishment for not choosing a bad job?
So any man choosing higher discomfort for more pay isn't just getting more money he's also improving his chance of finding a mate.
Meanwhile women have a smaller incentive to take discomfort since they will not get the compensation of enhanced attractiveness.
So your theory doesn't match reality.
Women do not in my experience value pay as highly and consider the (non-monetary) costs more carefully than men.
It wasn't an oppressive culture or dongle jokes that kept her out of programming, it was just the assumption by everyone around her that girls generally are not interested in computers.
Not offering someone a potential carrer path just because of their gender seems a bit opressive to me.
Sexualised content at tech events just reenforced the idea that "programming isn't for women". Imagine a woman at a tech event where ther'es a lot of straight male locaker room jokes, and the organisers do nothing ans say there's nothing wrong going on, she'll come out of it thinking tech is for men.
I don't want to make too many assumptions about someone I've never met, but from here it seems likely that it wasn't an oppressive culture that kept her out, it was the lack of enough innate interest to kick over into actively learning more about it.
If the 77% discussion makes more women reflect and choose professions with higher pay, fine. I just reject the notion of female victimhood and male oppression.
However, it might really be a bit complicated. For example to get a degree costs the same no matter if you are going to work part time or full time. So investing into higher education already is a bigger gamble for women, if they expect they might have kids at some point. I suspect women are not stupid but chose their jobs smartly.
I don't know that having all that societal pressure to make money is really a benefit for men. Women have far more options with career paths these days, and very rarely have to worry about money. It's totally socially acceptable to let their family or boyfriend support their existence. This is why you can easily find "professional artists" who write in their little blog that they "make their living" off of etsy when you can easily see they've made a total of a whopping $150 from their shop this month.
I don't think it's fair at all to blame men for women making less money than men. Most women have the luxury of being able to afford not making much (or any) money and still do whatever they feel like/not have to worry about starving/housing/etc.
> Women have far more options with career paths these days, and very rarely have to worry about money.
That's some first class trolling there.
How do you know they aren't related? What if women are being excluded from tech events due to the sexual objectification, and what if that's harming their carrer?
Now, if women are being excluded due to sexual jokes (and I'll note that the joke she responded to was specifically about comparing technology to a part of the male anatomy, not the female anatomy, so it's not objectification of women that's the issue here), then Adria's tweet here is causing the exact same problem she's crusading against.
I want to live in a world where you can make crude jokes with your work friends and not be afraid about who is listening in. Harassment shouldn't be defined by a list of taboo subjects or stupid rules. Harassment should mean intentional actions that make someone feel uncomfortable or afraid. That means there needs to be some reasonable leeway made for situations where you don't know you're making someone uncomfortable. It makes sense that we should be careful about the kind of jokes we make directly to people but we shouldn't by default have to assume that someone with absolutely zero sense of humour is listening in.
People should be free to make jokes and flirt and do whatever they like at the work place, as long as no-one minds. We have to spend half our life at work, what's the fucking point of having to be a robot the whole time? Sexual jokes aren't necessarily sexist, nor are they necessarily harassing. Neither is flirting, or kissing or flat out having sex, for that matter. (Might be inappropriate for a work environment, but doesn't have to be sexual harassment, does it?) On the other hand, if you do it in an inappropriate way, looking at someone could be genuinely terrifying harassment. I bet if you were careful and sadistic enough, you could turn any innocuous interaction into something that, over time, makes someone feel deeply uncomfortable.
Imagine if we work together. Imagine I am perfectly normal with everyone else, but when I put my reports on your desk, I slide them on gently, looking you in the eye, then I just hold them there, palm flat on the desk and I smile. I let the smile last just a second too long, then I go off and carry on being relatively normal with everyone else. I do that every single day, and each time you look less and less comfortable, and each time I either don't react or seem to enjoy your discomfort. How long would it take before that became very unpleasant for you? What kind of possible rule structure could be in place that could conceivable prevent me from doing this without requiring some communication from you? What would you ban? Looking someone in the eye and smiling for too long? How many seconds is too long? How would you time it? Moreover, how the fuck would this rule structure be able to distinguish intentional harassment from the situation where it turns out I am slightly autistic and I happen to really enjoy looking over your shoulder at your screensaver when I drop my reports on your desk?
We have to set the rules at a place of compromise and rely on explicit communication to sort everything else out. Otherwise we'll end up with segregated offices or women in fucking Burkhas or some other retarded solution to the general problem of otherwise clever people being unable to cope with social interaction.
The people in charge don't care if you transform yourself into a robot to cope with the fear, so long as they get their pound of flesh or whatever it was you promised in exchange for the job.
What he did was certainly wrong, but certainly not a firable offense. A stern warning from HR would've sufficed.
Also, I don't understand the hate and DDoS directed towards SendGrid. I think if any, PlayHaven should've been subject of it and pressured to reinstate the dev in question.
SendGrid should've been pressured to warn her, not fire her like it happened.
We commit mistakes every once in a while, and losing your job is a big punishment. It's like getting your car seized by the government for speeding 10% over the speed limit.
Unfortunately the outcome is that a message is sent that DDoS works to get people that the internet mob doesn't like fired, and that a part of the male tech community is wielding that power.
What if parts of the female tech community retaliate with a DDoS against SendGrid now?
Looks like the male privilege extends to having the resources to perform DDoS.
They had 2 devs involved that incident. One they fired. One they publicly said was a valued employee.
We will never know why they did what they did, why those devs were treated differently, and whether they had cause for their action. I personally find it hard to believe that this event would be enough cause by itself for a reasonable employer to fire an employee in good standing. Which means that some combination of these three are wrong: my belief, the claim that the employer is reasonable, the claim that the employee was in good standing.
Guess whatever combination you want - we are unlikely to ever know the truth. (Though your comment is perfectly in line with my belief.)
They fired one dev out of two, presumably as a value proposition: this was just the one thing to break the camel's back. Which is reasonable, but the issue is that it looks like they fired him entirely for the comment, which obviously has the potential to create a PR fiasco. Lo and behold...
Their entire business was under assault. They really had no choice in the matter and really are the biggest victims of the whole ridiculous ordeal.
This has all turned into farce.
I suspect the realisation that they were employing a time bomb as their developer evangelist caused them to rethink the value of employing her in that role.
This whole incident could have been averted if Adria had followed her own advice: rather than stir up foment on the Internet (the "thermonuclear option") she could simply have turned to the guys and said, "this is not cool."
Adria tries to explain that what was going on in her head was an unfortunate sequence of triggers: she's had a traumatic history, so it's to be expected that some things will "get her goat" and trigger her into irrational behaviour. In this case she apparently believed that telling these men that the jokes were not appreciated would have ended up with her being exposed to ridicule on the Internet.
So she took the obvious (to her) course of action which was a thermonuclear preemptive strike.
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.
> Looks like the male privilege extends to having the resources to perform DDoS.
Oh pull your head out of your ass. This is by far closer to give a man a hammer and every problem looks like a nail. People acted angrily with the tools they knew best.
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?
You don't??!
Note that it doesn't reflect well on them. Part of their point is how they say it. To me, this says they're being reactionary and not mindful of others, which undermines their standing.
Bad language is a useful signal in communication. In this case, especially, it's a negative signal about the poster.
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.
Another example of the glaring disparities between the sexes in tech.
It's probably not his first offense. It's more likely that this was just the straw that broke the camel's back rather than his first infraction.
>Also, I don't understand the hate and DDoS directed towards SendGrid.
4chan's politics+/b/ boards are chiefly responsible for the DDOS, as far as I know. Those guys love mob mentality and eye-for-an-eye, so it's likely their motivation was to get Richards fired rather than to redeem the guy who made the jokes.
Even if that's true (and I've got no clue either way), it's at least in retrospect turned out to be a _spectacularly_ bad PR move for them.
If they wanted him gone - they should have fired him "privately", doing something like that as such an obvious response to "internet drama" was _always_ going to be "the wrong thing". (Even it it _was_ "the last straw", they should have waited a week or two - if only just to publicly disconnect their HR processes from being twitter/forum shitstorm driven.)
| For the life of me cannot fathom why PlayHaven
| went to the extreme step of firing the dev in
| question.
|
| What he did was certainly wrong, but certainly not
| a firable offense. A stern warning from HR
| would've sufficed.
- According to CrunchBase, PlayHaven only has 50 employees. It's possible that they don't have an HR person that maybe went through some sort of training for issues like this, and instead decided to go for the approach they thought would be least likely to have fall out (e.g. people up in arms because he's not fired and they are "supporting a misogynist" or something similar).
- They could have paid for his PyCon expenses (therefore he was there representing the company), and they felt that he did a poor job representing the company.
- It's possible there were other reasons they wanted to fire him before PyCon, but this became a good excuse to act on them.
Doesn't explain why one person is still an employee while the other gentleman was canned.
"It's possible there were other reasons they wanted to fire him before PyCon, but this became a good excuse to act on them."
I strongly suspect this happened, given the comment in the PlayHaven response: "we will not comment on all the factors that contributed to our parting ways."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5418123
EDIT: clarifying that one person was not fired.
Which other gentleman got canned?
Editing parent to reflect the clarification
Had the complaint been private, it likely would have resulted in a warning from HR as you said.
Unfortunately, because Adria chose a public forum, it demanded a public response, right or wrong regardless.
EDIT: Not understanding the down-vote on my post. Someone please elaborate.
I saw the MRAs-vs-feminists going at it in at least two places on the Internet, one of them being HN. This issue was a microcosm of all their old fights and they were going to take us down with them.
The difference is that in the coding world it's something like 90% men. So of course you won't have enough women "teaming up" to make gravvy jokes about men's short appendages or whatever.
What about we stop it?
I was playing tennis with a friend the other day: two men. On the court next to our were four women. My friend was making a few jokes during pauses and being "gross". I can tell you that the four women were doing exactly the same: you can't hear it but they look at you and laugh and you know they're talking about you as meat they're going to eat or something. Because that's what women do when they look at men and laugh between them. Just ask them ffs. They can be really gross too.
Now I try not to make these jokes and sexual remarks: not because somehow I'd try not to offend the other person (honestly women can laugh as much as they want when talking about me, I don't give a frak). No, the reason I don't do this is because I've got a girlfriend and I don't want to be disrespectful to her by making sexual jokes about "wanting to fork other women's little hidden repo" or something.
It would be great if people stopped doing these lame remarks but it would be great too if women stopped playing 16 years old virgins who are never saying anything gravvy about men when between them.
I think that people who complain or argue quickly have some unresolved problem. I think this because I am one of those people and I KNOW that I have unresolved mento-emotional issues :) I know that I should be cool and appear to be agreeable all the time, but sometimes (more frequently, mornings or certain topics) it's very challenging. The payoff is so much better than bickering though.
The important thing is to realize you're being a righteous asshole. Then you can start changing.
The hateful aftermath, though, clearly should not be tolerated.
Funny that these trolls are so defensive after they got busted and photographed. They can dish it out, but they sure can't take it.
I feel sorry for mr-hank though, I hope he does better than a shitty startup like Play Haven.