Comment by largesse | Hacker News Reader

Comment by largesse | Hacker News Reader

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We all deal with the fact that we're in the middle of change, and it isn't always comfortable. Just as it wasn't comfortable for people dealing with the acceptance of homosexuals: I think everyone accepts that the word "faggot" is no longer appropriate.

Nope. That is not it. Men and women joke together freely with innuendo throughout society and most of the time it is not considered a problem. She did that exact thing on Twitter. To somehow say that a physical conference space is sacrosanct in a way that Twitter is not is ridiculous.

I think that if you look carefully, what you see is that what we term political correctness today is in actuality a new label on the old idea of chivalry. It aims toward a norm of social behavior where women are seen to require special protection in a way that men are assumed not to. They can toss away that protection and engage in banter, but men can not. This has been the norm in polite society for at least 500 years. Today, it just has different ideological window dressing.

No, context matters. Just as it is fine to be undressed when you go to bed but not when out on the street, it is fine to engage in innuendo with friends if that is what you and your friends do, or to be crass on Twitter to your followers who presumably opted in to reading your crassness (but not in @replies to people who don't follow you), but not at a professional conference in a public space. Can you understand that these situations are different?

Nope. I don't consider PyCon a "professional conference." Programming is not accountancy, or medicine. "Professional" is a word that people use to lull people into circumspect behavior leaving their basic humanity aside. Sometimes there is a good reason for it but often there isn't. In any case it's not a way of being at ease.

When I am with my close friends at a conference we speak however we like. It isn't church and it shouldn't be. But I'm sure now that I'll never go to PyCon. It's drowning in the crazy.

My sense is that this is largely generational and geographic. There's a strain of political correctness in the California area that is rampant among people in their 20s. I don't see it elsewhere in the US although I have seen it in Canada. PyCon is definitely a California conference.

I'm sure the educational system has something to do with it. It's a trend that rode the general trend in education in the 90s toward making people believe that feeling good was more important than anything and that their sensitivities were positive demands on other people's behavior. That's subsided since then in elementary education so I think this drama may be a blip.

So, you can't read then, and you also can't understand that people who are not exactly like you exist?

When you are with your close friends in public do you 'speak however you like' in such a way that it disturbs those around you? If yes, you are an asshole. The public spaces in conferences are much the same - and in the true Pythonic way (explicit is better than implicit) they even spelled out what the social norms were for the 'public spaces' at PyCon. If you call that crazy, you don't understand Pythonicity.

As for 'profession' - yes, programming is a skilled activity, and being paid to program usually involves being in a workplace with norms of behaviour - hence, a profession. You can say "I still don't consider it a profession", to which my reply is "that's nice; it still is one though".

edit: Urgh, I didn't see your edit when I posted. Your edit actually makes your post more stupid. Oh well.

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