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Comment by pekk | Hacker News Reader

It's hard to understand how you could think that Adria Richards is representative of all "women in tech".

It's also hard to understand why you take Adria's incident as such a severe personal affront to yourself that you not only seem to want PyLadies to bite the dust, but "a part of [you] would be quite happy if [you] never saw a female in tech again." Even a sane and moderate person can see in this post a suggestion that you would like to see women actively driven out of tech - all because you are offended about Adria Richards.

With respect, please consider that your reaction to this may be strongly irrational and that the things you are saying as a result (and the Adria-unrelated places you are choosing to start a fight) may be making matters even worse.

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I am trying not to get personal here, but you are guilty of just the sort of discussion that I find both embarrassing and narrow minded.

By narrow minded I mean you are deliberately cherry picking individual points out of context and trying to imply something negative or even the opposite of the original post.

For example you say:

> " a part of you would be quite happy if you never saw a female in tech again. Even a sane and moderate person can see in this post a suggestion that you would like to see women actively driven out of tech - all because you are offended about Adria Richards."

Yet you very conveniently skip over the part where I say "a bigger part of me would love to see more women in tech".

You are also putting words in my mouth. Nowhere do I express an opinion about Adria Richards herself.

You say other things as well but I am not going to defend myself any further or hijack this thread more than I already have.

You chose this.

You chose to drag the Adria incident (unnamed) into an unrelated thread, perpetuating the toxic discussion (the one about Adria's incident) that you claim not to want to hear about. But you weren't responding to someone else here. You went there first. And you set the tone.

You chose to open with 'I actually don't quite know what to think about "Women in Tech."'

You chose to say that a part of you doesn't want to see women in tech at all. You didn't, for some reason, choose to reflect on whether this was rational or needed to be said publicly.

You chose to say that you don't want to see articles "like this." Though this article isn't about anything offensive at all.

You chose all of this. Neither your words, nor their inflammatory meaning, were made up by anyone else. Then you chose not to rethink or climb down from any of your inflammatory remarks. And you chose to respond to correction by escalating and getting personal.

That attitude is the real problem that created the Adria mess. You are the same kind of person you are complaining about. And it has nothing necessarily to do with "women in tech."

Please stop the oversensitive, resentful whining about others and take responsibility for your own choices.

I find this dramatic rhetoric off-putting. OP seemed honest and nuanced. There might be a valid point to be made that his feelings are toxic to society, in some subtle way, but I'll just echo the other people here in saying that he comes off as constructive while you appear to be saying things that sound clever to you.

I think you took the worst possible approach to engaging in this discussion.

You definitely took parts of the previous post out of context and twisted the meaning of what he claimed to feel.

So rather than spring-boarding off the range of emotions that the poster felt and being productive, you made an attempt to destroy him by disingenuously twisting the spirit of his post.

Not cool.

He didn't say it was a nice part of him. He was just being honest.

That is not an acceptable excuse for publicly saying that you wish women would not be in tech. It definitely doesn't make it any more rational to want to punish all women because you feel personally offended about the stupid actions of one person, which did not actually affect you in any way.

If this pattern of feeling irrational resentments and using them to justify inflammatory public behavior is "just being honest" then Adria Richards was also "just being honest".

Then people just shouldn't say what's on their minds? That's not a very good attitude to have if you want to gain any understanding at all of the actual state of the industry in terms of who believes what. Suppressing opinions doesn't get rid of them, but it does make them almost impossible to change, because you now have no idea not only what people think, but who holds opinions you consider worth challenging.

>Then people just shouldn't say what's on their minds?

Well, there's "shouldn't because someone said so" and "shouldn't because it's counterproductive." So maybe not?

>Suppressing opinions doesn't get rid of them

Refraining from expressing them certainly helps prevent them from spreading; there are a lot of opinions about women, blacks, etc. that I would have never formed on my own if I hadn't heard them all the time from my father while I was growing up. One of the things that helped me to grow out of those opinions was simply to not repeat them, _especially_ if I was around people who might have reinforced the opinions by agreeing with them or "defending my right to have them".

I read it as a lament that an unhappy situation had provoked unhappy thoughts. The unhappiness of the thought serves as evidence of the unhappiness of the situation.

But I agree that we should move on.

So he is unhappy because he feels bad about women not wanting to be in tech? How exactly is that reassuring to women who know that this person takes a position that women do not belong in a space that should be open for everyone and that this person will probably end up enforcing that attitude (or at least others who share the same thinking and don't have an issue enforcing that attitude).

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