Comment by austinz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by austinz | Hacker News Reader

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Ben was called a bigot and his rejection of the pull request was ascribed to the "principle that pronouns should in fact be gendered" (from the Joyent blog). The problem is, all of this is being extrapolated from his statement "sorry, not interested in trivial changes like that", which could be seen as a flippant dismissal of gender issues in the tech industry - or it could be simply a curt response acknowledging standard practice ('rejecting pull requests that only correct typos or comments'). Only Ben really knows Ben's intention - and he didn't clarify it in either of the long comment threads on github. (If he did make explicitly misogynistic follow-up comments please correct me; I didn't see any myself.)

Maybe he was insensitive or tone-deaf, maybe he should have made an exception (because perhaps commits like these have some sort of special significance that goes beyond simply fixing spacing issues in comments), maybe people should have talked to him and explained why others might have found his actions questionable - and, some of this did happen - but the hysterical response is really sort of scary. Wikipedia has an "assume good faith" principle - maybe something similar would be a good idea for open-source communities, so that problems and differences in opinion could be resolved before escalation into a screaming match?

Well, there you go: https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015#issuecomment-29568...

Joyent is looking worse and worse as the dust settles.

Ben: "If this is what I have to deal with, then I'd just as rather do something else."

After this all-smoke-no-flame shitstorm, one big company carrying out a character assassination and publicly wishing they could fire him and his current employer dangling a Damocles' sword over his job...I really can't blame him.

"To me as a non-native speaker, the difference between 'him' and 'them' seems academic but hey, if it gets us scores of female contributors, who am I to object?"

I sense some subtle irony in that statement.

"To the people that felt it necessary to call me a misogynist: I volunteer in a mentorship program that gets young people - especially young women - involved in technology. How many of you go out and actively try to increase the number of women in the field?"

This is sort of like the "but my best friend is black" defense, but in this case I think it demonstrates that defense is not always invalid.

Your spin attempt ignored the part where he reverted someone else's commit with a threatening message. Nobody would ge talking about it if he had simply ignored it or asked Isaac about it first.

What was the threatening message? Could you link to it?

I believe he said, 'you are chided' or something along those lines. A public reprimand is quite harsh but I wouldn't call it a threatening message.

Here's his revert message, copied from below, in the full:

"@isaacs may have his commit bit but that does not mean he is at liberty to land patches at will. All patches have to be signed off by either me or Bert. Isaac, consider yourself chided."

Refers to a procedural matter, kind of snarky. Hardly 'threatening'. Does not discuss the pronoun, content of the revert, or any content related to gender issues at all.

By the way, it's rather fatuous to refer to my comment as a 'spin attempt' just because I didn't reflexively grab my pitchfork and torch and run out to join the mob trying to crucify this developer as a incorrigible misogynist, but asked for evidence and clarification instead. Food for thought.

I would really appreciate it if acdha could explain how they view this comment as a threat. acdha made the same claim elsewhere in this thread as well.

It appears that some people are attempting to lower the bar for something to be a "threat" to be any statement made by someone they don't like (or they've been told not to like).

Just in case you didn't see my sibling comment, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6834047. The IRC comment was where I saw the most threat:

   bnoordhuis> isaacs: ^ don't ever fucking pull a stunt like that

Even with that, however, I probably shouldn't have described it as a threat – it's aggressive and confrontational but there's no explicit threat.

Between the commit wording and his comment on IRC (https://twitter.com/ArmyOfBruce/status/406802499014627328) I read that as implicitly threatening Isaac's commit bit but that was wrong. I shouldn't have stated that: it would have been more accurate to describe it as confrontational rather than a threat.

> By the way, it's rather fatuous to refer to my comment as a 'spin attempt' just because I didn't reflexively grab my pitchfork and torch and run out to join the mob trying to crucify this developer as a incorrigible misogynist

I described it as spin because it focused on the initial commit & the grammar issues rather than the way Ben chose to escalate it. Your choice of quotes and commentary focused on the beginning rather than what happened afterwards, neatly omitting the actual focus of the discussion. Perhaps that was accidental but it sure looks like an attempt to minimize the offense before criticizing the response.

Please provide evidence for 'threatening message'.

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