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Comment by yawn | Hacker News Reader

Jakob Kaplan Moss owes PG a public apology for his behavior. The witch hunt tweets that were coming out of him without getting the facts straight are downright disheartening.

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I think Jacob's and Alex's criticisms and attacks on other communities/companies would be more relevant and credible if their own Django community would start being more inclusive, I only see one woman committer: https://github.com/django?tab=members

you can not expect to have women as core committers immediately, first step is get more women involved in community and OSS.

I don't think the work that Python/Django people are doing to get more women involved in the community can be easily ignored.

In 8 years they have got 1 woman involved in a core capacity to their community. I'm not asking for immediate results, I'm just asking for them to lead by example and to stop criticizing people who are doing a much better job at being inclusive than they are. They have a 3% rate, YC has a 15% rate of women.

At least the most notable woman and YC founder in the django community, Leah Culver, hasn't backed Jacob in any of his witch hunts. I think this says a lot about how the women in his community feel about his actions.

Just how one woman feels.

His behavior was perfectly fine unless you assume that the "interview" as published was wrong. We now know it isn't and the facts have changed.

I doubt he would have tweeted any of it, if he had known this.

Is it really deserving of the level of vitriol heaped on the issue? Even as printed it would only be mildly controversial, and even then not nearly noteworthy. It strikes me as me as offhanded comment from the first time I heard it.

you should see his current tweets

Seriously,

I took a few minutes to catch up on what JKB is saying and

A) His primary concern seem to be to promote all of the work he's done for women in IT and to make himself seem like a victim because of the backlash from his ramblings about PG.

B) he's completely ignoring PG's side of the story and continuing to promote the ideas mentioned in A.

I'm so sick of the insanity surrounding the issue of the lack of women in IT. Yes, it's a real problem and steps should be taken to fix it but the tsunami of hate that is aimed at anyone who is portrayed as remotely uncaring / oblivious to the issue is beyond disgusting. This is not how to make things better.

He was far from the only one.

So far seems he hasn't; he's explained why, and all the more power to him.

BTW, I'm disappointed that only "witch hunt" (terrorism against women) is used in this particular thread so far. Where's "lynch mob" and "McCarthyism", to round out the irony trifecta? (Hilariously sick when men liken themselves to women, whites to blacks, and capitalists to communists.)

Both men and women were killed during the Salem Witch Trials. A "witch hunt" isn't terrorism against women.

I seem to remember hearing that the final score in Salem being nineteen women and one man. Given this data, trivial statistical analysis tells us that the use of "witch hunt" in this context is 95% sexist, a value well within the margin of error.

21 were executed, 6 male. Regardless, in common use, when someone uses the term 'witch hunt', it's gender-neutral.

Citizen, surely you need no reminding that so-called "gender neutrality" is merely a sexist excuse for the ongoing structural oppression of women and gender-fluid individuals.

Only if you ignore all witch hunts outside Salem. That would be incredibly US-centric.

Bertrand Guilladot and Louis Debaraz come to mind.

Anyhow, that completely misses the point - that witch trials were based on a presumption of guilt against which no defense could be made. Much like the way certain media sites attack people.

Literature review and meta-analysis seemed out of scope, considering the comment to which I replied. (And I seem to've fallen into the HN trap of being too straight-faced about a smart-assed comment.)

75% to 80% of the killed victims were women, though, so it was mostly terrorism against women, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witch-hunt#Execution_statistics

I've found @jacobian's statement on the matter [1] eminently reasonable and even-handed.

As for the trifecta, I can't help you out on "lynch mob", I'm afraid, but how about this for McCarthyism?

"The [tech industry] is infested with [sexists]. I have here in my hand [2] a list of [102] -- a list of [user]names that were made known to the [Github administrators] as being members of the [sexist majority] and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the [tech industry]." [3]

[1] https://twitter.com/jacobian/status/417776560603549696

[2] http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:a3j7b1R...

(This link points to Google's cache of @ashedryden's tweet, because the tweet as originally hosted on Twitter has been deleted since I saw it last. I hope you'll agree that Google's cache is an acceptably authoritative source for what used to be hosted at that Twitter URL. The replies are more interesting than the original tweet, anyway.)

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_McCarthy#Wheeling_speech

> Hilariously sick when men liken themselves to women

Believing men and women are equal is "sick" now? What a strange notion.

I'm of mixed opinions about him. On the one hand, he's been influential in making Pycon more friendly to women, which I support[1]. On the other hand, he appears to have swallowed the feminist kool-aid without reflection. He has a knee-jerk reaction whenever an alleged case of "sexism" comes up - he is inclined to take the side of the "oppressed" group and facts be damned. He takes a guilty until proven innocent standard for people with a Y chromosome.

[1] The anti-harassment policies of Pycon are a gold-standard for the industry

You've described a number of the Django old guard. That is definitely not limited to him. Remember the gendered pronoun brouhaha against libuv?

And no, Jacob is already bitching about pg's essay on his Twitter.

He was part of pronoun-gate? That was one of the stupidest, most counter-productive brouhahas of all time. Something tells me that purging your best devs for being insufficiently progressive is not going to attract more females.

Alex Gaynor was the catalyst for pronoun-gate, and reflects a prevailing attitude among a large number of the founding and old-school Django developers. I had the privilege to meet them and spend some social time with them at a past PyCon and I saw some of the attitudes firsthand, but they were remarkably more muted and respectable in person. Online, well...

That's why the "disheartening". He's obviously very smart and compassionate. I add a Code of Conduct to all my sites now, largely because of his example. The way he flew off the handle so quickly without taking the time to understand first really bothered me.

So he's a flawed human being who makes mistakes just pg and the rest of us. What really is scary to me is the group dynamic that has come out of this "social justice" movement in that it seems to fueled by very loud public commentary about very small events. The pronoun incident with libuv really just took this to level of absurdism.

I blame it on universal college education. At least I ran into this stuff in college for the first time. SJW stuff is too alien and strange for most people to believe without indoctrination. But now there is an audience demanding burning of sexists and racists, the definitions of which have been expanded to include any person of a non-protected class that mentions sex or race.

After reading his tweets, my opinion of Jacob Kaplan Moss is more unmixed. I would never want to work with him on anything, even something as small as a lemonade stand. Keep that SJW BS out of tech and in English departments on the East Coast, where it belongs.

what about the software that he creates? will you stop considering using Django in future projects?

You don't have idea about what is a "witch hunt" and using that metaphor to describe some tweets is very insensitive and softens the absolute horror of people killed in real witch hunting.

Do you know that witch hunt still being a thing in some countries of the world?: http://www.eltiempo.com/colombia/medellin/ARTICULO-WEB-NEW_N... (title translated: Woman accused of being a witch in a town in Antioquia was burned)

This is a witch hunt: a woman was accused of being witch and _burned alive_, do you think that is even comparable with the tweets of Jacob Kaplan Moss?

> using that metaphor to describe some tweets is very insensitive and softens the absolute horror of people killed in real witch hunting

I'll start using this metaphor from now on, just to annoy PC-nazis like you.

I'm offended when people say that enduring something was "hell". It is disrespectful towards people who are burning in Hell.

> you don't have idea about what is a "witch hunt"

witch hunt (n): the act of unfairly looking for and punishing people who are accused of having opinions that are believed to be dangerous or evil

Sounds like proper usage of the word to me.

I cannot tell if you are being serious or sarcastic, but in either case, and with all due respect^, fuck off with this bullshit.

Arthur Miller wrote The Crucible, a play about a literal witch hunt, as an allegory for McCarthyism. Do you think that he thought that blacklisting actors was literally as bad as crushing somebody to death with stones over several days?

Of course he didn't. It was fucking allegorical. Do you really not understand the basic premise of a metaphor? I think you do. I think you are trolling.

^ little is due.

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