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.
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.
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.
Racial hatred is despicable in all forms. Those who push for such an artificial redefinition of racism would have us forget this.
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.
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.
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."
https://twitter.com/adriarichards/status/312265091791847425
I have trouble seeing her shaming behavior as anything more than self-serving drama.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!)
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.
Right, like Joan of Arc's [1] was, after she got burned at the stake.
> "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.
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?
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.
* 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.
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.
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).
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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?
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
"People just don't understand how hard it is to be a white male!"
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.
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.
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.
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.
The repo forking was, though informal, a thoroughly unpurient and non-sexual comment that she read meaning into.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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)
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.
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 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
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.
So long those posts get down voted, the community is actually dealing with the bad comments.
You're right that there are more serious problems to deal with, but feigning offense isn't helping the situation.
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 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...
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.
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.
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.
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.