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> Sorry, my dude, but I know where your car is parked. You don't know anything about me. I think I'm actually a pretty alright guy, and I treat everyone with a

> Sorry, my dude, but I know where your car is parked. You don't know anything about me. I think I'm actually a pretty alright guy, and I treat everyone with as much respect as they treat me. It's wonderful that on a post about why some people are afraid to bring politics to work, I'm being witchhunted now because I answered, in a completely non-partisan way, why that might be. I regret even making my post. Discourse is impossible anymore.

eropple 9y ago
You are not being witch-hunted, my dramatic dude, you are being argued with. There are no torches. There are no pitchforks. But let's be crystal clear: you are not aiming to have "discourse". If it were discourse, you'd, like, actually try to respond to the thrust of what I was saying, instead of rending your shirt and getting all "oh, a witch-hunt, I hope I'm not made of wood!" at a little bit of conversation. And I in turn would respond to your points, and maybe somebody here might learn something. (Maybe even me!) But nah. You gotta get down from that cross you climbed on, though. Nobody brought nails for you. To address your self-characterization, even the notion of treating "everyone with as much respect as they treat [you]" is a cop-out. What about how they treat the people around you? See Damore, to whom you could, by your own characterisation (assuming you're male; apologies if not, but "Jake" is pretty indicative), be totally okay with--because it's just all the women at the company he's shitting on. But not you. It should be obvious, I trust, that's not how decency works. And that scales to a maxim: "attacks on those weaker than us are attacks on us." (That's Maciej's entire thing, by the way.) And it's why you cannot ever be apolitical "because it's work" without fundamentally endorsing bad, bad stuff. You didn't ask for that responsibility, but neither did I. And yet, we own it, and it is up to us to be as good and decent with the burden as we can be.
Frondo 9y ago
What's happening here isn't "witch hunting," it's discussion on a forum. You may be uncomfortable being questioned or critiqued, but lamentably that is par for the course when posting to a discussion forum. There may also be fora where what you say isn't called into question; this, I don't think, is one of them. Discourse is certainly possible.
Tyrek 9y ago
I think that there are two lines here that are easy to conflate. 1) That the golden rule "treat others as you would like to be treated" is sufficient to make you A Good Person, or at least not complicit in any sort of -ism. 2) That, as (assumption here) a member of the ethnic/cultural majority in tech, there's some obligation to speak up for those who may not be able to do so themselves - the social dynamics are different when a member of the 'in' group calls the group out on exclusionary behavior, as opposed to when an 'out' group-er does so. On some level, this is a cultural divide, and at least from my perspective, we're perhaps realizing that the first line is insufficient - plenty of repugnant norms and behaviors have been implicitly approved by mainstream society despite everyone conforming to the 'golden rule'.

eropple 9y ago

You are not being witch-hunted, my dramatic dude, you are being argued with. There are no torches. There are no pitchforks. But let's be crystal clear: you are not aiming to have "discourse". If it were discourse, you'd, like, actually try to respond to the thrust of what I was saying, instead of rending your shirt and getting all "oh, a witch-hunt, I hope I'm not made of wood!" at a little bit of conversation. And I in turn would respond to your points, and maybe somebody here might learn something. (Maybe even me!) But nah. You gotta get down from that cross you climbed on, though. Nobody brought nails for you. To address your self-characterization, even the notion of treating "everyone with as much respect as they treat [you]" is a cop-out. What about how they treat the people around you? See Damore, to whom you could, by your own characterisation (assuming you're male; apologies if not, but "Jake" is pretty indicative), be totally okay with--because it's just all the women at the company he's shitting on. But not you. It should be obvious, I trust, that's not how decency works. And that scales to a maxim: "attacks on those weaker than us are attacks on us." (That's Maciej's entire thing, by the way.) And it's why you cannot ever be apolitical "because it's work" without fundamentally endorsing bad, bad stuff. You didn't ask for that responsibility, but neither did I. And yet, we own it, and it is up to us to be as good and decent with the burden as we can be.

Frondo 9y ago

What's happening here isn't "witch hunting," it's discussion on a forum. You may be uncomfortable being questioned or critiqued, but lamentably that is par for the course when posting to a discussion forum. There may also be fora where what you say isn't called into question; this, I don't think, is one of them. Discourse is certainly possible.

Tyrek 9y ago

I think that there are two lines here that are easy to conflate. 1) That the golden rule "treat others as you would like to be treated" is sufficient to make you A Good Person, or at least not complicit in any sort of -ism. 2) That, as (assumption here) a member of the ethnic/cultural majority in tech, there's some obligation to speak up for those who may not be able to do so themselves - the social dynamics are different when a member of the 'in' group calls the group out on exclusionary behavior, as opposed to when an 'out' group-er does so. On some level, this is a cultural divide, and at least from my perspective, we're perhaps realizing that the first line is insufficient - plenty of repugnant norms and behaviors have been implicitly approved by mainstream society despite everyone conforming to the 'golden rule'.