5 ms·

Are We An Unjust People?

30 points by alexholehouse 14y ago

Pent 14y ago
I think that when responding to these events, we should keep in mind that we all make mistakes. At this point I feel that Adria made a mistake, sometimes mistakes cause bad things to happen and I hope she moves forward and learns from her actions. Everyone is human and she didn't deserve all the snap judgements leading to hatred.
metaphorm 14y ago
so the moral of the story, according to raganwald, is that Adria Richards worst mistake is that she trolled somebody candidly instead of anonymously? indeed Reggie, what can be done about anonymous trolling on the internet? this is an honest question to which nobody knows the answer. do we all need to admit that we are powerless to stop anonymous dickheads from making death threats on the internet? I admit it. We all would admit it. We are powerless. We don't like to see that. But the world is ugly. Adria Richards did something ugly and got something much much uglier in response. She didn't deserve the death threats, but she did deserve the firing.
- raganwald 14y ago
  I don't think we're powerless, and the first step to you not thinking we're powerless is to stop and ask yourself, what would it take for things like this to be reduced to a few weird cranks and outliers instead of a flood? I would be very surprised indeed if your response is, "There is nothing we can do to change human behaviour around this."
  - mattvanhorn 14y ago
    Personally, I'd like to see some of the smart folks in the community assist the police in identifying the source of the threats and helping to ensure that those miscreants get jail time.
- IsaacSchlueter 14y ago
  A good first step is to actively reduce the level of misogyny and other ugliness in your circles to the degree possible. This sort of crap goes on in part because it has tacit support from "normal" folks. We rush to punishment of Adria, but we shrug and say "oh well" about the others, or the initial incident that started it all.
IsaacSchlueter 14y ago
In short, yes, we are, and it's shitty. Reg, everything you wrote here is pretty spot-on. Adria Richards' behavior was definitely a tactical misstep. With the benefit of hindsight, she should have reported the inappropriate behavior to the conference staff more discretely. Or, even, turned around and told them to show some respect. (And, if they didn't cut the crap, THEN get them kicked from the conference.) I don't believe that what she did was inappropriate/unacceptable in any kind of moral sense, and I would gladly hire Adria if I was hiring for that kind of role. If a person is making jokes with sexual innuendoes during a talk, they shouldn't be at that conference, and shouldn't be surprised that there are consequences, no matter how many kids they have. Behavior in public is already public; putting it on the internet may make it more so, but it's not as if they had any expectation of privacy in the first place. At the root, I'm glad she stuck up for herself somehow, rather than just kept quiet. She did so in a clumsy way, and has been castigated for it far more harshly than is useful. Furthermore, this is a clear incident of sexism in our community. If I had done the exact same thing, there's no way that /r/mensrights would DDoS Joyent into firing me. This is why women feel unsafe and mistreated in our communities: because they are. If they stick up for themselves, they're going to face an onslaught of trolling, and even the ostensible "good guys" are quick to point out that yes, yes, we don't condone this sort of thing, but come on, She Was Asking For It. As I said, her reaction was a tactical misstep. At a higher level, there's a strategic point about preventing these sorts of things from happening in the first place. How do we ensure that the next Adria feels empowered enough to tell the boys behind her to cut it out, where they realize their inappropriateness for the environment and apologize and the world moves on with dignity? How do we build communities that are compassionate, without so many pikes looking for heads? Every time some shitstorm like this happens, we all lose a chunk of our humanity, no matter what side we're on, or who does or doesn't get fired. I feel like a parent of a 14-year-old child, reading a news story about a 16-year-old dying in some horrible car wreck on prom night, knowing that mine will be that age soon enough. Node is SO nice right now. As technology communities go, it's astounding how compassionate and friendly we've managed to keep things. Even in the face of some strongly held religious feelings about CoffeeScript or async or promises etc, we still talk to one another, like human beings. Our IRC channel and mailing list has a zero-tolerance policy for rude conduct. Our meetups are small and there are enough regulars to keep up a culture of "We don't do that sort of thing here" with respect to lewd jokes, homophobia, sexism, ableism, etc. What happens when Node is as big as Python? How do we keep this going?
jerrya 14y ago
Hmm, I couldn't read your entire essay because your choice of font size and font color and background color makes for very difficult reading, and probably for many people.
luigi 14y ago
There are two really interesting, and frankly devastating, double standards at work here: (1) We all know Adria Richards's name. We know all about her. Her personal address has been spread. Things she wrote in the past have been used against her. But we don't really know anything about those guys. We know who they work for and what they look like, but there's been no widespread effort to expose them in the same manner that Adria's been exposed. (2) When that guy lost his job, everyone thought it was a great injustice, and that Adria should make a heartfelt apology to him. But when Adria lost her job this morning, there were no such pronouncements going the other way. No one declared, "That dude really needs to apologize to Adria for making the dick joke that eventually led to her getting let go." That's not an argument that's being made anywhere. Ask yourself why these things are happening in one direction. In an equal world -- a balanced world -- things should cut both ways. These tactics should be used by people on both "sides". But in this instance, that's decidedly not happening.
- Smudge 14y ago
  (1) Adria was the one using her non-anonymous Twitter account to publicly out these two individuals. So, by her own actions, we know her name. (2) There is a direct set of causalities leading from Adria's actions to the first firing. It wasn't (IMO) Adria's fault that he was let go, but it was a direct byproduct of the way she dealt with the situation. On the flip side, Adria did not lose her job because that guy made dick jokes. The causality there, while perhaps still arguable, is far more uncertain. There are numerous other ways Adria could have dealt with the situation which would not have resulted in her being fired. Furthermore, regarding it being a double-standard in general -- Had Adria been a man, I suspect that both your #1 and #2 points could still have been true given the nature of the events. But hypotheticals are tricky, and in either case there would probably be numerous double standards at play. But the divisiveness of how it was handled makes it hard to address the real issues, which is highly unfortunate. And lastly, to be clear, I could never, ever condone the hurtful, misogynistic, vitriolic backlash against Adria that we saw. I'd like to believe that much of that was from the froth-mouthed fringes of an otherwise reasonable community, but nonetheless I do wish there were a lot more being done to address that part of this debacle. I myself flagged a Facebook comment, but gave up when nothing really came of it and hurtful comments started coming into my own message inbox.

30 points by alexholehouse 14y ago

Pent 14y ago

I think that when responding to these events, we should keep in mind that we all make mistakes. At this point I feel that Adria made a mistake, sometimes mistakes cause bad things to happen and I hope she moves forward and learns from her actions. Everyone is human and she didn't deserve all the snap judgements leading to hatred.

metaphorm 14y ago

so the moral of the story, according to raganwald, is that Adria Richards worst mistake is that she trolled somebody candidly instead of anonymously? indeed Reggie, what can be done about anonymous trolling on the internet? this is an honest question to which nobody knows the answer. do we all need to admit that we are powerless to stop anonymous dickheads from making death threats on the internet? I admit it. We all would admit it. We are powerless. We don't like to see that. But the world is ugly. Adria Richards did something ugly and got something much much uglier in response. She didn't deserve the death threats, but she did deserve the firing.

raganwald 14y ago
I don't think we're powerless, and the first step to you not thinking we're powerless is to stop and ask yourself, what would it take for things like this to be reduced to a few weird cranks and outliers instead of a flood? I would be very surprised indeed if your response is, "There is nothing we can do to change human behaviour around this."
- mattvanhorn 14y ago
  Personally, I'd like to see some of the smart folks in the community assist the police in identifying the source of the threats and helping to ensure that those miscreants get jail time.
IsaacSchlueter 14y ago
A good first step is to actively reduce the level of misogyny and other ugliness in your circles to the degree possible. This sort of crap goes on in part because it has tacit support from "normal" folks. We rush to punishment of Adria, but we shrug and say "oh well" about the others, or the initial incident that started it all.

IsaacSchlueter 14y ago

In short, yes, we are, and it's shitty. Reg, everything you wrote here is pretty spot-on. Adria Richards' behavior was definitely a tactical misstep. With the benefit of hindsight, she should have reported the inappropriate behavior to the conference staff more discretely. Or, even, turned around and told them to show some respect. (And, if they didn't cut the crap, THEN get them kicked from the conference.) I don't believe that what she did was inappropriate/unacceptable in any kind of moral sense, and I would gladly hire Adria if I was hiring for that kind of role. If a person is making jokes with sexual innuendoes during a talk, they shouldn't be at that conference, and shouldn't be surprised that there are consequences, no matter how many kids they have. Behavior in public is already public; putting it on the internet may make it more so, but it's not as if they had any expectation of privacy in the first place. At the root, I'm glad she stuck up for herself somehow, rather than just kept quiet. She did so in a clumsy way, and has been castigated for it far more harshly than is useful. Furthermore, this is a clear incident of sexism in our community. If I had done the exact same thing, there's no way that /r/mensrights would DDoS Joyent into firing me. This is why women feel unsafe and mistreated in our communities: because they are. If they stick up for themselves, they're going to face an onslaught of trolling, and even the ostensible "good guys" are quick to point out that yes, yes, we don't condone this sort of thing, but come on, She Was Asking For It. As I said, her reaction was a tactical misstep. At a higher level, there's a strategic point about preventing these sorts of things from happening in the first place. How do we ensure that the next Adria feels empowered enough to tell the boys behind her to cut it out, where they realize their inappropriateness for the environment and apologize and the world moves on with dignity? How do we build communities that are compassionate, without so many pikes looking for heads? Every time some shitstorm like this happens, we all lose a chunk of our humanity, no matter what side we're on, or who does or doesn't get fired. I feel like a parent of a 14-year-old child, reading a news story about a 16-year-old dying in some horrible car wreck on prom night, knowing that mine will be that age soon enough. Node is SO nice right now. As technology communities go, it's astounding how compassionate and friendly we've managed to keep things. Even in the face of some strongly held religious feelings about CoffeeScript or async or promises etc, we still talk to one another, like human beings. Our IRC channel and mailing list has a zero-tolerance policy for rude conduct. Our meetups are small and there are enough regulars to keep up a culture of "We don't do that sort of thing here" with respect to lewd jokes, homophobia, sexism, ableism, etc. What happens when Node is as big as Python? How do we keep this going?

jerrya 14y ago

Hmm, I couldn't read your entire essay because your choice of font size and font color and background color makes for very difficult reading, and probably for many people.

luigi 14y ago

There are two really interesting, and frankly devastating, double standards at work here: (1) We all know Adria Richards's name. We know all about her. Her personal address has been spread. Things she wrote in the past have been used against her. But we don't really know anything about those guys. We know who they work for and what they look like, but there's been no widespread effort to expose them in the same manner that Adria's been exposed. (2) When that guy lost his job, everyone thought it was a great injustice, and that Adria should make a heartfelt apology to him. But when Adria lost her job this morning, there were no such pronouncements going the other way. No one declared, "That dude really needs to apologize to Adria for making the dick joke that eventually led to her getting let go." That's not an argument that's being made anywhere. Ask yourself why these things are happening in one direction. In an equal world -- a balanced world -- things should cut both ways. These tactics should be used by people on both "sides". But in this instance, that's decidedly not happening.

Smudge 14y ago
(1) Adria was the one using her non-anonymous Twitter account to publicly out these two individuals. So, by her own actions, we know her name. (2) There is a direct set of causalities leading from Adria's actions to the first firing. It wasn't (IMO) Adria's fault that he was let go, but it was a direct byproduct of the way she dealt with the situation. On the flip side, Adria did not lose her job because that guy made dick jokes. The causality there, while perhaps still arguable, is far more uncertain. There are numerous other ways Adria could have dealt with the situation which would not have resulted in her being fired. Furthermore, regarding it being a double-standard in general -- Had Adria been a man, I suspect that both your #1 and #2 points could still have been true given the nature of the events. But hypotheticals are tricky, and in either case there would probably be numerous double standards at play. But the divisiveness of how it was handled makes it hard to address the real issues, which is highly unfortunate. And lastly, to be clear, I could never, ever condone the hurtful, misogynistic, vitriolic backlash against Adria that we saw. I'd like to believe that much of that was from the froth-mouthed fringes of an otherwise reasonable community, but nonetheless I do wish there were a lot more being done to address that part of this debacle. I myself flagged a Facebook comment, but gave up when nothing really came of it and hurtful comments started coming into my own message inbox.