She's talking about some guy and his "campaign to legalize rape".
I thought she was exaggerating or maybe misunderstanding something. Sure, this guy is probably an asshole, but legalizing rape, come on!
I followed the link and... it is kind of almost entertaining. He means it. Literally. You can't stop reading that trainwreck of an argument, because it gets worse and worse.
And then you've lost all hope in mankind. I thought I knew what misogyny was about, but that is absolutely breathtaking.
A big problem is that many people won't believe a woman's complaints if it falls anything short of something as blatant as this. People like that guy are the easy cases.
I read an article the other day about devastating, long-term harassment that one person suffered. She had a dream where she was physically attacked by a harasser -- stabbed with a knife. In this dream her primary feeling was one of overwhelming relief. Why? Because the harasser had done something so obviously wrong that her complaints could now not possibly be ignored. She woke up disappointed.
> I followed the link and... it is kind of almost entertaining. He means it. Literally.
He means it in the same way Jonathan Swift meant that cannibalism should be legalized and the Irish should be allowed to sell their children as food in "A Modest Proposal" [1].
Randi talked about several different guys. Her main beef seems to be with the unnamed FreeBSD committer.
She refers to other people ("neo-nazi friends") with whom that person communicates on twitter / etc., one of whom is rooshv, who wrote that absurd "campaign to legalize rape" article.
He writes such extreme things to get a reaction (and a following of complete morons). Attention is oxygen in that business. Not that that makes it any better of course. Notice how you said it's "almost entertaining", well, that's what he's aiming for.
Before googling Randi's name with some relevant keywords I had no idea about the amount of people past puberty that are behaving like this. I was about to say that I'm glad I've never met their kind, but then I remembered that I actually have: in highschool.
No idea what happened to them, I assumed they grew up and the few that didn't, found their place at the very bottom of society that is not good for anything.
To them usually it's not really about genre, race or any particular property, their disturbed mentality causes them to look for ways to attack and inconvenience anyone they don't like for any reason. I actually think they're even looking for an excuse to find a target, because they are amused by the whole thing and it makes them feel good and important.
I can see how many of them would make it as gamers, I'm just surprised that a person like this would also make it as a FreeBSD committer.
I wonder why they silently forced him to turn his commit bit off, but they don't want to update their CoC or condemn this behaviour in public.
The stealth editing of the Trademark Policy to include this particular case (even though they missed the exception for old uses, which made that change pointless) also deserves some explanation, it's wrong.
Wow, really disgusting to hear how FreeBSD core reacted to this. I've read through a lot of the source materials; she hasn't been perfect in every move; but that's she's been able to be so level headed and professional about it in the face of an onslaught of sexism, intimidation and smear campaigns is... nothing short of a miracle.
I don't care about any argument of if she's ever committed, or if her code is any good; that's bike shedding and irrelevant to the fact that no HUMAN BEING should be treated this way, let alone in a leading open source project.
> The next communication from core asked me to stop talking about this publicly. They told me to tell everyone it was being solved through private mediation, and that the problem committer was on vacation for a week, so they didn’t want to do anything about it until he got back.
WHAT
> I had talked to someone from the FreeBSD Foundation earlier on the phone about what was happening. During this same conversation, they actually said “maybe you should be nicer.”
THE
> A week later, I received an email from this person threatening to involve the FreeBSD Foundation lawyers if I didn’t change my username immediately. They tried to pass it off as a trademark infringement
ACTUAL
> The FreeBSD Foundation had stealth added ‘usernames’ just prior to her sending that email, adding the word but not updating the date at the top.
FUCK
The shit she's had to go through makes me lose hope for humanity. While the way she's handled it has restored it. We need more people in tech like this, and I'm glad she's putting up such a fight.
It would be easy for anyone to just be a loudspeaker for change; but she's actually getting her hands dirty, talking to people, and engaging about it, and learning and sharing along the way. I seriously doubt most of us would have the gumption and fortitude to handle this the way she has.
Sounds like they're a bunch of dude-nerds who want to handle every problem as if it were a technical problem. Their "process" seems tantamount to separating the two sides and telling them to sit down and shut up.
That's a not-unreasonable policy when we're talking about a technical debate that becomes acrimonious It's a terrible policy when we're talking about threats or threatening behavior by one party against another.
My experience is that most dude-nerds are oblivious by default to those sorts of non-technical, purely human issues. It's made all the worse because their behavior is more-or-less indistinguishable from genuinely malicious behavior. From the perspective of the person being threatened, it doesn't make much practical difference whether they're doing it out of ineptitude or malice.
I still, deep inside, hold a dwindling hope that all humans can one day learn to treat humans as humans. Basically, literally, to treat others as they themselves would like to be treated. As humans.
It saddens me to hear of times when that doesn't happen, particularly in such devastating ways that affect someone's life so fundamentally.
I just spent far too long reading both of those links, and I don't see anything there that contradicts anything Randi said in her post.
If someone is regularly and routinely attacked (and all the bullshit about "Randi can't code" / "Randi hasn't contributed" is just obnoxious), it's reasonable for them to be pissed off and get angry. That doesn't somehow negate the fact that they were badly mistreated.
In hindsight, it's telling that people making the above comments are posting links to longreads and not citing anything specific--just seems like more of the misogynistic campaign.
You can, and lots of people will, wave their hands and ignore/belittle FreeBSDGirl's account. Certainly the trolls will.
But, it is just another example that the larger tech community has a problem. GamerGate et al, they are not fantasies. Women who want to create, same as any developer, getting SWAT teams sent to their homes, this stuff is real, and indicates a real problem.
Ask yourself, are you helping fix this behavior? Because if not, then you are part of the problem.
As someone who didn't really follow the whole controversy the past years, this was an eye-opener for me. Did it really get that bad?
Stop tolerating the intolerant! Also, I don't understand the point of GamerGate. As an outsider, all I see is two groups making themselves look really bad and everyone else loosing. You don't convince others by threatening and harassing them, something the extremes at both sides seem to do. Why?
By the way, note how she did not mention the harasser's username in her post.
I don't follow you on that last bit, about noticing how she didn't mention the username. I feel like you mean to imply something, but maybe I'm not following?
There is a thread on KiA where references to the original materials (transcripts of Randi's dispute with the freebsd developer) are available. The raw materials paint a rather less flattering portrait of who was attacking / harassing / abusing whom. This may be one of those cases where discretion (withholding names / evidence) does a disservice to the truth.
I know most of the people involved in this and it's just a shit sandwich. Randi wanted a person crucified, that's not how companies and foundations function, and thankfully so. I hope she finds success in new endeavors and am sad she had to leave under gross circumstance.
Here's what confuses me. What actually happened to her? Without any context, all this can really be is her word against someone else's. She says she forwarded on relevant harassment incidents, but without context, the actual truth of what happened to her is unknown.
>Don’t tell people to stay quiet about abuse. This removes them from their support network of friends and family.
Didn't they just tell her to stop talking about it in public, though? And really what mechanism does anyone have to force her to do this?
>If you’re a dude, don’t reach out to women leaving other open source projects saying “join us here!”
On the surface, that sounds like she wants men to...not be welcoming? This is, perhaps, poorly worded.
>You have no idea if women in the community have problems or not. Women will talk to other women about the quality of the community. But it’s also just really bad taste. Instead, find someone in your community that is also part of that minority group to reach out. They’ll know more about potential issues than you will.
Not sure how this follows from the previous sentence. How is it in bad taste to reach out to someone in a welcoming way? Does this mean that I, as a straight white male, should only communicate with other straight white males?
She probably doesn't mean it this way, but boy, am I confused.
>Publicly stand behind the women in your community, or eventually they will leave and write a post just like this.
I find it amusing that someone who has written a tool that allows you to filter out a specific block of individuals (as trollish as they may be) can write this post at all. The cynical side of me thinks the attitude shown here is, "Hear me, but here's a way you can systematically ignore people that I fundamentally disagree with".
I often feel like tolerance and progressivism has wrapped all the way around to discrimination. Am I wrong to feel that is part of what's happening here?
EDIT: I'd like to make it clear that I'm genuinely not trying to troll. If I'm being wrongheaded, then please show me how my thinking is wrong.
> I find it amusing that someone who has written a tool that allows you to filter out a specific block of individuals (as trollish as they may be) can write this post at all. The cynical side of me thinks the attitude shown here is, "Hear me, but here's a way you can systematically ignore people that I fundamentally disagree with".
Give me your twitter handle, and your employer's email address, and I'll send 800 death threat tweets and I'll spend weeks bombarding your employer with stuff.
One thing that is often said to the victims of trolls is "just ignore it" (we see that in this thread), so she wrote a tool that allows her to just ignore it and you're telling her that she's wrong.
I believe Ms. Harper to be both abuser and abused. And it should be noted that she now has a financial interest in keeping these kind of things active.
That's probably because the flame detector triggered (maybe lots of downvotes and upvotes, indicating a highly polarized discussion). I doubt it's been a manual intervention and wouldn't be surprised if a moderator manually reinstated the story on the front page, instead of having buried it in the first place.
Disclaimer: I know next to nothing about how HN really works.
Please don't. Also, it seems to me that you're taking this thread off-topic and violating the HN guideline that asks you to avoid classic flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say about them. (Even if you did, this is probably a bad place for it.)
You see behaviour you dislike and don't understand and you can say either "they are unpleasant people" or "they are unpleasant people and they have a mental illness".
Probability tells us the first is more probable.
This is the conjunction fallacy, and you need to address it because stigmatising people with mental illness causes those people harm, and doesn't help address the actual problem (which is that some people are arseholes).
Additionally, what's wrong with FreeBSD? I'd like to hear their take on this.
Because while I'm generally highly sceptic of this "everyone needs a CoC now!", the alleged reaction by Core goes much much further and is simply astonishing.
Maybe someone needs to explain to them that freedom of association includes freedom not to associate. "His harassment was outside our mailing list" is not a good reason to decline any action.
This is why no one will ever take them seriously, by spamming this thread out to their followings in this way they are attempting to create outside focus on the HN community not within it.
[+] [-] dang|10 years ago|reply
If you have a new account and want to comment here, you're welcome to email us at [email protected].
[+] [-] gravypod|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tomte|10 years ago|reply
I thought she was exaggerating or maybe misunderstanding something. Sure, this guy is probably an asshole, but legalizing rape, come on!
I followed the link and... it is kind of almost entertaining. He means it. Literally. You can't stop reading that trainwreck of an argument, because it gets worse and worse.
And then you've lost all hope in mankind. I thought I knew what misogyny was about, but that is absolutely breathtaking.
[+] [-] nnethercote|10 years ago|reply
I read an article the other day about devastating, long-term harassment that one person suffered. She had a dream where she was physically attacked by a harasser -- stabbed with a knife. In this dream her primary feeling was one of overwhelming relief. Why? Because the harasser had done something so obviously wrong that her complaints could now not possibly be ignored. She woke up disappointed.
[+] [-] 5F36B5F62640|10 years ago|reply
He means it in the same way Jonathan Swift meant that cannibalism should be legalized and the Irish should be allowed to sell their children as food in "A Modest Proposal" [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal
[+] [-] fche|10 years ago|reply
She refers to other people ("neo-nazi friends") with whom that person communicates on twitter / etc., one of whom is rooshv, who wrote that absurd "campaign to legalize rape" article.
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] fche|10 years ago|reply
No, rooshv was dripping with sarcasm.
[+] [-] draw_down|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nske|10 years ago|reply
No idea what happened to them, I assumed they grew up and the few that didn't, found their place at the very bottom of society that is not good for anything.
To them usually it's not really about genre, race or any particular property, their disturbed mentality causes them to look for ways to attack and inconvenience anyone they don't like for any reason. I actually think they're even looking for an excuse to find a target, because they are amused by the whole thing and it makes them feel good and important.
I can see how many of them would make it as gamers, I'm just surprised that a person like this would also make it as a FreeBSD committer.
I wonder why they silently forced him to turn his commit bit off, but they don't want to update their CoC or condemn this behaviour in public.
The stealth editing of the Trademark Policy to include this particular case (even though they missed the exception for old uses, which made that change pointless) also deserves some explanation, it's wrong.
[+] [-] meesterdude|10 years ago|reply
I don't care about any argument of if she's ever committed, or if her code is any good; that's bike shedding and irrelevant to the fact that no HUMAN BEING should be treated this way, let alone in a leading open source project.
> The next communication from core asked me to stop talking about this publicly. They told me to tell everyone it was being solved through private mediation, and that the problem committer was on vacation for a week, so they didn’t want to do anything about it until he got back.
WHAT
> I had talked to someone from the FreeBSD Foundation earlier on the phone about what was happening. During this same conversation, they actually said “maybe you should be nicer.”
THE
> A week later, I received an email from this person threatening to involve the FreeBSD Foundation lawyers if I didn’t change my username immediately. They tried to pass it off as a trademark infringement
ACTUAL
> The FreeBSD Foundation had stealth added ‘usernames’ just prior to her sending that email, adding the word but not updating the date at the top.
FUCK
The shit she's had to go through makes me lose hope for humanity. While the way she's handled it has restored it. We need more people in tech like this, and I'm glad she's putting up such a fight.
It would be easy for anyone to just be a loudspeaker for change; but she's actually getting her hands dirty, talking to people, and engaging about it, and learning and sharing along the way. I seriously doubt most of us would have the gumption and fortitude to handle this the way she has.
[+] [-] jfarmer|10 years ago|reply
That's a not-unreasonable policy when we're talking about a technical debate that becomes acrimonious It's a terrible policy when we're talking about threats or threatening behavior by one party against another.
My experience is that most dude-nerds are oblivious by default to those sorts of non-technical, purely human issues. It's made all the worse because their behavior is more-or-less indistinguishable from genuinely malicious behavior. From the perspective of the person being threatened, it doesn't make much practical difference whether they're doing it out of ineptitude or malice.
[+] [-] kevinbowman|10 years ago|reply
It saddens me to hear of times when that doesn't happen, particularly in such devastating ways that affect someone's life so fundamentally.
[+] [-] Globrazu|10 years ago|reply
And here's a "discussion" on the matter between Randi, Colin and Johannes on /r/FreeBSD: https://archive.is/wH4Rg
[+] [-] joeemison|10 years ago|reply
If someone is regularly and routinely attacked (and all the bullshit about "Randi can't code" / "Randi hasn't contributed" is just obnoxious), it's reasonable for them to be pissed off and get angry. That doesn't somehow negate the fact that they were badly mistreated.
In hindsight, it's telling that people making the above comments are posting links to longreads and not citing anything specific--just seems like more of the misogynistic campaign.
[+] [-] SliderUp|10 years ago|reply
But, it is just another example that the larger tech community has a problem. GamerGate et al, they are not fantasies. Women who want to create, same as any developer, getting SWAT teams sent to their homes, this stuff is real, and indicates a real problem.
Ask yourself, are you helping fix this behavior? Because if not, then you are part of the problem.
[+] [-] eeZi|10 years ago|reply
As someone who didn't really follow the whole controversy the past years, this was an eye-opener for me. Did it really get that bad?
Stop tolerating the intolerant! Also, I don't understand the point of GamerGate. As an outsider, all I see is two groups making themselves look really bad and everyone else loosing. You don't convince others by threatening and harassing them, something the extremes at both sides seem to do. Why?
By the way, note how she did not mention the harasser's username in her post.
[+] [-] andallas|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Pharaoh2|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] wila|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fche|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kev009|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] engi_nerd|10 years ago|reply
>Don’t tell people to stay quiet about abuse. This removes them from their support network of friends and family.
Didn't they just tell her to stop talking about it in public, though? And really what mechanism does anyone have to force her to do this?
>If you’re a dude, don’t reach out to women leaving other open source projects saying “join us here!”
On the surface, that sounds like she wants men to...not be welcoming? This is, perhaps, poorly worded.
>You have no idea if women in the community have problems or not. Women will talk to other women about the quality of the community. But it’s also just really bad taste. Instead, find someone in your community that is also part of that minority group to reach out. They’ll know more about potential issues than you will.
Not sure how this follows from the previous sentence. How is it in bad taste to reach out to someone in a welcoming way? Does this mean that I, as a straight white male, should only communicate with other straight white males?
She probably doesn't mean it this way, but boy, am I confused.
>Publicly stand behind the women in your community, or eventually they will leave and write a post just like this.
I find it amusing that someone who has written a tool that allows you to filter out a specific block of individuals (as trollish as they may be) can write this post at all. The cynical side of me thinks the attitude shown here is, "Hear me, but here's a way you can systematically ignore people that I fundamentally disagree with".
I often feel like tolerance and progressivism has wrapped all the way around to discrimination. Am I wrong to feel that is part of what's happening here?
EDIT: I'd like to make it clear that I'm genuinely not trying to troll. If I'm being wrongheaded, then please show me how my thinking is wrong.
[+] [-] DanBC|10 years ago|reply
Give me your twitter handle, and your employer's email address, and I'll send 800 death threat tweets and I'll spend weeks bombarding your employer with stuff.
One thing that is often said to the victims of trolls is "just ignore it" (we see that in this thread), so she wrote a tool that allows her to just ignore it and you're telling her that she's wrong.
[+] [-] Esau|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] dang|10 years ago|reply
Users flagged it.
[+] [-] Tomte|10 years ago|reply
Disclaimer: I know next to nothing about how HN really works.
[+] [-] panic|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unimpressive|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andrewprock|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eadler|10 years ago|reply
sorry if this is off-topic :\
[+] [-] dang|10 years ago|reply
We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10820149 and marked it off-topic.
[+] [-] enraged_camel|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] dang|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andallas|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] dang|10 years ago|reply
Please don't. Also, it seems to me that you're taking this thread off-topic and violating the HN guideline that asks you to avoid classic flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say about them. (Even if you did, this is probably a bad place for it.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10820199 and marked it off-topic.
[+] [-] ChrisClark|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] DanBC|10 years ago|reply
Probability tells us the first is more probable.
This is the conjunction fallacy, and you need to address it because stigmatising people with mental illness causes those people harm, and doesn't help address the actual problem (which is that some people are arseholes).
[+] [-] Tomte|10 years ago|reply
Because while I'm generally highly sceptic of this "everyone needs a CoC now!", the alleged reaction by Core goes much much further and is simply astonishing.
Maybe someone needs to explain to them that freedom of association includes freedom not to associate. "His harassment was outside our mailing list" is not a good reason to decline any action.
[+] [-] fche|10 years ago|reply
"GamerGate hopped onto all of this."
No claims of gamergate people actually doing anything, just hopping.
[+] [-] fleitz|10 years ago|reply
It was pretty much inevitable that these two groups would become the Middle East of the Internet.
[+] [-] andallas|10 years ago|reply
I feel like you have conflated the issues a bit maybe?
[+] [-] Jach|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] bendbro|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ps4fanboy|10 years ago|reply
I invite you to see how Hacker News responds to an inherent problem with misogyny in open source. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10819778 … https://twitter.com/LilyLemmer/status/682688557018828802
Admittedly really curious to see how the HN community responds to this. https://twitter.com/randileeharper/status/682683554447265792