Do we know if it was more than what the commit said? The reverse said it was a policy violation to have him commit it directly. It didn't actually say anything about being a he-man-woman-hater.
When the original blog post showed up on HN, I couldn't understand why it was penned. As best I could tell, here's what happened:
* Party A submitted a pull request for a minor change to the libuv docs
* Party B (who can signoff on changes) declined it for being an extremely minor change
* Party C merged it after getting signoff from Party D (who can signoff on changes)
* Party B reversed the change under the impression than neither he nor Party D had signed off on it
* Joyent would fire Party B for this
It just so happens that the minor change was removing two masculine pronouns into favour of gender neutral ones.
I can't reconcile the blog post on Joyent with what actually happened.
Blog post [1]:
Ben is not—and if he had been, he wouldn't be as of this morning: to reject a pull request that eliminates a gendered pronoun on the principle that pronouns should in fact be gendered would constitute a fireable offense for me and for Joyent.
The pull request wasn't rejected on any pronoun principle [2]:
Sorry, not interested in trivial changes like that.
And again:
Especially when that poor behavior transcended into the gobsmackingly inappropriate as Ben tried to revert Isaac's commit
The actual commit message [3]:
@isaacs may have his commit bit but that does not mean he is at liberty to land patches at will. All patches have to be signed off by either me or Bert. Isaac, consider yourself chided.
Unless bnoordhuis was aware the patch had been signed off on (in which case reversing the commit is a dick move), all he's doing is following procedures.
Minor detail: your summation makes it sound like Joyent would fire over reversing a change, when in fact Joyent appears to be saying they would fire over reversing the change because the change was removing two masculine pronouns.
It's a pretty extreme reaction by Joyent; I wonder how much further away "We would also fire whoever used the gendered pronouns in the first place" is.
Minor detail: It was misleading in the Joyent blog post, the fact that it also reads as misleading in the parent post isn't the poster's fault.
When I read the Joyent post, it doesn't seem like they acknowledge any other possible motivation for revert. When I later saw the revert message regarding sign-offs I was quite surprised that the blog neither mentioned it, nor was written in a way that indicated they had read it.
I'm not saying you were. Just saying that not only is that a fire-able offense to Joylet, their post heavily implies that to be the motivation for the revert.
I'm replying to my own comment to attach an opinion to it (I want the original comment to remain neutral). But, maybe we can't have women in IT because people like Bryan Cantrill can't avoid attaching themselves and company to even the most trivial gender issues and posting inflammatory blog posts about it?
I'd wager that there are less women in IT because of behaviour like Bryan's and a company like Joyent that will host his views than there are because of declined pull requests.
From what I've seen, this is the result of polarised thinking. There are lots of issues upon which campaigners are unwilling to accept any compromise on any level.
Case in point feminism. Women have put up with a lot over the years and I can understand someone being angry and having the courage of their convictions as a result.
In a way, I respect that. It's their prerogative to try and bring about change. Refusing to enter into dialogue over certain issues will certainly not win anyone over who isn't already on their side, but admitting that things aren't black and white is admitting that they could be wrong.
But mixing take-no-prisoners thinking with the workplace and you can end up with a very poisonous atmosphere. You always need some flexibility of thought, however strong your views, because sooner or later a situation will come up which requires clarification and discussion. Not everything is black and white, and sometimes there are mistakes and misunderstandings. I think the error bars on that github activity are wide enough that we can't be certain.
This blog rant reflects very badly on Joyent. I think it shows that Bryan Cantrill has exceptionally poor judgment. Bryan says "we believe that empathy is a core engineering value". That seems a bit hypocritical given his behaviour.
The pull request was titled "Removed use of gendered pronoun". I think that's a key fact missing from your summary.
I mean, there isn't really a whole lot of information from Ben here except two actions, the rejection and then the reversion.
Did he look at the title and think "I should reject a PR titled 'Removed use of gendered pronoun' because the act of removing a gendered pronoun is trivial"? Did he just look at the diff and think "This is a couple of characters, not important." Did he see the change and think "I can't wait to marginalize the shit out of these women reading my documentation!"
There's just not a lot of info from Ben. And now because of all this bluster, there is likely not to be.
Seems like a bunch of drama, rather than a fruitful discussion.
Nice job by Joyent. A lot of people will feel that this firing is an overreaction, but this is how civil rights movements work. You inconvenience the apathetic until they realize that apathy is as unacceptable as anything else.
This is the only way it can change the developer community. Don't be a sexist and you won't run into this problem.
Oh please. No one was sexist here. A diff of 3 characters on something wholly non-code or operations-related is hardly a change that requires attention.
So here's the problem. English doesn't have a gender-neutral pronoun that refers to a single person. So you have to pick "he" or "she". If you switch it around every sentence, the text is hard to follow. If you pick one and use it for the entire text, you're sexist.
Why not assume the best of your fellow developers, instead of assuming the worst? Here is an interpretation that has nothing to do with "sticking it in women's eyes": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6825193
And can we please put this into perspective? The language you use reminds me of another GitHub comment suggesting that reverting a commit from they -> him is 'erasing women from the community'.
Except it did, he just didn't know, and this whole thing could have been avoided if he had signed it off himself in the first place instead of calling it trivial.
I hear you, but not being sexist can be pretty hard. I always felt that obviously, I wasn't sexist: I like working with women in the workplace, I always figured we make software for everyone so it's probably best if everyone makes software, and so on. I've been fortunate to have female co-workers who I felt made terrific colleagues, both skills-wise and socially.
And yet one day one of them pulled me aside and explained to me what exactly I was doing that was making being at her job harder. It wasn't something I did intentionally, it wasn't because I thought ill of her, it was just that I didn't think much at all. I behaved differently toward her (and, I guess, other female developers) because I had a set of assumptions I automatically brought to bear against male developers I wasn't sure applied to her, and it affected my behavior in ways that kept singling her out and making her feel uncomfortable.
One of the most embarassing, humbling and in retrospect, valuable moments in my professional life.
I'm happy it went that way instead of a complaint followed by me losing my job. I think a lot of male developers don't want to be sexist, but we need to learn what that actually means in practice, and it's not as intuitive as you make it out to be. Wasn't for me at least.
Sorry - I wasn't saying that I'm sure I did something I would have gotten fired over, the point was more that I don't think just any instance of sexism should be treated as a fireable offense, because sexist behavior can be unintentional and due to lack of experience. "Don't be sexist and you won't have problems" as the OP put is what I thought I was doing, but wasn't.
My post is vague because it's about subtle behavioral stuff. Basically, when I interacted with male developers, my behavior toward them was based on projecting myself into them automatically. Like, say, the level of expectations I leveled against them, how competitive I would be with them, how aggressive I might be toward them was based on how I myself respond to being challenged and my own career path/experiences and things like that. I unintentionally behaved differently toward female developers (not necessarily worse actually, but differently) just because that automatic projecting would not happen, and it would end up singling them out.
Learning about that has improved my interaction not just with women but also men, actually. I make a much bigger effort to learn about the individual now.
I'm sure all this came a lot easier to others, or maybe they just had the right sort of experiences much earlier (I wonder if it would have helped if I had any siblings, say). But for me is something I can identify as "needed to learn that".
Yup, exactly. That's how computer software industry transforms into civil rights movement. I guess we developed all possible softwares on earth and need no industry anymore.
Probably not, which is why it is vitally important to choose battles well. This situation seems to be being sorted reasonably well without the incursion of a baying horde looking for the guys head, or Joyent's head for that matter.
Cast your net wide enough, and you will find that at a certain point some people will perceive an injustice and will begin turning themselves 'into' sexists, just to spite you.
I am spartacus. Or if you prefer, Giles Corey's refusal to plead.
Begin firing people for using "him" instead of "they", and you will "radicalize" many formally apathetic people.
Hey, no one's getting angry because someone wrote 'him' instead of 'they' in the docs. The issue is that someone inisted that this must not be changed, for no good reason, pointlessly antagonizing lots of people.
If you're running an open source project and someone you pay is driving off its community, you'd probably feel justified in not giving them money anymore.
I'm sorry to invoke Godwin's law on this, but this is beyond absurd...
Stating that defending that pronouns should be gendered is a fireable offense is more than just ridiculous political correctness, it's criminalizing opinion. It's the Holy Inquisition.
You can only invoke Godwin's law after someone else draws a comparison to the Nazis. You cannot invoke it on yourself prior to drawing a comparison to the Holy Inquisition, no matter how far beyond absurdity the situation may be.
The shrill objections that people raise when people draw parallels between things in history that are not strictly equal in all respects ("Do you really think this is equivalent to torturing people for being jewish?!?") are the same.
It is a shame that people have to preface legitimate comparisons to historic events with these sort of disclaimers.
It's not criminalizing anything. It's pointing out that it goes against that company's policy. Is it really so bad for a company to have a policy to prefer gender equality?
I'm rather amazed to see people rushing to defend sexism. Please tell me: what's so great about sexism? Why is it so wrong to fight it? Because I really don't get it.
But where is the sexism in this? And since when did companies earned the right to fire people over matters of personal opinion? Or stating they would do it when the person isn't even an employee?
This is a witch hunt, plain and simple. I'm amazed that people don't understand that this doesn't help the fight against sexism, at all...
Stating they would fire someone over this seems a bit unnecessary, but since he's not an employee at all, it has no direct consequences. But it does make clear what their company policy is: they would fire someone over this had it been an employee.
It seems a small thing to fire someone over, but if gender equality and using gender neutral pronouns are important parts of their company policy, then someone actively resisting company policy and reverting the work of people who improved the product according to company policy, would be pretty serious.
Also note that a female developer was ready to quit the community over Ben's behaviour. Ben directly contributed to a hostile atmosphere where an often excluded minority is likely to feel more excluded. That is definitely serious.
You consider it a witch hunt because you don't care about gender neutral pronouns. Probably because you haven't felt subtly excluded all your life by gendered pronouns referring to other people. Fighting that exclusion is an important part of the fight against sexism.
Things that are obvious:
1. Gender neutral language is obviously and undoubtedly preferable.
2. The changes would have been incredibly easy to implement, the work was already done.
I can't think of a good reason not to accept the pull request. It all seems like such a simple problem getting blown way out of proportion.
There's a more subtle issue at play: accepting the pull request could be seen as "admitting" that the original phrasing was offensive. Perhaps they didn't want to do so because they disagreed with the premise. Accepting the patch isn't a neutral action, it also means implicitly accepting a certain world view.
The patch itself comes across almost as bullying: accept our view, or be publicly shamed as a misogynist.
I wouldn't even call it offensive. I don't get where that's even coming from. It's not offensive, it's just simply incorrect phrasing. It's poor English if you will.
One reason I can think of -- some people make small grammar and spelling changes just to get their name in the commit authors lists and in the THANKS file. Hey look, "contributer to the famous Node.JS project" on the resume.
It is of course good that they want to contribute but some requests generate more traffic around the request than the request itself. Not if this was a bigger improvement to docs, a project wide spelling fix, I would probably be better.
Anyway the reason this go blown up is because of the gender aspect. Ask yourself this, what if this was not influence by the gender and was instead a basic spelling mistake, how would this played out?
Obvious in that it is obviously poor English, if you want to ignore the gender issue altogether. "He" has a specific definition as a pronoun, versus using "one".
Ok, even though I think the singular they is awkward, I can understand the fight for removing gendered pronouns.
However, something I've been wondering for a while now is: how does this issue manifest itself in other languages? Are there similar movements? How does it work in languages where every noun has a gender?
Miserably if you apply the same rules. But I can't imagine a Russian female software developer being offended by Russian "he" in the documentation. Every occupation has a gender too and 'software developer' is 'male', though you can produce the female gender from this word, but in looks very awkward in the text - if you use 'femalized' words it means you actually make a point. We also have 'neutral' gender (like "it" in English), but you usually can't use it instead of male or female unless you're writing satire :-)
There're even different female forms for 'male' occupations depending on whether the female is the professional or wife of the professional.
So all the documentation I can think of uses the 'default' gender which is usually male. And I'm yet to see someone offended by that, male or female.
So far as I can tell, it's a fundamental of all forms of feminism (though especially radical feminism) that yes, everyone must make fighting sexism and supporting feminism their #1 priority, over and above the actual goals of whatever businesses or groups they're involved in, and that anyone who doesn't is a women hater. You get stuff like Atheism+, where a bunch of feminist activists went into the atheist movement and declared that from then on, it must revolve entirely around their form of feminism, and that it didn't even matter if members were actually atheists so long as they supported that kind of feminism. Radical/non-intersectional feminists even tried to do the same to groups fighting against other forms of discrimination such as racism and homophobia.
Not really. So far as I can tell, anyone who disagrees with these tactics is publicly shamed as a misogynist by influential feminists and isn't welcome, even if they're a woman and even if they agree with the end goal. It's pretty easy to make generalizations about a political movement when anyone who those generalizations wouldn't apply to is effectively driven out of the movement.
Errrm, sexism certainly doesn't need defending. Unfortunately, as we've seen here anything that gets in the way of feminist activism gets portrayed as defending sexism. For instance, reverting feminist commits for not having the proper sign-off? Totally sexist.
I definitely wouldn't have reacted if I was personally involved in this. However, I do think it's worth pointing out how masculine pronouns can wear a girl down over time / create general awkwardness (ie: Send your "web guy" over).
I'm generally not bothered by subtleties, but then I realize that what's subtle to me as a woman is entirely invisible to men.
If the guy prefers masculine pronouns, it doesn't make him a sexist exactly. But it would imply that he doesn't experience the subtle discomfort in his everyday life. So, it's worth pointing out. In a chill way, if possible.
Oh dear God. This is what we've sunk to? Saying we'd love to fire some "asshole" because he chose not to pull a pull request changing two instances of "him" to "they"?
First, let me get it out of the way that I actually agree with the pull request. In this day, the personal pronoun "they" makes a more inclusive pronoun that just "him". Zed Shaw's suggestion of "you" is also a good alternative, particularly if you're wanting to be less formal.
That said, let me note that many of us were taught in school that using "he" here is the preferred pronoun. And that's just one reason why I can imagine why someone would reject this pull request. Because as much as I agree with the PR, I have the ability to conceive of other perspectives. We have no idea why Ben chose to reject the request.
1. Maybe he thought it was incorrect grammar. I disagree, since there's a strong history of singular, third-person use of "they" in English. But it's what we were taught.
2. Maybe he's overwhelmed with issues and pull requests, and thinks this is too trivial of a matter and doesn't want to encourage this kind of contribution to the project.
3. I can think of about 3-4 other valid reasons, but I won't bore you.
Bottom line, this has all the characteristics of a witch hunt. Joyent is OK with taking away a man's livelihood because he chose not to accept a two-word commit, and one that didn't even deal with code? Not only that, but to publically call him an asshole?
I'm all for making small steps toward gender equality like this one, but calling someone who doesn't share that opinion vulgar names and wanting to fire them is an altogether inappropriate move.
I am just afraid there is going to be a retaliation against Ben. Remember what happened early this year at PyCon? Honestly, people need to stop acting like animals and stop bash him out. There are other contributors who can rule him out and we don't need those hash comments.
Sexism is not about woman. When we call a country "she" we are making a female description of what a country is: nurturing her citizens. And since there are more and more single fathers we should be allowed to call a nation "he" instead of "she".
I often write in HN with the phrase "but your average uncle joe..." and this is sexist. So one day I will be asked to write "your average auntie Mary" or better yet "your average consumer."
Freedom of press should be honored. If I were an author and I like to write with "he" instead of "they" I should have that freedom. Yes, the project is owned by contributors. So like I said, let other contributors rule him out.
And why do we have sexism in the first place? Because we all assume to have some roles in this society. Today women want the same rights that men do, but there are also rights that men don't get easily (or assume to have less). For example, raping a woman is a big crime but raping a man, have you ever heard of that? Sure. But to some people that's less severe than raping a woman. I am just stating the obvious. In some countries, raping a man is a less severe crime. And law is making a sexist decision.
I believe in people's performance over gender.
All points from either side will draw to the same root cause: we want to be superior. We want to demonstrate that we are superior. We don't really want to be equal, we just want to be superior. If you think about it a moment - that's really where sexism lies. Because there are fewer woman in engineering, we ought to demonstrate our success and ability too.
I have bias, yes, because I am a man. Who doesn't? But I see performance. My sister is very capable and more capable than I am. I always look up to her.
And yes, the solution is to make gender neutral but we are looping between anti-sexist and feminism. There is often a confusion between what a feminist, a sexist or an anti-sexist person would do... We need Yi-Yang logo here.
-- EDIT --
I just thought this is a legitimate question to ask: any difference between an anti-sexist and a feminist? Do feminists prefer gender neutral or do they prefer to have "she" instead?
What we have learnt is that the CEO of Joyent is prone to over-reacting and will fire people over nothing. So don't work for Joyent as there is no job security when you can be fired for a commit.
If you're a Joyent employee and you're not part of the Node.js groupie love-fest, better spend your holiday looking for a new job. Imagine a lunch-time conversation over the Affordable Care Act, would you dare voice your opinion?
To Bryan Cantrill, just because you're the boss doesn't mean you can fire at will, without cause, and ruin a programmer's life, unless that is you like the idea of a lawsuit and getting into the press since literally nobody is talking about Joyent and SmartOS anymore.
Ben's dismissive attitude, and yours, is exactly the issue tech-communities needs to tackle & extinguish. No, sed 's/him/them/' isn't going to suddenly make the world a better place but it's the thought that counts. Every small step counts. Ben's attitude about it, just closing the PR and claiming not to be concerned with trivial matters is something that at least needed a serious HR sensitivity discussion. Firing Ben for it is extreme, but not unreasonable if a company wanted to send a pro-diversity message; albeit extreme. These kinds of actions also provide a good filter for future employees. If you're so bothered by Joyent's blog post that you won't work there and you tell others to quit, it's probably better for Joyent not to have you as an employee to begin with.
+1 on that PR and on Joyent's blog post.
EDIT: Stories about sexism & racism, minor or major, in the tech-scene almost always disappear off HN's front page in like 2 minutes. That's another symptom of a problem as far as I'm concerned.
I think you have a fair point. HR issue. For an employee this is a big red flag - now Ben's employer will probably receive some angry emails this weekend and Ben will probably face some angry comments this weekend too. Nasty situation.
If we do let Ben be a good man as he claims to be, then maybe it was a stupidity to rule out the ticket so quickly. How would a clever "sexist" person do? This "sexist" person would probably say "well, I don't like they. Not the way my teacher taught me grammar. Rephrase the whole sentence."
Or just don't bother deal with any pull request related to sexist.
But I agree with the parent. The CEO is afraid of any negativity. This is a typical way people handle crisis - find someone responsible and fire that person. A true heroic responsible CEO should first accept / address issue with the PR, then if the community thinks "YES DO IT" then accept the pull request and requires at least 2 contributors with sign off privilege to accept a pull request from that point onward. Firing someone quickly is the worst way to be a boss.
I'm not talking about the pronoun issue, I'm focusing on the hypothetical firing.
It's completely unreasonable to fire someone over what in essence is reversing a commit. It might warrant a discussion with a manager, it might warrant an official warning, and perhaps some other measure but summary dismissal? No way.
In my opinion, this is Bryan backing Isaacs, perhaps in a clash of egos with Ben, and grand-standing over an issue which he believes will earn Joyent brownie points.
I don't want any developer to work in an environment where the CEO openly boasts about firing people, so in summary, I guess, fuck Joyent.
>> What we have learnt is that the CEO of Joyent is prone to over-reacting and will fire people over nothing.
If you think what took place in that github thread was nothing, you represent exactly the dismissive attitude of sexism the tech-industry needs to get rid of.
I don't see anything in that Github thread to warrant summary dismissal of an employee.
A good CEO would ask the relevant manager to sit the two parties down and resolve the situation. If it were not possible, human resources could be brought in to assess the situation and perhaps administer training and/or disciplinary action. A sign of a bad CEO is knee-jerk firing and to write a blog post, boasting about such a hypothetical firing, shows incredibly poor judgement.
Let us imagine though that Bryan was right. So why doesn't Bryan fire Isaacs too? Isaacs broke commit rules by not getting his patch signed... what if this was some other commit which made it into deployment and brought down services for paying customers? Shouldn't Bryan view Isaacs as a bad employee who disregards rules and is thus a dangerous liability to the company?
No you don't get it. When you ask someone who is part of an underrepresented minority to "work it out" on an issue of gender discrimination, you are putting the onus on the person who was acted upon to resolve the situation. If you're mugged, do you think the police should ask you and the mugger to meet and "work it out?"
The person who committed the offense is the person who should be held responsible. this isn't a matter of opinion or a "cat fight" and your response is exactly why things aren't changing in tech. Most women have encountered a sexist at some point or another, tried to get it fixed and been told to "work it out." How exactly do you "work it out" with someone who is fundamentally convinced your issues are irrelevant?
EDIT: Stories about sexism & racism, minor or major, in the tech-scene almost always disappear off HN's front page in like 2 minutes. That's another symptom of a problem as far as I'm concerned.
Oh no, quite the contrary, I'm afraid. They constantly attract large discussions and pointless drama that always gets nowhere. As we are observing right now.
Wonderful. We need tags on HN. You could tag this #pointless_open_source_drama.
What happened: a maintainer refuses a pull request changing a pronoun in a doc on the grounds of "triviality", without giving more context. Joyent at this stage had two options:
a) reach out to him to stress why they thought it was actually really, really important, or at least get his deeper reasons
b) act as if somebody peed in their coffee and write an angry blog post talking about firing people, because Open Source doesn't have enough drama already - it's just missing some more good keywords like Pulseaudio to trigger the best flamewars
It's fascinating to see how supposedly smart people behave with the emotional maturity of a toddler.
Anyway, as of a couple of hours ago, Ben posted this comment on the Github issue:
Hi all, let me try to clear up a few things.
Why I rejected the pull request. Us maintainers tend to reject tiny doc changes because they're often more trouble than they're worth. You have to collect and check the CLA, it makes git blame less effective, etc.
That's why the usual approach to such pull requests is 'no, unless' - in this case the 'unless' should probably have applied. To me as a non-native speaker, the difference between 'him' and 'them' seems academic but hey, if it gets us scores of female contributors, who am I to object?
Why I reverted the commit. In hindsight, I should have given Isaac the benefit of the doubt because I don't doubt that he acted with the best of intentions. On the other hand, if another committer jumped the line like that, I would have done the same thing. We have procedures in place and no one is exempt from them.
To the people that felt it necessary to call me a misogynist: I volunteer in a mentorship program that gets young people - especially young women - involved in technology. How many of you go out and actively try to increase the number of women in the field?
I'm probably going to step back from libuv and node.js core development. I do it more out a sense of duty than anything else. If this is what I have to deal with, then I'd just as rather do something else. Hope that clears things up. Thanks.
Well, thanks Joyent. Hope the extra publicity was worth it.
I wish I had the gut to scream at the people who were commenting on the pull request and the reverted action page. But they are scary. Anyhow, I don't think Ben should continue contributing. There is going to be some distrust between Joyent and Ben. Though I am surprised they haven't taken his privilege away yet.
EDIT: Stories about sexism & racism, minor or major, in the tech-scene almost always disappear off HN's front page in like 2 minutes. That's another symptom of a problem as far as I'm concerned.
That is for anything 'controversial' There was a post the other day that found it was any story that has more comments than likes, and atleast 40 comments will be penalized. So, if you want stories like this to last on the front page longer do not comment on them as much.
Saying "your average uncle joe" does not ring sexist to me? You're drawing a comparison, to whomever you want to, and not making any radical assumption about a specified group of people.
As for your rape anecdote... I hope you'll give the mechanics of that a bit more thought? And also consider the type of physical injury. (Many rape victims suffer damage to their internal organs and/or lose the ability to conceive.)
Here is one. Not very long ago did our definition changed the way we interpret male rape. Of course how we rule male rape in court is a different story.
Indeed. However, you tell a rape joke about women and someone should (and very likely will) tell you that it's not funny.
Comments like,"Don't drop the soap," are so benign in our culture that you would have to be in a hypersensitized environment to be concerned about repercussions of any sort.
How many people feel as if justice is served when a male prisoner is raped to death, à la Jeffrey Dahmer. In fact, many would not call Dahmer's homicide a rape, but switching genders would absolutely qualify it as such.
I'm sounding as if I'm on a soapbox about this, but I'm not defending female rape in any way or the power imbalance of gender in most of the world.
> I just thought this is a legitimate question to ask: any difference between an anti-sexist and a feminist? Do feminists prefer gender neutral or do they prefer to have "she" instead?
Ok, on your recommendation I found a copy of the book and read it for the last three hours. I am significantly less convinced of the thesis "Feminism is about equal rights" after reading this book.
"Most women in the United States do not even know or use the
terms colonialism and neocolonialism." I found this statement to be emblematic of the issues this book has, it is right around 125 pages of assertions and 0 pages of proof, data, reasoning, or any sort of factual grounding beyond the implicit goals of the author.
"Future feminist studies will document all the ways anti-sexist male parenting enhances the lives of children" This is a second thing the book frequently proposes, while feminism doesn't have an answer today, we're sure we'll have an answer tomorrow.
The book itself had a deceptive title, it should be titled "Feminism is for marxists who claim to have all the answers but hand wave giving any".
I don't think your explanation for why we refer to countries as though they are females is necessarily complete or correct. In English, countries and ships are both "she". German famously has countries as male ("Fatherland"), but that is by no means the only example. In Russian, and I believe Portuguese, ships are male ("He's a good ship.")
Though does this have anything to do with culture? I honestly don't know. I use that as an example to ask myself whether sexism is conditional or not. You can use "it" or "she" to refer to a country (or a land if you enjoy poem hahaha), but I supposed most people will not find that sexist. So sexism is condition and has to do with the story (the context in which the pronoun is used).
>If he's overwhelmed, why would he go to the extra effort of reverting the commit?
For a possible answer to this (admittedly rhetorical) question, please re-read my comment, particularly the lines "...doesn't want to encourage this kind of contribution to the project."
Some developers cleverly attach their name to famous project "Contributors" lists by making small grammar changes to the documentation, and then put it on their CV. In my mind, that's actually not a bad thing, since documentation is improved and everyone benefits. But I can understand that some developers may not think that such recognition is deserved.
He may have reverted because it might have appeared that Isaac was trying to bullishly overrule him in violation of project guidelines (I'm not sure whether that's actually true, but it may have appeared as such).
Excluding contributors simply because you want to feel like you're part of some exclusive group, is possibly even more harmful to open source projects than insisting on gender-exclusive language.
People who improve the code or documentation, even if it's in some really minor way you don't care about, are vital to any open source project. If you exclude them, you're voting for your project to remain small and irrelevant.
He explicitly stated the reason for that in his revert: either he or another leader (that wasn't the one who did the merge) has to sign off before changes can be merged. He does care, not about the gendered pronouns but rather the principle of commits/ merges in a big project.
This is a blog post. Taking away a man's livelihood by firing them is widely accepted as perfectly normal and reasonable, and hn posters regularly talk about how they wouldn't want certain people working for them.
You're making a tone argument about calling someone a vulgar name, as if that is somehow worse or more important than them insisting on contributing to the pervasive exclusionary effect of gendered language.
In modern language, "witch hunt" does not literally mean "burn them alive because you believe that they have communed with Lucifer". The Crucible set the tone when it used literal witch hunts in an allegory about the House Un-American Activities Committee which, among other things, had it's hands in blacklisting people accused of being communists.
That's a fair point, and "they" certainly does work well in some places. But if you took every use of "he" or "she" from Shakespeare and replaced it with "they", then we'd have a problem. And that's what this post is hinting at doing.
It's harder to write non-gendered stuff in English than to write gendered stuff, but I'm sure Shakespeare would have been pretty easily up to the job if he had cared.
Running `s/he/they` on Shakespeare's current literature would fail, but why is that a problem? Don't you think Shakespeare could have made it work from the beginning if that was a big issue at the time?
No doubt, I was taught in the 80's in high school that "they" is only applicable to plural and "he" is the generic if you don't know sex of the person.
If I ever release a project, I'm just going to ban all pronouns because of how screwed up pronouns are in English. I'll just use single letters (U for user, P for programmer, etc).
The impression of that change in the US media seemed to be "oh my God, look at those overly politically correct Europeans inventing words to be politically correct" (when they noticed it at all).
This article misses the point. Before it goes on to speculate about hypothetical situations, it says:
> The reality is that probably Ben is not a sexist, maybe he believes simply that “him” does not make a difference in sexism. Everybody has his fight, and changing “him” is not the Ben fight
And that's okay. It doesn't have to be Ben's fight. The problem is that Ben denies this fight to others. The problem is not that Ben doesn't work to improve gender equality, the problem is that he rejects and reverts other people's work to improve gender equality.
And I can fully understand that this would be a firing offense in some companies. Rejecting and undoing other people's good work is seriously not cool.
but apparently ben didn't revert the commit on the basis of its content, he reverted it on the basis of a bad process (lack of review).
So we should criticize "people who don't accept these commits", or "people who revert commits because of bad process", but the case "people who revert these kind of commits" is not valid.
He initially rejected it on the basis of its content, and then reverted it on a basis that didn't hold up to scrutiny, as one the first comments on the revert commit demonstrates. Seems like that meets both your criteria?
If you actually look at the joyent blog post and the github commits its pretty obvious Ben was a dismissive prick with a bit of an agenda since this goes beyond just not accepting a pull request. I think firing someone over this would probably be a bit much but he definitely deserves to be called out for being a jackass.
If I was a company that was represented on github by someone who managed to antagonize the community I was hoping to be working with on my open source product, I'd probably fire them too and hire someone with better qualifications re: getting along with people.
<sarcasm>"to reject a pull request that eliminates a gendered pronoun on the principle that pronouns should in fact be gendered would constitute a fireable offense" - nice place to work, congrats Joyent employees.</sarcasm>
There's one practical problem with this approach though. If you start aligning everyone against a single doctrine and prosecute deviations, you'll quickly lose the ability to innovate.
Start sending people to jail for having an opinion different from the Central Committee of the Communist Party and you'll end up not only with engineers in jail but with an industry 100% copied from someone else. Ask me how I know.
It is so incredibly, profoundly frustrating to watch (mostly) male nerds grapple with sexism. Guys (and I mean that specifically and gendered-ly), you don't get it. You kinda can't, and I say that as a cis male person. I don't get it, either, except maybe intellectually, and even then only occasionally.
To get a little meta for a moment, I think a lot of the disconnect that happens in these discussions (to, admittedly, stretch the term a bit) comes from the fact that nerds are already deeply familiar with Othering. We know what that shit feels like, man; we've been Othered all our lives.
Consequently, when we see an instance of gender-based Othering that seems trivial to us (witness all this foofaraw over the gender of a pronoun — it's different by three whole letters!), we tend to rank our perception of that triviality over the Othered party's experience. After all, we know what Othering feels like, and saying "him" instead of "them" sure as hell doesn't feel like that. Ipso facto, it can't be Othering, and is therefore just those damned misandrists trying to make trouble again.
But that's exactly the thing you need to understand if you want to approach and engage meaningfully with feminism (in the "women are people, too" sense, which is how it's used by most people): your perceptions of how Othering should feel don't fucking matter if you aren't the party being Othered in that specific circumstance.
Just like an unpopular, male nerd might, in some ways rightly, object to a popular, pretty, smart girl bemoaning being treated differently for being "nerdy", because she's never had the experience of being Othered for her unpopular, male nerdiness, a male nerd can't legitimately claim, "That's nothing!" when presented with a case of gendered, grammatical Othering. He's not the Other there.
So, no, it's not reasonable for a male person to reject a gender-neutralizing pull request on the basis that the gender-based Othering that it's correcting is "trivial". It may seem trivial to him, but he isn't in a position to legitimately judge its triviality. That's not to say it's necessarily a firing offense, but I know I'd, personally, be uncomfortable working with someone who consistently manifests Ben's attitude towards women and gender issues.
your perceptions of how Othering should feel don't fucking matter if you aren't the party being Othered in that specific circumstance.
This is the exact same attitude that leads to such things as affirmative action and pampering.
You also make the fallacious assumption that all "nerds" (what a vapid and pointless label) have been socially ostracized during their lives, thus begging the question.
Your entire argument basically revolves around accommodating to the feelings of others, consistently. There are cases where this should be taken into account, but it is not a rule of thumb. Sometimes a triviality is a triviality, a ridiculous expectation is a ridiculous expectation.
I think this is the main reason of our present misfortune: we just can't handle getting offended. If we stopped being so emotional about the most minor of annoyances, we'd be much happier. In some ways, technology has contributed to this. We now have too much convenience, and not enough annoyance. It has made us brittle, weak and sensitive.
This stuff is less about being unable to "handle getting offended" than it is about being unwilling to tolerate people who behave offensively.
I don't think it's okay to use the word "gay" pejoratively, even when there aren't any queers in the room. I don't think it's okay to make rape jokes, even when there aren't any women around. I don't think it's okay to behave or speak in a way that is deliberately and hurtfully exclusive of anyone, for any reason, at any time.
To me, being deliberate and mindful about Othering is less about being "accommodating", and more of a useful means to help keep me from being "That Guy" in any of the countless, subtle ways that I might be — because we all do it, even the people you think of as the typically Othered, no matter how hard we try not to.
If you want to call that pampering, that's on you. I call it courtesy and decency, personally.
I don't think it's okay to use the word "gay" pejoratively, even when there aren't any queers in the room.
That's the whole point of an insult.
I don't think it's okay to make rape jokes, even when there aren't any women around.
I don't think you understand how comedy works. In many ways, it's a coping mechanism. The jokes we laugh at are often quite depressing or disturbing if you try to elucidate their underlying subject matter, but they're presented in such a manner that we can be humored by and cope with the dark side of life.
Not making jokes of X type is just censorship and idiocy. Comedy has no boundaries.
I don't think it's okay to behave or speak in a way that is deliberately and hurtfully exclusive of anyone, for any reason, at any time.
I can agree with that, but the way you put it is excessively vague.
Out of sheer curiosity, since the Joyent's blog post had such a big emphasis on "empathy", but wouldn't sociopaths/ psychopaths be even more likely to be not sexists? Because they would be an assholes to everyone anyway, regardless of gender :-). (I'm sorry, this is probably really wrong to be joking with, it's just that the whole situation is completely bizarre and incomprehensible to me, so weird questions just pop up).
A clever psychopath can put on the mask of an empathetic person when it suits them. Think Ted Bundy as an extreme case (of course most psychopaths/sociopaths/whatever are not serial killers).
Never mind those generations of discrimination. We men will tell you what is an acceptable commit and that's that. Offended? Tough luck. We run the world! It's a meritocracy don'tchaknow??!!
(But don't publicly shame us! We're too threatened a species! we're just innocent victims of tradition! Who got this way through our own hard work! Oh no the womenz are attacking!!!!!!!!! Poor us!)
139 comments
[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 217 ms ] thread* Party A submitted a pull request for a minor change to the libuv docs
* Party B (who can signoff on changes) declined it for being an extremely minor change
* Party C merged it after getting signoff from Party D (who can signoff on changes)
* Party B reversed the change under the impression than neither he nor Party D had signed off on it
* Joyent would fire Party B for this
It just so happens that the minor change was removing two masculine pronouns into favour of gender neutral ones.
I can't reconcile the blog post on Joyent with what actually happened.
Blog post [1]:
The pull request wasn't rejected on any pronoun principle [2]: And again: The actual commit message [3]: Unless bnoordhuis was aware the patch had been signed off on (in which case reversing the commit is a dick move), all he's doing is following procedures.[1] http://www.joyent.com/blog/the-power-of-a-pronoun
[2] https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015#issuecomment-29538...
[3] https://github.com/joyent/libuv/commit/804d40ee14dc0f82c482d...
It's a pretty extreme reaction by Joyent; I wonder how much further away "We would also fire whoever used the gendered pronouns in the first place" is.
When I read the Joyent post, it doesn't seem like they acknowledge any other possible motivation for revert. When I later saw the revert message regarding sign-offs I was quite surprised that the blog neither mentioned it, nor was written in a way that indicated they had read it.
I'd wager that there are less women in IT because of behaviour like Bryan's and a company like Joyent that will host his views than there are because of declined pull requests.
Case in point feminism. Women have put up with a lot over the years and I can understand someone being angry and having the courage of their convictions as a result.
In a way, I respect that. It's their prerogative to try and bring about change. Refusing to enter into dialogue over certain issues will certainly not win anyone over who isn't already on their side, but admitting that things aren't black and white is admitting that they could be wrong.
But mixing take-no-prisoners thinking with the workplace and you can end up with a very poisonous atmosphere. You always need some flexibility of thought, however strong your views, because sooner or later a situation will come up which requires clarification and discussion. Not everything is black and white, and sometimes there are mistakes and misunderstandings. I think the error bars on that github activity are wide enough that we can't be certain.
This blog rant reflects very badly on Joyent. I think it shows that Bryan Cantrill has exceptionally poor judgment. Bryan says "we believe that empathy is a core engineering value". That seems a bit hypocritical given his behaviour.
I mean, there isn't really a whole lot of information from Ben here except two actions, the rejection and then the reversion.
Did he look at the title and think "I should reject a PR titled 'Removed use of gendered pronoun' because the act of removing a gendered pronoun is trivial"? Did he just look at the diff and think "This is a couple of characters, not important." Did he see the change and think "I can't wait to marginalize the shit out of these women reading my documentation!"
There's just not a lot of info from Ben. And now because of all this bluster, there is likely not to be.
Seems like a bunch of drama, rather than a fruitful discussion.
This is the only way it can change the developer community. Don't be a sexist and you won't run into this problem.
Incredibly nitpicky.
What's your solution to this beyond trolling HN?
Gender-specific pronouns are fine for gender-specific use cases. They're not fine if they serve to exclude people using other pronouns for no reason.
And can we please put this into perspective? The language you use reminds me of another GitHub comment suggesting that reverting a commit from they -> him is 'erasing women from the community'.
https://github.com/alex/libuv/commit/3977d1b36c689767cc0db50...
Had nothing to do with using a masculine pronoun, it was to document how the code works.
Hes not a native english speaker either, so you should be glad that he wrote the comment in english for us that don't speak dutch :)
And yet one day one of them pulled me aside and explained to me what exactly I was doing that was making being at her job harder. It wasn't something I did intentionally, it wasn't because I thought ill of her, it was just that I didn't think much at all. I behaved differently toward her (and, I guess, other female developers) because I had a set of assumptions I automatically brought to bear against male developers I wasn't sure applied to her, and it affected my behavior in ways that kept singling her out and making her feel uncomfortable.
One of the most embarassing, humbling and in retrospect, valuable moments in my professional life.
I'm happy it went that way instead of a complaint followed by me losing my job. I think a lot of male developers don't want to be sexist, but we need to learn what that actually means in practice, and it's not as intuitive as you make it out to be. Wasn't for me at least.
My post is vague because it's about subtle behavioral stuff. Basically, when I interacted with male developers, my behavior toward them was based on projecting myself into them automatically. Like, say, the level of expectations I leveled against them, how competitive I would be with them, how aggressive I might be toward them was based on how I myself respond to being challenged and my own career path/experiences and things like that. I unintentionally behaved differently toward female developers (not necessarily worse actually, but differently) just because that automatic projecting would not happen, and it would end up singling them out.
Learning about that has improved my interaction not just with women but also men, actually. I make a much bigger effort to learn about the individual now.
I'm sure all this came a lot easier to others, or maybe they just had the right sort of experiences much earlier (I wonder if it would have helped if I had any siblings, say). But for me is something I can identify as "needed to learn that".
I am spartacus. Or if you prefer, Giles Corey's refusal to plead.
Begin firing people for using "him" instead of "they", and you will "radicalize" many formally apathetic people.
If you're running an open source project and someone you pay is driving off its community, you'd probably feel justified in not giving them money anymore.
Read the actual source, don't rely on editorials.
Stating that defending that pronouns should be gendered is a fireable offense is more than just ridiculous political correctness, it's criminalizing opinion. It's the Holy Inquisition.
There should be a law that concerns the confusion of the two.
It is a shame that people have to preface legitimate comparisons to historic events with these sort of disclaimers.
I'm rather amazed to see people rushing to defend sexism. Please tell me: what's so great about sexism? Why is it so wrong to fight it? Because I really don't get it.
This is a witch hunt, plain and simple. I'm amazed that people don't understand that this doesn't help the fight against sexism, at all...
It seems a small thing to fire someone over, but if gender equality and using gender neutral pronouns are important parts of their company policy, then someone actively resisting company policy and reverting the work of people who improved the product according to company policy, would be pretty serious.
Also note that a female developer was ready to quit the community over Ben's behaviour. Ben directly contributed to a hostile atmosphere where an often excluded minority is likely to feel more excluded. That is definitely serious.
You consider it a witch hunt because you don't care about gender neutral pronouns. Probably because you haven't felt subtly excluded all your life by gendered pronouns referring to other people. Fighting that exclusion is an important part of the fight against sexism.
I can't think of a good reason not to accept the pull request. It all seems like such a simple problem getting blown way out of proportion.
To be honest, you'd find a huge discrepancy on this. If this were true, the pull request would not have been rejected.
The patch itself comes across almost as bullying: accept our view, or be publicly shamed as a misogynist.
It is of course good that they want to contribute but some requests generate more traffic around the request than the request itself. Not if this was a bigger improvement to docs, a project wide spelling fix, I would probably be better.
Anyway the reason this go blown up is because of the gender aspect. Ask yourself this, what if this was not influence by the gender and was instead a basic spelling mistake, how would this played out?
However, something I've been wondering for a while now is: how does this issue manifest itself in other languages? Are there similar movements? How does it work in languages where every noun has a gender?
Really, what makes sexism so vital that it needs to be defended?
Shouldn't that be "Everybody has their fight"? I guess antirez is sexist. /sarcasm
Of course not. Only men have legitimate fights. When a fight is only being conducted by women, it must be something trivial.
I'm generally not bothered by subtleties, but then I realize that what's subtle to me as a woman is entirely invisible to men.
If the guy prefers masculine pronouns, it doesn't make him a sexist exactly. But it would imply that he doesn't experience the subtle discomfort in his everyday life. So, it's worth pointing out. In a chill way, if possible.
First, let me get it out of the way that I actually agree with the pull request. In this day, the personal pronoun "they" makes a more inclusive pronoun that just "him". Zed Shaw's suggestion of "you" is also a good alternative, particularly if you're wanting to be less formal.
That said, let me note that many of us were taught in school that using "he" here is the preferred pronoun. And that's just one reason why I can imagine why someone would reject this pull request. Because as much as I agree with the PR, I have the ability to conceive of other perspectives. We have no idea why Ben chose to reject the request.
1. Maybe he thought it was incorrect grammar. I disagree, since there's a strong history of singular, third-person use of "they" in English. But it's what we were taught.
2. Maybe he's overwhelmed with issues and pull requests, and thinks this is too trivial of a matter and doesn't want to encourage this kind of contribution to the project.
3. I can think of about 3-4 other valid reasons, but I won't bore you.
Bottom line, this has all the characteristics of a witch hunt. Joyent is OK with taking away a man's livelihood because he chose not to accept a two-word commit, and one that didn't even deal with code? Not only that, but to publically call him an asshole?
I'm all for making small steps toward gender equality like this one, but calling someone who doesn't share that opinion vulgar names and wanting to fire them is an altogether inappropriate move.
Sexism is not about woman. When we call a country "she" we are making a female description of what a country is: nurturing her citizens. And since there are more and more single fathers we should be allowed to call a nation "he" instead of "she".
I often write in HN with the phrase "but your average uncle joe..." and this is sexist. So one day I will be asked to write "your average auntie Mary" or better yet "your average consumer."
Freedom of press should be honored. If I were an author and I like to write with "he" instead of "they" I should have that freedom. Yes, the project is owned by contributors. So like I said, let other contributors rule him out.
And why do we have sexism in the first place? Because we all assume to have some roles in this society. Today women want the same rights that men do, but there are also rights that men don't get easily (or assume to have less). For example, raping a woman is a big crime but raping a man, have you ever heard of that? Sure. But to some people that's less severe than raping a woman. I am just stating the obvious. In some countries, raping a man is a less severe crime. And law is making a sexist decision.
I believe in people's performance over gender.
All points from either side will draw to the same root cause: we want to be superior. We want to demonstrate that we are superior. We don't really want to be equal, we just want to be superior. If you think about it a moment - that's really where sexism lies. Because there are fewer woman in engineering, we ought to demonstrate our success and ability too.
I have bias, yes, because I am a man. Who doesn't? But I see performance. My sister is very capable and more capable than I am. I always look up to her.
And yes, the solution is to make gender neutral but we are looping between anti-sexist and feminism. There is often a confusion between what a feminist, a sexist or an anti-sexist person would do... We need Yi-Yang logo here.
-- EDIT --
I just thought this is a legitimate question to ask: any difference between an anti-sexist and a feminist? Do feminists prefer gender neutral or do they prefer to have "she" instead?
What we have learnt is that the CEO of Joyent is prone to over-reacting and will fire people over nothing. So don't work for Joyent as there is no job security when you can be fired for a commit.
If you're a Joyent employee and you're not part of the Node.js groupie love-fest, better spend your holiday looking for a new job. Imagine a lunch-time conversation over the Affordable Care Act, would you dare voice your opinion?
To Bryan Cantrill, just because you're the boss doesn't mean you can fire at will, without cause, and ruin a programmer's life, unless that is you like the idea of a lawsuit and getting into the press since literally nobody is talking about Joyent and SmartOS anymore.
Ben's dismissive attitude, and yours, is exactly the issue tech-communities needs to tackle & extinguish. No, sed 's/him/them/' isn't going to suddenly make the world a better place but it's the thought that counts. Every small step counts. Ben's attitude about it, just closing the PR and claiming not to be concerned with trivial matters is something that at least needed a serious HR sensitivity discussion. Firing Ben for it is extreme, but not unreasonable if a company wanted to send a pro-diversity message; albeit extreme. These kinds of actions also provide a good filter for future employees. If you're so bothered by Joyent's blog post that you won't work there and you tell others to quit, it's probably better for Joyent not to have you as an employee to begin with.
+1 on that PR and on Joyent's blog post.
EDIT: Stories about sexism & racism, minor or major, in the tech-scene almost always disappear off HN's front page in like 2 minutes. That's another symptom of a problem as far as I'm concerned.
If we do let Ben be a good man as he claims to be, then maybe it was a stupidity to rule out the ticket so quickly. How would a clever "sexist" person do? This "sexist" person would probably say "well, I don't like they. Not the way my teacher taught me grammar. Rephrase the whole sentence."
Or just don't bother deal with any pull request related to sexist.
But I agree with the parent. The CEO is afraid of any negativity. This is a typical way people handle crisis - find someone responsible and fire that person. A true heroic responsible CEO should first accept / address issue with the PR, then if the community thinks "YES DO IT" then accept the pull request and requires at least 2 contributors with sign off privilege to accept a pull request from that point onward. Firing someone quickly is the worst way to be a boss.
It's completely unreasonable to fire someone over what in essence is reversing a commit. It might warrant a discussion with a manager, it might warrant an official warning, and perhaps some other measure but summary dismissal? No way.
In my opinion, this is Bryan backing Isaacs, perhaps in a clash of egos with Ben, and grand-standing over an issue which he believes will earn Joyent brownie points.
I don't want any developer to work in an environment where the CEO openly boasts about firing people, so in summary, I guess, fuck Joyent.
>> What we have learnt is that the CEO of Joyent is prone to over-reacting and will fire people over nothing.
If you think what took place in that github thread was nothing, you represent exactly the dismissive attitude of sexism the tech-industry needs to get rid of.
A good CEO would ask the relevant manager to sit the two parties down and resolve the situation. If it were not possible, human resources could be brought in to assess the situation and perhaps administer training and/or disciplinary action. A sign of a bad CEO is knee-jerk firing and to write a blog post, boasting about such a hypothetical firing, shows incredibly poor judgement.
Let us imagine though that Bryan was right. So why doesn't Bryan fire Isaacs too? Isaacs broke commit rules by not getting his patch signed... what if this was some other commit which made it into deployment and brought down services for paying customers? Shouldn't Bryan view Isaacs as a bad employee who disregards rules and is thus a dangerous liability to the company?
"@isaacs may have his commit bit but that does not mean he is at liberty to land patches at will. All patches have to be signed off by either me or Bert. Isaac, consider yourself chided." https://github.com/joyent/libuv/commit/804d40ee14dc0f82c482d...
The person who committed the offense is the person who should be held responsible. this isn't a matter of opinion or a "cat fight" and your response is exactly why things aren't changing in tech. Most women have encountered a sexist at some point or another, tried to get it fixed and been told to "work it out." How exactly do you "work it out" with someone who is fundamentally convinced your issues are irrelevant?
Oh no, quite the contrary, I'm afraid. They constantly attract large discussions and pointless drama that always gets nowhere. As we are observing right now.
What happened: a maintainer refuses a pull request changing a pronoun in a doc on the grounds of "triviality", without giving more context. Joyent at this stage had two options:
a) reach out to him to stress why they thought it was actually really, really important, or at least get his deeper reasons b) act as if somebody peed in their coffee and write an angry blog post talking about firing people, because Open Source doesn't have enough drama already - it's just missing some more good keywords like Pulseaudio to trigger the best flamewars
It's fascinating to see how supposedly smart people behave with the emotional maturity of a toddler.
Anyway, as of a couple of hours ago, Ben posted this comment on the Github issue:
Hi all, let me try to clear up a few things.
Why I rejected the pull request. Us maintainers tend to reject tiny doc changes because they're often more trouble than they're worth. You have to collect and check the CLA, it makes git blame less effective, etc.
That's why the usual approach to such pull requests is 'no, unless' - in this case the 'unless' should probably have applied. To me as a non-native speaker, the difference between 'him' and 'them' seems academic but hey, if it gets us scores of female contributors, who am I to object?
Why I reverted the commit. In hindsight, I should have given Isaac the benefit of the doubt because I don't doubt that he acted with the best of intentions. On the other hand, if another committer jumped the line like that, I would have done the same thing. We have procedures in place and no one is exempt from them.
To the people that felt it necessary to call me a misogynist: I volunteer in a mentorship program that gets young people - especially young women - involved in technology. How many of you go out and actively try to increase the number of women in the field?
I'm probably going to step back from libuv and node.js core development. I do it more out a sense of duty than anything else. If this is what I have to deal with, then I'd just as rather do something else. Hope that clears things up. Thanks.
Well, thanks Joyent. Hope the extra publicity was worth it.
That is for anything 'controversial' There was a post the other day that found it was any story that has more comments than likes, and atleast 40 comments will be penalized. So, if you want stories like this to last on the front page longer do not comment on them as much.
As for your rape anecdote... I hope you'll give the mechanics of that a bit more thought? And also consider the type of physical injury. (Many rape victims suffer damage to their internal organs and/or lose the ability to conceive.)
If the standards of language are changing, then we have to decide what punishment, if any, we deal out to those who don't keep up quickly enough.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/justice-dept-expands-...
Think before you react.
Comments like,"Don't drop the soap," are so benign in our culture that you would have to be in a hypersensitized environment to be concerned about repercussions of any sort.
How many people feel as if justice is served when a male prisoner is raped to death, à la Jeffrey Dahmer. In fact, many would not call Dahmer's homicide a rape, but switching genders would absolutely qualify it as such.
I'm sounding as if I'm on a soapbox about this, but I'm not defending female rape in any way or the power imbalance of gender in most of the world.
Feminism is about equal rights, don't worry.
"Most women in the United States do not even know or use the terms colonialism and neocolonialism." I found this statement to be emblematic of the issues this book has, it is right around 125 pages of assertions and 0 pages of proof, data, reasoning, or any sort of factual grounding beyond the implicit goals of the author.
"Future feminist studies will document all the ways anti-sexist male parenting enhances the lives of children" This is a second thing the book frequently proposes, while feminism doesn't have an answer today, we're sure we'll have an answer tomorrow.
The book itself had a deceptive title, it should be titled "Feminism is for marxists who claim to have all the answers but hand wave giving any".
This is an example of gender stereotyping.
Though does this have anything to do with culture? I honestly don't know. I use that as an example to ask myself whether sexism is conditional or not. You can use "it" or "she" to refer to a country (or a land if you enjoy poem hahaha), but I supposed most people will not find that sexist. So sexism is condition and has to do with the story (the context in which the pronoun is used).
That means he does care. He cares enough to enforce gendered pronouns in the face of others who prefer neutral pronouns.
For a possible answer to this (admittedly rhetorical) question, please re-read my comment, particularly the lines "...doesn't want to encourage this kind of contribution to the project."
Some developers cleverly attach their name to famous project "Contributors" lists by making small grammar changes to the documentation, and then put it on their CV. In my mind, that's actually not a bad thing, since documentation is improved and everyone benefits. But I can understand that some developers may not think that such recognition is deserved.
He may have reverted because it might have appeared that Isaac was trying to bullishly overrule him in violation of project guidelines (I'm not sure whether that's actually true, but it may have appeared as such).
People who improve the code or documentation, even if it's in some really minor way you don't care about, are vital to any open source project. If you exclude them, you're voting for your project to remain small and irrelevant.
This is a blog post. Taking away a man's livelihood by firing them is widely accepted as perfectly normal and reasonable, and hn posters regularly talk about how they wouldn't want certain people working for them.
You're making a tone argument about calling someone a vulgar name, as if that is somehow worse or more important than them insisting on contributing to the pervasive exclusionary effect of gendered language.
"God send every one their heart's desire!" - Much Ado About Nothing, Act III Scene 4
"There's not a man I meet but doth salute me, As if I were their well-acquainted friend." - Comedy of Errors, Act IV Scene 3
If I ever release a project, I'm just going to ban all pronouns because of how screwed up pronouns are in English. I'll just use single letters (U for user, P for programmer, etc).
What was the impression on the ground in Sweden?
> The reality is that probably Ben is not a sexist, maybe he believes simply that “him” does not make a difference in sexism. Everybody has his fight, and changing “him” is not the Ben fight
And that's okay. It doesn't have to be Ben's fight. The problem is that Ben denies this fight to others. The problem is not that Ben doesn't work to improve gender equality, the problem is that he rejects and reverts other people's work to improve gender equality.
And I can fully understand that this would be a firing offense in some companies. Rejecting and undoing other people's good work is seriously not cool.
So we should criticize "people who don't accept these commits", or "people who revert commits because of bad process", but the case "people who revert these kind of commits" is not valid.
There's one practical problem with this approach though. If you start aligning everyone against a single doctrine and prosecute deviations, you'll quickly lose the ability to innovate. Start sending people to jail for having an opinion different from the Central Committee of the Communist Party and you'll end up not only with engineers in jail but with an industry 100% copied from someone else. Ask me how I know.
To get a little meta for a moment, I think a lot of the disconnect that happens in these discussions (to, admittedly, stretch the term a bit) comes from the fact that nerds are already deeply familiar with Othering. We know what that shit feels like, man; we've been Othered all our lives.
Consequently, when we see an instance of gender-based Othering that seems trivial to us (witness all this foofaraw over the gender of a pronoun — it's different by three whole letters!), we tend to rank our perception of that triviality over the Othered party's experience. After all, we know what Othering feels like, and saying "him" instead of "them" sure as hell doesn't feel like that. Ipso facto, it can't be Othering, and is therefore just those damned misandrists trying to make trouble again.
But that's exactly the thing you need to understand if you want to approach and engage meaningfully with feminism (in the "women are people, too" sense, which is how it's used by most people): your perceptions of how Othering should feel don't fucking matter if you aren't the party being Othered in that specific circumstance.
Just like an unpopular, male nerd might, in some ways rightly, object to a popular, pretty, smart girl bemoaning being treated differently for being "nerdy", because she's never had the experience of being Othered for her unpopular, male nerdiness, a male nerd can't legitimately claim, "That's nothing!" when presented with a case of gendered, grammatical Othering. He's not the Other there.
So, no, it's not reasonable for a male person to reject a gender-neutralizing pull request on the basis that the gender-based Othering that it's correcting is "trivial". It may seem trivial to him, but he isn't in a position to legitimately judge its triviality. That's not to say it's necessarily a firing offense, but I know I'd, personally, be uncomfortable working with someone who consistently manifests Ben's attitude towards women and gender issues.
This is the exact same attitude that leads to such things as affirmative action and pampering.
You also make the fallacious assumption that all "nerds" (what a vapid and pointless label) have been socially ostracized during their lives, thus begging the question.
Your entire argument basically revolves around accommodating to the feelings of others, consistently. There are cases where this should be taken into account, but it is not a rule of thumb. Sometimes a triviality is a triviality, a ridiculous expectation is a ridiculous expectation.
I think this is the main reason of our present misfortune: we just can't handle getting offended. If we stopped being so emotional about the most minor of annoyances, we'd be much happier. In some ways, technology has contributed to this. We now have too much convenience, and not enough annoyance. It has made us brittle, weak and sensitive.
I don't think it's okay to use the word "gay" pejoratively, even when there aren't any queers in the room. I don't think it's okay to make rape jokes, even when there aren't any women around. I don't think it's okay to behave or speak in a way that is deliberately and hurtfully exclusive of anyone, for any reason, at any time.
To me, being deliberate and mindful about Othering is less about being "accommodating", and more of a useful means to help keep me from being "That Guy" in any of the countless, subtle ways that I might be — because we all do it, even the people you think of as the typically Othered, no matter how hard we try not to.
If you want to call that pampering, that's on you. I call it courtesy and decency, personally.
That's the whole point of an insult.
I don't think it's okay to make rape jokes, even when there aren't any women around.
I don't think you understand how comedy works. In many ways, it's a coping mechanism. The jokes we laugh at are often quite depressing or disturbing if you try to elucidate their underlying subject matter, but they're presented in such a manner that we can be humored by and cope with the dark side of life.
Not making jokes of X type is just censorship and idiocy. Comedy has no boundaries.
I don't think it's okay to behave or speak in a way that is deliberately and hurtfully exclusive of anyone, for any reason, at any time.
I can agree with that, but the way you put it is excessively vague.
http://blog.jooq.org/2013/12/01/the-open-source-bikeshed/
And
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson's_law_of_triviality
(But don't publicly shame us! We're too threatened a species! we're just innocent victims of tradition! Who got this way through our own hard work! Oh no the womenz are attacking!!!!!!!!! Poor us!)