Adria, could you please explain what the t-shirt means?
.
Not a lot I can say about this that hasn’t been said elsewhere, and frankly, it’s not my horse race anyway. Yet another example of gender fem-bot Jacobinism rearing it’s ugly head – the godless and the gamers are far from the only ones under siege. I’ll leave the concise summary to ArsTechnica –
“Donglegate” is classic overreaction—and everyone pays
Adria Richard’s (her site looks like it’s currently being DDoS’ed) version –
Forking and Dongle Jokes Don’t Belong At Tech Conferences
I would have let this idiocy slide and left it to the propeller heads but for one item in the commentary on Richard’s piece –
And it’s not the only comment flying around specifically comparing Richard’s to Watson. Becky, it is no longer just the godless community that knows you for the unfunny clown, fraud and vandal that you are. Your name is pretty much mud nowadays anywhere outside your MeanGirls clubhouse and the male chumps you can still lead around by the balls.
And in case anyone doubts the comparison to Watson, Adria is happy to confirm it herself –
Really, it doesn’t matter where you go – all of these professional victims are cast from the same injection mould. Nothing ever changes. Behold, the product of the US education system. And then they wonder why the Chinese are eating them alive.
Also of interest –
Adria Richards, PyCon, and How We All Lost — Amanda Blum shares her previous encounters with Richards
A Difficult Situation — SendGrid’s response
grey lining 
March 22, 2013 at 5:26 pm
You’re right it’s everywhere. It HAS been everywhere for over a generation now. The only thing new is the resistance they’ve met when invading two spaces (the skeptics and the geeks) that aren’t as easily fooled and simply aren’t primitive enough to be so easily controlled with demands of chivalry.
All other places (and there are many) just caved in without the slightest fight. That includes journalism and pretty much all education. The hope is that this resistance will inspire people in other areas to start pushing back.
It’s much like the new atheist movement. Like Dawkins gave lots of people the confidence to call themselves atheists openly and criticize religion, so do people like you give sane people the confidence to openly criticize feminists.
And just like new atheism, the discussion will never be over but it will be a lot more balanced in the future.
March 22, 2013 at 6:59 pm
Credit where credit’s due – SendGrid actually had the integrity and the backbone to fire the slug:
http://blog.sendgrid.com/a-difficult-situation/
March 24, 2013 at 12:43 pm
SendGrid’s response should serve as an example to everybody of “doing it right.” They act responsibly by fulfilling their duty to listen, but do not at the same time tolerate and enable antisocial behavior like public shaming, defamation, etc.
March 24, 2013 at 12:55 pm
It was fucking school yard humour. I keep saying this, I’d love to drop a microphone into the chicks toilets at their workplaces. With the geek girls I’ve worked with, the conversations would be guaranteed to peel paint. This bullshit has nothing to do with misogyny or discrimination – and everything to do with opportunistic exploitation of what in its barest sense is the puritan impulse. Grow the fuck up you cunts. This is not just whining – it’s personal destruction and it’s no different to accusations of witchcraft in the past.
March 24, 2013 at 11:25 pm
franc wrote: I keep saying this, I’d love to drop a microphone into the chicks toilets at their workplaces..
You don’t have to, just work with a large group of women! In my dept., myself and our boss are the only males. My hearing is shot from years of abuse(Rock n Roll), but I can hear. Some of the stuff I hear shouted from the cubicles would embarrass a sailor! We’re pretty casual on 2nd and 3rd shift.
Because of my hearing, I block most of it out. But e,g; tonight, I was looking forward to slawdogs after someone left coleslaw in the fridge, yesterday; it’s an American food thingy- you might eat it, too. I mentioned, a now defunct restaurant chain, Wiener King, and all I heard for the rest of the night were subtle dick jokes and the sexual proclivities of a bunch of 30 and 40 year old women.
March 25, 2013 at 9:47 am
I don’t know how heroic their action was. They supported the “right” to report “inappropriate” conduct, rather than point out that there was nothing inappropriate about the conduct in question. It was just two people sharing a joke, and there is no form of humor possible that could not conceivably offend someone.
They caved into pressure and got rid of someone who had become a liability, nothing more.
Courage would be supporting the right to tell hyper-sensitive, puritanical Stasi narcs like Richards to go fuck themselves…with a big dongle.
I would have appreciated an answer like:
“As a company involved with communications, we do not believe effective communication can occur in an atmosphere of oppression created by those with an agenda of generating outrage over the exercise of free speech. If anyone objects to something they hear, they should behave like adults and discuss the matter with the people in question. Attempting to destroy the livelihoods of people because they offend you is the behavior of a sociopath, and such behavior will not be tolerated by our company.”
March 23, 2013 at 12:30 am
Too bad those two guys weren’t caught making jokes about men getting their dicks cut off. They might have ended up with promotions.
March 23, 2013 at 12:04 pm
I notice that PZ Myers has weighed in with his latest blog post, “Adria Richards did Everything Exactly Right”. Surprisingly, EllenBeth Wachs is the voice of reason in that thread, but unsurprisingly, the baboons that inhabit Pharyngula attacked her for not toeing the party line. All of a sudden, she fell in their eyes from ardent feminist to being a chill girl, misogynist, dudebro supporter, etc. DESPITE her track record!
March 23, 2013 at 11:32 pm
My favorite part was this tweet:
> Black people CANNOT be racist against White people.
Yeah, no.
March 24, 2013 at 5:23 am
These kind of lunatics always claim to be “sex-positive” and yet when someone mentions or jokes about something even remotely sexual, it brings negative feelings and responses from these people. Sex positive, negative response? Something’s a little off.
Adria probably saw this as her chance to become famous. To these people, any kind of fame is good fame.
March 25, 2013 at 3:28 am
I have been given to understand this is an old blog post from Richards:
“Because of my experiences growing up, I have triggers. This means that I’m always scanning for danger; for situations that seem like something from the past that could hurt me. When I recognize something that matches, I can overreact and feel intense fear, anger or anxiety. This is something I’ve worked on a lot. It’s much better now than 10 years ago but there are some things that send me over the edge. …
Or coming back on the plane from Mexico the other weekend. The man in front of me had both the window shades open and the light was pouring in over my face. I thought to ask him if it was all right to close the shade but in the back of my mind I thought, “What if he gets mad, yells and starts attacking me when I ask?”. I worked on this for several minutes to overcome the fear. I had to coach myself that the other thought was irrational and that I needed to say something. I finally did ask a few minutes later. He happily agreed and I closed the shade. While on the outside it seems things are simple, often they are emotionally exhausting for me on the inside.”
I’m inclined to see her response to that situation and this one as signs of PTSD, also taking account Amanda Blum’s mention of a “pattern” of overreaction from Richards. I think Richards might have had personal reasons extending well beyond feminist indoctrination to take offense at a seemingly innocuous joke. The social justice angle seems a rationalization of her own emotional problems, rather than the cause.
As soon as it got to the Greater Internets battle lines among the social justice warriors were drawn, as well as the actual mysoginists and the usual sprinkle of trolls that muddy the waters for lulz. Suddenly Richards became the symbol of women suffering under the Patriarchy (as opposed to an emotionaly fragile person obviously overreacting) or a hateful radfem bitch (as opposed to an emotionaly fragile person that latched on to an ideology(/religion) to alleviate her hurt).
March 25, 2013 at 4:28 pm
http://www.rathergood.com/kick
March 27, 2013 at 3:53 am
Sounds like a lot of people (both male AND female) are fed up with the notion women empowered to act as ‘morality police’ on all public gatherings, and less than enchanted with crybabies like Adria, Surly Amy, and Rebecca Watson.
Good. Such a backlash is long overdue and richly deserved. Adria’s done a lot of harm to serious IT professional women who want to be taken seriously and therefore behave like grownups. I’m glad to see many IT women calling her out on it. You’re not part of the solution, Adria; you’re part of the problem.
March 29, 2013 at 3:04 am
So now is ISN’T ok to record people’s image without consent.
http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2013/03/27/here-i-stand-i-can-do-no-other/#more-10118
Maybe Chris didn’t receive the memo from PZ. Or he’s just a hypocrite. Take your pick.
April 15, 2013 at 6:03 pm
It’s not just identity politics, it’s that everybody everywhere seems to be in passive, consumerist mode, requiring and demanding that others regulate their negative emotions for them. The stronger the consumerist mentality and cultural atomisation, the more you produce these crybabies. People feel weak as workers but strongest in their position of consumers, where the principle applies that the customer knows best. So they complain, when they enter a new situation, that their consumption of it wasn’t to their liking. They take the strongest line they know how to on the basis of their experience — they demand that the authorities “fix” the situation so that they can consume it more pleasurably. And then of course the bosses, who only want to make the generalized consumer happy, sack the errant workers, to please the random consumer. The workers have no value — unless they become consumers themselves. In other words, they must learn to embrace identity politics and whine about their situations. Who knows? They could be reinstated.