I can’t even.
I’ve been tracking misogynistic ridiculousness on this blog for five years, but I’m not sure I ‘ve ever run across anything quite as ridiculous as this.
A prominent Open Source guru, Eric Raymond, is warning tech dudes to be extra super duper careful around their female colleagues, because any one of them could turn out to be a secret feminist “honey trap” aiming to frame men in tech with false allegations of harassment or rape.
In a blog post earlier this week, Raymond passed along what he called a “disturbing warning … from a source I trust.”
His anonymous source warned him that it was no longer safe for men in tech to mentor women, or even be in the same room with them. “I’m super careful about honey traps,” the source wrote.
For a while, that’s how the Ada Initiative was trying to pre-generate outrage and collect scalps.
That’s right; according to this mysterious source the now-defunct Ada Initiative wasn’t actually a non-profit trying to bring more women into the open source world; it was a secret army of false-accusing honey-trap sex commandos, or something.
“The MO was to get alone with the target, and then immediately after cry ‘attempted sexual assault,'” the source wrote, adding that these devious sex harpies disguised as female programmers had already “made multiple runs” at Linux creator Linus Torvalds.
Naturally, faced with a set of outlandish accusations offered with zero proof, Raymond did what any rational, skeptical, scientifically minded man would do: he posted them on his blog and warned men that even being in the general vicinity of a woman at a tech conference was like playing with a loaded false accusation gun, or something.
[I]f you are any kind of open-source leader or senior figure who is male, do not be alone with any female, ever, at a technical conference. Try to avoid even being alone, ever, because there is a chance that a “women in tech” advocacy group is going to try to collect your scalp.
He expressed outrage at the alleged attempts to sully Torvalds’ name.
If my source is to be believed (and I have found him both well-informed and completely trustworthy in the past) this was not a series of misunderstandings, it was a deliberately planned and persistent campaign to frame Linus and feed him to an outrage mob.
I have to see it as an an attempt to smear and de-legitimize the Linux community (and, by extension, the entire open-source community) in order to render it politically pliable.
Will those sexy feminazi sex hyenas stop at nothing?
Linus hasn’t spoken out about this; I can think of several plausible and good reasons for that.
Apparently “because it’s not true” isn’t one that Raymond thought of.
Even though “the Ada Initiative shut down earlier this year,” Raymond went on warn that the danger will likely persist as long as evil SJWs live and breathe.
[T]his report is consistent with reports of SJW dezinformatsiya tactics from elsewhere and I think it would be safest to assume that they are being replicated by other women-in-tech groups.
And any women who are unhappy that they are being lumped in with these devious honey traps can go fuck themselves, because you ladies brought all this on yourself with your talk of rape culture and all that. And yes, he uses the word “ladies.”
Don’t like that, ladies? Tough. You were just fine with collective guilt when the shoe was on the other foot. Enjoy your turn!
Oh, and then Raymond says that in light of this irrefutable evidence of feminazi infiltration conspiracy theory utterly lacking in proof of any kind and frankly ludicrous to boot, he’s going to apply the skepticism he should have shown his mysterious source’s wild tale to actual accusations of sexual assault leveled at men in tech.
Naturally, the extended manosphere is abuzz with talk of this vast sexy conspiracy. Breitbart Tech breathlessly reported that “FEMINISTS ARE TRYING TO FRAME LINUS TORVALDS FOR SEXUAL ASSAULT, CLAIMS OPEN SOURCE INDUSTRY VETERAN.”
“If true,” Breitbart’s Allum Bokhari declared,
these claims will rock the world of software development, not to mention the wider tech community, which is suffering under the yoke of diversity campaigners levelling bogus charges of sexism at companies and individuals and pestering companies to improve their diversity credentials.
Discontent at the behaviour of feminists in tech has already been spreading in the open source community thanks to the feminist-led introduction of controversial codes of conduct for developers on some open source projects. But these new claims elevate feminists in tech from the controversial to the potentially criminal.
“If true,” claims that monkeys are flying out of my butt would rock the world of monkeys, not to mention the wider butt community.
Concluding his article, Bokhari wonders why
other tech news outlets – normally champing at the bit to report on diversity issues – have so far been curiously silent on this story. Breitbart Tech is, thus far, the exception.
Maybe because these tech news outlets prefer to write about, you know, tech news and not the fever dreams of misogynistic conspiracy theorists?
On Reddit, meanwhile, the usual suspects are doing what they usually do. KotakuInAction, the main Gamergate hub on Reddit, the Breitbart story drew more than 2600 upvotes, last I checked; on the Men’s Rights subreddit it garnered nearly a thousand.
And people wonder why women don’t feel welcome in tech? Maybe it has something to do with the fact that tech bigwigs like Raymond literally think every woman in their general vicinity is a potential “honey trap” out to steal his “scalp” if not his precious bodily fluids.
@Leda Atomica:
That’s compartmentalization for ya! Even ostensibly intelligent and enlightened individuals, when it comes to one subject or another, can become blathering imbeciles and not be aware of it.
@Byron Hudson:
Um, no. That’s just all in your head.
Why not just take it to the most logical extreme and make sure they all dress in form-obscuring robes? Why not just make everything segregated based on gender? How about never letting them leave the home since, hey, they’re in danger of everything outside of it? Maybe, just maybe, we should have each and every one of their actions recorded and analyzed – to make sure they’re not making “false accusations”?
I’d argue that, were more men were actually self-aware and willing to take responsibility on their fuck-ups, all of these (sarcastic) suggestions wouldn’t even need to be contemplated. It’s amazing to me that many men want to be simultaneously thought of as being the more reasonable and less emotional of the sexes – yet claim to be unable to control themselves at certain moments, thus should not be held accountable for their actions. Seems rather convenient to me…
If I believed every single story someone like you brought up, as if it was self-evident proof I couldn’t argue with, I’d be living in a cave in the wilderness while wearing a tin-foil hat and refusing to ever drink water ’cause of fluoride.
This seems to be just the sort of “tech news” that Breitbart Tech was launched for.
Hey, they also run informative articles about how women who dye their hair blue are scary.
You know how men are. You try to get them interested in STEM, and all they want to do is gossip and talk about hair.
Dudebros are STILL whining inaccurately about elevatorgate? And without even mentioning feminist hair?
@numerobis – It depends on both the sector being discussed and if institutional level resistance to change is a factor.
Are you a contractor (especially a contractor on a short-to-medium-term contract) working in the private sector with a CTO with no compunctions about cutting losses?
Yeah, that’s a shit strategy.
But I’ve seen a discomfiting number of people nestled into the public sector – especially risk-averse or “big ship” portions of the public sector – who’ve built whole careers on making their little fiefdoms as obtuse as fucking possible. It might backfire in the long run (though I haven’t been around long enough to see that happen), but by then they seem to have amassed enough institutional knowledge to dodge the wrecking ball.
Even before 9-11, ESR was way off the rails. Just google “ESR sex tips for geeks” to see him spewing the whole PUA line. He has also blogged that he was a natural at “game”.
A quick check of RationalWiki shows that he thinks Turing deserved his persecution, he backed John Derbyshire when he was fired by the National Review, is a HIV denialist, and a climate denialist who fabricated assertions during “climategate”.
And that’s not all. He was nominated for the John W. Campbell Award on the rabid puppies slate based on a single story published by Castalia House!
He’s way past Dawkins and well into Shockley territory.
I was wondering which would come up first: elevatorgate or donglegate. Anyway, there’s probably been enough online ink spilled about elevatorgate at this point, but I’ll just note: for more than four years now, people have twisted Watson’s relatively innocuous comments into some sort of ne plus ultra of myopic rape hysteria. For a lot of folks like me – people who are not significantly involved in tech – elevatorgate really shows how much ingrained sexism there is in the tech world.
mockingbird:
See it myself. And the wrecking ball did sweep them away, but sadly did more harm to coworkers who were blameless. This shit can cause real lasting damage to a company.
On the other hand, the greybeards wrangling mainframe COBOL are making more money than me, and it’s dying too damn slowly…
Ah, the old ‘honey trap women posing as scientists’ chestnut. I know it well.
http://imgur.com/GbS6yk4
elegant code doesn’t exist, it only is elegant in the mind of the author and those who argee with his writing style. A fluent API can be very inelegant. A lambda could look terse and elegant to a select few cognoscenti, to other programmers a jumble of text based Japanese emoji. It’s the structure, intent and flow I feel makes code elegant.
I doubt if you could have all four elements of readability, correctness, efficiency and performance as equal partners to create elegant code. in fact for highly performant systems the code often becomes quite horrid.
working and maintainable I think as well should be thrown into the mix.
@Derby –
http://imgur.com/gallery/lSYDV.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/lSYDV.jpg
@autosoma
I loled. 😀
Dear fuckhead:
You should be aware that the Gishgallop method of spraying rapid-fire lies and idiocies does not, in fact, work so well in text, because it relies entirely upon the inability to reply in the time allotted. I have no time limit here.
I’m amazed you can see anything other than your own colon, consider the obvious location of your head. Though I must admit, you’re a rather transparent troll.
So the world is just a self-correcting wonderland where liars are automatically found out without anyone bothering to point out that they are lying, Sweetums? We’re pointing out that his claims have had no evidence so far, and that furthermore, they defy probability, as there would be no motivation for any organization of women to act in the manner he alleges. So posting your three ‘possibilities’ as if they were equally likely is more than a tad disingenuous.
Also, you’re a sloppy writer, or a particularly mendacious one. “Telling the truth” about what? That he was told that there was a conspiracy, or that the conspiracy actually exists? It would not surprise me to find out that some other douchebro whom he regularly speaks to on IRC spouted this fantasy first, which would make his story technically ‘true’, but only for values of truth that allow for accepting any bullshit that anyone, ever, utters.
#yesallmen, which is actually rarely used, would be about all men benefiting from the effects of a patriarchal society, even those who would otherwise reject that advantage.
Far more commonly used is #yesallwomen, which is about the fact that all women have to deal with our society and the oppressive nature of a sexist culture.
And no, we’re not the ones claiming that all men want to rape women. That would be the evo-psych rape-apologists who talk about how men can’t help but want to rape women because Darwin. Those are the people you should be bothering with your inane drivel, not us.
Oh, believe me, Chuckles, we greatly hope for the day where anyone who still thinks like this is never alone in the room with a woman, or anyone, really. Ideally, until they manage to stop being such shitheads, we would, in fact, prefer that they keep their contact with the bulk of humanity to a minimum. That is not the part we are mocking.
Translation:
“Crying” = “*Sigh* Guys, don’t do that”; “asked for coffee in an elevator” = “followed her from the hotel bar into the elevator, without ever having spoken to her prior to that, during a convention where she gave a speech that touched, in part, on what a pain it was getting to be to be hit on constantly by atheist men who treated the cons as meat-markets, and after she had loudly expressed a strong desire for sleep; he then proceeded to ignore all of this and give her a line that, at 4 AM could really only be considered a come-on by anyone who is remotely aware of how human language works.” You’re not very good with context stuff, are you?
And then, of course, there’s the fact that the guy wasn’t ‘attacked’. He wasn’t even named, ever. His behavior was merely held up as an example of the sort of approach that was, frankly, vaguely annoying, and could come off as slightly intimidating due to the circumstance.
Okay, chucklefuck, feel free to see yourself out–there’s a corridor full of Lego blocks waiting for you as the exit.
I recall a certain women crying because a guy asked her for coffee in a elevator.
“A prominent Open Source guru, Eric Raymond” has infinitely more credibility then the clowns who run this joke blog. Christ an entire article of whiny unsourced butthurt.
@Shaenon may have won the thread with this:
“You know how men are. You try to get them interested in STEM, and all they want to do is gossip and talk about hair.”
I really hate this fucking “just buck up!” mentality with anything.
What’s this weird need to be as combative and antagonistic as possible, especially for novices, to “prove their worth”? It’s rather backwards to fault the person who, like any normal and decent human being, doesn’t like having some loud and obnoxious person yelling horrific insults right into their ear.
It doesn’t prove skill or anything – it’s just an endurance test. You also have to wonder why it is we’re awarding terrible behavior by claiming others need to tolerate it, in order to get anywhere? All those people who are so convinced it comes down to meritocracy seem to have their blinders on, with this kind of stuff, and it is infuriating.
I’ve noticed it in so many fields of interest, too. You can’t be into (say) automobiles without having to deal with people who, already knowing more than you, constantly mock your ignorance of the subject and for bothering to ask questions. As if everyone who goes into it must have innate wisdom on how it works even before they realize it. It’s like a really inane Catch-22.
Ah, in that case, I’m calling it now: Linus the Loser is just a diversion, ESR’s real reason for sharting this out is he’s muddying the waters (eew =P) because he recently harassed/assaulted/raped a woman and she reported it. He’s wrapping himself in a safety blanket of rape culture and conspiracy theorists.
… Sometimes, I’m so bloody cynical it might as well be a superpower.
@autosoma, every now and then I’ll come across a chunk of code someone else has wrote and it gives me a pleasing surprised kind of feeling for its ingenuity. I suppose that might be elegant code by some definitions. I often find myself just staring at code, knowing there is a better way I’m just not grokking. And to be honest I’d like others to look at my code and get that pleasing surprised feeling, if only to feed my own ego 🙂
Crank magnetism strikes again
I understand that feeling well, there have been times when I’ve experienced it, there have been the other experience when guys have scoffed at it. The thing is you should write code that us “elegant” in its immediate circle the people who work with you and those who follow on after you.
I’ve worked with tok many arrogant fucks whose way us the only way – white code supremacists.
On a side note at work they are playing Drakes Hotline bling frequently… I’ve just read the lyrics – fucking hell what shit, I’m glad I’m to old for youth culture…
Fnolcby:
I obviously suck at expressing myself on this, because I don’t actually disagree with you. It’s just…
Self-teaching (with or without google) is great, but in programming it can’t be the end of the story, at least in a team environment. For me, elegance is in large part about maintainability, and that’s a judgement which necessarily involves other people. I might believe I write the most elegant code evar, but if coworkers look at it and struggle to figure it out, then my judgement is flawed. The learning process needs to incorporate feedback from your team.
As it happens, at present I’m working on some elderly code which was a one-man project by a long-departed guy who thought he was a programming hotshot. It’s dreadful, and will need an inordinate amount of work just to bring it up to scratch, before I start adding functionality. I’m tempted to throw it away and start from scratch.
You folks and your coding discussions are cool.
I only code statistics. I’m trying to self teach a little for more variety (starting with python!), and you lot discussing stuffs is just…
Cool.
[fly on wall mode re-engaged]
@Moggie, ah, gotcha. I work by myself and I do try to consider whoever may follow me next, and since I do lack feedback from any team members I’m never entirely sure just how readable and efficient someone else may find what I’ve done. I am in a bit of a niche field and will probably never have to work with anyone else if I don’t want to. In this situation self-teaching can be the end I suppose, though I’m considering getting a more formal education in case I decide to move out of my little niche.