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.
For a long time, we have been told that women can’t STEM.
When it was proven that women can actually STEM, and women began to get education in prestigious schools, some men felt like the very presence of women in those schools were taking away spots that those men were entitled to have. See Mark Lepine.
Now that we have made some headway, now that the mens know that they couldn’t keep us out, the only solution is to get women out of the space that rightfully belongs to the mens. And they will employ any tactic to do that, apparently, including the WOMEN BE SKEERY HONEY TRAPS THAT WILL SCALP YOU TO KEEP US FROM STEMMING OMG THE FEE MALES MUST BE STOPPED GAAH.
it’s sussing the intent of the code, if its legacy then your going to have enormous issues unit testing and refactoring. I don’t envy you, well I do, if your working by yourself.
I started a new job 19 days ago I’ve been 7 days on the companies flagship product, integrating salesforce, entity framework and doing front end code jquery etc and the moody cockstar longtern frontend developed has it in for me. I’m quite fragile at the moment so three weeks in, unstable hone and a stroppy work colleague… not a good time to be writing high quality code
@autosoma, I’m always torn by Drake. I like the music, but some of his lyrics are so ridiculous.
@contrapangloss, python was one of my firsts 🙂 A great place to start. I haven’t used it for years now
The one thing about maintainability is, after 10 years in the field, to read again what you did ten year ago and that you forgot about completely.
If it’s horrible, it give pointers on what to avoid.
If it seem perfectly clear, then you have to work on self-awareness.
are you using R, I used it on an actuarial system for calculating assurance risk… it was awesome
Yep, @AnAndrejaPejicBlog, and because one woman once may have overreacted to something, that means all sexual harassment claims ever are an evil feminist plot!
Seriously. Is that the best you’ve got?
@autosoma sorry to hear that, starting a new job is stressful enough without home situation being less than stellar 🙁
My mantra in bad times is to repeat to myself “the only constant in life is change”. It won’t always feel this way.
Honestly, that’s may main criteria for “elegant”.
Is it confusing to others well-versed in the language?
No?
Awesome.
But I am a novice.
Most of the complaints I know about shit code come from listening to people in my life complain 😀
@Byron Hudson
Hey, Byron, you’ve obviously given this some thought.
So help us out here: Why will he “eventually follow up with evidence”?
And what kind of time line are you talking about when you say “eventually”?
And why should we believe him in the interim?
The way I see it, if you have a charge to make against someone, you have proof. Otherwise, it’s just a lie and a smear campaign.
That’s the way this feminist looks at it.
Why yes, I do use R! I love R. R is my friend. R is best statistics programming program.
It also seems like it has a few things that carry over to python, but not enough to make it super easy.
(matlab is also cool, but also expensive and not super flexible, so I don’t play with it often)
Oh my fucking God it was ESR behind this rumor? The dude thinks straight people can’t get hiv and that he’s a literal god. The guy has been a joke for at least fifteen years if not longer. Is this some kind of last grab at relevance?
Yeah, I’ll agree with SFHC- he probably just yanked Torvald’s name out of a hat labeled “known tech shitheads”.
Still, though, I stand by my statement that I’d have exactly zero surprise.
Either way, holy crap going through some of this guy’s writing makes me horrified.
fuck me sideways watch this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFMGvjszu4s she sets fire to her parachute and free falls… fuckin hell totally awesome
The way I see it.
A.) He is lying and will make a fool of himself
B.)He is telling the truth but has no evidence thus making a fool of himself again.
C.) He is telling the truth and will eventually follow up with evidence. Making all of you look like fools
If he’s following the established Breitbart/Gamergate playbook, I’m leaning toward
D.) He knows plenty of dumbasses will believe any tall tale as long as it caters to their particular bigotries, and they’ll take the story viral before anyone bothers to find out if it’s true. Years from now, long after it’s been debunked and forgotten by everyone else, online misogynists will still be insisting there’s a secret man-hating feminist training camp disguised as a tech nonprofit that teaches women to pretend to be engineers so they can falsely accuse real engineers (i.e. men) of sexual harassment.
You know, just like currently they’re still insisting that one time a woman cried because a man got in an elevator.
“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.”
<3
Moggie re: COBOL — it's dying so slowly that I fairly recently had a psych suggest (more like insist with that one) that it would be a good field for me since I know about computers (yes, really, apparently web dev = ALL THE COMPUTERS!)
Freemage — holy shit batman, nice takedown! Tangentially — "That would be the evo-psych rape-apologists who talk about how men can’t help but want to rape women because Darwin." — yeah, my Darwin thinks males must hump everything, but he's a tortoise! The human Darwin said fuck all about such things, not that that stops assholes from using him to justify them acting like tortoises!
I love my little guy, I really do, but please don't stick your bizarre flower shaped penis out when I'm bathing you! That's the level of "logic" we get from these guys — ooooh, my genitals are warm, must be time to mate!!!
If you can write code, you can string together a thought process involving "no, I shouldn't try to fuck now"
autosoma — if your front end dev is anything like me, show up with an extra coffee, and if you both smoke, maybe offer one. Might get them to chill the fuck out a bit, at least for me, when I get like that it's a fear of being pushed out combined with "this fucker is gonna fuck up my code goddamnit".
Or maybe I'm just easily bribed with coffee (I'm easily bribed with coffee)
“You know, just like currently they’re still insisting that one time a woman cried because a man got in an elevator.”
Seriously. I’m socially inept and dear gods do I drink a lot of coffee, and even I realized straight away that he wasn’t after a thoughtful discussion over a late night coffee! And fuck, “yeah, guys, maybe don’t do that” is pretty much exactly what she said, totally non-threatening, and entirely fucking reasonable!
Eric Raymond: Your Honor, I call to the stand my surprise witness: The Source That Never Lies.
Everyone: OOOOOOOOOOH!
Eric Raymond: But only I can see him and hear him, so I’ll tell you what he’s doing and saying.
‘Don’t mentor women’ is an absolutely classic way of keeping women out of anything and everything. Stops them even getting started.
A feeemale is always hysterical, hormonal and most likely crying and/or screaming when she is asking anything of a man. These irrational creatures have driven poor men from their homes to seek refuge in pubs, which were invented after many enough feeeemales had hysterically screamcried their men to do light dusting and sometimes even the dishes.
Amy L Murphy:
Wow, that guy put so much stupidity in just two sentences. That’s pretty impressive.
1)I think the bigger issue is women being treated so dramatically different than men, not men being “expected to treat females differently than males.” If they showed the same level of respect for women as they do men (by respect I mean as a person, as in having the same respect for a woman you don’t know as you would a man you don’t know (this is to preempt the “respect is earned blah blah blah” types)), there’d be less of a problem.
2)And I really hate the “it’s a tough field” no matter the gender bit. All those things that make it a “tough field” for men? Women have to deal with those too, aaand in addition they have to deal with the gender bias and sexism.
ESR has always been 95% mouth, 5% trousers. A good writer, but for all his talk about code, he’s written almost nothing of great value or interest. Linus, on the other hand, is an abrasive asshole, but his achievement is monumental. Raymond had been trying to attach himself to that glory for years. I remember several patronising attempts to play wise mentor on the LKML; you could hear the cringe every time.
This is more of the same, worth the side-effect of linking sexual harassment to Linus’ name, something he afaik doesn’t deserve,.
Probably the most embarrassing ESR incident was when, soon after 9/11, he announced he’d thought of a terrorist attack which couldn’t be defended against. He was trying to get in touch with his extremely high level contact at the CIA who for some strange reason weren’t returning his calls, but in the meantime he wanted all the jihadists out there to know that if they were planning to try to come to his house to find out this super-attack, he had lots of guns. So there. Then a few days later he announced he’d thought of a defence against the scheme to end all schemes and America could sleep soundly in its bed again.
In short, this is the latest in a long line of idiotic pronouncements from a man who knows somewhere how irrelevant he is.
The problem with conspiracy theorists in general, and this sort of null-evidentiary conspiracy theory in particular, is that the theorist has set up their logic to function in a “heads I win, tails you lose” fashion, and there is no way of winning the argument against them.
If you do the research and find that there is no evidence of the conspiracy, they will point to the lack of evidence of a conspiracy as evidence for a greater conspiracy aimed at suppressing the evidence of the original conspiracy.
If you go to the people who are supposed to be conspirators and ask them whether there’s a conspiracy, and the supposed-conspirators deny it, the conspiracy theorist merely resorts to the Rice-Davies dismount (“Well, they would [say that], wouldn’t they?”).
If, finally, at the end of multiple efforts to try and insert some logic into the whole discussion, you break down and say “Yes, yes, there is a conspiracy! We all meet at 11.30am every Thursday at the town hall to plot the ultimate excruciating downfall of you, $INSERT_NAME, personally; and then adjoin to the nearby diner at midday to plot World Domination!!! over lunch”, they just smile smugly at you and say they knew it all along.
Lol, $INSERT_NAME reminds me of the problem in all the code for my ex’s site — he uses CamelCase, I use _ and WordPress defaults to – making for an absolute hodgepodge of code. Otoh, easy to tell who fucked it up (always nice to be able to go “see that dash? This is WP weirdness, don’t blame me!”)
So yeah, elegant code is consistent.
The really fun thing? I think that whole “$VARIABLE” thing was originally a COBOL convention. I picked it up through sidewise contamination reading the Jargon File (published as “The Hacker’s Dictionary” – edited by ESR[1]) and hanging around in the scary devil monastery while newsgroups were still a Thing. I have never coded in COBOL in my life – Pascal, Basic, C and Java (of the bunch, I prefer C, because at least that vaguely makes sense to me, and it encourages me to treat computer code as the powerful weapon it is. C has been described as not so much allowing programmers to shoot themselves in the foot, but handing them the ammo and helping them to reload afterwards!)
[1] Ob On-topic reference.