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.
I didn’t want to give any boost to posts like ESR’s, so I went through a donotlink URL to view it.
http://www.donotlink.com/h8ku
Amusingly, the interstitial page says “Other users have classified this link as: Nonsense”
Okay, can someone who understands this mindset better than I do (or one of the trolls we get around here) help me with something?
Suppose that, hypothetically, there were a vast conspiracy that badger-gamed men in tech.
What motive do they have?
If it were money, why tech and not, say, finance?
@numerobis
Well, it mostly gives job security when the code needs to be maintained, so they can’t move the programmer to another slot, plus the occasional horror story from programmers at a non-tech company where the management can’t tell that the code is a mess, just that it works. If it’s something that absolutely has to be maintained, it can provide job security for a long, long time. Of course, it’s not likely to get you a new job.
Programmers working with the IRS have actually wound up in this situation through no fault of their own, because the initial system was written so long ago that it originally was six bit, and it was at no point acceptable to not have an up to date, functional tax system come filing time. So it’s in a horrifying customized version of IBM assembler. They’re currently in yet another attempt to write a new one; the last attempt was cancelled when it reached a point where it took five times as much processing power and also didn’t work.
On the plus side, the system is fast.
Because tech is a male safe space and it’s a lot more fun for us evil feminists to ruin it for men. Besides, our lady brains would bungle up finance if we tried to invade it and we need successful men in finance to have someone to get beta bux from.
@Hedin
I was quoting someone else and for got the @. I know quite well that was a complete BS retelling of Elevatorgate. I saw Dawkins’ ‘Dear Muslima’ appear on Pharyngula in real time.
Reblogged this on Subspace Radio Signals and commented:
IIRC he now infests the Neopagan community, or at least the “Humanistic” Atheist wing of it.
@Tessa
OK, I love how these guys hand wave away any study that shows how STEM fields aren’t bias-free meritocracies that value white men solely for their amazing intellect.
“Maybe they are reluctant because they fear being accused of misconduct”
Women are genuine threats whose behavior requires them to be shunned. Seems reasonable.
“or being expected to treat females differently than males”
Feeemales are ready being treated differently due to sexism, that’s actually the problem people want addressed, hence the excerpt from ’Sexism in the Tech Industry’: “Science professors at American universities widely regard female undergraduates, with the same accomplishments and skills, as less competent than male students”.
“And when it comes down to it in a tough field you have to be tough no matter what your gender is.”
These guys rail against any attempt to increase diversity in STEM fields because that somehow automatically means quotas. Quotas bad and meritocracy good! We can only have a meritocracy by ignoring all existing inequalities and changing nothing. Cue victim blaming, evil straw-feminist cautionary tales, and/or Orwell quotes.
…Byron has figured the super sekret plans of Katie-Hivemind out! Whatever will we do now?! Oh yeah…once he is finished making his way through the exit and its room floored-with-sharp-legos there’s a WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAhmbulance waiting to take him out to the pasture so he can frolic with all the other trolls that come through here, just don’t let him know that’s simply a stopping point before they all go to the mens internment camp.
Hail Katie.
Oh, and I should probably discuss elegant code since I brought it up.
There’s a lot of different rules out there on the internet for how you should format your variables and use whitespace. Ultimately, it’s not really important which set of rules you use; it’s important that they be consistent. Ideally, your company should have an official, written coding standard that dictates how you name things and how you should use whitespace and various other little details, so everyone writes things the same way and knows exactly how it should be interpreted. It should probably be consistent with the libraries that come bundled with the preferred programming language unless there’s a highly compelling reason for it to be different.
One guideline that I would universally recommend is using curly brackets{} for if statements. In Java and many other languages, an if statement without curly brackets will treat the next line as the body of the if. That’s handy for lots of little one-line statements, but it’s easy to forget to add the brackets when making it into a two-line statement.
More generally, any variable or function name should tell you approximately what it’s for*. If there is any room for confusion, use comments. If a function is getting complicated and hard to read, break it into smaller functions with clear names so someone can look at your top function and know approximately what happens; this also lets you use JUnit or another test harness to check each part for correctness individually. There’s a mathematical measure called Cyclomatic Complexity that essentially counts the number of different branches in a function. Start at one, add one for every if (don’t count an isolated else), case, while, and for statement, and add one for each boolean operator inside their conditions. Don’t add the complexity of called functions. I’m told that empirical evidence shows that software quality falls sharply if this number exceeds four because it becomes easy to misread and hard to test, though I personally suspect that if you’ve got an input that could be in any of fifteen distinct categories it’s better to have one complexity fifteen function than to arbitrarily break it into several smaller ones.
*Exception: for historical and typing reasons, i, j, and k are standard names for integers used for loop control.
I learned this the hard way on a final coding project for a class where the code we were supplied and told to update had an if statement without the braces. Spent so many hours trying to trace down that bug. 🙁
(points and laughs) Ha, good one.
The way you see it = massive pile of horseshit. If he can’t produce evidence of any actual false accusations up front, let alone a massive feminist conspiracy like he claims, he’s got nothin’.
Also, Rebecca Watson (she has a name, google it) didn’t “cry because a guy asked her for coffee in an elevator”. She didn’t cry at all. She calmly pointed out that a guy following her out of a conference, very late at night, and making a pass at her in a closed space she couldn’t get out of, was deeply, darkly and extremely creepy, and that guys shouldn’t do that.
Do try to keep up. You look like a fool already.
(points and laughs some more) Funny, that’s what I said about Eric Raymond’s super-seekwit “feminist” conspiracy theory, too!
I imagine it’s to get some of that sweet sexual harassment/assault/rape privilege.
And they don’t even need warm water to “inspire” them. The mere sight of a Croc will do:
(That tiny squawk is so darn poignant!)
@kagato
I haven’t actually clicked your donotlink, but I’m really amused that the url is h8ku. I’m now picturing hateful haikus by MRAs.
Female harpie witch
Why doesn’t she sex me up?
Forever alone
ESR, ah where do I begin. Reading his blog tells me that Eric is a wannabe “thought leader” in the open source movement who wrote a book 23 years ago and is still trying to cruise on that brief notoriety. He is in his late 50’s and staring into the face of age and irrelevance and starting to thrash around maniacally to keep his meager bona fides above the water line. He hangs out with the “cool kid” younger programmers trying to impress them with his stories of writing all the code that underpins EVERYTHING IN THE WORLD! He has a weird love/hate relationship with Torvalds and alternates between pooh-poohing Torvald’s contributions to open source and dreaming of becoming Linus when he grows up. He even wrote a blog posting placing himself in the pantheon of bestest programmers in the history of the world forever along with Torvalds and Stallman. ESR believes any attention from Linus is good attention, so no qualms about linking Linus and sexual misbehavior. Eric also sees himself as a programming/math genius equivalent to Dave Mills, who wrote the Network Time Protocol (Eric calls him an “eccentric genius”), and ESR is now busy forking the project because the “cool kids” only like new stuff and besides solving the complexities of time on the internet just involves a bit of math and a few tricky algorithms that he hasn’t quite figured out yet. One person on Twitter has already offered a $10.00 bounty for any security flaws Eric introduces in the protocol—presumably because there will be so many that he can’t afford to pay too much per incident.
On a side note my husband (who is in the open source community and not a member of the he-man women haters club) wants to know where all these “honey pots” are. He never sees them at his conferences. He is sad now, because he suspects that means he is not a “thought leader.” 🙁
I’m very saddened. Eric Raymond has always been one of these libertarian types who likes to pose for gun porn, but he’s a very good writer of tech philosophy, not only of the Cathedral and the Bazaar, but also of “The Joy of Unix programming.
>>Linus Torvalds is notorious for being the poster boy of the narcissistic tech asshole.
These comments are just lousy with vague, meaningless crap like this, about everybody involved. Linus was a decent guy 10 years ago, when his memoir was called “Just for fun”, and his wife was a national Karate champion. Maybe Android went to his head, but I also believe that there’s a bunch of shitty fanboy tech bloggers shitposting so that other shitty fanboys will click on their shitty posts. It’s the same kind of market incentives that practically guarantees that, right now, as you’re reading this, somebody is uploading a video trashing Anita Sarkeesian.
Okay, bets on whether the following comment makes it through moderation on ESR’s blog?
—
Nop on 2015-11-06 at 00:29:21 said:
Your comment is awaiting moderation.
@ESR: “What this is about is the SJWs’ attempt to fundamentally transform the hacker culture and STEM in general from an (imperfect, but honestly trying) meritocracy into a perfect hell-pit of identity-group politics, grievance-mongering, and rage-mobbing. Anything I can do to prevent that, I must.”
Including inventing shadowy conspiracies, apparently. I would’ve thought that “a natural at Game” like yourself would be immune to this kind of attack, due to your amazing self-proclaimed ability to convince women that they want to have sex with you. /s
It’s interesting that you attempt to pass this claim off as concern for Linus Torvalds, considering that for all his assholeishness, I’ve never heard of him being creepy to women, whereas I’ve heard it many times about you over the years.
The one upside to this revelation of yours that it might make you less likely to creepily hit on married women at tech conferences in future.
It’s a shame that ESR is so easy to troll, but I guess if it keeps creepy types away from women at tech conferences, this can only be a good thing.
Bina — I’ve seriously considered buying Darwin crocs cuz I’m sure as shit not getting him a lady tortoise! Male tortoises can be insistent, to the point that housing any combo besides all females is risking injury and infection when they start fighting over mating. These guys seriously remind me of tortoises, which is saying something since the turtle family harks back to the dinosaurs and while they’ve changed more than crocodiles, they haven’t changed all that much, and they literally have a reptile brain. We’ve spend millions of years building off that reptile brain to arrive at the higher order functions like inhibitions and self control, the MRA red pill crowd would rather claim they can’t be expected to behave more like humans than reptiles, and then say feminists are the ones who hate men!
Re: Linus Torvalds — I’d always thought he was more social inept nerd who let fame go to his head a bit than asshole, but I might be wrong there. Probably am, but I’d like more than this never-was saying he’s been accused of all sorts of stuff before I consider whether the lady doth protest too much.
I’m just going to leave this here.
So, just to make sure I’m not missing anything, he’s giving men in tech the same advice that male teachers are given, for the same reasons?
Yeah, it must suck if you are a woman who would never do such a thing, but if one single bad actor can effectively ruin your life and career, why *wouldn’t* you behave in a fashion so as to prevent being in a situation where it could even come up?
My earlier comment was so typo-ridden that I feel the need to clarify that I agree with those upthread saying that linking Linus with sexual harassment is playing right into ESR’s hands, unless there’s some actual evidence or accusations.
Linus does practice ‘management by insult’ and has said some tone deaf stuff, but that’s a long way from being a harasser. He’s also a genuine tech hero for many and ESR would like nothing more than for unfounded rumours to spring up around Linus, encouraging the fans of his technical achievements to be sympathetic to the ‘feminists are out to smear allthemen’ claim.
Mocking ESR is a fun and easy game for the whole family; let’s play that!
I’m honestly surprised that he bothers with moderation, given his commitment to Freeze Peach. Back in 2009, he called someone a censor for asking SourceForge to pull hate speech (for very loose interpretations of “speech”) — and then let the original hatemonger dribble his violent and creepy fantasies all over the comments.
http://www.donotlink.com/h9rf