I also want to highlight a specific problem I have with the "dismissing Windows" comment. You could claim this if things didn't actually work. As far as I am concerned[5] things work exceptionally well *despite* $ENV{RUNNING_IN_HELL}. This dissonance raises an interesting question:
There were many calls to look at the issues at hand pragmatically - why don't we actually try to do that?
Cheers
[1] Yes I am aware you only meant perlmonks... and of course other sites that are "official faces" of perl... like possibly blogs.perl.org... and possibly IRC... and of course any YAPC and/or workshop... Slippery slope much?
[2] Spoiler - they don't because there isn't much input. Interestingly if there was considerable input, there currently is no infrastructure to deal with it (the amount of people employed by anyone to work on perl5 exclusively is in the single digits).
[3] Same problem as in [2] - I am not saying we are equipped to deal with actual complaints when they start coming in, far from it. And this is a massive problem as it discourages complaints. However you keep taking your own perceptions of how someone else may feel as genuine complaints.
[4] And yes, there definitely is an excluded demographic, nobody is denying that[7]. I for one would love to be able to see a more diverse crowd when I go to a conference. But to paraphrase mst - what you are doing here are not the horses you are looking for
[5] I sadly have to deal with several Win32 machines at work. Perl does an *unbelivably good job* at hiding this sad fact from me most of the time
[6] By ultimately-technical I mean that unlike many other fields we have an extremely well defined line between correct and incorrect (really we can only be rivaled by mathematicians). Hence in the context of a demographic which spends most of their workday separating correctness from incorrectness, it is wishful thinking to expect the same people to discount their occupational side-effect of black-and-white vision
[7] Well... maybe someone is. There are lunatics that deny evolution as well - should we care? :)
]]>Like I have mentioned elsewhere: we recently had a discussion in our german perl forum. It was about something that is typical for the german language (male and female job titles, a problem that does not exist in the english language).
The discussion seemed very aggressive to me - from the direction of the guys (and the anonymous trolls who didn't want to tell their gender).
More or less regularly we two female moderators are criticized, and usually in this criticism the gender is emphasized, and usually a concrete reason for criticism is missing. If the forum was moderated the same way mainly by guys, I'm pretty sure a lot of criticism didn't happen, and none would emphasize that fact that the moderators are male. We are even criticized for splitting an offtopic subthread to its own thread (we also have tree structured threads).
After a longer discussion my fellow moderator was harassed by email and telephone.
I'm telling that because, when talking about patronizing, please don't forget that some are really just afraid to complain because they might get mobbed.
Yes, one should not patronize a minority by, for example, establishing rules against discrimination without actually asking the minority.
But "they can speak up for themselves" is not always true, and "you should not speak up for them" neither.
When I read Joe's perlmonks post, it was actually nice for me to see - somebody cares.
]]>By calling it out for being offensive and/or alienating.
As Joe said - "I didn't, and don't, want to see it either." Neither do I.
If you believe that members of a particular group are being offended by something but you aren't ... first look into yourself and ask why you aren't offended too.
Disliking gross sexualisation because gross sexualisation is horrible works out well, it just requires us to stop and think and realise that it's horrible in its own right, not just because teh wimminz might not like it.
Any time somebody says "lighten up", it's time to darken down - because enlightenment only goes to show just how deep the shadows go.
> I might be going of on a wild goose chase here, but maybe your idea that women feel patronized by calling out inappropriate publications from within our community might be coming from women that already are part of our community
This isn't an idea. This is a concrete "I have heard from a number of upset people."
I don't want to offend and alienate people who -might- join our community.
I also don't want to upset and patronise the people who already did.
Just because they're currently on the inside doesn't mean they won't walk away if we don't take their feelings into account as well.
Tinita wrote:
> More or less regularly we two female moderators are criticized, and usually in this criticism the gender is emphasized, and usually a concrete reason for criticism is missing.
I see that a lot. I find it utterly offensive because I find any attempt to use any aspect of somebody that isn't relevant to the argument as if it was relevant to be offensive.
I wrote On Not Being A Problem to highlight this - and to remind us that there's a whole laundry list of ways to make an ad hominem attack and none of them are acceptable.
I'm not saying "don't fight back when somebody's being offensive." I'm saying "fight back because they're being offensive" - rather than "fight back because somebody else might be offended."
The difference is subtle, but to me extremely important - it moves the judgement of offensive from third person hearsay to something I can directly argue.
This provides a much clearer basis from which to define why it's offensive and how to avoid being so in future - and a firm basis on which moderators can issue technical penalties and peers can issue social penalties if the bad behaviour continues.
-- mst, out
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