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> we also live in a society and, as hackers, in a sub-culture where we generally prize reason and debate over emotion. This is an ideal, but it's not true at all. Look at all the 'dramas' posted all over HN, does that seem like reason to you, or emotion? Hackers are people too, as much as they try to deny it. > who else is going to do it? Either them themselves, or someone else. I think maybe this comes from a slight misunderstanding of what the saying means. Let's say that Bob makes a joke about rape around Alice, a survivor. Alice says "yo, that is not cool, and you're making light of a trauma I experienced in the past." Bob says "Why?" Alice says, "I don't want to explain it to you, I'm really upset right now." The saying is trying to explain that it's not _Alice_'s responsibility to make Bob see exactly where he went wrong; he can either look at the numerous resources online to explain why, think about it and puzzle it out himself, or maybe, ask Eve or someone else about it. But forcing Alice to confront something in her moment of pain is just not right. > I think the hacker community prizes rationalism and if you want to persuade them of anything you should use rational and not emotional arguments. This is _exactly_ why there's so much sexism here. The rhetoric around this is extremely frustrating, especially with your charge of 'abandons rationalism.' |
If you want to be persuasive, you appeal to people's better nature. You don't tell them that their cherished ideals of rationalism and no-bullshit, all-about-the-code ethos are a crock of shit, you tell them that you believe in this too, and you want it to be this way for everyone. The people who are undermining this are the misogynist minority, who are putting their irrational hatred of women ahead of all other things. The reason we keep having to have this tedious discussion is because these people are consistently attacking and undermining our fellow female hackers, and it's about time we told them where to go with that kind of behaviour.
The problem is, you've become convinced that the community at large is full of sexism, when it really isn't. It's just that nobody has figured out how to talk about this in a way that makes sense, and unfortunately arguments like yours are counter-productive (which is why people are arguing with you, which has the depressing effect of making you think that the community must be full of sexism, and the cycle goes on).