[MartinCron]

I totally agree that it was a microaggression, and that microaggression is a real thing that isn't to be tolerated. I know that it's all part of a pervasively unwelcoming and alienating culture that I, as a straight white male, am also disturbed by. I get all of that.

I understand all of that and still think her reaction was out-of-scale.

[esbwhat]

Why? She reported the microaggression to the relevant organizers through a public channel. I don't see the problem?

[MartinCron]

The problem was the extremely public nature of the channel. It wasn't speaking softly to the usher that someone was being inappropriate and unprofessional, it was shouting into a megaphone that someone was being inappropriate and unprofessional.

It's the "megaphone" part that I think is out-of-scale. If we're going to be a civilized community, then gentle, discreet correction should be the societal norm.

[esbwhat]

I don't think she had any obligation to raise the issue quietly. Making things public works. Unless people start calling out this kind of behaviour in a public manner, there will be no pressure for anyone to change anything. I think this is just a variant of a tone argument basically.

[MartinCron]

That's where I (respectfully) disagree. There are many ways to apply pressure for social change that don't involve identifying and shaming individual bad actors.

Even discussing the event in public is fine, (although I'm not convinced that the level of discourse on Twitter is appropriate for something as nuanced as Microaggression), but including the picture feels like an out-of-scale response to what the guys did.

[esbwhat]

That's the thing though - People always think that calling out microaggressions is overreaction, because they look at an individual incident, and not the whole. At the same time it needs to be clearly communicated that this kind of behaviour is absolutely unacceptable.

[dragonwriter]

> People always think that calling out microaggressions is overreaction, because they look at an individual incident, and not the whole

How is publishing photographs of the individual offenders in a specific indicdent and a description of that specific incident not both looking at, and encouraging others to look at, an individual incident, instead of some broader problem that incident might be part of?

[mkr-hn]

> Microaggression

I've been trying to remember this word all week

[justin66]

> Making things public works.

How does this episode not serve as a pretty glaring counterexample to that principle?

[esbwhat]

hindsight is 20/20, eh?

[justin66]

I wouldn't have thought that tweeting someone's picture was a sound method of conflict resolution BEFORE the brouhaha, no hindsight required...

although conflict resolution probably wasn't what was really being attempted. I'm not sure what was being attempted, but I'd venture to guess that "let the internet settle this" didn't have the intended result.

[dragonwriter]

> Why? She reported the microaggression to the relevant organizers through a public channel.

As I understand it, the particular use of a public channel (particularly, the use of a photograph in it) was itself a direct violation of the Code of Conduct of the conference, and an unnecessary escalation. The only arguably excuse for such public shaming, independently of whether or not it was a violation of the Code of Conduct, would be if the act were more something significantly more serious on its own than she described (though a public complaint about the organizers would be in line if the act, as described, was privately reported and the organizers failed to deal with it in such a way that that failure was itself a hostile.)

[esbwhat]

The part of the code of conduct you are referring to was added AFTER this whole thing happened. So you don't think it was a serious thing. I disagree. It's brushing off these things as "not serious" that is part of the problem.

[dragonwriter]

> The part of the code of conduct you are referring to was added AFTER this whole thing happened.

That's not what several of the accounts I've seen has said, but as I noted in my post I don't consider that particularly important in the final analysis one way or the other.

> So you don't think it was a serious thing.

I didn't say that; quite the opposite, I said that there was a legitimate grounds to expect that conference organizers would treat an appropriate, private report seriously and that it would be legitimately to publicly complain if they failed to do so.

Theft of even a small value is serious. Murder is serious. Most people who agree with both these propositions would still readily agree that the appropriate response to the former and that to the latter are not the same.