[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?

[esbwhat]

That's not the point. The point is we shouldn't brush off these individual incidents as insignificant because they are part of a whole. The problem is not going to get solved if you don't show that you do not tolerate this sort of behaviour, on an individual scale.

[dragonwriter]

> That's not the point.

It's clearly not your point. But I think its an important point.

> The point is we shouldn't brush off these individual incidents as insignificant because they are part of a whole.

If the significance is because they are part of a whole, then they need to be addressed in that context.

> The problem is not going to get solved if you don't show that you do not tolerate this sort of behaviour, on an individual scale.

You can not-tolerate it by making a private report to conference staff; you can not tolerate it by making a public discussion of the general problem with the specific incident as one of the illustrations; you can not tolerate it in many ways. The argument that something shouldn't be tolerated, even when accepted, doesn't automatically justify every possible response.

[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.