[andrewdupont]

> "It is unfortunate that Richards received the huge storms of abuse that she did. But she chose to handle the situation in a way that invited that abuse, when there were clear ways to "speak up" that would not have resulted in such abuse."

This reasoning bothers me.

Let's stipulate that Adria's post to Twitter was a mistake. You seem to say that the abuse is her fault, because if she hadn't made that mistake, she wouldn't have received any abuse.

But shouldn't punishments be proportional to crimes? We all seem to agree that it's barbaric to cut off a shoplifter's hand, or to hand out the death penalty for petty crimes (as was once common in England, for instance).

People say this sort of thing all the time — "If you didn't want Y, you shouldn't have done X." I feel like it shuts down the conversation. Yes, X was wrong, but Y was also wrong, and it's ridiculous that something as wrong as Y resulted from X. That's a discussion worth having.

The point is that nobody deserves death threats. It need not feel like a defense of Adria Richards to say that.

[overgryphon]

Nobody deserves death threats. But that issue has nothing to do with PyCon, women in tech, or software development.

It is simply current reality that whenever anyone posts things online, other people are able to respond by anonymously sending death threats. The fact that there are people who choose to do so sucks, and is a problem, but this is a well-known fact. You, right now, could click reply on my comment and send me a death threat. I would have no recourse.

Richards knew that people who didn't like what she posted publicly may respond in that manner, and she decided to take that risk when she posted a photo of other developers to twitter. If she did not want to deal with anonymous death threats, she could (and did) handle the situation in a less public manner. She chose to make the situation public.

The developers she posted a picture of had no way of consenting to that publicity.

[andrewdupont]

> "But that issue has nothing to do with PyCon, women in tech, or software development."

I disagree. The shitheads in our community who would stoop to death threats do not threaten everyone equally. The way I know that is that a woman who complained about a joke got a bunch of abuse, yet the company who fired the joke-teller — by all accounts, an overreaction — got nearly none.

Also, it's not just death threats; it's harassment, too. Jesse Noller, who ran PyCon, commits the sin of "having a Code of Conduct and enforcing it," and ends up getting hate mail and harassing phone calls (https://twitter.com/jessenoller/status/314417532842950656).

Internet geeks have weird and sadistic ways of dispensing "justice." That's unfortunate, but even worse is what they decide to point their magnifying glass at.

[pifflesnort]

> The shitheads in our community who would stoop to death threats do not threaten everyone equally.

What do you have that demonstrates that they're even in our community?

> Internet geeks have weird and sadistic ways of dispensing "justice." That's unfortunate, but even worse is what they decide to point their magnifying glass at.

Not "Internet geeks". Anonymous mobs of dubious maturity and intelligence have weird and sadistic ways of dispensing "justice", on and off the internet.

This is not unique to technology, it's not unique to women, it's not unique to issues of sexism, and it's not unique to Twitter.

As I've noted numerous times in this thread, Olivia Wilde, an actress, received similarly hateful and disgusting Twitter messages for daring to insult Justin Beiber, a pop musician whose primary fanbase seems to be pre-teens and teens.

Something tells me that the people that were offended enough to send hate mail and treets were not angry "internet geeks".

[jff]

> But shouldn't punishments be proportional to crimes? We all seem to agree that it's barbaric to cut off a shoplifter's hand, or to hand out the death penalty for petty crimes (as was once common in England, for instance).

I agree. So let's not fire people for saying "dongle".