| I think the core problem here is we have someone (Shanley) who is allowed to attack people on the basis of their gender, class, profession, etc. [e.g. https://twitter.com/ryan/status/474791621100199936 ] An example relevant to HN is: https://twitter.com/shanley/status/474601030986903552 "HN is fucking obsessed with me lol. what is wrong with you little boys? mad cuz i'm cute and would NEVER talk to you or know you exist?" Yet, this person is still able to get an employer to fire one of their employees for engaging in the same behavior she does. Is it just me that feels people who attack people on the basis of their gender shouldn't be able to get people fired for doing the same thing? Edit:
I was trying to say the consequences should be equal. I probably should have said the reverse in my question at the end there since it seemed to lead to confusion. [e.g. Both should be fired since consequences should be equal for equally bad behavior] |
Substantively: why should the previous behavior of the reporter matter one bit? If someone does something bad, whether a person complaining about it is "good" or "bad" is sort of besides the point, and digging into how evil that person is amounts to an all-too-transparent attempt at deflection. Shanley, for better or for worse, takes advantage of that to generate news. That means that even if you get provoked, external observers won't and shouldn't care enough to get caught up in whether Shanley's a bad person or not. (Your takeaway, by the way, should be "do not engage" because she's communicating with an audience that's not-you when she engages with you. Also: all comments on this story amount to engagement, hence the heavy flagging.)
My sympathy for the fired guy is very limited. He clearly fucked up, and immediately knew it and took it down (before she even posted her screenshot, it seems), either because a friend told him he was out of line or he realized it himself. Which does elicit a bit of sympathy from me, and if I were in her shoes, I'd have let it slide--there's more than enough misogyny in tech than to need to scrape the bottom of the barrel here. Despite that, he did fuck up. Freedom of speech is not an issue: if he had posted a long stream of tweets calling for Jews to be slaughtered, no one would be upset that his company let him go. She has just as much freedom-to-report-speech as he has freedom-to-insult-speech, and freedom of association is an equally important right.