[13thLetter]

"If you can personally demonstrate the effectiveness of a better way than calling out people causing problems, I am sure plenty of people will follow your example."

I have a great suggestion which would have worked perfectly and not caused any excessive harm: if anyone in his workplace was bothered by his shirt, they should have talked to his manager, and those actually affected could have resolved the issue like adults. Does every trivial workplace slight need to be dealt with in the international media?

"That's not a novel position here; few programmers on HN weight highly the advice from non-programmer managers on how to program."

Except this is not a situation where a bunch of managers weighed in and said that this guy should be shamed worldwide. This is a situation where a whole bunch of random bored strangers decided to make an example of him. Please forgive me if I'm not convinced this is how an experienced manager would deal with it.

[wpietri]

I say again that basically nobody who's taking action on this issue is interested in advice from anonymous peanut-gallery members. If you want to change how activism is done, demonstrate your better way.

> Does every trivial workplace slight need to be dealt with in the international media?

No, only the ones where the person has chosen to represent a major project in the international media. Which is the case here.

> This is a situation where a whole bunch of random bored strangers decided to make an example of him.

He spoke to the world. The world spoke back. The people doing so were generally neither random nor bored. Quite a lot of them were working female scientists, for whom this is a major and very personal issue.

Also, you aren't getting the analogy. Here, you are the useless manager trying to tell feminist activists how to better do their work, work you show no sign of understanding or even caring about.

[13thLetter]

"If you want to change how activism is done, demonstrate your better way."

Here's the change I want: I want people not getting mobbed for what are, at the absolute worst, trivial infractions that should be taken care of in the context of their own workplace. A lot of other folks who might be sympathetic to your goals feel the same way. Maybe if you want your activism to be more successful in changing minds, as opposed to just temporarily cowing opponents into resentful silence, you should put some thought into how it's coming across.

[wpietri]

Sorry, you don't get to judge what's trivial. But keep acting otherwise if it makes you feel better.

But you aren't getting my point. As somebody who is not actually working to solve the problem, your peanut-gallery "you're doing it wrong" is basically irrelevant. E.g.: "Hey firefighters! Do you really have to use axes on that front door? You should just ring the doorbell and maybe leave a note. That's the polite thing to do." A firefighter might take tips on techniques from other firefighters, but will (and should) have very little interest in the shouted suggestions of random passers-by, and even less in what arsonists think they should do.

People unhappy with social progress are forever telling the people making that progress that they are doing it wrong. Here's a famous example:

http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.h...

Note here that MLK actually took the time to reply to his fellow clergy, people also devoted, at least in theory, to making the world better.

Also, at least as far as my activism goes, I think convincing everybody would be nice but it's neither necessary nor practical. Consider this graph:

http://content.gallup.com/origin/gallupinc/GallupSpaces/Prod...

If you compare it with the death rate, it suggests that progress was made on this issue not because most people change their minds, but because most of the people opposed to interracial marriage died off.

This is hardly unique to social change; Max Planck, one of the inventors of quantum theory, wrote, "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."

So although I would like to change minds, I will settle for some amount of resentful silence. Because a) it reduces the direct impact of oppression, and b) it means that Planck's "new generation" will pick up the new truths. If I have to choose between civil rights and civil dialog, I'm generally going to pick civil rights.

[scatters]

"[If] anyone in his workplace was bothered by his shirt, they should have talked to his manager, and those actually affected could have resolved the issue like adults."

You're implying that only people within ESA could have been affected by his choice of clothing. But he wore that shirt in public; worse, on broadcast media, which means that those potentially affected includes the media-consuming population of the whole world. And anyone who is concerned about access to and diversity in science and technology has a right to be "bothered" by the message it sent out.

[13thLetter]

"those potentially affected includes the media-consuming population of the whole world"

I really don't know what to say. Here we have people insisting one moment that I'm blowing this way out of proportion, and then the very next moment insisting that billions of people were harmed because an obscure space scientist wore a shirt.