Diversity and inclusion have a cost of having to deal with ongoing disagreement and friction that comes from coexistence.
Diversity(tm) and Inclusion(tm) have a cost of inviting Diversity Experts to tell you why you cannot do any of this on your own and why you need to pay them for it, even though none of their materials or solutions have been peer-reviewed and the readily observable effect is that they make everyone miserable.
One is how communities work, the other is how protection rackets work.
Propriety is a poor excuse to let others control the conversation. From what I've seen, Dries and the Drupal Association have not invited good faith dialogue, quite the opposite. He's edited his statements silently and has subtly shifted his position (first a conflict about values, then about reported behavior). Comments remain moderated and reasonable ones have not been allowed through when they contradict the party line [1]. Many questions that were raised have been handwaved away or ignored.
Using PR-speak to sound reconciliatory while doing the opposite is a game two can play at. It may not be nice, but it's better than trying to be reasonable against someone arguing in bad faith. That's a recipe for frog boiling and being a pushover. The idea isn't to endlessly escalate, it's to ensure both sides now have something to gain by cooperating and to lose by defecting.
You can also see this in action with replies. Certain shadowbanned accounts will only show up in threads if you follow them. If you open the thread in an incognito window, certain people disappear.
"Trust and Safety" is just Orwellian newspeak for controlling who gets to hear which opinions.
It is both notable and unsurprising that the Drupal code of conduct [1] makes zero mention of any of the topics in this debate. Nothing about sexuality, nothing about feminism, or equality, ... Yet every discussion about this immediately turns to gender politics. I think this shows the duplicitous nature of COCs: no matter what the letter says, the intent, as understood by nearly everyone, is to apply it to filter by reigning morality, under the threat of public punishment.
When it comes to Drupal, the only gender problem it has is the people who keep manufacturing major incidents out of minor slights, even when the people involved don't mind. Case in point, the Drupal Association member who resigned because he called his friend a pussy, who in turn didn't mind it.
It is disingenuous to uphold a code of respect, diversity and inclusion while simultaneously expecting everyone to conform to the wishes of the most easily offended. More so to act like the only way to be respectful to women is to treat them like fragile flowers. Some people prefer traditional gender roles, in or outside the bedroom, and some are women.
The last thing these inclusion activists want is diversity, it would expose them as the sheltered and privileged upper class they are.
That's a really oppressive patriarchy we live in, when a single blog post with no evidence and only hearsay is enough to spike a massive protest and boycott...
The codes of conduct are unfortunately sanctimonious non-sense to beat people over the head with. Those who champion them never apply the rules to themselves, and those who really want to harass pay them no heed. This was already the case with Adria Richards and her dongle joke offense, where she harassed a guy by putting his photo on Twitter and cost him his job, and got lauded for it by gender activists and news articles alike. While citing the code of conduct.
Real harassment is already illegal. Conduct policies can only serve in the gray area where people do not want to get police involved, but still want to exact some form of retribution and punishment, often by playing the politics game. It empowers the wrong people for the wrong reasons. It also creates the illusion that tech is particularly nasty, when the exact opposite is true: despite what activists claim, it is far more meritocratic than most industries, and far more reliant on tools and methods that emphasize work over personality and identity.
The propositioning, this is a fact of life: men propose, women dispose, and it's creepy unless he's attractive. Fact is, people like to date people with similar interests, they meet in all sorts of contexts, and some are more tactful about it than others. That doesn't mean it's automatically harassment to be flirted with outside of a dating site or bar night, or that it's never welcome.
One asshole manager is just one asshole manager, and such crudeness is the exception, not the norm.
Some people would love to receive just an ounce of affection and appreciation just for merely showing up, so being able to complain about it is the luxury of the desirable. Especially when, as I've often seen, it's paired with exasperated stories of how so-and-so just won't take the endless "clear hints" that have been made, but a polite but firm "sorry, flattered but not interested" is never actually provided. We are told we must be more empathetic, but the empathy for the socially awkward or the lonely, those who are bad at reading social cues, that's never on the table. All this talk of "safe spaces" seems to vanish once it's the real nerds and geeks, the 'losers' who need consideration.
Just keep in mind, HR is mostly a female-staffed endeavour, and the passive aggressive and underhanded interaction described is certainly not typical of male interaction styles. If it's a poster child for how not to behave, I don't think those griping about techbros and misogyny are quite thinking through the implications here.
You've only graduated 2.5 years ago, so trying to push yourself as a Product Designer is probably out of your reach, and comes across as unrealistic. This is a senior-level role where experience is more important than ticking off skills. In combination with the breadth you listed this doesn't make you seem like a genius, it makes you seem like a generalist who lacks focus and probably has a touch of ADHD.
Personally your website also doesn't impress me, nor do any of the projects shown. They all have the same blank slate look of plain sans-serif fonts on white backgrounds with little or no colors and virtually no iconography. That might be good to sell consumer goods, but it doesn't demonstrate your skill and it contradicts that you're "passionate about all things visual". There are no illustrations, no flourishes, the artistry and aesthetics are absent.
In fact, what seems to be your "showpiece" for product design is IMO a self-sabotaging demo. Instead of showing off the creative process and focusing on the creative possibility space, it's a long-winded and visually dull story of navel gazing about details, interspersed with random code screenshots and programmer art. The end result, buried at the very bottom instead of pulled out at the start, is an ugly neon monospace table view with only an out of place Mario coin for graphics.
The golden rule is show, don't tell, and to not force people to do the heavy lifting for you. Also, drop phrases like wanting to work "at your cool startup", it screams try-hard. You don't want to join the startup because _it_ is cool, you want the startup to hire you because _you_ are cool.
Don't talk about writing witty copy or designing mesmerizing colors and dazzling typography, just make me laugh, mesmerize me, dazzle me.
Most of the criticism of Yarvin is by those unable to distinguish between descriptive and normative ideas. His writing is a giant "what if" that mainly rejects the provincial notion that only today's common views are the most sound.
I'd bet that the adjacent commenter's idea of "[his racist advocacy] is well documented" comes from Twitter and Tumblr quotes taken out of context, cyclically retweeted in outrage.
Despite their protestations, I get the feeling that journalists are some of the most prolific consumers of social media, using it more and more as a source for their scoops and discussion topics. If so, it seems pretty disingenuous for them to blame the readership for what they click on, when they themselves seem unable to turn away and go find some real material.
The griping about the overuse of "fake news" displays a lack of self-awareness too. It isn't just Alex Jones adherents who call the New York Times, Washington Post and BBC fake news. All these major outlets have been caught with their pants down posting untruths, often with an obvious political agenda masked with under the thinnest veneer of objectivity. Corrections and retractions are lost in the maelstrom of the attention economy, and opinion pieces compete on equal footing with 'real' reporting, as the front page is no longer the main source of traffic. The response to the obvious and baited ire from the readership is to double down, censor any comments that contradict the story as being uncivil and harassing, and get ever more offended the plebs aren't eating up what you're serving, seeking out alternate sources in their 'ignorance'.
Respect and credibility are earned, not given. If contemporary journalists want to raise the bar and bring their audience back to them, the solution isn't a war on information, it's a war on their own delusions of grandeur and their inability to step aside to let real domain experts speak. Those who are in it for the job rather than the agenda and attention left the scene long ago, and Gell Mann amnesia remains as true as ever.
>you are a frigging master of the computer universe.
Strange because this is exactly why I love OS X. Because it's empowering and gets out of the way.
For instance, it's the only OS where multi-touch gestures for desktop/window management works instantly and controls everything as I'm doing it. A common thing to do is to select some objects on one desktop, click and drag them with the trackpad, then swipe with 3 additional fingers to move to another desktop, before dropping. It just works.
The browser works like a tablet and I can zoom and pan and navigate back easily. The OS is smart enough to reposition all my windows to their previous location when I unplug and replug an external monitor, instead of giving me a bunch of cropped apps in the corner. Renaming or moving a file makes apps pay attention and save to the new location. Preferences apply just by changing them, labels and controls everywhere update to track underlying changes, every listing is live. I can instantly preview anything with a spacebar tap, without losing keyboard focus on the finder window I was working with. Even the little icon in the titlebar of a document window is interactive, letting me drag a file I have open to a new place without making me go find it again, or right click it to get a dropdown menu to all parent paths.
Plugging in devices and drives, managing audio inputs and outputs, managing network interfaces and VPNs, backing up to external devices, it's all right there and instantly accessible, without 3 layers of legacy control panels or a bunch of config files to go dive through.
All of these things preserve my flow state by letting me manipulate the objects and the state of my desktop without having to make a chore out of it, by acting exactly like the natural and traditional objects around me. When I turn on the light, I don't open the "light preferences", click a checkbox and hit "Ok", I don't go edit /etc/light.conf, I just switch on the light. Why "professionals" think it should be any other way keeps amazing me, but then, I recall a study a while back that said that when it takes a lot of small steps to perform a particular task, it seems faster, even if it actually isn't.
I can't help but notice the contradiction. A man jumped to her defense, which was sexism, and then her co-workers got resentful, which she wanted to be defended from but wasn't, and that was sexism too. Somehow, we all need to display more empathy for her situation.
I imagine there's a different side to this. Her coworkers noticed her getting treated differently and started teasing her about it, in a typical form of male ribbing on each other, in an attempt to equalize the status among the team. Rather than take this in stride and rolling with it, she clammed up and got offended, being used to a very different social style. The mistake was to see herself as the primary victim from day 1, rather than a beneficiary of unearned perks. The empathy she demands for herself she doesn't grant to others, and the reasonable and self-sufficient behavior she expects of everyone around her, she was unable to muster herself.
So here's the long medium post where she is unable to dissociate her experience from her identity. A "personal perspective" that nevertheless puts up a list of changes necessary for supporting women and minorities. She also somehow concludes that despite management not seeming to care and not bothering to reply to her final letter, her experience was nevertheless instrumental in causing sweeping and highly visible changes in policy.
Sorry but, being empowered by being uniquely protected is a contradiction. She opens "as a woman and minority" as if that's a liability, rather than the trump card she's actually playing it as. People who don't use that line still have problems, but they don't get to instruct others on how to solve them. If one of her white male co-workers had gotten bullied, I imagine we wouldn't be reading about it today, and she probably wouldn't have noticed either in her me-bubble.
I understand the author's frustrations. Open source is lovely when it works, and communities can be fun when you're part of them. But I understand the other side too. Most people don't care, and they shouldn't have to care, yet they are told to regardless.
The flipside to all this griping about entitlement is that most open source ecosystems are set up as an explicit groupthink and infrastructure to which you must defer. You can't just grab something and keep playing by yourself, no, you must keep moving in lockstep with everyone else, or things will break. That's why people get frustrated and angry, and that's why they barge into issue queues feeling miffed. They gave up too much control to too big an entity, and it bit them in the ass. Angular 1 should be a big lesson here: people abandoned the entire framework in droves simply because the _promise_ of future updates was taken away. The beautiful carriage turned back into the pumpkin it always was, and now the rot was starting to set in.
Even something like node.js with its fractally versioned npm packages has this problem. Drop-in compatibility is only true as long as you're in the sweet spot of doing what most other people do, on the version most widely installed. Not too bleeding edge that you can't expect StackOverflow to have gotten there before you, but not too far behind that you lose compatibility with the important dependencies.
The author concludes "If we focus on solutions, focus on helping others, focus on sharing ideas, we’ll be in a better place." I disagree, because too much sharing is what got us into this mess. The answer is more self-sufficiency, with enough affordances for going at it by yourself if you want to. Alas, that doesn't jibe with the latest fad of inclusiveness, so I'm afraid the same people griping about civility are the ones doomed to recruit more ineffective members into their congregation.
Exercise for you: join the actual conversation instead of preaching from above like a schoolteacher and wielding the red marker that is the flag button when it doesn't follow your orthodoxy.
It's funny though, because the other day there was a free speech debate at the University of Toronto where a gender ideologue explicitly denigrated her opponent's outreach on Youtube as amateurish videos unworthy of consideration. Despite him being a tenured professor. [1]
Then again, both his opponents also expressed how dismayed they were that this debate was taking place at all, after they reinterpreted its topic as being offensive to common decency. They ignored the indecent actions from their camp that led to it though. It seems liberal academicians do not like debate of any kind, official or otherwise, they'll just bang on about empathy and care while denying it to those they disagree with.
This happens every time the identitarian left narrative stumbles and gets torn apart in subsequent comments. LambdaConf was the most memorable example. Perfectly reasonable post, intelligent discussion, flagged and memory holed by those who claim their side is rational and fact-driven.
Are you sure you know what happened? Because all I saw was Pao being lauded as a hero for standing up to supposed misogyny, when the community was upset about how they fired a female community coordinator on top of bringing in other harsh censorship tools like quarantining.
It was classic fact-free "women in tech" non-sense. Equality means if you mess up at the top, you take responsibility. What women-in-tech advocates want is all the prestige with none of the flak.
He said them in jest, and the audience didn't react in horror the way the original clickbait said they did, as proven by recordings. It was pure projection and misrepresentation on the author's part, and everyone else listened and believed and ran with it.
It was also false, horrific and libellous, and he did lose his job over it. Just because the stick used to beat people with was misogyny instead of cheese pizza, doesn't make the act of spreading false information any less despicable.
Edit: BTW, the fact that our media is now staffed by people who are utterly unable to separate their subjective experience from objective reality should seriously worry you. It should also make you reconsider anything you've heard about what's going on in culture wars online and offline, because I guarantee you, the people covering it do not have the statistical and digital literacy to accurately gauge the size and nature of things.
It's also a great place for motivated actors to pour gasoline on some minor embers and turn them into a wildfire, allowing an irrelevant minority to seem like a representative majority.
Diversity(tm) and Inclusion(tm) have a cost of inviting Diversity Experts to tell you why you cannot do any of this on your own and why you need to pay them for it, even though none of their materials or solutions have been peer-reviewed and the readily observable effect is that they make everyone miserable.
One is how communities work, the other is how protection rackets work.