Comment by temphn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by temphn | Hacker News Reader

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Mr. Byrnes, it is a little more complicated than that.

Many of the people angry about this incident will, in another context, back up someone like Richard Dawkins when he offends. Dawkins happens to be one of my favorite authors, but he is quite provocative. And Heroku advertises the Dawkins Foundation as a success story:

  http://success.heroku.com/dawkins-foundation

  The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science 
  (RDFRS) supports scientific education and advances 
  critical thinking and an evidence-based understanding of 
  the natural world, in the quest to overcome religious 
  fundamentalism, superstition, intolerance and human 
  suffering. The foundation’s namesake and founder, Richard 
  Dawkins, is a scientist and best-selling author of works 
  including The God Delusion, The Selfish Gene, and The 
  Blind Watchmaker.

As an objective fact, The God Delusion is surely a book that many millions of people around the world are on the record as finding "offensive" [1,2,3].

So the issue is really not whether a statement is offensive or not, or how the apology is phrased. It is whether the group that is offended has the power to force an apology.

[1] http://www.religiousforums.com/forum/religious-debates/65603...

[2] http://richarddawkins.net/articles/628795-duking-it-out-over...

[3] http://mattgrube.com/seminary-writings/dawkins-god-delusion-...

Not at all.

When deciding whether you think someone should apologize or not for an action, the issue is not whether the party they offended can force an apology, it's whether you believe that person's action was wrong.

Many of the people angry about this incident believe that sexism is wrong, but advocating atheism in Dawkins' manner is not wrong. Therefore they believe the sexist should apologize, and Dawkins should not. Their opinions are consistent, and it has nothing to do with force.

  Many of the people angry about this incident believe that 
  sexism is wrong, but advocating atheism in Dawkins' manner 
  is not wrong.

Right. However, the group of people who are against sexism are objectively much more culturally and economically powerful than the group of people who are against Dawkins. Heroku doesn't fear any lost business from supporting Dawkins, but it dropped Sqoot like a hot potato.

You could quantify this by comparing a Facebook-based StatusRank for the anti-Sqoots vs. the anti-Dawkins. The former group will have much higher socioeconomic status than the latter. Harvard graduates are much more likely to believe "sexism not ok, Dawkins ok" and high school dropouts are much more likely to believe the reverse.

That is, sexism is "not ok" and Dawkins is "ok" in this thread because these are the beliefs shared by the most powerful people in society. This has little to do with right and wrong and much to do with socioeconomic status.

Correlation is not causation.

You seem to be stating that Christians (the anti-Dawkins) are objectively (ie measurably) less culturally and economically powerful than Feminists (the anti-Sqoot). I'm assuming, as Heroku and Sqoot are American, you mean it as a general statement about the US, or at least the US tech industry.

I'd like to believe this was true. Could you offer any evidence?

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