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Comment by eli | Hacker News Reader

Not sure this adds much to the story, but I think it's noteworthy that this was covered in a mainstream news program. I heard it on the radio yesterday.

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The whole thing is sad, but hopefully this sort of exposure will have the 'training' effect that folks won't seriously expect us to believe the excuse "Hey, its just a joke, I didn't mean it." which works fine if you're comedian doing a comedy act, not so well if your venue is more serious than that.

Once we remove jokes from the workplace, then we can concentrate our focus on removing smiling. Work should be no fun zones, one day our dream of robotic toil will come to fruition.

I love that response. It captures the essence of the maturation process. My kids would use variations on it when we talked about rules and behaviors. And that lead to productive discussions about absolute rules versus (don't kill people), contextual rules (kill people who are enemies), and societal rules (kill people who are trying to kill you) [1].

Clearly in the context of TechCrunch Disrupt making sexist jokes is a problem, but Rickrolling Arrington as our CTO did one year when he showed a backwards search engine (you went from a bunch of results to figure out what the query was that would return those kind of thing) just 'funny' (for some definition of funny, since it was pretty late in the Rickrolling meme but I digress).

But the maturation process, the one where you look at a situation and predict which behaviors will be ok for the group or not ok for the group, is something that you can't teach but you can learn.

[1] "Murder" is a useful foil to have this discussion around as there are so many different contexts in which one person may feel compelled or desire to take the life of another.

So that's one vote for removing satire from internet discussions.

I heard the story too, and I was most offended that the reporter said that I would be offended by what we were about to hear. Also, what do they know about locker room attitudes? My locker room attitude is to get out of the locker room and into the gym, pool, etc. Calling it sexism seems sexist to me, since I'm a guy who wouldn't normally do that kind of thing.

You're offended that other people were offended? I think everyone (even you) knows what they meant by "lockerroom attitude" even if you disapprove of the word choice.

No, being told that the story would offend him was offensive. That's a very condescending view!

Thank you!

The New Yorker has been covering misogyny in tech for a while, be it a "beat" or just a growing trend of coverage.

A = {all areas ∈ Tech | TNY's staff can cover the area at the level they cover other beats}

B = {all areas ∈ Tech | area interests TNY readership}

A ∩ B = ________

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