Esquire article: http://www.esquire.co.uk/culture/books/7933/exclusive-extrac...
Since kindergarten children are taught to politely ask somebody to stop as their first step, and escalate from there -- not go nuclear right from the get-go.
Or maybe I'm out of the loop on this -- I could be. I really only read about this the other night -- I get a healthy enough dose of drama just in my own life without having to read about somebody else's :-)
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> I decided to do things differently this time and didn’t say anything to them directly. I was a guest in the Python community and as such, I wanted to give PyCon the opportunity to address this.
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So if "personal agenda" includes being fed up with tech industry sexism, then yeah it was very obviously because of a personal agenda. PR? Sure, she was trying to manage how her story was received by the public. Wouldn't you?
I hope you explain yourself, because from what I can tell, you're attempting something ugly.
As I said in this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9164064, I don't think Adria Richards did anything out of line in asking for an apology to be modified. You're allowed to be anonymous in this context, you are allowed to try to control how your story is told.
Asking someone to bear false witness is not comparable to posting as a throwaway.
And in any case, your logic of narrative control is contradictory: Adria was trying to override Hank's control over how his story was told. She didn't ask him publicly, she went through back channels to his previous employer for social leverage.
Hank is allowed to try to control how his story was told. Adria tried to interfere with that right.
> She didn't ask him publicly, she went through back channels to his previous employer for social leverage.
I'm sure going public would have resulted in people accusing her of "going nuclear", or adding insult to injury, etc. Considering this guy was recently fired, I wouldn't want to speak directly to him if I were her. That leaves going via his former employer. You can choose to see that as using "social leverage" but there's no real way to know. If that was the point, it wasn't enough leverage, because he didn't change it.
Facing down this king of online scrutiny and doubt of your motives is exactly why women tend to keep quite about this kind of stuff, and then things don't change because nobody's talking about the problems.
>Considering this guy was recently fired, I wouldn't want to speak directly to him if I were her.
Did you know that she responded directly to his comment on HN? (See here)[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5399047].
Adria portrays herself as a fearless crusader against injustice. She has failed in this portrayal in several ways and appeared opportunistic and hypocritical.
Would you be willing to admit there's 'no foul play' in that failure? I don't know if I'd go that far, because my point is more about the nature of the court of public opinion than it is trying to assign blame.
>Facing down this king of online scrutiny and doubt of your motives is exactly why women tend to keep quite about this kind of stuff
It's a problem, sure, but the court of public opinion is extremely volatile and doesn't like being misled, which is part of why it's considered a 'nuclear option'. Adria deliberately used that option and it backfired. This is not doubt of her motives, it's a plain reading of her account of events.
How can you protect someone that chooses to engage in a game of social russian roulette? How can you protect someone that then pulls the trigger six times? You can't, and now Adria is jobless while Hank has a new job. And it's sad and really unfortunate that things have worked out that way for her.
I haven't been trying to make a point like "Adria deserved it" though you probably heard that, and there's an "unfair" amount of that going around (though it's not foul by the rules of the story-telling game you're describing, right?).
There simply isn't anything to be done about mob justice except be aware that it will betray you for the slightest infraction.
...I've been tracing back through the beginning of this conversation, because I was focusing on where exactly I think Adria made a significant mistake "in the eyes of the court" and I wanted to make sure we were still topical.
>>But if you believe that her actions were about "PR and a personal agenda" then I think you'd also have to agree that "Hank"'s apology was just as much about "PR and a personal agenda".
I don't disagree actually with that statement in isolation, but I think you're missing the point here. When they say things are about "PR and a personal agenda," what they mean is there's a sense of dishonesty detected. You can shape the narrative, but get caught distorting it and the mob pounces.