Re: removing toxic emailers

[Kalamatee <kalamatee@gmail.com>]

On Fri, 16 Apr 2021 at 05:59, Eric S. Raymond <esr@thyrsus.com> wrote:

> Ian Lance Taylor <iant@google.com>:
> > Patronizing or infantilizing anybody doesn't come into this at all.
>
> I am not even *remotely* persuaded of this.  This whole attitude that if
> a woman is ever exposed to a man with less than perfect American
> upper-middle-class manners it's a calamity requiring intervention
> and mass shunning, that *reeks* of infantilizing women.
>
> > We want free software to succeed.  Free software is more likely to
> > succeed if more people work on it.  If you are a volunteer, as many
> > are, you can choose to spend your time on the project where you have
> > to short-stop unwelcome advances, where you are required to deal with
> > "men with poor social skills."  Or you can choose to spend your time
> > on the project where people treat you with respect.  Which one do you
> > choose?
>
> The one where your expected satisfaction is higher, with boorishness
> from autistic males factored in as one of the overheads.  Don't try to
> tell me that's a deal-killer, I've known too many women who would
> laugh at you for that assumption.
>
> > Or perhaps you have a job that requires you to work on free software.
> > Now, if you work on a project where the people act like RMS, you are
> > being forced by your employer to work in a space where you face
> > unwelcome advances and men who have "trouble recognizing boundaries."
> > That's textbook hostile environment, and a set up for you to sue your
> > employer.  So your employer will never ask anyone to work on a project
> > where people act like that--at least, they won't do it more than once.
>
> Here's what happens in the real world (and I'm not speculating, I was
> a BoD member of a tech startup at one time, stuff like this came up).
> You say "X is being a jerk - can I work on something else?"  Your
> employer, rightly terrified of the next step, is not going to "force"
> you to do a damn thing. He's going to bend over backwards to
> accommodate you.
>
> > (Entirely separately, I don't get the slant of your whole e-mail.  You
> > can put up with RMS despite the boorish behavior you describe.  Great.
> > You're a saint.  Why do you expect everyone else to be a saint?
>
> I'm no saint, I'm merely an adult who takes responsibility for my own
> choices when dealing with people who have minimal-brain-damage
> syndromes.  OK, I have probably acquired a bit more tolerance for
> their quirks than average from long experience, but I don't believe I'm
> an extreme outlier that way.
>
> What I am pushing for is for everyone to recognize that *women are
> adults* - they have their own agency and are in general perfectly
> capable of treating an RMS-class jerk as at worst a minor annoyance.
>
> Behaving as though he's some sort of icky monster who should be
> shunned by all right-thinking people and taints everything he touches
> is ... just unbelievably disconnected from reality.  Bizarre
> neo-Puritan virtue signaling of no help to anyone.
>
> If I needed more evidence that many Americans lead pampered,
> cossetted, hyper-insulated lives that require them to make up their
> own drama, this whole flap would be it.
>
>
Im glad there are people like you on the project Eric, because you express
exactly what a lot of people see - even if a minority of people chose to
ignore it,

To a lot of "non americans", the events on here appear as nothing more than
a power grab by a small minority of developers, abusing their position and
american corporate ideologies to enact change, ignoring any one who dares
question or disagree unless they fit into a clique they have built (and
want to maintain by ostracizing people they deem unworthy),
brandishing them jerks, trolls, toxic and other childish names. Im glad
there are a few devs that can see this, but it feels like they are stepping
on egg shells (despite the rhetoric about how well the people in said
clique can communicate on technical matters).