Category Archives: the atrocity thresh-hold

Compare and contrast a woman versus grrrrl

Merely existing does not equate to Holocaust

So I spotted this article about a psychotic hosebeast of epic proportions on Larry Correia’s twitter:

http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-London/2014/12/10/The-Madness-Of-Queen-Shanley

Some of the battles Kane has fought on behalf of the sisterhood include objecting to the use of the device terminology “master” and “slave” (they’re “oppressive”, apparently), flouncing off websites for being called out on parasitic financial practices, telling women that if they have a male co-founder he will probably rape them one day and attacking prominent academics such as Vivek Wadhwa, who works tirelessly on behalf of women and minorities in Silicon Valley.

By any reasonable person’s definition, and even by the standards of Silicon Valley, Kane is an abusive engine of discord, creating precisely the opposite conditions to those needed for happy co-operation between the sexes. So how did she land a feature-length profile in Matter, Silicon Valley’s long-read organ of choice—even though her paranoia and control freakery eventually screwed up what would probably have been a fawning profile and left journalists and readers alike aghast at her childishness and self-destructiveness?

(In case you’re not familiar with the story, follow those two links, which have to be read to be believed. Evidently Matter started calling around, asking people about Kane’s personal and professional life in preparation for their profile of her and her work—doing journalism, in other words—and she threw a hissy fit and started defaming and smearing the journalists in question, who were respectable professionals, beyond reproach in their dealings with her.)

While my gob is totally smacked by the massive screeching witchhunt that this Shanley crazy did over proper fact-checking investigative journalism, Kate Paulk links me this delightful contrast.

http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/girls-and-software

Seriously, it is a joy to behold for those of us who actually value true equality and meritocracy.

Open source was my refuge because it was a place were nobody cared what my pedigree was or what I looked like—they cared only about what I did. I ingratiated myself to people who could help me learn by doing dull scutwork: triaging issues to keep the issue queues neat and orderly, writing documentation and fixing code comments. I was the helpful kid, so when I needed help, the community was there. I’d never met another programmer in real life at this point, but I knew more about programming than some college students.

It Really Is about Girls (and Boys)

Twelve-year-old girls today don’t generally get to have the experiences that I did. Parents are warned to keep kids off the computer lest they get lured away by child molesters or worse—become fat! That goes doubly for girls, who then grow up to be liberal arts majors. Then, in their late teens or early twenties, someone who feels the gender skew in technology communities is a problem drags them to a LUG meeting or an IRC channel. Shockingly, this doesn’t turn the young women into hackers.

Why does anyone, anywhere, think this will work? Start with a young woman who’s already formed her identity. Dump her in a situation that operates on different social scripts than she’s accustomed to, full of people talking about a subject she doesn’t yet understand. Then tell her the community is hostile toward women and therefore doesn’t have enough of them, all while showing her off like a prize poodle so you can feel good about recruiting a female. This is a recipe for failure.

Honestly, the problem comes from caring too much about the superficial stuff, versus the really meaningful and important things. The constant obsession about sex, sexuality, and who you’re sexually attracted to lends to really boring conversation and people because guess what – people aren’t just their sex drives and their sexual organs to me. Thankfully, the ones who do constantly focus on the superficial unimportant crap – SJWs and their endless focus on gender, race, sexuality – are very loud and obvious and I can steer clear of them. I seriously DO NOT CARE about your ethnicity, dangle-or-boobs, or boinkchoice, I’m more interested in if ‘you are a jerkass’ or ‘can I actually talk to you without you biting my head off in a giant ragefit of a rant simply because we disagree’?

I’m not the only one baffled by this.

http://prosebeforehohos.com/2014/12/10/on-diversity/

Seriously, the people who whine and cry about their hurt feels are not new. I leave you with the wonderful Ray Bradbury’s words on that.

http://www.rjgeib.com/thoughts/451/451.html

The point is obvious. There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches. Every minority, be it Baptist / Unitarian, Irish / Italian / Octogenarian / Zen Buddhist, Zionist/Seventh-day Adventist, Women’s Lib/Republican, Mattachine/FourSquareGospel feel it has the will, the right, the duty to douse the kerosene, light the fuse. Every dimwit editor who sees himself as the source of all dreary blanc-mange plain porridge unleavened literature, licks his guillotine and eyes the neck of any author who dares to speak above a whisper or write above a nursery rhyme.

      Fire-Captain Beatty, in my novel Fahrenheit 451, described how the books were burned first by the minorities, each ripping a page or a paragraph from the book, then that, until the day came when the books were empty and the minds shut and the library closed forever.

      “Shut the door, they’re coming through the window, shut the window, they’re coming through the door,” are the words to an old song. They fit my lifestyle with newly arriving butcher/censors every month. Only six months ago, I discovered that, over the years, some cubby-hole editors at Ballantine Books, fearful of contaminating the young, had, bit by bit, censored some 75 separate sections from the novel. Students, reading the novel which, after all, deals with the censorship and book-burning in the future, wrote to tell me of this exquisite irony. Judy-Lynn Del Rey, one of the new Ballantine editors, is having the entire book reset and republished this summer with all the damns and hells back in place.