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Comment This isn't a victory for Behring-Breivik. (Score 3, Insightful) 491

Someone once pointed out that hoping a rapist gets raped in prison isn't a victory for his victim(s), because it somehow gives him what he had coming to him, but it's actually a victory for rape and violence. I wish I could remember who said that, because they are right. The score doesn't go Rapist: 1 World: 1. It goes Rape: 2.

What this man did is unspeakable, and he absolutely deserves to spend the rest of his life in prison. If he needs to be kept away from other prisoners as a safety issue, there are ways to do that without keeping him in solitary confinement, which has been shown conclusively to be profoundly cruel and harmful.

Putting him in solitary confinement, as a punitive measure, is not a victory for the good people in the world. It's a victory for inhumane treatment of human beings. This ruling is, in my opinion, very good and very strong for human rights, *precisely* because it was brought by such a despicable and horrible person. It affirms that all of us have basic human rights, even the absolute worst of us on this planet.

Comment Re:The term "Sexual Harassment" is very misleading (Score 1) 182

Just thought I'd update this now that more details have been revealed. Horvath was dating someone at github, who at the time much of this happened was an ex; however, he's not the bully; Ted Nyman is the guy who vengefully reverted her commits after she refused to get involved with him--that's a classic pattern of sexual harassment. She never dated Nyman.

Subsequently revealed emails and texts show that TPW and his wife were pretty much as bad as alleged, and that various upper-ups at github worked with them to protect github and the upper-ups. Most of what comes out of this story is that github is a pretty drama-heavy, toxic place to work.

Comment Re:Good. (Score 1) 182

Women like Julie Ann Horvath who intentionally antagonize those who aren't perfectly politically correct

I didn't realize that complaining about your commits being vengefully reverted by the guy you wouldn't fuck, was antagonizing, and demanding of an unreasonable level of political correctness. So sorry!

Comment Re:The term "Sexual Harassment" is very misleading (Score 1) 182

This would all be a much more meaningful comment if it were 80 years ago and we were debating allowing women into the workplace at all. Outside of the tech industry--in medicine, law, business, factory work--women make up a substantial, if not equal, portion of the workforce, and the employers have figured out how to handle men and women working together. You have an express policy forbidding harassment, an HR department that responds properly to accusations, and bam! You're in the clear. For employers who do these things, they have cases of sexual harassment. They also have cases of theft, embezzlement, incompetence, misunderstandings, and all the other normal workplace issues that get worked out by having competent management and HR, and the company isn't in any particular danger from a lawsuit. Companies have to be grossly negligent in handling complaints or allowing particular environments to persist, to be liable.

Except in the tech industry, the retarded manchild of the working world, where the male/female ratios are from the 1960s, and so are the attitudes of your average techie--and the startup world is 10 times worse than everywhere else because they're not big enough to need competent HR professionals and they imagine themselves to be "disruptors" of the status quo. It's improved a lot over the last couple decades, if only because of the general improvement in society's attitude towards women. But if you want to see truly caveman sexism, look no further than the latest Hacker News darling.

BTW, women in the workplace don't really want a change in the status quo--more flexible hours, etc., is just more sexist "men are from mars" bullshit. What women want is not to have to put up with crap because they're women. Figure that part out (and as I said, most of the Fortune 1000 could give lessons on it), and you're golden.

Comment Re:wife at the office (Score 2) 182

The term itself has a dictionary meaning, but in a practical sense it's one of the lies that startups and HR departments tell themselves about themselves and their employees (like "we're passionate about changing how payments are processed" or "we only hire rockstar ninjas") to avoid dealing with difficult real world concerns.

I have no problem with the concept as an ideal, but as with many other practical lies, it's as often used as a bludgeon, as a way to dismiss external factors, and as a means of post facto reasoning while committing the Just World fallacy--we're a meritocracy, you haven't advanced, therefore you lack merit.

Comment Re:The term "Sexual Harassment" is very misleading (Score 1) 182

The time cube guy has nothing to lose by being time cube guy. Horvath's prospects in the startup world are in a shambles now, and she's faced a volume of shit that crazy people like time cube guy don't care about because they're crazy, but is a huge disincentive to normal people. It's not proof, but it's a point in her favour.

Comment Re:The term "Sexual Harassment" is very misleading (Score 4, Insightful) 182

If you mean "the official story from the people hired by github to investigate github's wrongdoing, who found that their employer github did nothing wrong, but for totally unrelated reasons one of our founders is going to spend more time with his other interests," then I agree.

Comment Re:Maybe this will wake some people up (Score 1) 182

Good points all, but I would one thing to your diagnosis that this is particularly bad in Silicon Valley: when you create a culture that celebrates "disruption" and sees rule-breaking as entrepeneurialism, you're almost certain to have a much harder time living within social boundaries that are the result of a lot of hard-earned lessons.

Rules can be profitably broken, but doing so tends to require understanding those rules in the first place and figuring out why some particular point is no longer worth obeying, not just willy-nilly smashing of barriers in the hope that a VC will pay you to keep making messes.

Comment Re:The term "Sexual Harassment" is very misleading (Score 3, Informative) 182

The original accusation has a human being who's come forward and publicly attached her name and career prospects to it, and is accepting significant personal costs to do so. The anonymous blog post is 100% consequence free for the author. That does imply a relative difference in credibility.

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