[TriLUG] Palmer for another SC term; proposed amendment to the bylaws

Daniel Sterling sterling.daniel at gmail.com
Thu Apr 25 15:42:41 EDT 2013


On Thu, Apr 25, 2013 at 7:30 AM, Aaron Joyner <aaron at joyner.ws> wrote:
> 1 - Not tolerating harassment, and avoiding gender and sexual orientation
> bias (which seems to be a large component of the policy) , should be an
> obvious part of *any* discourse in *any* civilized society.

Agreed, but we're not there yet. We live in what some sociologists
call a "rape culture" [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_culture ],
and as such it's worth pointing out and defining what we mean by
having proper civil, societal interaction.

Women are grossly under-represented in many professional settings,
including tech. I trust I don't need to cite anything for you to
believe this, but feel free to refute this if you have a source.

You might say women are socially excluded in tech:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_exclusion

The marginalized group gets to decide what is offensive / harmful. Any
noise we as the majority group make about what is or isn't acceptable
is worthless.

As a thought exercise to perhaps promote some empathy  I encourage you
to imagine what going through life as a women is life. Here's some
help: http://eringoblog.net/?p=2364

Are we really having a discussion about whether or not to have a
policy that encourages a minority group to feel more included in our
events?

We should be debating the exact language of the document, perhaps, but
certainly not if we should have one. And even the former is in the end
best handled by a lawyer.

smdh

-- Dan



More information about the TriLUG mailing list