On Tech Elitism and Gatekeeping

rendakuenthusiast

On Tech Elitism and Gatekeeping

mitigatedchaos

“. If you identify yourself “I am a PHP programmer“ or “I am a Windows user“, that sounds like you can’t change that! Criticism of your tool, or of the ecosystem around your tool, sounds like an attack on your personality. You are forever married, shackled even, to an editor, operating system, language, graphics editor. “ <- I really dislike this attitude. I think that programmers should view all these things as tools that can be taken up and put back down again as needed rather than being a part of your identity.

That makes sense, after all a language is just a language, and while they sometimes have new concepts and idioms to learn, IME they aren’t that challenging to switch between.

My question is whether employers will treat it that way. It’s obvious to me that a good C# programmer is only N months away from being a good Java programmer, but the job listings don’t seem to work that way.

Source: the-grey-tribe

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the-grey-tribe

flowingblades flowingblades

The average hackathon environment makes for a hard place for coding females–let alone noncoding ones–to feel comfortable but is deeply necessary, Ali says: “Having that diversity is actually a huge asset.”
Each of the women were adamant about not letting biases become an excuse for them. And none is apologetic for not having prior coding knowledge. They do, however, ask for a level playing field–in all positions technical or not. “Noncoding women’s voices and ideas matter,” Ahmad says. “It doesn’t matter if they [women] don’t know how to code, because that’s a teachable skill, but passion isn’t. Hustle isn’t.”

“There’s not enough tech diversity because programming companies won’t hire women who can’t code.”

the-grey-tribe

This is a pattern that crops up again and again. From a certain angle, it’s obvious why it happens: It alienates competent men and women. And it gives professional diversity consultants a foot in the door.

Full-time culture warriors can be the “idea guy“, but not the coder/engineer/manager. So this move gives activist a way to weasel their way in without having to invest time into skills and without being accountable when the implementation sucks.

The other part of the strategy, drawing a line between sub-groups and declaring one more female or more feminist, gives you an easy rallying flag, a motte, a bailey, and a group to blame.

Source: glimmersight

moral-autism

ilzolende ilzolende

HEY EVERYONE I FINALLY DID A THING FOR MY CODING PROJECT THAT I WAS HAVING TROUBLE ACCOMPLISHING FOR SEVERAL WEEKS

HAVE AN IMPORTANT DUCK TO CELEBRATE

ranma-official

profeminist

5 Debunked Gender Myths In That Google Anti-Diversity Rant

argumate

regular reminder that the most woke way to mock a man is to imply that sexual virility is the key to male worth; oh yeah and all men are straight

ranma-official

Patriarchal attitudes are the most feminist thing possible

mitigatedchaos

Bad Trad Chad: You see, women are weak and helpless creatures at the mercy of strong, powerful men, who hold all agency and make all decisions.

Dumb Internet Feminists: Yes, I agree, it is definitionally impossible for women to have power.

Source: profeminist gendpol uncharitable

the-grey-tribe

Source: notyourexrotic gender politics

brazenautomaton

marcusseldon

(Note: Rehashing things I’ve said before, definitely a late-night rant)

I still find the fact that 46% of the country decided to vote for Donald fucking Trump of all people for President to be completely baffling at a gut level.

How could anyone possibly have been comfortable voting for such an obviously mean, selfish, low-IQ, inexperienced, incoherent, authoritarian, and unserious person? How could otherwise educated, moral, rational people, have voted for this man (as many otherwise well-educated, moral, and rational Republicans did)? I still feel like I live in a bad satire of America rather than the real world.

Even if I grant every critique of his opponent, Hillary Clinton, and I try to inhabit the mindset of a person with conservative policy views, and I concede all the frustration with the cultural left that many on the right feel, I still don’t see how there is even a contest between which one would be preferable to run our military, our diplomacy, and our nuclear weapons. Like shouldn’t basic respectability and competence trump all else when the other candidate completely fails on those metrics?

I feel a deep shame whenever I think about the fact that such a horrible man is the face of my nation. I didn’t feel that way about Bush, I would not have felt that way about McCain or Romney.

Something is rotten about the right in this country, something so rotten that they all thought that somehow Trump was a lesser of evils choice. There were signs of this rot earlier: the rise of Fox News, talk radio, and Breitbart, the crazier elements of the Tea Party (Sharon Angle, Christine O’Donnell, Todd Aiken), the radicalization of Republicans in Congress and state legislatures, but it wasn’t clear until Trump how deep the rot went.

The left is by no means perfect, not even close, and if this were another time with a more normal President I’d be more comfortable focusing more of my time on that. But there really is no equivalence between the left’s dysfunction’s and the right’s. Right now there really is something truly different, something scary, something very big and uniquely bad going on with the right at a systemic, sociological level that I don’t really understand no matter how much I obsess about it, at least at an emotional level.

Half the country was willing to accept authoritarian rhetoric. Half the country was willing to accept incoherence and stupidity and lying. Half the country was willing to accept meanness, endorsement of sexual assault, and racist rhetoric. Most Republican voters are not authoritarians, racists, sexists, liars, or mean, but they didn’t mind voting for it at all.

That’s terrifying.

mitigatedchaos

I want you to imagine that there was a group within your country that had been mass kidnapping kids for sex trafficking with more or less impunity, for years.

The police refused to do anything about it. The politicians not only claimed it wasn’t happening, but celebrated bringing more of that group. The media gaslit you and said it wasn’t happening.

In fact, when you raised objections, you were sent for ideological retraining.

Of course, I’m not talking about the United States.

But suppose someone in the United States did know about such a thing happening. And the same cycle of “but it isn’t real” was being used by the same ideological groups to claim that what happened in another developed country was impossible, that it would never happen, and certainly wasn’t happening there and could not possibly happen here.

Approximately how many layers of “FUCK YOU” would they want to send those ideological groups as a message? Why on Earth would they care about those groups’ criticisms when said groups are a bunch of lying hypocrites?

Quite frankly, if you’re actually baffled that they could put Trump in the Whitehouse, you don’t understand Trump voters as well as you think you do.

And those Very Serious People that Clinton was the representative of? Clinton wanted even more involvement in Syria than Trump has so far actually provided. She said as much right before he missile striked that airbase, and we all know that the MSM would have been chanting “YASS, QUEEN, SLAY! #STRONGWOMEN” the whole time.

I didn’t vote for Trump, but the Serious People have worn down the value of being perceived as serious. If we get through to 2020 with no new big wars, I’m going to chalk it up as a victory.

marcusseldon

1. I don’t claim to understand Trump voters, in fact my post is about how I don’t understand them.

2. The politically correct left does I think have real problems, as illustrated by Rotherham or the naivete of not being worried about Germany taking in so many Syrian refugees. But, with respect to America, they are basically correct. Immigrants to the US have lower crime rates than natives, largely assimilate by the third if not second generation, and you almost certainly won’t be killed in a terrorist attack.The fact that half the country would never believe this is attributable to the intellectual rot in right-wing news sources.

3. On foreign policy, I don’t love those “very serious people” either (or Hillary on foreign policy, way too hawkish), but they wouldn’t be completely destroying America’s leadership position and credibility, thus ceding it to authoritarian states, and they would possess much less of a long-tail risk of a true foreign policy catastrophe that Trump does. Also, I strongly doubt foreign policy had much to do with Trump’s success.

brazenautomaton

But, with respect to America, they are basically correct.

And you can’t even envision the mental state of someone who doesn’t believe this?

And you can’t even imagine a person who has noticed “Hey, they acted exactly the same way they did here, exactly the same way in every possible respect, as they did in Rotherham, and the things those people are telling me about how I’m a terrible bigot who is only driven by bigotry are exactly the same things they said about Rotherham, and all of the statistics they wave in my face are made and controlled by the same people as made the statistics that proved Rotherham wasn’t happening”?

You think it’s “intellectual rot” in right-wing news sources to not roll over and admit defeat and adopt your ideology. You keep admitting that there are horrific, soul-deep problems in Your Ideological Tribe and that they keep lying and they keep maliciously trying to hurt people, but you just act incredibly perplexed when someone actually notices those things, and then acts like a person who noticed it. When someone notices the politically correct left never stops lying to them and about them, they act like people who noticed that, and they stop believing the things the politically correct left demands they believe.

Your continued inability to understand conservatives is seriously because you aren’t trying.

mitigatedchaos

So, in addition to what BrazenAutomaton says, which gets at why the Conservatives don’t trust “well okay, they lied that time, but overall they’re right.” (And why I didn’t respond earlier, since what I would have said would not have been so different.)

There are policies you can use to bring a Rotherham-like situation under control.

They are not nice policies. They are not kind policies.

This kind of price must be paid in pain or blood.

It will have to be very firmly established to not only these men, but the communities in which they reside, that this behavior is utterly unacceptable and intolerable. No excuses just because they are foreign. Child sex trafficking isn’t littering.

There are solutions to other problems as well, that are forbidden from consideration, because we are simultaneously too soft and too tough in all the wrong ways at once.

Some of them should be very stupidly obvious, like banning first and second cousin marriage, but oh, we can’t even admit there is a problem.

Source: marcusseldon

marcusseldon

(Note: Rehashing things I’ve said before, definitely a late-night rant)

I still find the fact that 46% of the country decided to vote for Donald fucking Trump of all people for President to be completely baffling at a gut level.

I feel a deep shame whenever I think about the fact that such a horrible man is the face of my nation. I didn’t feel that way about Bush, I would not have felt that way about McCain or Romney.

That’s terrifying.

mitigatedchaos

I want you to imagine that there was a group within your country that had been mass kidnapping kids for sex trafficking with more or less impunity, for years.

The police refused to do anything about it. The politicians not only claimed it wasn’t happening, but celebrated bringing more of that group. The media gaslit you and said it wasn’t happening.

In fact, when you raised objections, you were sent for ideological retraining.

Of course, I’m not talking about the United States.

Quite frankly, if you’re actually baffled that they could put Trump in the Whitehouse, you don’t understand Trump voters as well as you think you do.

I didn’t vote for Trump, but the Serious People have worn down the value of being perceived as serious. If we get through to 2020 with no new big wars, I’m going to chalk it up as a victory.

politics trump