Linus and Roosh: Birds of a Feather

[elfs]

Because if you want me to “act professional”, I can tell you that I’m not interested. I’m sitting in my home office wearign a bathrobe. The same way I’m not going to start wearing ties, I’m also not going to buy into the fake politeness, the lying, the office politics and backstabbing, the passive aggressiveness, and the buzzwords. Because THAT is what “acting professionally” results in: people resort to all kinds of really nasty things because they are forced to act out their normal urges in unnatural ways.

If that sounds exactly like some MRA complaining about how the standards for treating women 'interfere' with his 'natural urges,' you'd only be half-right. No, that's Linus Torvalds making excuses for his willingness to spew vitriol and anger from the safety of his basement and bathrobe.

But it's the same mindset. "I have natural urges, and I act them out, and if you don't like it then this isn't the space for you" poisons the space around us, and makes every single one of us feel more comfortable in our locked, armored basements than anywhere else in the world. It's the poison of the open source community; it's the poison of the atheist community; it's the poison of the BDSM community; it's the poison of every church and mosque and synagogue and retreat in America.

Comments

[frith]

It takes just a few people to poison a community. In a tiny community I made on Dreamwidth, I wrote on the 'profile' page: "I expect all to be excellent to each other". I don't expect people to have the same opinion, but I do expect people to be courteous in a 'live and let live' manner should there be a debate over opinions. In 2011 I joined a My Little Pony fan community that had a moderator that was not interested in diversity. They were interested in maintaining the 'Old Boy's Club' atmosphere, and to maintain civility, banned all discussion of anything contentious. Top item on that list: "bronies" (the new fans). Between the rise of Tumblr and erasing all talk of fanfiction, art, music, games, animation, podcasts, fan meetups, fan conventions... that community has gone from poisonous to pretty much dead.

People are diverse and many have thoughts you'd rather not hear, but for us all to get along, it has to be clear that everyone must remain civil.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

The thing that drives me crazy about people like Linus is that he's talking from a position of power. He has a lot of power where he is, and he doesn't use that power to promote an atmosphere that attracts the best and the brightest; it merely attracts the "good enough and tough enough," which is a terrible way to make quality software.

[frith]

This person appears to be assuming a high degree of homogeneity in the skill sets of co-workers, and thus the solutions should be so apparent to all that abusive language is the most efficient way to get everyone that strays back on track. In other words, grunt work.

I find that people are quite a bit more granular. I spend a good deal of effort looking for ways to deal with each of my co-workers in a way that gets the best motivation and productivity out of them, dampens their anxieties and prejudices, and thereby steer animal care to a compromise that I find to be closer to optimum. Being abusive does not achieve that goal. But if someone is a manager and can ignore feedback, I can see being abusive takes a lot less effort.

You are aware that challenging projects attract charming bastards as managers? We've had a few of those.

[autopope.livejournal.com]

#include <privilege.h>;

[autopope.livejournal.com]

I don't expect people to have the same opinion, but I do expect people to be courteous in a 'live and let live' manner should there be a debate over opinions.

Yeah, this.

That's mostly the core of the moderation policy on my blog (which averages a couple of hundred comments per article), and enforcing it has led to word-of-mouth along the lines of "do read the comments there, they're not like the rest of the web". So yes. People have differing opinions; that's unavoidable, but we don't have to tolerate personal attacks and bullying.