Why I'm not laughing at C Plus Equality
blog.mollywhite.netThe comments section got absolutely slaughtered by Reddit and 4chan after this made its way on a popular subreddit.
That said, I personally thought her entry only ended up (unintentionally?) conforming to the very stereotypes the project served to satirize in the first place.
I agree with you that her entry unintentionally ends up skewering itself by running head-first into the joke. Really though, she skewered herself by ranting about a really bad joke.
The C+= joke sucks. It's poorly executed. It's far too self-conscious and has way too many "wink-wink" moments to be effective satire. You either need to be clever and subtle, or absurd and outrageous. Instead, most of the jokes fell flaccidly in the middle: too obvious about its subject matter, but not even remotely clever. Making it a programming language doesn't make it clever joke, it just means you tried really hard to tell a joke.
And she fell for it. Which ironically validates its existence, poor joke execution be damned.
"Your document is a collection of sexist, trans*phobic jokes and negative stereotypes, and I'm not laughing."
I think it's great the way Ms. White met their ugly speech with more speech of her own.
That's the remedy to ugly speech, more speech.
I disagree with Ms. White almost entirely, but I do approve of the way she has chosen to confront them.
In the past 36 hours, we've seen github censor this speech, and calls from feminists to have bitbucket censor this repo at bitbucket as well. On twitter there have been callouts where people who "star"ed the repo were listed and implicitly threatened and people tweeting in support of the parody were named and labeled.
That sort of behavior from github and from internet feminists trying to stifle speech and police speech is wrong.
The sad part is that this sort of behavior is exactly the reason that repo exists.
Great promotion to that repository (some of which I found quite clever). I'm not sure what the writer wanted to achieve by publishing this blog entry, especially as it's pretty thin on commentary.
That being said, maybe the best way to change the tone of the open source community - or any male-dominated community, for the matter - is to get involved with it?
Humour is subjective. What I find not funny, other people will find hilarious, and vice versa. I am not humanity's arbiter of what is or isn't funny, and neither is Molly White.
"A strange game. The only winning move is not to play."
I didn't see the point of dignifying it with a comment when submitted earlier, since it's obvious unfunny trolling, better ignored than acknowledged.
Feminism discussions in tech circles never go anywhere good anyways, because a huge number of people have a warped perception of feminism that they rally against and it just ends up being one big shitshow where no meaningful dialogue occurs.
Reminds me of the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair.