Women and TLUG - a personal rant

[Matt Seburn]

On Thu, Jan 16, 2014 at 1:58 PM, Randy Jonasz <rjonasz-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> wrote:

> If someone incited hatred to a group or an individual by her actions then
> we must act to prevent that from occurring because the behaviour is
> injuring someone else's ability to pursue her life's goals.  In my opinion
> William's comment does not come close to that.
>

I disagree.  His comment basically amounts to "women are whores".  If
that's not an example of inciting hatred, I'm not sure what is.

I worked on an assembly line in  a factory in Ontario while in university.
>  The sensibilities there were completely different.  Women and men engaged
> in sexual innuendo usually deriving from stereotypes zestfully.  There was
> no consideration of it being harassment. Everyone smiled or rolled their
> eyes and played along.
>

You're delusional.  You're describing a textbook example of workplace
sexual harassment.  Just because *you* didn't experience it as such doesn't
mean the same was true of others.  I suspect some of those who "rolled
their eyes and played along" felt like they had no choice if they wanted to
keep their jobs.  This kind of thing is against the law for a reason.

The consequences of free speech  does involve tolerating distasteful speech
> in the sense of allowing the perpetrator freedom to offend. The
> consequences of giving offence can be manifold, not to mention being
> ostracized from the group.  But to silence him or her in the name of social
> justice is wrong in my opinion as it limits all our speech and gives
> precedence for further reductions in the space we have for self expression.
>  The nanny state of modern liberalism must be curtailed.
>

As others have pointed out, "free speech", "censorship" and "the nanny
state" are all irrelevant here.  William is not in danger of being arrested
so his right to free speech is not being challenged.  Being a member of the
TLUG mailing list is not a right.

It's telling that you think that his ability to denigrate an entire class
of people is more important than the ability of that class of people to use
this space.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://gtalug.org/pipermail/legacy/attachments/20140116/7b2a27c5/attachment.html>