The problem was the extremely public nature of the channel. It wasn't speaking softly to the usher that someone was being inappropriate and unprofessional, it was shouting into a megaphone that someone was being inappropriate and unprofessional.
It's the "megaphone" part that I think is out-of-scale. If we're going to be a civilized community, then gentle, discreet correction should be the societal norm.
I don't think she had any obligation to raise the issue quietly. Making things public works. Unless people start calling out this kind of behaviour in a public manner, there will be no pressure for anyone to change anything. I think this is just a variant of a tone argument basically.
That's where I (respectfully) disagree. There are many ways to apply pressure for social change that don't involve identifying and shaming individual bad actors.
Even discussing the event in public is fine, (although I'm not convinced that the level of discourse on Twitter is appropriate for something as nuanced as Microaggression), but including the picture feels like an out-of-scale response to what the guys did.
That's the thing though - People always think that calling out microaggressions is overreaction, because they look at an individual incident, and not the whole. At the same time it needs to be clearly communicated that this kind of behaviour is absolutely unacceptable.
> People always think that calling out microaggressions is overreaction, because they look at an individual incident, and not the whole
How is publishing photographs of the individual offenders in a specific indicdent and a description of that specific incident not both looking at, and encouraging others to look at, an individual incident, instead of some broader problem that incident might be part of?
That's not the point. The point is we shouldn't brush off these individual incidents as insignificant because they are part of a whole. The problem is not going to get solved if you don't show that you do not tolerate this sort of behaviour, on an individual scale.
It's clearly not your point. But I think its an important point.
> The point is we shouldn't brush off these individual incidents as insignificant because they are part of a whole.
If the significance is because they are part of a whole, then they need to be addressed in that context.
> The problem is not going to get solved if you don't show that you do not tolerate this sort of behaviour, on an individual scale.
You can not-tolerate it by making a private report to conference staff; you can not tolerate it by making a public discussion of the general problem with the specific incident as one of the illustrations; you can not tolerate it in many ways. The argument that something shouldn't be tolerated, even when accepted, doesn't automatically justify every possible response.
>If the significance is because they are part of a whole, then they need to be addressed in that context.
How are you ever going to get any accountability if you don't address them individually. People need to be taught what a microaggression is and why it's important, and then punished if they continue to make them. Repeated sexual jokes are already considered a form of sexual harassment.
>The argument that something shouldn't be tolerated, even when accepted, doesn't automatically justify every possible response.
This is true, and we seem to disagree what a justified response is in this scenario. I don't think it was that big of a deal actually. The internet made it into a big deal, but that's not adrias fault. I guess we will just have to agree to disagree on this one, because I don't know where to go from this.
I wouldn't have thought that tweeting someone's picture was a sound method of conflict resolution BEFORE the brouhaha, no hindsight required...
although conflict resolution probably wasn't what was really being attempted. I'm not sure what was being attempted, but I'd venture to guess that "let the internet settle this" didn't have the intended result.
> Why? She reported the microaggression to the relevant organizers through a public channel.
As I understand it, the particular use of a public channel (particularly, the use of a photograph in it) was itself a direct violation of the Code of Conduct of the conference, and an unnecessary escalation. The only arguably excuse for such public shaming, independently of whether or not it was a violation of the Code of Conduct, would be if the act were more something significantly more serious on its own than she described (though a public complaint about the organizers would be in line if the act, as described, was privately reported and the organizers failed to deal with it in such a way that that failure was itself a hostile.)
The part of the code of conduct you are referring to was added AFTER this whole thing happened. So you don't think it was a serious thing. I disagree. It's brushing off these things as "not serious" that is part of the problem.
> The part of the code of conduct you are referring to was added AFTER this whole thing happened.
That's not what several of the accounts I've seen has said, but as I noted in my post I don't consider that particularly important in the final analysis one way or the other.
> So you don't think it was a serious thing.
I didn't say that; quite the opposite, I said that there was a legitimate grounds to expect that conference organizers would treat an appropriate, private report seriously and that it would be legitimately to publicly complain if they failed to do so.
Theft of even a small value is serious. Murder is serious. Most people who agree with both these propositions would still readily agree that the appropriate response to the former and that to the latter are not the same.
