A recap of Prickly People Week

So much to write about - an so little time to do it in! :-)

Everything from Apple's rather unexpected performance on Wall St to the now usual GOP misogynistic and misanthropic antics. Alan Cox departed Linux development, a noteworthy event, and the first picture of a Martian night was taken. Davos happened, an increasingly important event that is attracting not just the Self-Aggrandizing Important People, but, by a few accounts, some Important People Who Think They're Distrusted by the riff-raff and other proletariat. (They're right, they're not.) Big banks were stunned to discover that their huge PR budgets have gone to waste - people don't like them, or trust them. What a surprise.

In other news, Hillary did a nice job on various Congressional Goppers. Hillary will be named CongressionalWeight Champion of the Decade on Thursday. Many of her challengers will now pontificate and bluster in a contralto from now on; the others will likely physically recover from their injuries.

The whole Julie Burchill thing came to a sputtering end; as I figured it would. With hurt feelings all around, it ended with Ms Burchill accomplishing her goal and being in full-throated gloating mode. In other words: situation normal, RadFems continue with their fuck-up bigotry and people pay attention to those who should be ignored. There was only one Transsexual Separatist, that I know of, squawking through the whole thing. She was rather disgusted to discover that Radical Feminists include her with those icky transgender crossdressers, transvestites and drag queens. I'm sure there were more, but as most of those people stay behind their password-protected, invite only forums and blogs - no one is any the wiser and only they care about their prickly bigotry.

The Linux world was shaken to see that Alan Cox, the #2 man in Linux, was calling it quits. I've got a suspicion that, despite his exhortations otherwise, that Linus Torvalds had a lot to do with the decision. The man has been in the news for blowing up at people; he must have read Steve Jobs' biography and decided being an arrogant prick was a good management strategy. Truth be told, I have no idea. I think the man can be insufferably arrogant.

In other news, a Mozilla developer, Heather Arthur, was deplorably insulted about some code she wrote. I mention this because I think it shows two things: the arrogance of some coders, and the way women are treated in IT circles. I was going to write about it in the week, but didn't. So I'm mentioning it now. The original tweet, from David Cramer, wasn't especially nice, but it wasn't especially nasty. It was, however, something he should have thought about. Would he walk up to Ms Arthur and say the same thing? Would he stand in front of a crowd, point to Ms Arthur and say the same thing? (If he would - he's a real piece of work.) There was one actual apology,  one that blamed Twitter and David Cramer's "I'm not going to apologize and I'm blaming Twitter" effort.

I totally agree that if you put something up on the internet, it's going to attract comment; some of it might be negative. But don't blame the sodding medium you use - they're your words. God knows, I've annoyed enough folk over the last few years. I'm a firm believer that you need a thick skin out on the internet; the insults I've received over the last few years are so many I've started classifying them (they mostly fall into the "wow, that's boring" and the "did you think of that all by yourself?" taxonomies). And yes, I distribute a few of my own - I can take it, so I can dish it! - but I never blame the damn medium! If I'm an idiot, it's not because of Twitter's 140 character limit - it's because I was being an idiot at that moment. (It's a loooong moment.) Blaming the medium is inane. Man up (as the saying goes) and simply admit to screwing up.

And yes, I think there was some misogyny involved in the whole thing. There was certainly a lot of arrogance. Quite frankly, Steve Klabnik's "Twitter makes it so hard not to accidentally be an asshole" is a feeble excuse; David Cramer's effort involved the same level of thought he applied to his original tweet (not much), and his rationalization is even weaker than Mr Klabnik's. He employs the "well, if you put things on the internet, you need a thick skin" argument to miserable effect. Jeez, I know it's enervated because I've used variations of it! I, at least, know it's shoddy; I will say that I, at least, don't use it to blame those who disagree with me for my own failings. The responsibility for my criticisms isn't with the idea of free expression or the electronic medium I employ to express the criticism - it's with me.

I think I'll stop there.

Carolyn Ann