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whine flu, railsmalefail 2009

You go away from the Internet for a couple of days, and all hell breaks loose. Everyone dies of swine flu, and then the Rails community goes into one of those fantastic explodey nosedives where all the geek social fallacies come out to play (probably including the one that claims that all geek social fallacies are on that list).

Maggie Koerth-Baker, BoingBoing’s current guest blogger, gives the best answers to the whine flu epidemic.

And, completely belying the normal trainwrecks that occur in comment threads about sexism in the tech world, here’s the best encapsulation on the Presentation of Doom and the whole You’re Just Offended Because We’re Flipping Sexy Rockstars response, taken from the Slideshare comments:

It’s not about whether it’s porn or not porn. Those commenting on people’s supposed hypersensitivity to nudity or bodies are completely missing the point.

It’s about presenting women as ‘the other,’ not ‘us.’ It would have been just as offensive if all the women shown were domineering mothers in aprons, shaking their fingers and threatening with rolling pins.

Can I just say that slowly, oh so nanometer-by-painful-nanometer slowly, we are perhaps getting better at dealing with both pandemics and parochialism?

2 Responses to “whine flu, railsmalefail 2009”

  1. Saltation Says:

    damn you, that’s the first ppt-screed for years that i’ve wanted, WANTED, to see the actual presentation of.

  2. Saltation Says:

    (ie, i just KNOW i’m missing out on most of the jokes, and all of the key points)

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

petit disclaimer:
My employer has enough opinions of its own, without having to have mine too.