Nathaniel

I've read your post carefully, and your follow-up comments, and I believe I understand what you're trying to say. I also understand your frustration at people reacting as if you had written some conventional racist rant; there's certainly a distinction between "those people shouldn't have done this because their actions harm the fabric of the community we share" and "those people shouldn't have done this because they're a bunch of nasty little brown people who know only hate", and I generally agree with what you said about the importance of community and civic duty.

But I wanted to let you know that all that given, I still found your post repugnant. Partly for the reason that pnkrokhockeymom articulated better -- that sometimes upsetting people *is* a civic duty, depending on the principles at stake. I too deplore the ammunition that this has given some of the nastiest groups in our politics, and the possibility that they'll use it to help gain power and push through regressive policies. But as holzman notes, the prayer room at this center is needed to *make it possible for community members to practice their faith*. I believe the Founding Fathers would approve of upsetting people in order to achieve this goal.

The other reason this post makes me cringe is that parts of what you say give me the impression that you've taken on more toxic anti-Islam/racist ideas than you realize. It's the uncritical assumptions that this is a mosque, that the people building it are immigrants; it's the annoyance at someone giving a talk about Islam for not going into its fundamentalist and violent sects, and talking about the "forebearance" that we (collectively?) have given Muslims (which ones?); it's the impression I get that you're replying to comments that arguably misread your argument and are easy to 'shoot down', but not the ones that point out your factual errors and missing context. Of course, I don't know you; I could be wrong. But please consider the possibility that you don't know you as well as you thought, either; I know from experience that these kinds of ideas are insidious, can sneak in invisibly from the culture around us, and are horrifically harmful to those on the receiving end (often, in aggregate, more harmful than the rare acts of actual racist or other-ist violence).

You might also consider whether some of the people responding angrily did in fact understand the point you were trying to make, but are responding to these implications -- which are present in your text, whether you intended it or not -- rather just the explicit point you had in mind.

Lawrence v Texas, 539 US 558, 604-05 (2003) (Scalia, J, dissenting) ("If moral disapprobation of homosexual conduct is 'no legitimate state interest' for purposes of proscribing that conduct * * * what justification could there possibly be for denying the benefits of marriage to homosexual couples exercising 'the liberty protected by the Constitution'? Surely not the encouragement of procreation, since the sterile and the elderly are allowed to marry.") [emphasis added]

An excellent question, Justice Scalia. I remain confident in your ability to find some horribly cock-eyed way to answer it, but: an excellent question.

So probably some of you already know a depressing fact about free software: its developers are about 98.5% male. That's not hyperbole, it's a real statistic; female participation ratios are about 10-30 times worse than for even closely related fields like professional programming or academic computer science. It's a wonderful, wonderful community in many other ways; I owe it a huge debt, not just for, ya know, writing all the software that makes my computer go and being a force for liberty in the digital age, but for experience, knowledge, friends — a chunk of who I am. And yet...

Anyway, the issue of female participation came up a few times recently on a news site I frequent, and attracted the usual response (neither link recommended unless you need a cure for low blood pressure, though the second has more redeeming features). That response being, of course, a big pile of spin, denial, and derailment. Not exclusively, but. I'm sure you're surprised.

I mostly stayed out of RaceFail et seq., but privilege has really been on our minds around here recently, and, well. These are my people. I'm not sure wading in did much good (if you ignored my advice and followed that link, mine are the posts from "njs"), and I particularly doubt I convinced any of the main offenders. But — in part as a result of RaceFail, in fact — I think I was able to discuss the issues more clearly than in the past. I had better conceptual tools. And perhaps I was able to help a few bystanders learn to see and talk about these issues, and pick up some tools for themselves. I'm not an expert in these things, but my impression is that when women are so rare that they — and other's behavior towards them — are simply invisible, then that itself becomes one of the problem's roots. Expert or not, I can at least make sure that on my little corner of the internet, this $#@ won't go unchallenged. Here's to awareness.

But on a more uplifting note, it's also from the first discussion — esp. Kirrily Robert's keynote that set it off — that I became aware of the Organization for Transformative Works's Archive of Our Own. I knew about OTW, of course — they're a great group fighting for other sorts of creative liberty — but I didn't know about their software development project.

Now, as you know, Bob, their core demographic is fangirls, the sort who squee and write slash fiction and all that, and every Bob knows that that's about the least tech-heady audience you can think of.[1] So then how on earth did they start this project off, anyway? They said, hey all you women who've been told to be afraid of computers, BAM, you're programmers now, try this and report back (click this link it is fantastic, maybe this one too). And that's what happened. And now they have 60k LOC, 20+ coders, all women.

Okay, so that's a simplification and those contributors aren't all newbies pulled in by that post, but: High-octane AWESOME, yo, on so many levels. So screw you, Bob.

I've recently been enjoying some art games — computer "games" designed as interactive art pieces. It's a pretty experimental scene; everyone's trying to figure out how to make this stuff work at all. And one of those interesting experiments is called Pathways, by Terry Cavanagh.

I recommend it — it'll only take you 10 minutes to play through, and no clicky-clicky reflexes are required.

But playing it with all the above swirling around my head, I couldn't help noticing how very... gendered it is. Not explicitly, and I'm definitely not calling it out as sexist — it's a personal work, and that person is male. Well, but... since the answer to art is art, I just did my own experiment.

I drew some sprites and poked some assembler and inverted it. For me it makes something new. Try for yourself: Pathways Remixed (if you don't have Windows — I don't — then it works well under Wine).

[1] ETA: since it seems this wasn't totally clear to everyone, let me clarify that yes, this is intended as irony.

Unicode (6th edition, published 1889). For all your internationalized steampunk needs.

(Somehow found this while reading about the etymology of "okay", which, it turns out, contrary to all reputable references I've seen previously, we actually do know.)