Re: [boost] [IBD] Help request, A Woman's Point of View

From: Oliver Kullmann (O.Kullmann_at_[hidden])
Date: 2007-07-06 15:47:01

On Fri, Jul 06, 2007 at 02:39:14PM -0400, Jake Voytko wrote:
> OK, I think it's time we try to remain professional and back off a little.
> Matias clearly didn't mean any harm by what he said, and he had good intent.
> Joaquín raises valid points in his email, and I think these need to be
> addressed, and negative discussions aren't going to advance the topic any.
> 
> I ask that we stick with the objective view of the situation (as presented
> by Joaquín), rather than the subjective view (women feel patronized // women
> feel excluded // ...)
>

Interesting "objective view": The point of view that "something is
wrong" is a an artifact from which one cannot even say that it is
"subjective" since such believes have a very objective force.
Nevertheless, there is nothing "objective" with them.

May I remind at the extreme misrepresentation of Chinese and
Indian programmers? What about the native people of America??
What about the over-representation of the English language??
What about the over-representation of C++?
There are so many things missing in the boost community (basically
the whole world, except of a few exceptions).

A few e-mails early, "positive discrimination" was mentioned (forgot
the politically-correct jargon for that), in a way as if everybody
here would agree that this is a good thing. I would have my doubts,
since I actually hope that a place like Boost is centred around 
technical (and scientific in a wider sense) excellence, and that
for that it DOESN'T MATTER at all what special type of person
is contributing.

>From the political-correct point of view, how does it come to the assertion
at all that there are not many woman present? Perhaps most contributors
are woman who just have a name which traditionally is associated with
a male person? Or they are using other names?
How do we proceed to determine the sex? How about the androgyne cases?
Perhaps I feel like a woman, and are now being neglected by the assertion
that there are "no woman" here??

Every "positive discrimination" has the following first act:
Look at somebody, who was a person before, but ignore this,
only look at that object regarding the speciality you are
looking for, and then, by some (typically not specified procedure),
decide whether this speciality applies to the object under
consideration, and say "Yes, you are falling under the speciality,
and thus you belong to our club.", or "No, unfortunately you
are not falling under the speciality, and thus you are not
belonging to our club". An interesting phenomenon of society,
that this very blatant form of discrimination, ruled out
as far as I know in every constitution I'm aware of, did
come to be "accepted".

A last word: I hear somebody saying to this message "Hey, that's
politics, we should leave out politics at this list." --- in principle
I think this is not an unreasonable point of view, but I didn't
bring up the topic in the first place: I only want to avoid that these questions,
which are purely political questions, sneak in in some typical
way of subliminal reference to guilt. 

Oliver