Misogyny in Computing

I was reading my normal blog entries, and ran into Mairin Duffy's reaction to the crap postings people took the time to spew in the comment section of an LWN.net article about an O'Reilly series of articles on women in computing. The trolls seemed to have arrived in force for todays postings also.

The amount of hatred spewed by people in these two LWN articles just seems to underscore how little self esteem many of us in the computer industry have. The threat of another sex getting into the profession and showing that maybe we aren't as smart as we say we are.. seems to bring out lots of anger and hatred.

To painfully quote George Lucas/Yoda: Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering. ... which leads back to fear. It is a buddhist recursive circle. We are afraid of things we can't understand, we are afraid of social interaction (maybe because a lot of us are autistic or borderline autistic), we get angry and we hate those feelings so we lash out at others who represent that which we are afraid of..

Sadly, looking at most biological systems that get into this state... we are off to extinction unless we can learn to better tolerate the change that is going to happen as computing becomes more ubiquitous.

Off to sleep... my above post makes no sense, but I post it anyway :).