Do I Offend?
I was a full time mom for a lot of years. I absolutely would not have tolerated one of my kids triumphantly humming louder to intentionally aggravate the other one. The fact that he thinks there is something wrong with the other child protesting this makes me think the answer to his question -- <i>Do I Offend?</i> -- is probably &quot;yes.&quot; He probably is pretty offensive at times. He doesn&#x27;t really get basic human respect.<p>Having said that, I have come to the conclusion that we all offend, we all exclude, we all decide what kind of people we want to associate with and what kind we want nothing to do with. Then we argue about who is right and where those boundaries &quot;should&quot; be drawn.<p>Some people draw those boundaries along racial lines or religious lines or other fairly arbitrary categories for deciding who is the &quot;right&quot; kind of person and who is the &quot;wrong&quot; kind of person. Boundaries drawn that way tend to have a lot of downside to them.<p>But it&#x27;s simpler and easier than trying to figure out who is actually respectful, honorable, kind and decent. That&#x27;s a much harder question to answer in a meaningful way and we often need to decide if we trust someone to some degree under circumstances where, no, we can&#x27;t reasonably determine the answers to such questions. So it&#x27;s really common for people to come up with some shorthand method for sorting the presumed good apples from the presumed bad apples so we can try to get through the damn day without wondering if the guy bagging our groceries is really a serial killer.<p>I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s actually good policy to use such rubrics. I think the world needs to sort out some better methodology for coping with social realities in a world of 7 billion people when our brains evolved to cope with little tribes and villages of about 150 people.<p>But I have come to believe that we all, to some degree or another, tend to promote rules with our own self interest in mind. So I no longer feel like, <i>clearly, X is morally superior to Y!</i><p>Just because I&#x27;m a big believer in X and I spent years thinking about it doesn&#x27;t mean it really is morally superior in some big picture sense. Those folks who believe in Y may have spent just as much time thinking about it and may feel just as strongly as I do and we may both be wrong. We may both simply be promoting something that happens to work for us as individuals while dressing it up in moral language because that works better for getting buy-in than admitting &quot;It works for me, so I want it that way to enhance my life.&quot;<p>I&#x27;m a woman. Hacker News was perhaps as much as 98 percent male when I joined under a different handle more than nine years ago. I feel like it has become more welcoming of women over the years. I feel like I have played some role in that change.<p>I think the guys here tolerate me as well as they do because I don&#x27;t take some sort of strident moral (&quot;Feminazi&quot;) position that I have some kind of <i>right</i> to be here. I am mindful of the fact that there is something of value here and that thing was mostly built by men. I&#x27;m aware that change is a potential threat to the value that exists and accommodating my presence -- what with me being some loud-mouthed brassy broad who never managed to learn my &quot;place&quot; in the world and who, for whatever reason, grew up with the idea that my voice was as acceptable as any guy&#x27;s voice, never mind that this is apparently not what most people on the planet seem to learn -- de facto involves change. I&#x27;ve worked at trying hard to figure out how to make that work in a way that doesn&#x27;t kill the goose that lays the golden eggs, so to speak.<p>When I first joined HN, I was more inclined than I am these days to feel self-righteous about trying to stand up for myself. I still am willing to take a stand, but I am much less inclined to feel self-righteous about it.<p>I&#x27;m just a human trying to make my life work. I&#x27;m angry, as most anyone would be, about the ways in which I feel that arbitrary categories, such as my gender, have undermined and seem to continue to undermine those efforts.<p>I am a big believer in win-win solutions.<p>If other people help me make my life work, then that&#x27;s one less person who needs food stamps and other forms of welfare. We pay for those people who don&#x27;t succeed. Whether they are in prison or standing in line at a soup kitchen, someone else is paying for them because they can&#x27;t manage to support themselves.<p>But I&#x27;m also aware that not all solutions are win-win solutions. Plenty of them are just redefining the split without growing the proverbial pie. So it is generally reasonable to be somewhat leery of people advocating for changes that would lead to them having more pie, because it is possible that they are just trying to change the rules to get a bigger slice for themselves at the expense of other people.<p>The things that have happened to me really stick in my craw precisely because I&#x27;m not looking for a handout. I&#x27;ve consistently tried to figure out how to develop an earned income of my own. Perhaps people have trouble seeing the distinction there. Perhaps all they hear is that I want a better life and they assume I&#x27;m asking for a larger slice of the pie rather than asking for the means to bake more pie for myself.<p>I&#x27;m not very good at writing in some kind of &quot;professional&quot; detached third-person fashion. I&#x27;ve gotten a lot of feedback over the years that I&#x27;m doing it wrong to speak from firsthand experience and to speak from a first person point of view based on my life experience. For a long time, I worked at improving on that. At this point, I&#x27;m sort of inclined to feel like such accusations are really just intended to silence me, not to tell me &quot;There are better methods for communicating than what you are doing and please get a clue, you silly person, you.&quot;<p>So the above is <i>testimony</i> as to the problem space as I best understand it, not me whining about my life and asking for advice. If you give me advice about how I&#x27;m just doing it wrong or you want to tell me that talking about my life is inherently bad and wrong and unwelcome when it seems fine for other people to talk about their lives, I&#x27;m planning to just ignore such replies.<p>Happy to engage people about anything of actual substance concerning, say, how the world draws various boundaries, etc.