Dum Pendebat Filius

I hate to say it, but Sara Robinson, who writes with Dave at Orcinus, has gotten one wrong.

Just like Michelle Malkin did, Sara has inserted politics into the Kathy Sierra death-threat issue, where they really do not belong:

Sierra’s blog was a downhome tech blog, not a political free-for-all. Her readership was largely male, and she’d served them well for over four years. The vast majority of men would never allow themselves to be seen treating a woman (or anyone, for that matter) this way in public; but these guys figured they could brutalize her, in broad daylight in front of hundreds of other people, with impunity. Why?

Most likely, it was because the men who put up the most heinous comments were right-wing authoritarian followers (RWAs), whose high-social-dominance (high-SDO) leaders given them permission to unleash their violent impulses, and encouraged them to direct it toward high-profile female targets. They did it because someone they regarded as an authority figure told them that the community rules don’t apply any more. America is a war zone. The President has told them so. Their leaders have given them the formal go-ahead to behave accordingly. And that has very specific implications for how they’re allowed to treat women they see as standing outside their own in-group.

Honestly, readers — do you buy that? Do you think the slimy jerkoffs who attacked Kathy Sierra, the kind of guys who take programming-language Internet blog flame wars so seriously that they’re willing to issue death threats over them, are all a bunch of “right-wing authoritarian followers”? I think it’s much, much more likely that Sierra’s online attackers are simply a bunch of woman-hating geeks, who use the quasi-anonymity of the Internet to spout the sick garbage they’d never express out loud in real life. Politics has nothing to do with it. These people couldn’t care less about politics, but they’re willing to issue death threats if you disagree with them on some computer-related subject. They can’t tolerate the idea of a woman daring to disagree with them on the subject that is dearest to their hearts, so they try to “put her in her place” with sick trash talk.

There are indeed a lot of right-wing authoritarian followers on the Internet; they are, in fact, over-represented online (so are atheists, I think, but that’s a topic for another day). But I do not believe that the fools involved in the Kathy Sierra affair have anything to do with right-wing politics.

Michelle Malkin tried to suggest that this was a political matter, too. She seemed to be saying that everyone in the tech-blogging world would have leapt to her (Malkin’s) defense if Malkin’s politics were left-wing rather than right-wing:

Or is it just harmless fun when tech elite in-crowd bloggers smear and target other bloggers and innocent bystanders whose politics you oppose?

No, there’s a political blogosphere and a techie blogosphere. There are plenty of assholes, and more than a few out-and-out sickos, in both of these groups. But there is very little overlap between the two groups. The reason tech bloggers don’t come to Malkin’s defense is not because they hate her politics, it’s because they simply don’t care that much about her, nor do they care about Michael Moore, Michael Savage, or Hannity and Colmes. What gets their blood boiling is bubble-sort algorithms, context-free grammars, lex and yacc, that sort of thing.

I simply do not believe that there was more to the Sierra threats than good old-fashioned misogyny combined with programming-language zealotry.