This whole thing leaves me feeling like I just watched a dog get kicked for bringing the wrong color tennis ball to its owner.<p>Chad seems to have made a fundamental category error: he thought he was dealing with a person who wanted to have a reasonable, productive discussion. In reality, he was dealing with a vicious bully who wanted to hurt him.<p>This Shanley person sounds like she has a lot of anger. Maybe it's justified. Maybe someone did something terrible to her, and this horrific persona is a logical defense mechanism. But I feel like it probably wasn't Chad's fault.
I'm only going to make one comment on this thread:<p>If you use this thread to make disparaging comments about Shanley, you're missing the point and you're doing it wrong. Go look at how respectfully I tried to treat Shanley when she gave me tons of crap, and then go do the same thing. Shanley's abuse does not make your abuse okay.<p>Let's all be kind to each other! :D
I feel really bad for Chad. I agree with @didgeoridoo that it feels like I just watched a dog get kicked.<p>He's on a quixotic quest toward a certain kind of world, with openness and transparency. Unfortunately when he tries to interface with the rest of the world it can often go horribly wrong. His general attempts at embracing those who disagree with him, eg by thanking them and retweeting, exacerbate and lend weight to unpleasant comments.<p>It's truly unfortunate that Chad didn't manage to support the diversity activist community in a way that was acceptable to them. I think fundamentally there missions are much more similar that they're acknowledging now, and each is loosing out on what could potentially be a great ally.<p>I hope in the future these sort of things can be more constructively handled on both sides that either has so far.
I guess I'm a little unclear on why anyone would bother engaging with shanley in the first place. Her twitter feed, while frequently entertaining, screams "professional bullshitter" pretty loudly. It's reasonable to assume that her primary motive is to drive traffic to her website. I suppose it's also possible that she's just a truly damaged person -- or maybe some combination of both.<p>Either way, it seems like there are better ways to expend your energies. In the end, outside her relatively small circle of fellow cottage-industrialist diversity activists, shanley is a pretty insignificant presence in the wider world of tech and likely to remain so for the foreseeable future.
Thanks for posting this. I feel the discussion around this topic has become particularly vitriolic; it's nice seeing individuals attempt to recenter the dialog on dialog.