Oof. Anyone else worried about the amount of GNU infrastructure (GCC, GLibc, etc) that has fallen into IBM's hands -and what will happen with it in the future?
I do not think that OP doubts the existence of harassment, I think he doubts the causes of it. The cause written, "this person received horrific threats because she's good at her job and out teaching others how to use an up-and-coming programming technology" does seem pretty unlikely.
On one hand, this comes off kinda' bad, as if we're looking for the real reason this person is being harassed, looking if they deserved it or not. No matter what prompted this harassment, this is wrong, terrible and should not happen to _anybody_ no matter the sex, position or actions of that person.
But, I still have my curiosity as to what reason these harassers might have. They might be simply sexist but that seems a little exaggerated, considering there are other women that have exposure and don't seem to suffer the same level of harassment. I enjoy greatly reading Julia Evans's posts for example, and I haven't seen signs of harassment over there - maybe I haven't been paying attention.
There might be something specific that this person did that made the harassers angry - I repeat, this is not to incriminate miss Jessie Frazelle, and she might not have done anything wrong, but something made the attackers angry, maybe something complety ridiculous. What would that thing be? If there is a thing this person did, this harassment might have originated even if she were a man. Maybe it's not such a sex thing after all? It seems there are plenty of public people that get death threats and are harassed, and these things are generally tailored to the sex of a person - women get killed an raped, men get killed and told to suck a dick.
I don't know, I'm just confused - it's true there aren't many women in tech, and I'm as welcoming as possible but there are certain issues that I don't understand and don't know how to approach, but trying to solve them requires actually understanding them beyond a short article and evasive tweets.
Regulations have been trying to limit the speed of the cars for decades, with only partial success.