On the sickness of our community

Seriously? WTF is your suggestion for "better mental self-defence techniques" that will fix the problems of being suddenly (a) unemployable, and (b) receiving a constant stream of credible threats of violence against your family? Will "better mental self-defence" make the police take these kinds of things seriously? (They don't.) Will "better mental self-defence" magically make employers stop believing slanderous rumours about what a "slut" someone is? As Kathy Sierra documents, her main troll was widely celebrated by tech luminaries after admitting what he'd done.

Women get attacked harder then men (because it's easy to find men willing to dogpile on women online), and they're softer targets because the *people around them don't back them up*.

(And anyway, I get why being a stone-cold hardass is a reasonable requirement if you want to be, like, a marine or something, but why is it a reasonable requirement for writing init systems or writing chatty blog posts about learning Java?)

(Oh right, and on your other point: the reason you get accused of "victim blaming" is because you make arguments like this that are based entirely on your vague impressions of how things work and ignoring a bunch of well-documented facts you can't be bothered to read about, and then somehow come to the erroneous conclusion that the *major* problem is something that the victim should have differently, like improve their "mental self-defence". I.e., you're blaming victims for not controlling things that are outside their control. It's a pretty simple and descriptive term really; it only sounds like some Machiavellian ploy because you can't be arsed to learn how uninformed you are. The result isn't "censorship" any more than it's censorship to suggest that people might want to slow down before suggesting on LKML that the kernel would be much more awesome if they rewrote it in JavaScript, or that if you go ahead anyway then you might be disappointed by the response.)