I'm pretty sympathetic to the cause of feminism especially in technology and I cringe hard at a lot of the casual sexism that gets thrown around, but this is truly baffling. Assuming this is all they actually have on him this is nothing more than very clever word play with zero gender inferences to be made.
It's not even "word play." The word "promiscuous" was used for hundreds of years to mean "indiscriminately mixed" before it had any sexual connotation.[0] And yes, JSLint is opinionated. That's its whole raison d'etre.
It's a tempest in a teapot, not at all comparable to the LambdaConf thing, which I almost wish I hadn't learned about.
I find it even more confusing on the basis that regardless of gender, calling the second case slut-shaming is bizarre in a context where Crockford is painting the "old web promiscuity" in a positive light for the most part, but pointing out that it has one specific problem in the case where what you want is commitment.
To me it reads as part nostalgia for the old "promiscuity" and lack of need for complex network security. It paints it as a period of innocence. I did not see any "shaming" of anything.
Unless he followed up with something more offensive, it would seem the person complaining didn't even understand what he was saying.
Perhaps you need to be of a certain age (if anyone told me I'd soon be using that phrase about myself...) to be likely to "get" that this was not a description of "bad old days" but of good old days.
There are perfectly legitimate reasons to put a network interface controller into promiscuous mode [1], and it's nothing to be ashamed of, and perfectly acceptable to discuss at conferences.
Back in the "bad old days" of the simplex NCP protocol [2], before the duplex TCP/IP protocol legalized same-sex network connections, connect and listen sockets had gender defined by their parity, and all connections were required to use sockets with different parity gender (one even and the other odd -- I can't remember which was which, or if it even mattered -- they just had to be different).
The act of trying to connect an even socket to another even socket, or an odd socket to another odd socket, was considered a "peculiar error" called "homosocketuality", which was strictly forbidden by internet protocols, and mandatory "heterosocketuality" was called the "Anita Bryant feature".
Anita Bryant [3] slut shamed not only all gays but even Jim Morrison. It's not like Douglas Crockford held a "Rally for Decency" at the Orange Bowl to slut shame a popular poet and performance artist [4]. Just throw a pie in his face [5] and move on.
When the error code is zero, the next 8 bit byte is the Stanford peculiar error code, followed by 72 bits of the ailing command returned. Here are the Stanford error codes. [...]
IGN 3 Illegal Gender (Anita Bryant feature--sockets must be heterosocketual, ie. odd to even and even to odd) [...]
Illegal gender in RFC, host hhh/iii, link 0
The host is trying to engage us in homosocketuality. Since this is against the laws of God and ARPA, we naturally refuse to consent to it.
; Try to initiate connection
loginj:
init log,17
sixbit /IMP/
0
jrst noinit
setzm conecb
setom conecb+lsloc
move ac3,hostno
movem ac3,conecb+hloc
setom conecb+wfloc
movei ac3,40
movem ac3,conecb+bsloc
move ac3,consck
trnn ac3,1
jrst gayskt ; only heterosocketuals can win!
movem ac3,conecb+fsloc
mtape log,[
=15
byte (6) 2,24,0,7,7
] ; Time out CLS, RFNM, RFC, and INPut
[...]
gayskt: outstr [asciz/Homosocketuality is prohibited (the Anita Bryant feature)
/]
ife rsexec,<jrst rstart;>exit 1,
(The PDP-10 code above adds the connect and listen socket numbers together, which results in bit 0 being 0 if they are the same gender, then TRNN is "test bits right, no change, skip if non zero", which skips the next instruction (jrst gayskt) if they different sex.)
Completely off the topic, but interesting to know nonetheless.
It always makes it worth the time spent going through comments on HN to find such buried gems.
I don't see where the socket numbers are added. You test ac3 which is loaded from consck, but where does that come from? Or did you mean the code you linked to with "The PDP-10 code above"?
Good catch -- the link to the code was wrong (it was linking to an old version). I updated it to point to the new NCP version.
That's weird that it does several different types of moves in a row into the same register -- there must be some kind of implicit calculation going on, or maybe it's just a bug.
I'd use "git blame" to bug-shame whoever wrote that heterosexist code, but I don't think they were using safe source code control practices back then.
I guess you'll never be allowed to speak at this conference after a comment like this...
> There are perfectly legitimate reasons to put a network interface controller into promiscuous mode
Absolutely - for a long time it was the only way of adding multiple IP address aliases on a single network card in Linux for example (might hav been the same on other OS's - I don't know).
I once had someone imply we were trying to hack because our web servers had the network cards in promiscuous mode for that reason (of course this was a genuine concern - they could not verify the difference between someone innocently adding IP aliases and someone listening in on the mostly unencrypted traffic intended for the other servers connected to the same hub (I don't miss hubs...)
> I'm pretty sympathetic to the cause of feminism especially in technology and I cringe hard at a lot of the casual sexism that gets thrown around, but this is truly baffling.
It's not that baffling. Being a victim of harassment raises your status in certain circles. People in those circles tend to accept your word without requiring any other evidence, and so naturally some people will find harassment in anything that happens to or near them that can be stretched or interpreted, no matter how far fetched, in some way to be harassment.
This is bad because it makes it harder for actual victims. Too many people making exaggerated or false claims will make people less likely to believe the real victims.
This is probably more general. In general, if some event raises status in a group a person is in, and claims of that event are hard to verify, some people will claim the event even if it did not happen to them. They may not even be knowingly lying. They may be convinced it did happen.
A couple examples are having Native American ancestry and being abducted by a UFO. Many people claim one or both of these, and there are groups in which those claims will raise your status. Result: a lot more people claim Native American ancestry than actually have Native American ancestors, and the number of people who claim to have been abducted by UFOs is way higher than the number who have actually been abducted. My guess would be most of these false claims are from people who believe they are telling the truth.
The desire for status in the groups you are in is very strong. For instance, I recall reading a book about the major criminal gangs on Los Angeles, and they talked about status within the gangs. One of the things that earned you higher status was being arrested, refusing to talk or cooperate, refusing to take a plea bargain, and getting sent to jail. Gaining status was so important to new, young teen gang members that they would purposefully commit crimes that would get them a few months incarceration so that they could gain the status. Note that unlike UFO abduction or Native Ancestry, serving jail time is verifiable, so they young gang members cannot simply claim they served time to gain the status. They actually have to do it, and they do because gaining status is that important.
Any evolutionary biologists here? I'm curious if our need for status is just a cultural thing, or if it predates culture? I believe that most of our current close primate relatives live in groups where status relationships are very important, so it seems at least plausible that this is something that developed very long ago, in the common ancestors we share with those other primates.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Until I see the extraordinary evidence I'm going to assume the number of UFO abductees is the same as the number of leprechaun abductees.
Dude, dude, dude, you've almost identified the real issue here (interpreting everything as harassment for the sake of an agenda), and then gone off onto wild elaborate tangents about social status and evolutionary biology.
"Don't bother to examine a folly, ask yourself only what it accomplishes". These people have a laser-focused sensitivity on actions which make certain groups feel unwelcome. They can't be unaware of the messages they themselves are sending. Who are they trying to make feel unwelcome?
They think it's unfair that Math and Science are only "open" to those with enough intellectual capacity to understand them. To them, it's not fair that a person not capable of understanding math or engineering can't get a job designing the next generation CPU chip, or the next compression algorithm. So they just throw a monkey wrench in the whole thing.
"I have a theory, feel free to prove me wrong by "kicking out" "toxic actors", I dare you".
The sad part is, I think she does have a point. People who treat each other decently might soon enough LEARN to be great coders, while being good at something is really no excuse to be a dick. Not that I think Crockford is one, but generally speaking; the better you are, the more polite you ought to be towards "little ones", or you're an asshole. But the whole logic of let's prove it by assuming it's true, with ZERO thought given to what to do if it turns out wrong, is just one gaping wound of a brainfart, I'm just astonished. I'm not not just saying that to be snarky: it does remind me of things Hannah Arendt wrote about totalitarian propaganda, e.g. someone is declared as unfit to live and then killed, proving the theory correct, with some pseudo-scientific, pseudo-compassionate babble on the side. Oh, but they're "just" declaring people as non-existing for them and any decent person, so that's different, right? Well, not different enough to be acceptable. One way in which it is the SAME is that the words are just a bunch of hot air and sophistry, the standards are all double - it's all about the action, the movement, the in-group. You don't have to build concentration camps for there to be something deeply wrong with that.
> They can't be unaware of the messages they themselves are sending.
It was (and in many ways still is) an extremely sexist community, but over the last few years it has gotten better. My worry is that continuing to agitate when there's been obvious improvement is only setting things up for a backlash, which would be counterproductive -- however, I'm not sure many of the "activists" care (they're activists first, after all, so it's in their nature to keep pushing the envelope even when it's no longer profitable to the cause they're championing)
I see this assertion made often but never with any justification. Please provide evidence that we are a "extremely sexist community". I posit that the opposite is true, and provide the same level of evidence.
Ruby? Not as far as I know. Matz rejected the Contributor Covenant, and instated the PostgreSQL CoC. Maybe you meant Ruby On Rails? They have adopted the Contributor Covenant.
Well, it is. They're the ones that push them through. It's classic bureaucratic maneuvering: it gives you a political hammer from which you can then further cement a position of authority by leveraging the threat of official censure.
See also the expansion of Title IX and the resulting chill on campus speech.
> It's almost entirely contained in the javascript community.
No it's not. Did you forget about the lambda conf already? it's everywhere in the Tech community, which is less and less about tech, and more and more about pushing some unrelated political drivel.
I think the significant change is that the tech community is growing to include other subcultures. And some of those subcultures bring new/different focuses on what's important to them.
Also, I think there's some amount of momentum behind the legitimate disclosure of unacceptable behavior. The fact that many women and minorities lately feel unashamed in admitting that they were oppressed/assaulted/etc is a net win. The perpetrators of that oppression and violence should get justice. But it probably brings with it some risk of attention-seekers and easily-offended folks too.
> The perpetrators of that oppression and violence should get justice
I don't see any justice in that story. Justice means the accused should have the right to defend himself and be confronted to his accuser. He often doesn't as "political tribunals" have already decided he already is guilty. Don't conflate "justice" with witch hunts.
Maybe you misunderstood what I meant. "The perpetrators of that oppression ..." referred to "... legitimate disclosure of unacceptable behavior...". So, concrete examples could help clear this up: disclosures of sexual assault [1] and occasions when law enforcement have killed unarmed minorities [2].
I referred to the fact that many women no longer feel embarassment or shame that would prevent an attacker from getting justice, or minorities with a policeman's justice -- I said that was a "net win." In earlier decades these legitimate evils might have gone un-punished, and that's bad.
But unfortunately with that good comes the potential bad that some folks are emboldened to cry wolf.
Because it conflicts with my sense of English aesthetics. Sorry for not supplying anything more interesting than that but it is what it is.
Edit: I thought a little further about it, and I can expand a bit. It's in the unhappy valley between too clever and not clever enough. Sort of like referring to Comcast as comcrap.
How about instead of crybullies we call them Corinthians.
> And he said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness. Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me. Therefore I take pleasure in infirmities, in reproaches, in necessities, in persecutions, in distresses for Christ's sake: for when I am weak, then am I strong.
I think that was an affirmation of God's saving grace. It describes the ease of putting one's faith in God when suffering under great stress or pain or loss.
The 'grace' comes from the fact that God won't judge us for our sins because Jesus took our place in the courtroom. So rather than our being damned, Jesus saved us through His perfect sacrifice.
Crybullies are the persecutors, no? They're the ones to pray to God for deliverance FROM!
Well it's obviously not the originally intended message, but the idea is that "crybullies" get their strength from weakness, in the sense that it gives them a feeling of moral superiority due to victimhood. They then use this as a platform to attack opponents. "Punching down" is the worst sin in the modern liberal conception of morality, so if your peer group consists of those people (and that means, nearly everyone in the middle and upper classes of modern western society) then you can very effectively have someone shunned by the group if you paint them as an oppressor. It doesn't appear to matter how tenuous those claims are, if the purported victims are sufficiently weak.
It is actually a fairly recent, systematic campaign across all industries. These actions are taking place across medicine, the scientific community and many others.
Universities are also debating this through safe spaces.
However, these events lead me to question if silencing the "bullies" is the only strategy in activist playbook? How is it different from a minority voice not being heard? If there is no common platform to interact with those "bullies", how else would you prove their belief's fallacious.
I'm often a jerk, and occasionally an asshole. If I do something bad and someone justifiably berates me over it or criticizes me over it, I pretty much have to acknowledge that it was something I did that has upset them. That's because I'm a white male, so I can't rationalize it away as them just being racist or sexist.
Some women and minorities (some, nowhere near a majority, but it only takes a few to stir up a lot of trouble) are also jerks and assholes, and when that draws criticism or anger or insults they can rationalize it away as them being attacked for their race or sex.
It's a lot easier on the ego and self-esteem to think that someone dislikes you because of something you have no control over such as your race or sex rather than because you have a terrible personality.
I'm a woman with an EE degree. I hate non-tech "women" who go to conferences that have no real interest in (like Pycon, Ms. Richards) just to push some wacky agenda.
These "women" aren't making it easier for real girls in real engineering programs.
I am a man with an EE degree. Most all placed I worked in my 20 years of professional life I've had female bosses, typically also EE degreed. Yes there were typically less women sure, but as a rule they were better respected as engineers and managers. Especially when they were both. They also drove better cars so I'm going to assume they were adequately compensated too.
Why are you using "quotes" around women? It also sounds like you are unfamiliar with the job of developer evangelist (which Richards held) - it is actually a pretty common position in the programming industry, perhaps not so much around electrical engineering. Here's an explanation - https://sendgrid.com/blog/explained-developer-evangelism-par...
I suspect she put the quotes because "real women" code and don't talk, just like "real men".
Developer evangelist is a nonsense job that can be useful to a company to attract certain funding, nothing more. It's the politically correct version of a booth babe.
I suspect the quotes around "woman" are about trans men who start speaking for all women after they transition. I imagine some women are bothered by this. I have no evidence of this, just trying to explain the quotes.
I'm pretty vigilant about calling out sexism and trans/homophobia in the tech community but I'm having a hard time seeing Crockford's comments as offensive enough to un-invite him to speak. I expected TFA to be typical apologist fare but it's really more puzzlement over a perplexing situation, a puzzlement I share.
I’d really like to know how a decision like that is made. In Nodevember's statement on the matter[0] (which the parent link doesn’t mention, a rather glaring omission), they quite openly admit that they “...aren't professional organizers or PR people. We are still learning, and will make mistakes.” So why not admit a mistake?
I certainly don’t want to see sexist speakers at conferences, but this decision seems to have been made with almost no evidence and almost purely based on unsubstantiated rumours.
I'd guess people with lots of social capital in the JS community told the conf orgs Crockford had to go and the orgs decided disinviting him would be less risk than having Crockford's enemies campaign against the conference.
It was colossally stupid and unfair of them to tweet what they initially tweeted. I don't have a strong opinion on their larger statement, but they should have tweeted, "A statement about our speaker lineup and concerns [URL]", not a self-contained announcement about Crockford being booted in order to make a "conference a comfortable environment for all". There's almost no way to read that statement without the connotation that Crockford is accused of sexually or otherwise assaulting someone.
Crockford would be well advised to spend some quality time with his libel lawyers. Nodevember and their associates need to be taught a lesson in respecting people and boundaries, other people have rights too. Virtue signalling between sjw and their groupies are amusing and entertaining, until its not. Crockford needs to bring the hammer down hard.
I can't resist being pedantic here. Nodevember's shitty tweet does not likely fall under "libel" because it's not a falsehood. It may be considered defamatory (and libel is a kind of defamation), in the way that "We've decided not to invite Douglas Crockford because we want to maintain an environment where children aren't abused" can be technically true but defamatory by insinuation.
I justify being pedantic here, though, because the justice system is not just a binary system of "Someone got hurt, and now someone will pay in a court of law". Other common-sense factors are taken into consideration (such as the magnitude of alleged defamation, and whether the defendant is a public figure). And in terms of how things are regardless of U.S. civil law, the reality is that Douglas Crockford is Douglas Crockford. Just because some relative nobodies said hurtful things to him and he got disinvited from a privately-run conference doesn't mean he needs to turn to the justice system to find recourse. As we speak, whoever is running Nodevember's Twitter account is probably wishing they were running @CincinnatiZoo, post-Harambe. And the people who made allegations against Crockford are likely getting death threats and other things hurled their way. I'm not implying that I, or Crockford, think that this is the way things should be, but unless Crockford can conclusively argue that being shunned by Nodevember has destroyed his livelihood, arguing that Crockford deserves legal recourse against personally harmful speech would require some radical revamping of First Amendment rights.
This I'm going to agree with. One of the particularly odd things about the whole "social justice" craze is the desire to run everything through the legal system. It seems to be rooted in the idea that in any conflict, there must always be an authority figure to pronounce one side right and the other wrong, and there must be a visible, tangible punishment for the side deemed to be wrong, so they can be "taught a lesson" about how wrong they are. Maybe it's a lost art or not emotionally satisfying enough to just say that this person or group are being jerks and I don't want to deal with them anymore, including by trying to definitively prove to some authority figure why they are jerks.
Along those lines in this situation, I'm not really part of the Node/JS community, but I have at least heard of Crockford, and have never heard of Nodevember. It seems likely that the Nodevember people will suffer a lot more from this drama than Mr. Crockford. It seems petty and undignified to me for Crockford to start any kind of legal action, as they will probably suffer more from the lack of his presence and the drama related to this than any legal action would be likely to cause.
>I certainly don’t want to see sexist speakers at conferences,
I don't want to see a sexist talk (as opposed to a-sexist talk), but an 'objectionable' speaker really shouldn't be a problem if their talk would otherwise have merit and they can be reasonably expected not to be objectionable on stage.
No-platforming and economic warfare are tactics used by the worst kind of political actors, the kind you should be actively avoiding if you value your own livelihood, let alone anybody elses.
> I don't want to see a sexist talk (as opposed to a-sexist talk), but an 'objectionable' speaker really shouldn't be a problem if their talk would otherwise have merit and they can be reasonably expected not to be objectionable on stage.
As the other poster mentioned, I'm very sympathetic to the cause of egalitarianism and pre-third-wave feminism. However, hopefully we will see more and more pushback against this kind of senseless crying wolf. If you're in favor of social justice, THIS is the thing you're fighting against?
If this even shows up on your radar and is a priority, then I'd say the mission you're fighting for has been accomplished a long time ago. Time to go home.
I don't know who really benefits from policing every word that public tech figures say. There's no monetary value to this unless this is a PR stunt to make the conference get social justice brownie points in some kind of a twisted form of social posturing. Who's to gain from this? Sociopaths wanting to exert control over others? I'm not quite ready to believe that.
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." - C. S. Lewis
People do make money from this by raising their profile. Every successful no-platform campaign that they organise is attached to their name and raises their credentials in this sordid business. Some of the worst examples end up in extremely well paid positions in the biggest tech companies.
Particularly since nothing he said was sex-specific. Anyone who hears mention of promiscuity and assumes sexism are, in my opinion, the sexist ones. Some men are promiscuous too, probably in similar numbers.
So, I have no idea what's going on, but just because this guy could only find these two examples, doesn't mean those are the actual reasons for him being dismissed. In fact, I'd be very surprised if that was the case.
For the record, I've seen Crockford talk... It wasn't offensive, it just wasn't very good. He seemed more interested in calling out business decisions which companies have made that he felt were stupid, than actually talking about anything related to JavaScript. Maybe that's just how his talks go and I didn't realize, but it wasn't what I was expecting.
The folks calling for Crockford to be disinvited weren't complaining about his talk quality, they were complaining about his behavior. And there really isn't much beyond what this blog post mentions that they are complaining about. One person cited a post of his from 9 years ago about weight loss as being evidence of him fat shaming. They also cited a GitHub comment from 4 years ago where he said some code was "stupid". My guess is the campaign against him is rooted in personal animosity.
Someone posted a transcript from their chat room where they discussed it. It was literally in response to that twitter user who was so offended about his weak map joke. Its laughable really. The level of stupidity is just insane.
Ignoring the fact this discussion about this, and this culture as a whole, is a minefield to navigate, it's important to note that Douglas Crockford can definitely be abrasive [1]. The issue at hand is that whether this abrasiveness is a bad thing, when compared to the contributions he's made and whether it leads to constructive discussions.
The javascript developer who took offense (Kas?) definitely seems to have taken it too far, automatically associating Douglas's personality with being a jerk.
The other issue at hand is how this influences tech conferences, because I've always attended conferences with the implicit assumption that I was there to learn first and foremost. Discourse and disagreement with speakers is natural and should be encouraged, as it oftentimes leads to enlightening discussions for bystanders and conference attendees, which was the entire point of the conference in the first place. By allowing certain viewpoints to dominate and silence a subset of speakers, we're ultimately limiting our views and building an echo chamber, which is not what conferences are meant to be. If we're going to dismiss speakers, it should be on merit of their talk and previous talks, not their speaking style.
People and organizations can be justified in shunning Crockford's allegedly level of abrasiveness, so I don't agree that Kas took it too far in opining that Crockford, by Kas's standards, is a jerk (I do, however, disagree with the purported evidence of Crockford's "slut-shaming). My tolerance for what is jerk-like behavior is probably not a good one, and I think I've definitely made people feel unwelcome at times, even if inadvertently.
If you want to post on the net that someone is a jerk in your professional forum, you don't NEED evidence, but if you offer it and its complete flim-flam then we all assume you are an idiot.
If someone has to be so careful as to not use normal network terminology around people who are clearly ignorant and use their ignorance as a weapon against you instead of take the time to learn what the hell they are talking about, that's not a community you want to participate in anyway.
My goodness, a respected dev dares to defend his philosophy and implementation and is vilified for being "abrasive" ? JSLint has never not been pedantic, that is why you use it.
"You can write all the crappy code you want. I don't care, because you don't work for me. The purpose of JSLint is not to make you feel good about your bad choices. It is to help you conform to a more reliable subset of the language."
As someone that has very little involvement in the JS community, Crockford definitely comes off as abrasive in that issue. He could've just as easily said "scope confusion is an issue in JS, I don't see a reason to implement this" instead of calling someone's decision stupid. Is it bad he's abrasive? Not particularly, any undergrad worth their salt would've come across a professor who's abrasive in college. Abrasiveness is a personality artifact, and I'm not belittling him for that matter, just pointing out how someone can interpret his personality.
I've read some of his stuff, watched a presentation. He is direct and opinionated. It's part of his charm. Sometimes it's quite funny.
I've met many people who are "dicks without knowing it". Sometimes it's because they are that far up their own arse. Sometimes it's raw abrasion. It's common in the private healthcare industry.
Seems like throwing of the dummy out the pram. I'd prefer Crockford's direct approach to sugar-coat. It's how I like to work.
That and if someone's focus is on inclusion, perhaps it's an ill-thought marketing campaign where the result is exclusion.
> But that seems to still assume this "abrasiveness" is a bad thing.
The commenter literally says "it's important to note that Douglas Crockford can definitely be abrasive [1]. The issue at hand is that whether this abrasiveness is a bad thing..."
The consequences of one's own interpretation, if deleterious, are one's own loss. When they include the disinvitation of a brilliant and deeply knowledgeable speaker from a conference in his field, they become everyone's loss.
> it's important to note that Douglas Crockford can definitely be abrasive [1]. The issue at hand is that whether this abrasiveness is a bad thing, when compared to the contributions he's made and whether it leads to constructive discussions.
I'm not sure what bearing, if any, one's contributions should have on how individuals or communities respond to behaviour and "abrasiveness". Good deeds should obviously be respected and appreciated, however they should not shelter one from criticism.
> automatically associating Douglas's personality with being a jerk.
Being a jerk is usually associated with one's personality.
> By allowing certain viewpoints to dominate and silence a subset of speakers, we're ultimately limiting our views and building an echo chamber,
One could argue that by enabling abrasive and overpowering personalities and cults of celebrity to dominate these events we were already doing that.
> If we're going to dismiss speakers, it should be on merit of their talk and previous talks, not their speaking style.
I would think speaking style matters at least somewhat if one is planning on speaking.
All of that is besides the point. It was unprofessional and petty to make a public announcement out of that. All you have to say is that so and so is not coming anymore. Is this conference ran by a bunch of high school kids?
To be fair, if you catch me on a bad day I will be a jerk to you if you ask me what I think is a stupid question.
Everyone has bad days, everyone can be an arsehole to others due to the emotions swirling around in their heads. It doesn't mean they are a jerk. It may just mean you asked your question when they were going through a difficult time. If you asked the same question on a different day you got a pleasant answer.
I disagree with his position on that issue (var at the top) but somehow I'm not hurt by him calling "my" position stupid. People are allowed to have strong opinions on things, especially if they have spent a great deal of time studying them. And I do want to hear his opinion spoken loud and clear because the conviction is a signal that I should not ignore the opinion lightly.
Perhaps. In a vacuum I could see reading "I am sorry I hurt your feelings" as pretty condescending. That's not apologizing for what you said; it's more like pitying the person for their irrational reaction to it. (Or that's how it could feel to that person.)
(I'm not saying that's how it was intended or anything. I have no idea. Just saying this could just as easily be evidence for abrasiveness as against it. I'll also just note that I don't think someone should be removed from a conference for mild abrasiveness regardless.)
Condescension is not always regarded as bad. Readers of Pride and Prejudice will recall that Mr Collins, for one, was highly appreciative of Lady Catherine de Bourgh's 'affability and condescension'!
You may be thinking of when politicians say "I'm sorry if you found what I said offensive", or "sorry for an offence your feel", which is a classic anti-apology.
Normally without the nuance of speech it might be impossible to tell if it was meant in a genuine way. In this case however the context makes it clear he is being arrogant and egotistical in a manner quite consistent with techie internet forum behavior.
The idea of a javascript developer feeling intellectual superiority is of course absurd.*
I disagree. I can only read it that way if I make bad assumptions about him, which is circular reasoning.
In my experience, you should always give people the benefit of the doubt in such things. I've honestly thought otherwise in many other occasions, only to be proven wrong.
I understand the need to give the benefit of the doubt to someone, but going out of your ways to not recognize the higher probability of this comment being irony seems kind of naive to me. Im my opinion, this looks like a 90% probability of irony and only 10% sincerity. The commentator never made the claim of being butt hurt and kept the conversation technical, but Crockford's comment comes out of nowhere and seems to want to achieve some degree of infantalization that was clearly unnecessary. Given the context of this exchange it's really difficult to me to see it otherwise than a sly middle-finger. I think people trying to see it otherwise are clinging a bit too much to their principles. This is not a court of law folks, it's real life.
I've had people do this sort of gaslighting to me before in discussions of a technical nature. Implying my disagreement with them was somehow emotional. Which is particularly annoying in online discussions where emotion can be inferred or not at the readers discretion.
The problem with doing otherwise is that you give people very little opportunity to ever be sincere. They're locked into a confirmation bias trap with no way out unless you allow it.
And one can read just as easily that the other party seems hurt by the rejection. I would not readily assume that he can't read that either.
This may not be a court of law, but I always try to think twice before I judge people. It's almost always the wrong approach, at least in my experience, and I certainly haven't always been on the right side of that.
In the end, you don't win anything by being right about this kind of thing and I know it's way too easy for me to do all the things I hate seeing others do :(
To be fair, the hostility he uses there isn't the type of "Discourse and disagreement" that fosters "enlightening discussions for bystanders and conference attendees".
It's just being abrasive for the sake of being abrasive.
Not that I think that thread is grounds to kick out a speaker
> Discourse and disagreement with speakers is natural and should be encouraged, as it oftentimes leads to enlightening discussions for bystanders and conference attendees, which was the entire point of the conference in the first place.
I agree with this, but we should tease “disagreement about the ideas that are the purpose of the conference” apart from “disagreement about things not relevant to the conference.”
If I go to a JavaScript conference, I am more than happy to see two speakers in a monkey-knife fight over whether the class keyword is taking two steps backwards. Those are the core ideas relevant to the conference.
Making jokes or metaphors that touch on contentious social topics like gender roles and so forth can touch of disagreement that may be valuable in a larger social context--like on HN and a whole or the internet as a whole, but it is off-topic for most technology conferences.
It’s a lot like discussing a programming problem on HN, and then someone mentions IQ, and someone else mentions how terrible it is that we can’t give interviewees IQ tests, and then we’re discussing racism, the right and wrong way to interview programmers, and on and on and on with something that si no longer the original programming problem.
None of what I am saying implies that I agree that Mr. Crockford should have been uninvited, and nor is it an endorsement of his choices as a speaker. But in a general sense, I totally get why its ideal that when I give a talk, I avoid jokes and metaphors that invite off-topic debate.
And likewise, I get why conferences ought to attempt to moderate the talks such that they have the highest probability of leading to on-topic debate. It’s much the same as moderating Hacker News threads to stay roughly on-topic and with high quality.
Well since the person who seems to hate him so much gave a talk at that conference same conference a year before that had nothing to do with Javascript or node (something about community/inclusivity big surprise) I would say that "on topic" covers just about anything for these circus events.
I would say he is one of the more likely speakers to stay on topic.
I think it's fair game to call ideas stupid, and that's what he did. It's his assessment, your opinion may be different, but in this case I'd personally say his judgement was correct.
As far as feedback on ideas goes, this is a harsh criticism, but it hasn't really crossed the line into abrasiveness because it's not a personal attack. It's just a given that even smart people can and do have stupid ideas. At no point did he say or imply anything about the person raising the idea.
I've only seen Crockford once in person, years ago [0], and though I never heard of him and his curmudgeonly-approach to JavaScript, I came away with a very favorable impression of him (and JS in general).
So I'm inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt, out of sentimentality. At the same time, I know that one speech and/or book is not enough (if anything ever is) to judge whether someone has or hasn't been harmful to people who are not me.
But after reading the original critique on Medium, and the OP's transcription of when Crockford allegedly "slut-shames the audience", I don't feel convinced to have a negative impression of Crockford. I'm not saying that the original complainant isn't justified in their critique or that there isn't more to the story, because I know that things are different in person. But I could also be sympathetic towards the OP's defense of Crockford.
In terms of Nodevember's decision, well, they have different prerogatives when running a conference. And having a speaker who allegedly so openly derides other speakers is definitely something they have to think about in ways that I as an individual do not.
edit: One thing I personally find disingenuous about the OP's writeup is their appeal to the dictionary definition of "promiscuous" to defend Crockford. I guess it's just up to people's opinion, but I felt that Crockford was clearly using "promiscuous" in the first sense -- "indiscriminate mingling or association". I've never even heard of the second sense, and very little in Crockford's transcribed statement seems to suggest why "promiscuous" would be the right word to use instead of something like "heterogeneous".
That said, I also don't feel that Crockford's statement was slut-shaming. Saying, "Back in the day, you could browse the web like a whore, not caring what your computer connected to. But with the new web..."
But that's not what he says at all. You could read a sexual connotation to what he says, but the words he use is very much about being indiscriminate about security and identity. He even states that there is a benefit to promiscuity -- "because you could go from one thing to another and discover stuff and start forming relationships" and directly implies there's a tradeoff with the security of commitment.
Saying, "Back in the day, you could browse the web like a whore, not caring what your computer connected to. But with the new web..." But that's not what he says at all.
For sake of argument, let's assume that he had said exactly this. Even so, I still don't see the claims being met. First, even though the metaphor may be "sexual", I don't see anything that would make it "sexist". Promiscuity as a behavior is far from limited to females, and he's at least equally addressing males with his "you".
But further, the quote leads off with "So the old web was great because it provided promiscuity". Rather than "shaming", if we apply a sexual interpretation, his statement seems downright "sex-positive". If anything I'd expect the critique to be coming from the "family values" side, for putting such a positive spin on promiscuity.
My guess is that dissecting Crockford's language leads won't produce useful insights, either into him or his detractors. Instead, I think this is increasingly about "power". Some individuals realized that with the right accusations (regardless of validity) they can replace the old leadership, and others (seeing their success) are excited to try their own hand.
The scary part is what happens when the accusations are replaced with actions, as this is when it sometimes get really ugly. I don't know the history well, but I can't help thinking of the violent excesses of the youthful Red Guard in 1960's China: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Guards_(China).
I think the hypothetical argument would be that "whore", in our current time period, is not only primarily used as an insult, but it's one that seems to be disproportionately directed against women. Not just today, but in our very recent history (on a sidenote, I wonder how easy the gender association of "whore" could be quantified by looking at Google's n-gram dataset).
Sure, you could argue that "whore" is used against men, e.g. "He's such a manwhore". Just like someone could persuadively argue that their habit of wearing Confederate flag t-shirts has nothing to do with 19th-century American thinking about slavery. But we make judgments based on a spectrum of pragmatism and likelihoods, and we can make our own decisions to attend or avoid events that invite or disinvite such folks.
In the case of Crockford, I fully support the right for Nodevember to have its own threshold for what makes someone too much of a jerk to be a fit for their audience. And I personally wouldn't be inclined to go to such a conference, because I think that that threshold would likely exclude too many people besides Crockford, such that the event doesn't seem worth my time or travel expenses
Sorry to be snippy, but no, that's not the point. That's your point, and one possible counter argument. The worry is that while true, it's weak and specific, and leaves the way open to further attacks. By concentrating on the counterfactual I'm trying to address a broader issue.
I think it's also worth noting that the word 'promiscuous' already has a history in computers.
Both I and 'danso' know the meaning of 'promiscuous' with regard to packet snooping. We didn't mention it here because it's amply discussed elsewhere, and because it's not relevant to the discussion we are having. The real question, as with "daemon processes" and "master and slave relationships" is whether this usage is appropriate today, not whether the usage has precedent.
agree w/ liking "curmudgeonly" js when Crockford got vocal: at a time when only ninjas were allowed to pee (and to pee, of course, a ninja stands up), he was like, "no, quit these 'ninja' antics, kids, and just be decent programmers".
idk a/b the second comment.. it does appear that's being read into, but w/o context of the talk or intonation, it's difficult to conclude intent. I'd like to think it's not negative.
but the first transcript in the article? the context for that is that dude is not "jacked" or "ripped", flexing on stage like a lumberjack. don't think he's in bad health or anything, but i suspect the first comment was poking fun at himself, mostly.
I thought this wouldn't be an issue in CS; thankfully it only seems to be the Js community -- or at least I hope so. Medium is now becoming less informative on technologies and software into a platform for finger pointing and complaining, which is really depressing imo.
Exactly. Hardcore languages like C++, Lisp, Haskell, etc. should be safe for a little while longer. SJW presence seems to be inversely proportional to the degree of rigor required to use a language.
I've noticed this too! The communities I deal with that spend the least amount of time worrying about tangential issues like "who's offended" are the CUDA/C++ and the Verilog/VHDL communities. Never see any issues like this come up, ever.
It just goes to show that SJW bullshit is what happens when you've solved all your real problems. The JS people got tired of making frameworks every three weeks, so now everything is some kind of oppression.
People who use other languages have real problems.
Drum roll...the biggest undisputed champion of all assholes is... and i love him... Linus Torvalds (tah dah!). The difference is when he says something that could be taken as offensive, the community is much less diverse, extremely so and tends to share his sentiment or simply reveres him so much they stay silent. Crockford, the genius in his own right that he is, does not get the same respect in this free for all culture JS has become. I see nothing wrong with having that type of culture but it is hard to see someone so cool being treated with disrespect and nodevember is just a cancer in my eyes at this point.
I have to wonder if this was a real complaint or if it was done to highlight the obvious problem here, a bit like the guy who patented a "Method of exercising a cat".
I mean, if you're going to ban Douglas Crockford from your conference it should at least be for his stated prejudice against comments in data-interchange formats. Not vague allegations that may damage his personal and professional reputation, to which he not only has no right of reply, but any response could be damaging by generating more attention. This is the classic trolling strategy, but stepped up a level.
If he actually did something wrong, take him to court and let the facts be decided in law. Otherwise, he's innocent and should be treated as such.
I also wonder, given that the allegations haven't been published, just implied, if he would have a libel case against the conference organisers?
Furthermore, the best defense against libel is the truth. Part of the complaint is an opinion based on public statements made by Crockford (the "slut-shaming"). The other published complaint is that Crockford said to the complainant before her talk, "the talks as the day went on just got stupider and stupider.” Unless he can convincingly prove that he never made such a statement to the complainant, he's not going to have much of a libel case. He could argue damages based on "false light", I suppose. [0]
On a (computer-related) technical standpoint, I disagree with what you think is the right reason ban a technical speaker, e.g. Crockford "for his stated prejudice against comments in data-interchange formats". That's the kind of strong diverse opinions that a tech conference should be thirsty for, just like a Ruby conference should be thrilled to have Edsgar Dijkstra talk about object-oriented programming.
But if someone says, "People who think comments belong in data interchange formats are fucking morons"...Yeah, I could see why some conferences wouldn't invite them.
That passive-aggressive "update" is quite telling of his/her personality: "I’ve switched comments to ‘not visible.’ I won’t be reading them. I don’t feel the need to justify this, either. Thanks <3."
This does not give much more information, but it does acknowledge that the tweet was poorly worded. Not sure how helpful that is though, now that the genie is out of the bottle.
Indeed, his aversion for comments in data-exchange formats is much more grounds for excommunication. He's also a code-style nazi. And sjeesh, his hangups on the keywords 'new' and 'class', yes, we know, Javascript is not Java, but they're just shorthand dude, what's in a name and such, get over it. Or the deranged second half of "The Good Parts", where he earnestly assumes a linter implementation is a good introduction to a programming language. And stop already with shoving all those functional programming paradigms down JS coders throats; you're goading us on to write inscrutable, nested C-syntax vomit, without having any of the advantages of a real functional language, like you know, type safety, strict compilers, decent performance. He's both Javascript's best friend and worst enemy.
I'm joking of course. The Good Parts is amazing, and JSON is amazing. The attendees of nodevember will miss out on an amazing speaker too.
> If he actually did something wrong, take him to court and let the facts be decided in law. Otherwise, he's innocent and should be treated as such.
This is hilariously ridiculous. Being unprofessional, uncivilised or objectionable is not illegal. In fact the majority of reasons for someone to be fired do not involve breaches of the law. And even if it was illegal conduct e.g. sexual harassment the onus is on the accuser to have enough evidence to convict. Which is not always the case.
And no he doesn't have a libel case against the organisers.
I know nothing of this situation other than what I just read in the linked blog, but speaking as someone who is very sympathetic to the cause of the continued problems of sexism in the tech industry, I'm very confused about what the problem is, if it is in fact related to either of those two quoted statements.
Nodevember's tweet seems borderline libelous to me, unless they are willing to explain exactly what the event/statement/whatever is that got him pulled from the lineup is.
I generally feel like there's a kneejerk reaction from people (especially in the tech community) to be "PC compliant", at the level where you almost can't have any discourse because it's such a minefield (can't imagine a rational person whoms first intepretation of the tweets is "that's sexist" to be pleasant having a conversation with).
I almost feel in the minority (or just a silent one?), but I honestly don't care what kind of political views, personal preferences, outrageous statements or whatever problems a speaker at a conference might have, as long as he gives a good talk/presentation.
I feel there's a knee jerk reaction from people in the tech community to minimize very legitimate concerns about bias and about making people feel uncomfortable and unwelcome.
I think it's easy to look past someone's personal preferences and outrageous comments when you're already part of the club. But respect that that isn't everyone's experience.
Because many in tech approach things with a very logical almost cold manner... They brush off emotional responses like offense, because being offended isn't a logical or useful response... Its emotion, it's random, and for many it's too much chaos to deal with.
My experience than many in tech like to believe that they are logical, while actually being as prone to bias and emotional reasoning as anyone else. Just more in denial of it.
> I think it's easy to look past someone's personal preferences and outrageous comments when you're already part of the club. But respect that that isn't everyone's experience.
What specifically did Crockford say that was outrageous?
and it's rather "put-up or shut-up" time, I'd say.
I've never heard of this conference. I've read Crockfords books, and while any given person on earth may be a total bear to deal with, I'm not buying this greasy smarmy "he'd been uninvited for undisclosed reasons but we'll imply lot's of socially-disapproved-of reasons without confirming nor denying any of them"
what a kafka-esque load of nonsense.
the conference organizers are in the wrong and are doing further damage with every greasy fart they let out by way of explanation.
Yes but if you are going to give half-assed reasons for uninviting him, then you are going to have to defend yourself. If they had said: " Unfortunately Douglas Crackford will not attend the conference for unforeseen circumstances", we would not be in this outrage. If you are going to publicly shame someone and possible harm their career, you better have proof that he has done some very horrible things or comments. Listing a possible twitter message calling someone stupid does not sound like a reasonable cause too me. That is why we are voicing our concerns, and why hardly anyone here is agreeing with you.
The problem is that they stopped being private grievances when they were used to remove a speaker from a public conference.
Way back in the good ol' days, this was exactly the sort of thing used to oppress the minorities: an unknown group of well-connected men would get together to black-ball someone for being the wrong sort of person, with no explanation, recourse, or accountability.
Like I have said before: choose your enemies carefully; you become them. The faces may have changed, but the behavior hasn't.
Clearly these other people are in the club and Crockford is most definitely not. If this other person can get Crockford removed from the conference on a whim with no explanation the power and abuse of it is in the hands of the other person.
"I removed comments from JSON because I saw people were using them to hold parsing directives, a practice which would have destroyed interoperability. I know that the lack of comments makes some people sad, but it shouldn't.
Suppose you are using JSON to keep configuration files, which you would like to annotate. Go ahead and insert all the comments you like. Then pipe it through JSMin before handing it to your JSON parser."
>I feel there's a knee jerk reaction from people in the tech community to minimize very legitimate concerns about bias and about making people feel uncomfortable and unwelcome.
Maybe people shouldn't be so precious snowflakes that should always feel "comfortable" and "welcome"? Maybe they should have the courage to be challenged?
I blame it on the BS "you are so special" mode of baby boomer parenting...
I grew up with "you're so special" parenting, sort of, but I also was raised with tolerance and acceptance. Looking back, it makes sense, because if everyone is a unique snowflake, they have to learn to be tolerant and accepting of all the other unique snowflakes in the world.
Most parents seem to teach their children that, but looking at the millennial generation, of which I am unfortunately part, you're supposed to be "accepting" and "tolerant", unless someone else's uniqueness hurts your feelings or makes you feel uncomfortable.
The former is just plain childish, and the latter is just too vague to base an ideology off of.
> I honestly don't care what kind of political views, personal preferences, outrageous statements or whatever problems a speaker at a conference might have, as long as he gives a good talk/presentation.
I find it interesting if a speaker has vastly different preferences, political views and makes outrageous statements that I'd never make.
That doesn't mean I'm always comfortable with it, but it's interesting to think about how people came to be different than me. It's interesting to see their interaction with others. I might learn something, even if I disagree.
Having all people be "my way" on the other hand, sounds really numb.
I can relate to the feeling of being a 'silent' minority. As an introverted white guy who lives in a foreign country, I feel that I am being discriminated against all the time.
I literally have to force myself to act extroverted in order to succeed in the workplace. People just assume that if you're a guy, you're just a confident hussler.
I know several introverted white guys who are extremely qualified but missed out on job offers because they were honest about their qualifications and didn't talk themselves up like some other guys do.
Being introverted, shy or weak isn't necessarily a female attribute. The fact that someone assumes that makes THEM the sexist one.
> As an introverted white guy who lives in a foreign country, I feel that I am being discriminated against all the time.
This is, literally, what it feels like to be a minority in the US and most European countries. Everything about you is questionable, you get slighted all the time, and you're the representative of an entire ethnicity. So whatever you do or opinions you hold are representative of the entire group.
Kind of like MLK, or Malcolm X, or Marcus Garvey, etc. etc.? What about those minorities wrongfully imprisoned for long periods of time for nothing short of suspicion before being released with no charges (or worse)?
I'm pretty sure their public removal was a little harsher and unfair without a so-called minority card to play.
>Kind of like MLK, or Malcolm X, or Marcus Garvey, etc. etc.?
No, kind of like in 2016.
>What about those minorities wrongfully imprisoned for long periods of time for nothing short of suspicion before being released with no charges (or worse)?
More likely they are invoking their famous card. The minority card had no advantages.
Chris Rock pointed out that in being a black actor he is not allowed to make a bad/questionable movie. He makes one bad film and and all of black Hollywood is out of work for a year.
>More likely they are invoking their famous card. The minority card had no advantages.
I think if you're famous/succesful, the minority/victim card can be played to your advantage too.
If you're a poor/unknown minority, nobody gives a fuck.
The same way few care or write indignant posts for sex trafficking victims or exploited immigrant people, but if some minority member at some $1000/person conference hears something they that hurts their feelings, it warrants a small media/social-media storm.
It's the upper middle class minority version of "white people's problems".
The quantity of white males who are removed from their position in a possibly career-ending way without trial or due explanation (e.g. Mozilla CEO, GitHub CEO, various conferences, colleagues), plus the quantity of government aid and help that are offered based on people's gender, and not based on people's weaknesses, now makes me uncomfortable. White males who work hard deserve a life too.
22 points on the comment above (which I can't edit anymore). As the 74th comment on a page (of 640 points), it's a pretty good score: I would say that gender justice is a feeling shared by many people.
> We will also be removing Douglas Crockford from our keynote speakers list to help make the conference a comfortable environment for all.
If they are going to insinuate things about what he said, they should mention exactly what he said or did.
The fact that they don't somehow tells me there is not much there to go on.
To put it another way, if they have the guts to remove Crockford that should have enough guts to clearly explain why.
I've been saying this before, and maybe it is just me, but it seems Node.js community somehow attracts a disproportionate number of immature people but with big egos. Because, let's call this for what it is -- childish immature behavior. That's at best, at worst it is getting attention and hurting someone's reputation just for a power trip. "Look how important I am, I kicked Crockford out of a conference with a single tweet".
Well the lesson is when you pick some open source technology, the community comes with it. Maybe even if technology has good merits, it makes sense not to pick it because the community behind it is not compatible with what you think a community should be.
They said "We will also be removing Douglas Crockford from our keynote speakers list to help make the conference a comfortable environment for all."
Imagine saying that about anyone, to any group (here it was to the whole world).
Let's say the invite you to a gathering publicly then wrote a tweet about "We will also be removing eli from list of invited guests, to help make the venue a comfortable environment for all".
That is just insulting, because it insinuates something terrible has happened, or you did some shameful unspeakable thing and they are just being considerate and not disclosing it publicly.
The insinuation made in the actual example with Douglas Crawford isn't exactly this clear cut, but it is still very damaging while lacking documented basis in reality.
The fact that they've disinvited him so publicly and so strangely is itself an insinuation. Quite a strong one, in fact.
Imagine your child was expelled from your local school and the reason given was "she made others feel uncomfortable". And that was the end of the discussion.
you'll have gotten better treatment than Mr. Crockford did, because clearly there wasn't much reviewing done by Nodevember. Otherwise, they could surely fill us in on what they reviewed?
You are missing the point... It does not matter if you feel comfortable or not. If you dont like something someone says, you dont have to attend. Instead of ruining a conference for people who dont care that someone uses normal language to describe things. Heck, I like speakers to be a bit raw, including people like Linus etc. So what if they are a jerk, I value them on their work, not their language. Of course I also have a personal limit of what i can classify as "acceptable", but if someone goes over that limit, i just ignore and move along. Why would i try to change the speaker or event to cater to me? Even if it was a slur or comment directed at me, it would be so much easier to just ignore it. I dont understand what gives these people the balls too try to publicly shame someone who have produced so much more value to society and tech then most of these guys combined.
>If the HN moderators wanted to do that after reviewing complaints against me, it's certainly within their rights.
What's legal/within one's rights and what's right is not the same thing.
To be also right, those HN moderators should also have thoroughly investigated (reviewed) those complaints, not just knee-jerk reacted to them (as seems to be the case here).
And even then, they should publicly state the reasons, not just leave an insinuation open.
And if this did had happened to you personally, with all the possible implications in your reputation, job etc, you'll be also demanding this of them too.
By comfortable environment they mean where you can say what you want... as long as it doesn't offend any of their unpublished list of vague rules, then you'll be publicly shamed, with no recourse nor explanation.
I certainly wouldn't feel 'comfortable' speaking at a conference with a reputation for publicly character-assassinating their invited speakers. Especially as the worst accusation I could find on twitter was that he used the word 'stupid'. Several times! Throw away the key...
It might also be a good idea to not hire someone with this sort of political leanings into your organization, if you know what I mean.
It seems to me like numerous advocacy organizations nowadays have run out of genuine grievances and are now attacking largely innocent things, possibly in turn harming their cause.
I might also be a bit worried as a speaker that people looking over the speaker list might think I was one of those that lead to the disinvite and thus be a poor person to invite if for no other reason than further hassle.
The JavaScript/Node.js community attracts a lot of young programmers compared to other communities - But there are also a lot of older people - The range is just broader; that's why we often get into these kinds of debates... I guess it makes it more exciting.
But there is no debate, that's kind of the problem. There is vague doublespeak with fine print declaring no further replies will be made. Old or young, this is just inept.
> If they are going to insinuate things about what he said, they should mention exactly what he said or did.
> The fact that they don't somehow tells me there is not much there to go on.
FWIW organizations will often refuse to disclose the precise nature of these kinds of accusations, because it would (a) impinge on the privacy of a victim, (b) start a circus trial in the Court of Public Opinion (which this thread is already becoming) or even (c) further shame the accused, and it's a favor to everyone involved to stay mum.
As external parties whose involvement probably extends no further than commenting on HN, we're not entitled to an explanation nor should we expect one. It could all be a big screen of plausible deniability, or there could be serious accusations at the heart of this.
Use your own intuition to decide if their behavior is in earnest, but speculating what happened is useless (and distasteful besides).
No, they "often" ask people to cancel and state personal grounds or scheduling conflict, etc. Much like suspicious resignations. Then they get wierder when people refuse but the facts are then confusing nonsense about inflexibility and inability to reach a concensus, not a statement of vague unease about a speaker.
Given the terrible track record of the JS community with regards to basic behavior, I really have to wonder what is wrong and why anyone should risk their personal reputation by doing public activities in JS.
Perhaps transpiling purely to avoid interacting with caustic elements of the JS community will be the new normal.
Their whole handling of the situation was incredibly unprofessional. Really makes the whole conference sound like utter crap if they can't even handle something like that like adults.
Maybe someone can tell me what's offensive about the first comment. It seems to be poking fun at programmer machismo.
The second quote is more problematic. I'm firmly of the opinion that it is not slut-shaming because it presented both promiscuity and commitment in a positive light. On the other hand, it is perfectly reasonable for a conference to not want sexual metaphors in presentations. The whole "he used the word correctly" in TFA is a non-sequitur when the first definition is clearly sexual, and promiscuity is contrasted with commitment. Still, I would hope that less extreme measures than banning would be used to address this.
Now to one thing not in TFA, but in the linked medium post:
> I’ve never dealt with Crockford in a way that I felt pleasant afterward. He is rude, unrepentant, and completely (one could argue willingly) oblivious to the meaning of his statements. I’ve never seen a person use the word ‘stupid’ so liberally in replacement of constructive criticism.
A conference is more than a bunch of people giving talks, it's a social gathering. If there were a lot of people who agree with Kas on this, then it's a much more reasonable reason to keep him out.
On a much smaller scale, I often run pencil-and-paper RPG groups. Being a jerk is much more likely to find yourself out of my group compared to game-mechanics related issues.
"Promiscuous" also has a long history in computer networking. E.g. network cards with "promiscuous mode" (allowing it to receive all available packets rather than only passing on packets with the correct address; not as relevant any more, but was commonly used to sniff packets on a hub, but also to implement aliases). Commitment is non-sexual and often used in all kinds of contexts that does not imply anything sexual.
But I agree with you that no matter whether you are ok with the terms, calling it slut shaming is just strange.
I also agree with you that acting like a jerk would be a better reason for banning someone. But I'd also argue that "outing" him is worse than the alleged behaviour in that respect - if they're going to punish him for what has been reported, then they also ought to punish that kind of public shaming that pretty much makes it impossible for said person to get fair treatment.
I agree that those terms are clearly meant in a networking context, where they also have a long history. Interpreting it as slut-shaming seems like somebody who has zero interest or knowledge about technology or networking started listening to talks to try and find something that could be twisted into meaning something sexist.
I would hope that everybody with a genuine interest in technology finds these people ridiculous, and their constant demands to kick people out of things for nonsensical reasons more offense than anything that was supposedly said.
In their code of conduct, the conference states, in part:
Be kind to others. Do not insult or put down other attendees.
Crockford appears not to be a good match, even on just abrasiveness grounds alone. Though it would have been better to determine that before inviting him.
At the time of the post, Crockford was slated to be an attendee. In fairness, this would imply that Perch be uninvited from the conference for violating the code of conduct. Or does the code of conduct have an escape cause in cases where everyone agrees that the victim has really "gone too far"?
Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby
by Donald Barthelme (1973)
Some of us had been threatening our friend Colby for a long time, because of the way he had been behaving. And now he'd gone too far, so we decided to hang him. Colby argued that just because he had gone too far (he did not deny that he had gone too far) did not mean that he should be subjected to hanging. Going too far, he said, was something everybody did sometimes. We didn't pay much attention to this argument.
It's a fantastic story, and while I'll concede that it's only tangential to critiques of codes of conduct, reading the story would almost certainly be more enjoyable than spending time thinking about the inherent contradictions of tolerating intolerance. If you prefer video, I was amazed to find that a couple years ago someone (Chris Rubino) remade Barthelme's classic story as a short film: https://vimeo.com/149832821
Seems to me to be a useless rule, or at least one that needs some clarification. If criticizing others' works is included in that, then having meaningful discussions is not possible. If criticizing others' works is not included in that, then "Your talk was stupid" which is clearly insulting and (in most contexts) non-constructive, would still be allowed.
At its best, it's redundant with "Be kind to others." Its placement immediately after seems to be intended as an example of unkind behavior, but IMO it muddies, rather than clarifies the situation.
Disinviting Douglas Crockford – particularly in the way it was done – is not being kind. Doing so with no clear evidence is an insult to their audience. Therefore their actions are, in my estimation, entirely hypocritical.
TLDR; personal vendetta against Crockford led to accusations of "sexism", and him getting uninvited from Nodevember conference. There is absolutely no proof of sexism anywhere ,only a bunch of people who want to take him out professionally because he might have pissed them off for whatever reason in the past. Only now these people can use dubious political arguments to justify their vendetta. This can happen to anybody in any community.
I don't think public evidence of sexism matters if other speakers were uncomfortable enough to withdraw from the conference. They're trying to run a conference where people feel comfortable, not hold a public tribunal.
So because someone else decides to withdraw, for whatever reason no matter how petty and irrational, that's now grounds for public character assassination of another professional and their being cast into exile? That's insane. The bar shouldn't just be automatically dropped down to whichever crybully can play the biggest victim.
You don't need a public tribunal to understand this failed the reasonable person test.
The "speakers" you talk about are two Twitter users. Kas Perch and Nexylove. They started to cry wolf, without any reason what so ever, and that's that, he is out, ruining it for those that actually wanted to learn about Javascript.
Listen to actual conferences these two have held. Calling others assholes, subhuman, human garbage and worse simply for dismissing their twisted ideology. Kas has shamed Twitter users lives. All of this would be against Nodevembers CoC.
Of course it matters: it determines who is the aggressor in this. Whatever argument you could make for "making others uncomfortable", it goes orders of magnitude more for the shit they pulled and the lukewarm reaction to it. That people don't want the tribunal, and inform others of the execution after the fact is the problem not the solution, and "I cannot judge this" to me just reads like code for washing your hands of not even trying. Plenty of variations of that to be had, all cloaking cowardice as intelligence or morality. SSDD.
Maybe this is long game karma revenge for his notorious role in spreading communicable diseases in Habitat. [1]
Disease
One of the more successful "games" we invented for Habitat was the disease. There are three strains currently defined:
Cooties
Happy Face
Mutant (AKA The Fly)
We only were able to test Cooties with live players, but it was a hit. It works like this: Several initial Avatars are infected with a "Cootie" head. This head replaces the current one, and cannot be removed except by touching another non-infected Avatar. Once infected, you can not be infected again that day. In effect, this game is "tag" and "keep away" at the same time. Often people would allow themselves be infected just so he could infect "that special person that they know would just hate it!" Every time the disease was spread, there was an announcement at least a week before, and for at least a week afterward it was the subject of major discussions. One day that the plague was spread, a female Avatar that was getting married got infected 1 hour before her wedding! Needless to say, she was very excited, and in a panic until a friend offered to take it off her hands.
Some interesting variations to try on this are: Touch 2 people to cure; this would cause quite a preponderance of infected people late in the day. The "Happy Face" plague: This simple head has the side effect of changing any talk message (word balloons) to come out as "HAVE A NICE DAY!"... can you imagine infecting some unsuspecting soul, and him saying back to you HAVE A NICE DAY! ??? ESP and mail still work normally, so the user is not without communications channels. The Mutant Plague: The head looks like the head of a giant housefly and it has the effect of changing talk text to "Bzzz zzzz zzzz". We think these all will be great fun.
Given the content of your first remark, I'm strongly inclined to suspect this use of the explicitly masculine pronoun is first-degree trolling.
This serves as a counterexample to your point, because as statements go, it would be simply be factually (rather than politically) correct to have said "they" rather than "he", unless you really do hold an expectation that all conference speakers are male. In other words, neutral language is more rational, not less.
I notice a fairly common tactic for trying to change norms is to pretend that the norms aren't norms and then aggressively shame people for doing a normal thing.
This leads to a toxic atmosphere where people can't be secure in their words, social reality keeps being pulled out from under their feet.
When the normal thing marginalizes people, marginalized people are hurt. In recent years, they have started to defend themsves in force, the ks to unifying power of the internet.
The insecurity you observe is feeling of the erosion of privilege.
Where should boundaries get drawn? And when should they change? In the past, gender and race were dividing lines for privilege. What about animals? Don't they have the right to not be murdered and be free? Are they not conscious pain feeling beings? Is it OK for me to constantly call everyone out on their meat eating murderous ways? Many people are offended when people talk about eating steak.
There is thought that changing your password often might make passwords worse... Don't have a citation at the moment (phone) but, the tl;dr is that often changing means you're more likely to pick smaller passwords that are easier to construct, and to remember, making them weaker than something you'll commit to for a longer time.
I absolutely agree. Being "PC compliant" is more about staying informed of what is considered, that moment, to be
proper language. As much as I would like to not offend
anyone, I find such extreme scrutiny of language to be
unnecessary and quite honestly, arbitrary. If one generally
does not encounter the "liberal elite" and say, one is not a
native speaker of a language, they can easily be misconstrued as being racist/sexist or as possessing any other undesirable traits.
Having grown up in a society where sexism/racism/casteism
is extremely blatant (in urban India), I sometimes find it hard to comprehend the utility of labelling people harshly
for what might be innocuous comments. I almost feel those energies must be spent in condemning the "real" racists/sexists, many of whom are still allowed to scream whatever offensive nonsense they please (I have seen many growing up). How do people
feel genuine outrage over harmless comments? Are we allowed
to ever call out on hypersensitivity?
Also, as a vegan, sometimes I do feel genuinely sad
when I see lots of meat being eaten and relished. I feel like giving my friends an explanation or at least attempt to convince them to cut down
on the meat-eating but I also realize it can be highly offensive and have never voiced my opinion.
Brigading forum threads and dog piling social media of people you have a perceived grievance with does not help 'marginalized' people. In fact your trying to marginalize and bully people.
Cry bully trolling and aimless power tripping under the banner of 'social justice' does not provide you any magic cover. I think most people can see thorough it this point and realize your only contribution is harassment and its destructive to communities like this one.
You assume the parent is privileged (younger white male) for having an opinion that conflicts with your own?
Another point - educated white males are not your enemy. If you're looking for racists, sexists, etc - you need not seek them out by reading between the lines of comments here. There are people proudly spewing garbage you can speak out against (on their own forums and blogs). Why fight against your allies in this?
I think the disconnect is that the vast majority of people, regardless of gender, do not consider these things to be marginalizing anyone. Why you can't see that and why you want to patrol for everything that only superficially resembles that is puzzling. When the number of people who are complaining about these "normal" things is about 1 in 10,000, it should make you stop and think. Are you really an early adopter of significantly better social norms and a heroic defender of the chronically marginalized, people who are so downtrodden that 99% of them don't see or don't have the energy to complain along with you? Or, are you just the crackpot on the street with the sign saying, "The end is near," whom people walk more quickly just to get past?
Or perhaps the marginalization is felt now, but certainly once wasn't - it's an artificial, unnecessary and divisive perpective. But I can imagine that just like misheard song-lyrics it's something that people pick up on, and won't let go.
It's aggrevating, but it's a battle that may already have been lost.
If you wrote some software instead of talking, like Grace Hopper, Barbara Liskov and thousands of others, people would respect you automatically in this space.
Likely you did not understand that the clause starting with "like Grace Hopper [and] Barbara Liskov" applies to "wrote some software" not to "instead of talking". '10938101' is actively praising women who write code, and disrespecting those (of both sexes) who only talk. The attack is not directed at women, but at empty talk by non-practictioners.
Here's the thing; I am technically from a "marginalised" group and yet I still often use what you'd call marginalising pronouns. I use them not to marginalise anyone, but because they're commonly used and there's no reason to not use them.
When I say "he", it's probably because I am a male so I default to "he", but that DOES NOT mean that I mean to "marginalise" women, in fact be free to substitute "she" in if you feel like it, it is sort of implied if you're a female and I am technically talking about all genders.
In reality, it's just faster to not watch every word your write for "inclusiveness" or "marginalisation", because I assume you're able to infer the inclusiveness from context.
If you're searching for offence, you WILL BE offended, even if no offence was meant by the original poster and by doing this you're actually marginalising the real problems marginalised groups face.
People aren't saying that you are trying to marginalise women and transgendered people. And if they are saying that you can safely call them idiots and ignore them.
What they are saying is that switching from "he" to "they" is simple and easy, and will make life better for many people. It's correct English, and has been in use since the 16th century, albeit with some push from prescriptivists.
You're right that in the face of things like rape statistics (women are far more likely to be raped by men) or domestic violence (women are far more likely to be killed by male partners) worrying about "he" vs "they" is a small thing.
> What they are saying is that switching from "he" to "they" is simple and easy
I get that and if I remember to use it, I will, but when I instinctively do not use it, because well, "he" still comes more naturally to me than "they", it should not be assumed that I am sexist, bigoted etc. because I made a particular choice of words that can be reasonably interpreted as not meant to explicitly exclude people, unless they're looking for it.
> will make life better for many people
It's true that it may make them feel better, if they're looking at every use of a gendered pronoun from a "it's sexist" perspective, but I'd argue that's unproductive and not really making their life any better in a meaningful way
> It's correct English
That's good, but that doesn't mean that it's "intuitive" English for everyone and they shouldn't feel bad for it.
- rape has largely been defined so that it is physically close to impossible for a woman to rape a man.
- The official numbers for IPV are very close and there is a strong reason to believe that female on male IPV is dramatically underreported (female on female IPV apparently has levels similar to male on female). The only statistic I could find for murder was murder-suicide.
Maybe it depends on your origins or age, but I'm over forty and attended a conservative religious school, and it boggles even me that anyone considers "he" the current generic/default pronoun.
Ok sure. In that case, I'll point out that being "a common practice going back hundreds of years" should lead you to question something, not accept it.
It reminds me of the time I recommended (to the Unix team at a major financial institution) that they use ssh rather than telnet, and being rebuffed with "that's the way we've always done it".
In this case, since you want to be specific, the practice of defaulting to "he" correlates with hundreds of years of treating women as chattels, with economic consequences and imbalances that persist today, and continue to be reinforced through structural, unconscious, and explicit biases, and that we'd all be better off without.
The notion that language should reflect thought is as old as Plato.
I know languages where literally every word is gendered, and languages where almost nothing is gendered and haven ever seen any correlation to how women are treated.
> the practice of defaulting to "he" correlates with hundreds of years of treating women as chattels
Er, no. It just means it is the unmarked/unremarkable case corresponding to males being generally worth less and discardable ("save the women"...).
It is also a quirk of some of our languages that the gender-neutral pronouns are considered derogatory when applied to people. German and English have this problem ("it", "es"), whereas French "on" seems to be okay.
So the language requires gendering when no gender is semantically intended. In German, every noun is gendered. So "person" is "she", whereas "human" is "he", "Civilisation" and "Society" are both "she", "state" is "he". "Lampshade" is "he" whereas "Lamp" is she, etc. You can try to read deep meaning into these quirks, or you can just not.
TL;DR: Not only are you reading way to much into linguistic quirks, your analysis is also at best shaky.
But the way that sentence would normally be said where I'm from (Australia) would be "as long as they give a good talk" - no need to use specifics when you're talking about a specific person. I find it disjoining when I hear otherwise.
I also find it weird that German and Spanish inject gender into every noun, although I do get that there's little meaning behind it (from the little quizzing I've given speakers of each)
> But the way that sentence would normally be said where I'm from (Australia) would be "as long as they give a good talk"
Yes, language evolves. Currently, this is almost certainly grammatically incorrect, "they" being the third person plural and (not shown here, but assumed) the speaker being singular.
"They" is being pressed into service as the non-derogatory, gender-neutral third person singular that's missing in english. So "they" has started to mean both third person plural and unspecified third person singular. The previous solution was that "he" meant both "male" and "unspecified". So previously women got their own pronoun, men didn't, now we have a harder time telling whether there's a single person or a group.
Both solutions have their quirks, both work at some level.
Original was: "problems a speaker at a conference might have, as long as he gives a good talk/presentation."
The pronoun refers to "speaker", singular, yet indefinite, we don't necessarily know who it is.
Let's substitute "they: "problems a speaker at a conference might have, as long as they give a good talk/presentation."
Yep, works for me, but I think the "they" definitely talks about about that single (if indefinite) speaker. Yet we use the plural of the verb ("give"), so the sentence is confused, grammatically. I wonder what will give as this evolves, whether "they gives" becomes acceptable or we simple leave "they" grammatically plural even when it is semantically singular.
> Currently, this is almost certainly grammatically incorrect, "they" being the third person plural and (not shown here, but assumed) the speaker being singular.
"They" has been grammatically correct for single person of unspecified gender for hundreds of years. Do a little research before saying ignorant things.
Only "on" in French is specifically for persons whereas "it" is for things and not persons. It is properly considered derogatory to refer to a person as a thing - hardly a quirk.
"On" is also non-specific and can't stand in for he or her.
The advantage or quirk in French is the singular possessive pronouns follow the gender of the thing possessed not the possessor.
Edit: to clarify, my objection is that "on" is not an example of a gender-neutral all-purpose or sentience-neutral pronoun. Not having one of these is hardly a quirk (just a pita).
Indeed. It would be great if everyone who claims that gender neutral pronouns should be used could give a few examples, at least for us non native speakers. I get strange looks whenever I refer to people (hypothetical, or not) as "it", which would be the obvious gender neutral pronoun.
Currently it's 'they'. Yes, there's some confusion about whether it refers to one person or more, but that confusion already exists with 'you', in all except regional usages.
I've noticed this online, and I actually find it quite bizarre.
Maybe it's my age or culture (24, brought up in regional Australia then moved to the city), but I actually find it really disjointing when people use gendered pronounce when talking generics, regardless of whether it's 'he' or 'she'.
My default, myself and everyone I interactive with just default to gender neutral pronouns - not out of any sense of 'political correctness', but it just makes for easier conversation.
I have no way of knowing whether the poster you're replying to intended to use the masculine pronoun as a purposeful declaration that all conference speakers are male, but I'm having trouble understanding why you would immediately jump to the conclusion that they are engaging in "first-degree trolling". To be frank, the tone you seem to be taking in assuming that what could very well be an unintentional mistake should be used as an indictment of the poster as a troll or worse is one of the reasons I find myself somewhat fearful of posting on HN.
English is not my native language, and the language that I first learned to speak has very different rules for gender specific pronouns which results in me being very careful in how I write in English. Despite this, I sometimes(often) make mistakes. One common mistake I've noticed myself making is when I write about a specific person, male or female, I sometimes tend to then use that person's gender as the default pronoun for the rest of my sentence. I have no problem being called out on my mistakes but it makes me nervous that any error I make can be grounds for me being called a troll or a sexist.
This is happening in all parts of society. So-called "social justice warriors" and parts of the liberal left have sprung up that are very hostile to free speech and seek to destroy and silence anyone whom they oppose. Unfortunately, they have the full support of not only college administrations, but increasingly HR departments as they ascend into the workforce, and PR departments as they air their grievances over social media.
I am posting from a throw away account because voicing an opinion such as this is reason enough to be targeted.
My biggest problem with this Taleb piece is that it doesn't really take into account the probability of success from a particular intolerant minority. In practice there's a kind of signal-strength effect where the further up the chain you go the less effective any one person becomes. Once you factor that into the model Taleb's argument falls apart.
My educational experience doesn't really jive with what you're suggesting, either. There was certainly a large and vocal neoliberal/SJW caste at my (large, Canadian) university, but I never saw the administration or faculty kowtow to them in any significant way. However, I'm prepared to believe the problem does exist at some schools.
It's not related to liberal or left logically, but it is related to the liberal left socially, because these SJW movements mostly arose from the liberal left (specifically, IMHO, from the part that somehow lost track of the scope of real problems - kind of ironic, since it means they're generally a pretty "privileged" bunch themselves!).
As someone who considers himself to be liberal left, I'm annoyed by that but I do feel that it's fair to point it out. We shouldn't just bury our head in the sand in the face of an inconvenient reality.
But yes, let's please point out again and again that large parts of the SJW movements have lost track of what being liberal and left is all about, even if that's where they originally started out from.
This kind of petty, childish nonsense is why I find the whole talk/conference community awful. Which is a shame because there are good talks that are given all the time. But those can be watched online without having to deal with people who get outraged over the kinds of harmless comments quoted in this post.
Vote with you feet. I don't support Organizations or communities that imposes speech or behaviour codes. Or tries to cram identity politics, feminism or any other unrelated virtue signalling nonsense into there content.
Its a hard at the moment but more and more people are starting to realize there is a corrosive agenda behind a lot of these movements and personalities. And you can have all the inclusion you want without opening the door to social justice activist to destroy your community and derail the focus into endless navel gazing and radical social activism.
Given information publicly available this seems infuriatingly ridiculous, but Nodevember's official statement in response seems quite reasonable: http://nodevember.org/statement.html
The theories here about sociopaths attempting to exert control are quite exotic and interesting, though :P
> Given information publicly available this seems infuriatingly ridiculous, but Nodevember's official statement in response seems quite reasonable: http://nodevember.org/statement.html
That statement is the opposite of reasonable. If you're going to call someone out, publicly, that they're making other speakers uncomfortable to the point where they won't show up if he's there (when he was one of the first confirmed speakers), something is fishy. They can call him out publicly but not share their reasons publicly so he can defend himself publicly? Alternatively if they want to keep the reasons private they could have just said something along the lines of "Crockford will no longer be a speaker at our events due to <some bs>". Something that doesn't insinuate he's a misogynist without proof.
No, absolutely reasonable. They say that multiple other speakers have stated that Crockford's "presence would make some speakers uncomfortable to the point where they refused to attend or speak." So they chose to prioritise them over him, something which they can totally do as organisers. Do they owe everyone a detailed explanation for that? I think not.
1) "owe" - as in some kind of contractual obligation? were I a ticket-holder or Mr. Crockford, I would speak of being owed something, but I think you are using a strange word for a privately-presented public-conference that has insinuated quite a LOT, actually, by such a provocative statement. This private organization presenting this public conference can, of course, refuse to divulge anything it wishes to. The stench, however, only grows more fetid, like a used diaper hidden under the bed.
We are currently led to believe that the early invitation to speak issued to Mr. Crockford has been rescinded due to some horrible and recent behavior on the part of Mr. Crockford, sufficient to warrant taking said secret allegations seriously enough to both rescind the invitation AND maintain the secrecy of both the allegations AND the identities of the accusors.
While we, the rubber-necking public, are not "owed" any explanation, it's not a reasonable position to not provide one.
The pastebin conversation suffices, meanwhile to show us, the rubber-necking public, the paucity and weakness of evidence being used to dis-invite Mr. Crockford.
This is seriously some stupid shit.
It's not advancing humanity at all, and it's not EVEN worthy of the label "Social Justice Warrior" as it's more American cultural colonialism, forcing the world at large to behave like a stupid American television series of 30-minute-episodic-duration, often set in a domestic kitchenette... but I digress...
The actual Social Justice Warriors are concerned about real issues.
I meant "owe" more like as in "you owe me one". If contractual obligations for ticket holders exist, I guess they'd have to offer a refund.
Regarding the other meaning, I could only repeat myself: they state that some other speakers have big problems with Crockford, and that they chose them over him. I think it's totally ok for them to do that, even without providing more information.
In fact, it's totally conceivable that revealing more information could hurt more people, or the same people more, or Crockford himself, or all of this. I fail to see how it would "advance humanity" if they did such a thing.
it says: these charges are big enough and serious enough to grant anonomity to said "other speakers" and grant secrecy to the stated charges.
Bottom line: they are a private entity and can do whatever they wish to, more or less, however, I don't consider their petty behavior reasonable in any way, especially given the context and further info released, inadvertently or otherwise...(pastebin of Slack conversation)
"The correct thing for the organization to do" is also not really a matter of our public concern. They have already made their move, and it's shameful and wrong, IMO.
Our public concern (that which WILL advance humanity) lies in crucifying such behavior as this conference organizer has displayed, to discourage further disgusting displays of intellectual cowardice and perversion of REAL social justice issues.
Once you let privileged bullies grasp a bit of power, they don't tend to let go. It's really quite oppressive, and makes me uncomfortable. (and yes, the ability to get a keynote speaker thrown-off in a public and last minute fashion is a kind of power and privilege wielded like a true oppressor.)
It's certainly not an environment conducive to the safe spaces they seem to be verbally wishing to achieve...
(censorship via an insulting combo of an invitation and then rescinding it in order to no-platform said speaker based upon flimsy evidence of flimsy charges that don't hold-up to the slightest bit of scrutiny. Were "everyones" comfort actually considered in the slightest, the organizers would already have developed a tactic for dealing with troublemakers as such.)
Your arguments only make sense if you assume that the people refusing to speak if Crockford is there are the bullies, while they and the organisers seem to say that Crockford is the bully. Who is right? We cannot know from the available facts.
If you believe the organisers' reasons to disinvite him were not "good enough" (whatever that is), well, then just don't go there or get a refund.
The reason would be that they announced a speakers list which they then changed. Of course this happens all the time at conferences without refunds offered, so I guess it's very fair from them to do this.
If you're going to give a vague insinuating tweet regarding him being uninvited then yes they need to clarify why otherwise how do I know there is even an issue here? Many tickets purchased by people would be to hear Crockford himself speak (he's a real crowd drawer in JS conferences). So if he did something wrong that's bad enough to make multiple speakers, those who actually wouldn't have to interact or deal with him much at all, then it needs to be public because it's apparently bad.
Alternatively if they don't want to say because, let's say he did do something awful and saying why would give the victim away, then why the original insinuation in the first place? Instead they should have went the professional route of simply saying he's no longer coming or something.
Ultimately we, while allowed to say almost anything,need to mind what we say about others. If someone is saying unsubstantiated things regarding someone else that could be career ending in this current climate. If it is substantiated then it should be brought to the attebtion of police or perhaps the public depending on what it is.
I didn't mean to suggest their initial behavior was reasonable. In their statement that I referenced they apologize for their initially insensitive behavior and offer to refund tickets for anyone that no longer wishes to attend. Does this excuse their initial gaffe? No. Is it a reasonable way to move forward given their mistake? I think so. Is it their obligation, and is it in the best interest of people to further elaborate on their decision at this point? Depending on the details, quite possibly not.
449 comments
[ 5.7 ms ] story [ 317 ms ] threadIt's a tempest in a teapot, not at all comparable to the LambdaConf thing, which I almost wish I hadn't learned about.
[0] http://etymonline.com/index.php?term=promiscuous
To me it reads as part nostalgia for the old "promiscuity" and lack of need for complex network security. It paints it as a period of innocence. I did not see any "shaming" of anything.
Unless he followed up with something more offensive, it would seem the person complaining didn't even understand what he was saying.
Perhaps you need to be of a certain age (if anyone told me I'd soon be using that phrase about myself...) to be likely to "get" that this was not a description of "bad old days" but of good old days.
Back in the "bad old days" of the simplex NCP protocol [2], before the duplex TCP/IP protocol legalized same-sex network connections, connect and listen sockets had gender defined by their parity, and all connections were required to use sockets with different parity gender (one even and the other odd -- I can't remember which was which, or if it even mattered -- they just had to be different).
The act of trying to connect an even socket to another even socket, or an odd socket to another odd socket, was considered a "peculiar error" called "homosocketuality", which was strictly forbidden by internet protocols, and mandatory "heterosocketuality" was called the "Anita Bryant feature".
Anita Bryant [3] slut shamed not only all gays but even Jim Morrison. It's not like Douglas Crockford held a "Rally for Decency" at the Orange Bowl to slut shame a popular poet and performance artist [4]. Just throw a pie in his face [5] and move on.
http://www.saildart.org/IMPSER.DOC[SS,SYS]
When the error code is zero, the next 8 bit byte is the Stanford peculiar error code, followed by 72 bits of the ailing command returned. Here are the Stanford error codes. [...]
IGN 3 Illegal Gender (Anita Bryant feature--sockets must be heterosocketual, ie. odd to even and even to odd) [...]
Illegal gender in RFC, host hhh/iii, link 0
The host is trying to engage us in homosocketuality. Since this is against the laws of God and ARPA, we naturally refuse to consent to it.
http://www.saildart.org/FTP.NCP[S,NET]
(The PDP-10 code above adds the connect and listen socket numbers together, which results in bit 0 being 0 if they are the same gender, then TRNN is "test bits right, no change, skip if non zero", which skips the next instruction (jrst gayskt) if they different sex.)[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Promiscuous_mode
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Control_Program
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anita_Bryant
[4] http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/jim-morrison-prom...
[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-A2Ql81WTY
That's weird that it does several different types of moves in a row into the same register -- there must be some kind of implicit calculation going on, or maybe it's just a bug.
I'd use "git blame" to bug-shame whoever wrote that heterosexist code, but I don't think they were using safe source code control practices back then.
> There are perfectly legitimate reasons to put a network interface controller into promiscuous mode
Absolutely - for a long time it was the only way of adding multiple IP address aliases on a single network card in Linux for example (might hav been the same on other OS's - I don't know).
I once had someone imply we were trying to hack because our web servers had the network cards in promiscuous mode for that reason (of course this was a genuine concern - they could not verify the difference between someone innocently adding IP aliases and someone listening in on the mostly unencrypted traffic intended for the other servers connected to the same hub (I don't miss hubs...)
It's not that baffling. Being a victim of harassment raises your status in certain circles. People in those circles tend to accept your word without requiring any other evidence, and so naturally some people will find harassment in anything that happens to or near them that can be stretched or interpreted, no matter how far fetched, in some way to be harassment.
This is bad because it makes it harder for actual victims. Too many people making exaggerated or false claims will make people less likely to believe the real victims.
This is probably more general. In general, if some event raises status in a group a person is in, and claims of that event are hard to verify, some people will claim the event even if it did not happen to them. They may not even be knowingly lying. They may be convinced it did happen.
A couple examples are having Native American ancestry and being abducted by a UFO. Many people claim one or both of these, and there are groups in which those claims will raise your status. Result: a lot more people claim Native American ancestry than actually have Native American ancestors, and the number of people who claim to have been abducted by UFOs is way higher than the number who have actually been abducted. My guess would be most of these false claims are from people who believe they are telling the truth.
The desire for status in the groups you are in is very strong. For instance, I recall reading a book about the major criminal gangs on Los Angeles, and they talked about status within the gangs. One of the things that earned you higher status was being arrested, refusing to talk or cooperate, refusing to take a plea bargain, and getting sent to jail. Gaining status was so important to new, young teen gang members that they would purposefully commit crimes that would get them a few months incarceration so that they could gain the status. Note that unlike UFO abduction or Native Ancestry, serving jail time is verifiable, so they young gang members cannot simply claim they served time to gain the status. They actually have to do it, and they do because gaining status is that important.
Any evolutionary biologists here? I'm curious if our need for status is just a cultural thing, or if it predates culture? I believe that most of our current close primate relatives live in groups where status relationships are very important, so it seems at least plausible that this is something that developed very long ago, in the common ancestors we share with those other primates.
How can you possibly be certain of that?
Look at the actual people who incite these campaigns (e.g., https://twitter.com/nexxylove/status/771503661956501504).
"Don't bother to examine a folly, ask yourself only what it accomplishes". These people have a laser-focused sensitivity on actions which make certain groups feel unwelcome. They can't be unaware of the messages they themselves are sending. Who are they trying to make feel unwelcome?
I thought it was a joke, I mean... its almost funny now.
"I have a theory, feel free to prove me wrong by "kicking out" "toxic actors", I dare you".
The sad part is, I think she does have a point. People who treat each other decently might soon enough LEARN to be great coders, while being good at something is really no excuse to be a dick. Not that I think Crockford is one, but generally speaking; the better you are, the more polite you ought to be towards "little ones", or you're an asshole. But the whole logic of let's prove it by assuming it's true, with ZERO thought given to what to do if it turns out wrong, is just one gaping wound of a brainfart, I'm just astonished. I'm not not just saying that to be snarky: it does remind me of things Hannah Arendt wrote about totalitarian propaganda, e.g. someone is declared as unfit to live and then killed, proving the theory correct, with some pseudo-scientific, pseudo-compassionate babble on the side. Oh, but they're "just" declaring people as non-existing for them and any decent person, so that's different, right? Well, not different enough to be acceptable. One way in which it is the SAME is that the words are just a bunch of hot air and sophistry, the standards are all double - it's all about the action, the movement, the in-group. You don't have to build concentration camps for there to be something deeply wrong with that.
> They can't be unaware of the messages they themselves are sending.
Oh, as foot soldiers of course they can be unaware. Between https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_projection and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect there isn't anything anyone cannot get themselves to believe.
The Tech community is sexist? Extremely sexist?
How so?
See also the expansion of Title IX and the resulting chill on campus speech.
No it's not. Did you forget about the lambda conf already? it's everywhere in the Tech community, which is less and less about tech, and more and more about pushing some unrelated political drivel.
Also, I think there's some amount of momentum behind the legitimate disclosure of unacceptable behavior. The fact that many women and minorities lately feel unashamed in admitting that they were oppressed/assaulted/etc is a net win. The perpetrators of that oppression and violence should get justice. But it probably brings with it some risk of attention-seekers and easily-offended folks too.
I don't see any justice in that story. Justice means the accused should have the right to defend himself and be confronted to his accuser. He often doesn't as "political tribunals" have already decided he already is guilty. Don't conflate "justice" with witch hunts.
I referred to the fact that many women no longer feel embarassment or shame that would prevent an attacker from getting justice, or minorities with a policeman's justice -- I said that was a "net win." In earlier decades these legitimate evils might have gone un-punished, and that's bad.
But unfortunately with that good comes the potential bad that some folks are emboldened to cry wolf.
[1] https://www.buzzfeed.com/katiejmbaker/heres-the-powerful-let...
[2] http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-police-deaths-20160707-s...
Eventually the people who just want to build shit and get things done will have to splinter off again and go back into an uncool cultural ghetto.
Also, it's a terrible word in an aesthetic sense. People don't try to bring much elegance to neologisms these days. Such a pity.
Edit: I thought a little further about it, and I can expand a bit. It's in the unhappy valley between too clever and not clever enough. Sort of like referring to Comcast as comcrap.
> And he said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness. Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me. Therefore I take pleasure in infirmities, in reproaches, in necessities, in persecutions, in distresses for Christ's sake: for when I am weak, then am I strong.
The 'grace' comes from the fact that God won't judge us for our sins because Jesus took our place in the courtroom. So rather than our being damned, Jesus saved us through His perfect sacrifice.
Crybullies are the persecutors, no? They're the ones to pray to God for deliverance FROM!
However, these events lead me to question if silencing the "bullies" is the only strategy in activist playbook? How is it different from a minority voice not being heard? If there is no common platform to interact with those "bullies", how else would you prove their belief's fallacious.
Some women and minorities (some, nowhere near a majority, but it only takes a few to stir up a lot of trouble) are also jerks and assholes, and when that draws criticism or anger or insults they can rationalize it away as them being attacked for their race or sex.
It's a lot easier on the ego and self-esteem to think that someone dislikes you because of something you have no control over such as your race or sex rather than because you have a terrible personality.
These "women" aren't making it easier for real girls in real engineering programs.
Developer evangelist is a nonsense job that can be useful to a company to attract certain funding, nothing more. It's the politically correct version of a booth babe.
I certainly don’t want to see sexist speakers at conferences, but this decision seems to have been made with almost no evidence and almost purely based on unsubstantiated rumours.
[0] http://nodevember.org/statement.html
I justify being pedantic here, though, because the justice system is not just a binary system of "Someone got hurt, and now someone will pay in a court of law". Other common-sense factors are taken into consideration (such as the magnitude of alleged defamation, and whether the defendant is a public figure). And in terms of how things are regardless of U.S. civil law, the reality is that Douglas Crockford is Douglas Crockford. Just because some relative nobodies said hurtful things to him and he got disinvited from a privately-run conference doesn't mean he needs to turn to the justice system to find recourse. As we speak, whoever is running Nodevember's Twitter account is probably wishing they were running @CincinnatiZoo, post-Harambe. And the people who made allegations against Crockford are likely getting death threats and other things hurled their way. I'm not implying that I, or Crockford, think that this is the way things should be, but unless Crockford can conclusively argue that being shunned by Nodevember has destroyed his livelihood, arguing that Crockford deserves legal recourse against personally harmful speech would require some radical revamping of First Amendment rights.
Along those lines in this situation, I'm not really part of the Node/JS community, but I have at least heard of Crockford, and have never heard of Nodevember. It seems likely that the Nodevember people will suffer a lot more from this drama than Mr. Crockford. It seems petty and undignified to me for Crockford to start any kind of legal action, as they will probably suffer more from the lack of his presence and the drama related to this than any legal action would be likely to cause.
I don't want to see a sexist talk (as opposed to a-sexist talk), but an 'objectionable' speaker really shouldn't be a problem if their talk would otherwise have merit and they can be reasonably expected not to be objectionable on stage.
No-platforming and economic warfare are tactics used by the worst kind of political actors, the kind you should be actively avoiding if you value your own livelihood, let alone anybody elses.
I agree, you’ve worded that better than me.
If this even shows up on your radar and is a priority, then I'd say the mission you're fighting for has been accomplished a long time ago. Time to go home.
I don't know who really benefits from policing every word that public tech figures say. There's no monetary value to this unless this is a PR stunt to make the conference get social justice brownie points in some kind of a twisted form of social posturing. Who's to gain from this? Sociopaths wanting to exert control over others? I'm not quite ready to believe that.
I used to be where you are.
I am now however firmly of the belief that there are these sociopaths wanting to exert control over others.
What's worse is that their righteousness only fuels their fervor.
Yes, and thankfully that sense of righteous indignation very often causes them to eat their own.
People do make money from this by raising their profile. Every successful no-platform campaign that they organise is attached to their name and raises their credentials in this sordid business. Some of the worst examples end up in extremely well paid positions in the biggest tech companies.
Because - academically speaking - its primarily about being sex, sex worker, and trans positive Vs how regressive 2nd Wave was on those issues.
For the record, I've seen Crockford talk... It wasn't offensive, it just wasn't very good. He seemed more interested in calling out business decisions which companies have made that he felt were stupid, than actually talking about anything related to JavaScript. Maybe that's just how his talks go and I didn't realize, but it wasn't what I was expecting.
The javascript developer who took offense (Kas?) definitely seems to have taken it too far, automatically associating Douglas's personality with being a jerk.
The other issue at hand is how this influences tech conferences, because I've always attended conferences with the implicit assumption that I was there to learn first and foremost. Discourse and disagreement with speakers is natural and should be encouraged, as it oftentimes leads to enlightening discussions for bystanders and conference attendees, which was the entire point of the conference in the first place. By allowing certain viewpoints to dominate and silence a subset of speakers, we're ultimately limiting our views and building an echo chamber, which is not what conferences are meant to be. If we're going to dismiss speakers, it should be on merit of their talk and previous talks, not their speaking style.
[1]: https://github.com/douglascrockford/JSLint/issues/17
If someone has to be so careful as to not use normal network terminology around people who are clearly ignorant and use their ignorance as a weapon against you instead of take the time to learn what the hell they are talking about, that's not a community you want to participate in anyway.
"You can write all the crappy code you want. I don't care, because you don't work for me. The purpose of JSLint is not to make you feel good about your bad choices. It is to help you conform to a more reliable subset of the language."
I've met many people who are "dicks without knowing it". Sometimes it's because they are that far up their own arse. Sometimes it's raw abrasion. It's common in the private healthcare industry.
Seems like throwing of the dummy out the pram. I'd prefer Crockford's direct approach to sugar-coat. It's how I like to work.
That and if someone's focus is on inclusion, perhaps it's an ill-thought marketing campaign where the result is exclusion.
I find it much nicer and respectful than the passive-aggressive weasel-wordishness so common now.
The commenter literally says "it's important to note that Douglas Crockford can definitely be abrasive [1]. The issue at hand is that whether this abrasiveness is a bad thing..."
EDIT: And I should have made that more clear, thanks for pointing it out.
I'm not sure what bearing, if any, one's contributions should have on how individuals or communities respond to behaviour and "abrasiveness". Good deeds should obviously be respected and appreciated, however they should not shelter one from criticism.
> automatically associating Douglas's personality with being a jerk.
Being a jerk is usually associated with one's personality.
> By allowing certain viewpoints to dominate and silence a subset of speakers, we're ultimately limiting our views and building an echo chamber,
One could argue that by enabling abrasive and overpowering personalities and cults of celebrity to dominate these events we were already doing that.
> If we're going to dismiss speakers, it should be on merit of their talk and previous talks, not their speaking style.
I would think speaking style matters at least somewhat if one is planning on speaking.
Everyone has bad days, everyone can be an arsehole to others due to the emotions swirling around in their heads. It doesn't mean they are a jerk. It may just mean you asked your question when they were going through a difficult time. If you asked the same question on a different day you got a pleasant answer.
I think this kind of bias is often overlooked
" douglascrockford commented on Feb 21, 2011
I am sorry I hurt your feelings."
I'll take someone who realizes they made a mistake and apologizes for it any day over someone who seeks to get rid of all the people they don't like.
(I'm not saying that's how it was intended or anything. I have no idea. Just saying this could just as easily be evidence for abrasiveness as against it. I'll also just note that I don't think someone should be removed from a conference for mild abrasiveness regardless.)
Normally without the nuance of speech it might be impossible to tell if it was meant in a genuine way. In this case however the context makes it clear he is being arrogant and egotistical in a manner quite consistent with techie internet forum behavior.
The idea of a javascript developer feeling intellectual superiority is of course absurd.*
* Joke
In my experience, you should always give people the benefit of the doubt in such things. I've honestly thought otherwise in many other occasions, only to be proven wrong.
And one can read just as easily that the other party seems hurt by the rejection. I would not readily assume that he can't read that either.
This may not be a court of law, but I always try to think twice before I judge people. It's almost always the wrong approach, at least in my experience, and I certainly haven't always been on the right side of that.
In the end, you don't win anything by being right about this kind of thing and I know it's way too easy for me to do all the things I hate seeing others do :(
It's just being abrasive for the sake of being abrasive.
Not that I think that thread is grounds to kick out a speaker
I agree with this, but we should tease “disagreement about the ideas that are the purpose of the conference” apart from “disagreement about things not relevant to the conference.”
If I go to a JavaScript conference, I am more than happy to see two speakers in a monkey-knife fight over whether the class keyword is taking two steps backwards. Those are the core ideas relevant to the conference.
Making jokes or metaphors that touch on contentious social topics like gender roles and so forth can touch of disagreement that may be valuable in a larger social context--like on HN and a whole or the internet as a whole, but it is off-topic for most technology conferences.
It’s a lot like discussing a programming problem on HN, and then someone mentions IQ, and someone else mentions how terrible it is that we can’t give interviewees IQ tests, and then we’re discussing racism, the right and wrong way to interview programmers, and on and on and on with something that si no longer the original programming problem.
None of what I am saying implies that I agree that Mr. Crockford should have been uninvited, and nor is it an endorsement of his choices as a speaker. But in a general sense, I totally get why its ideal that when I give a talk, I avoid jokes and metaphors that invite off-topic debate.
And likewise, I get why conferences ought to attempt to moderate the talks such that they have the highest probability of leading to on-topic debate. It’s much the same as moderating Hacker News threads to stay roughly on-topic and with high quality.
I would say he is one of the more likely speakers to stay on topic.
As far as feedback on ideas goes, this is a harsh criticism, but it hasn't really crossed the line into abrasiveness because it's not a personal attack. It's just a given that even smart people can and do have stupid ideas. At no point did he say or imply anything about the person raising the idea.
So I'm inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt, out of sentimentality. At the same time, I know that one speech and/or book is not enough (if anything ever is) to judge whether someone has or hasn't been harmful to people who are not me.
But after reading the original critique on Medium, and the OP's transcription of when Crockford allegedly "slut-shames the audience", I don't feel convinced to have a negative impression of Crockford. I'm not saying that the original complainant isn't justified in their critique or that there isn't more to the story, because I know that things are different in person. But I could also be sympathetic towards the OP's defense of Crockford.
In terms of Nodevember's decision, well, they have different prerogatives when running a conference. And having a speaker who allegedly so openly derides other speakers is definitely something they have to think about in ways that I as an individual do not.
[0] http://original.livestream.com/etsy/video?clipId=pla_1463e54...
edit: One thing I personally find disingenuous about the OP's writeup is their appeal to the dictionary definition of "promiscuous" to defend Crockford. I guess it's just up to people's opinion, but I felt that Crockford was clearly using "promiscuous" in the first sense -- "indiscriminate mingling or association". I've never even heard of the second sense, and very little in Crockford's transcribed statement seems to suggest why "promiscuous" would be the right word to use instead of something like "heterogeneous".
That said, I also don't feel that Crockford's statement was slut-shaming. Saying, "Back in the day, you could browse the web like a whore, not caring what your computer connected to. But with the new web..."
But that's not what he says at all. You could read a sexual connotation to what he says, but the words he use is very much about being indiscriminate about security and identity. He even states that there is a benefit to promiscuity -- "because you could go from one thing to another and discover stuff and start forming relationships" and directly implies there's a tradeoff with the security of commitment.
For sake of argument, let's assume that he had said exactly this. Even so, I still don't see the claims being met. First, even though the metaphor may be "sexual", I don't see anything that would make it "sexist". Promiscuity as a behavior is far from limited to females, and he's at least equally addressing males with his "you".
But further, the quote leads off with "So the old web was great because it provided promiscuity". Rather than "shaming", if we apply a sexual interpretation, his statement seems downright "sex-positive". If anything I'd expect the critique to be coming from the "family values" side, for putting such a positive spin on promiscuity.
My guess is that dissecting Crockford's language leads won't produce useful insights, either into him or his detractors. Instead, I think this is increasingly about "power". Some individuals realized that with the right accusations (regardless of validity) they can replace the old leadership, and others (seeing their success) are excited to try their own hand.
The scary part is what happens when the accusations are replaced with actions, as this is when it sometimes get really ugly. I don't know the history well, but I can't help thinking of the violent excesses of the youthful Red Guard in 1960's China: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Guards_(China).
Sure, you could argue that "whore" is used against men, e.g. "He's such a manwhore". Just like someone could persuadively argue that their habit of wearing Confederate flag t-shirts has nothing to do with 19th-century American thinking about slavery. But we make judgments based on a spectrum of pragmatism and likelihoods, and we can make our own decisions to attend or avoid events that invite or disinvite such folks.
In the case of Crockford, I fully support the right for Nodevember to have its own threshold for what makes someone too much of a jerk to be a fit for their audience. And I personally wouldn't be inclined to go to such a conference, because I think that that threshold would likely exclude too many people besides Crockford, such that the event doesn't seem worth my time or travel expenses
Sorry to be snippy, but no, that's not the point. That's your point, and one possible counter argument. The worry is that while true, it's weak and specific, and leaves the way open to further attacks. By concentrating on the counterfactual I'm trying to address a broader issue.
This person inferred 'whore' from 'promiscuous'.
Who is "this person"? I don't think anyone inferred this -- it's a counterfactual. In particular, Perch did not use the term 'whore': https://medium.com/@nodebotanist/why-i-won-t-be-speaking-at-...
I think it's also worth noting that the word 'promiscuous' already has a history in computers.
Both I and 'danso' know the meaning of 'promiscuous' with regard to packet snooping. We didn't mention it here because it's amply discussed elsewhere, and because it's not relevant to the discussion we are having. The real question, as with "daemon processes" and "master and slave relationships" is whether this usage is appropriate today, not whether the usage has precedent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Promiscuous_mode
And this version exactly fits what he was trying to get across.
idk a/b the second comment.. it does appear that's being read into, but w/o context of the talk or intonation, it's difficult to conclude intent. I'd like to think it's not negative.
but the first transcript in the article? the context for that is that dude is not "jacked" or "ripped", flexing on stage like a lumberjack. don't think he's in bad health or anything, but i suspect the first comment was poking fun at himself, mostly.
People who use other languages have real problems.
I mean, if you're going to ban Douglas Crockford from your conference it should at least be for his stated prejudice against comments in data-interchange formats. Not vague allegations that may damage his personal and professional reputation, to which he not only has no right of reply, but any response could be damaging by generating more attention. This is the classic trolling strategy, but stepped up a level.
If he actually did something wrong, take him to court and let the facts be decided in law. Otherwise, he's innocent and should be treated as such.
I also wonder, given that the allegations haven't been published, just implied, if he would have a libel case against the conference organisers?
The allegations are published and the OP links to the original complaint on Medium: https://medium.com/@nodebotanist/why-i-won-t-be-speaking-at-...
Furthermore, the best defense against libel is the truth. Part of the complaint is an opinion based on public statements made by Crockford (the "slut-shaming"). The other published complaint is that Crockford said to the complainant before her talk, "the talks as the day went on just got stupider and stupider.” Unless he can convincingly prove that he never made such a statement to the complainant, he's not going to have much of a libel case. He could argue damages based on "false light", I suppose. [0]
On a (computer-related) technical standpoint, I disagree with what you think is the right reason ban a technical speaker, e.g. Crockford "for his stated prejudice against comments in data-interchange formats". That's the kind of strong diverse opinions that a tech conference should be thirsty for, just like a Ruby conference should be thrilled to have Edsgar Dijkstra talk about object-oriented programming.
But if someone says, "People who think comments belong in data interchange formats are fucking morons"...Yeah, I could see why some conferences wouldn't invite them.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_light
That passive-aggressive "update" is quite telling of his/her personality: "I’ve switched comments to ‘not visible.’ I won’t be reading them. I don’t feel the need to justify this, either. Thanks <3."
Ironically, that language "triggered" very bad memories of an extremely dishonest and passive-aggressive person I once worked with.
http://nodevember.org/statement.html
This does not give much more information, but it does acknowledge that the tweet was poorly worded. Not sure how helpful that is though, now that the genie is out of the bottle.
I'm joking of course. The Good Parts is amazing, and JSON is amazing. The attendees of nodevember will miss out on an amazing speaker too.
This is hilariously ridiculous. Being unprofessional, uncivilised or objectionable is not illegal. In fact the majority of reasons for someone to be fired do not involve breaches of the law. And even if it was illegal conduct e.g. sexual harassment the onus is on the accuser to have enough evidence to convict. Which is not always the case.
And no he doesn't have a libel case against the organisers.
Nodevember's tweet seems borderline libelous to me, unless they are willing to explain exactly what the event/statement/whatever is that got him pulled from the lineup is.
I almost feel in the minority (or just a silent one?), but I honestly don't care what kind of political views, personal preferences, outrageous statements or whatever problems a speaker at a conference might have, as long as he gives a good talk/presentation.
I think it's easy to look past someone's personal preferences and outrageous comments when you're already part of the club. But respect that that isn't everyone's experience.
What specifically did Crockford say that was outrageous?
I was addressing the parent comment's point about inclusiveness in general.
and it's rather "put-up or shut-up" time, I'd say.
I've never heard of this conference. I've read Crockfords books, and while any given person on earth may be a total bear to deal with, I'm not buying this greasy smarmy "he'd been uninvited for undisclosed reasons but we'll imply lot's of socially-disapproved-of reasons without confirming nor denying any of them"
what a kafka-esque load of nonsense.
the conference organizers are in the wrong and are doing further damage with every greasy fart they let out by way of explanation.
disgusting.
Way back in the good ol' days, this was exactly the sort of thing used to oppress the minorities: an unknown group of well-connected men would get together to black-ball someone for being the wrong sort of person, with no explanation, recourse, or accountability.
Like I have said before: choose your enemies carefully; you become them. The faces may have changed, but the behavior hasn't.
For the millionth time, this isn't about what people are legally allowed to do. This is about what it's right to do.
Suppose you are using JSON to keep configuration files, which you would like to annotate. Go ahead and insert all the comments you like. Then pipe it through JSMin before handing it to your JSON parser."
https://plus.google.com/+DouglasCrockfordEsq/posts/RK8qyGVaG...
Maybe people shouldn't be so precious snowflakes that should always feel "comfortable" and "welcome"? Maybe they should have the courage to be challenged?
I blame it on the BS "you are so special" mode of baby boomer parenting...
Most parents seem to teach their children that, but looking at the millennial generation, of which I am unfortunately part, you're supposed to be "accepting" and "tolerant", unless someone else's uniqueness hurts your feelings or makes you feel uncomfortable.
The former is just plain childish, and the latter is just too vague to base an ideology off of.
I find it interesting if a speaker has vastly different preferences, political views and makes outrageous statements that I'd never make.
That doesn't mean I'm always comfortable with it, but it's interesting to think about how people came to be different than me. It's interesting to see their interaction with others. I might learn something, even if I disagree.
Having all people be "my way" on the other hand, sounds really numb.
I literally have to force myself to act extroverted in order to succeed in the workplace. People just assume that if you're a guy, you're just a confident hussler.
I know several introverted white guys who are extremely qualified but missed out on job offers because they were honest about their qualifications and didn't talk themselves up like some other guys do.
Being introverted, shy or weak isn't necessarily a female attribute. The fact that someone assumes that makes THEM the sexist one.
This is, literally, what it feels like to be a minority in the US and most European countries. Everything about you is questionable, you get slighted all the time, and you're the representative of an entire ethnicity. So whatever you do or opinions you hold are representative of the entire group.
I'm pretty sure their public removal was a little harsher and unfair without a so-called minority card to play.
No, kind of like in 2016.
>What about those minorities wrongfully imprisoned for long periods of time for nothing short of suspicion before being released with no charges (or worse)?
What about them? I've talked about famous people.
Chris Rock pointed out that in being a black actor he is not allowed to make a bad/questionable movie. He makes one bad film and and all of black Hollywood is out of work for a year.
I think if you're famous/succesful, the minority/victim card can be played to your advantage too.
If you're a poor/unknown minority, nobody gives a fuck.
The same way few care or write indignant posts for sex trafficking victims or exploited immigrant people, but if some minority member at some $1000/person conference hears something they that hurts their feelings, it warrants a small media/social-media storm.
It's the upper middle class minority version of "white people's problems".
If they are going to insinuate things about what he said, they should mention exactly what he said or did.
The fact that they don't somehow tells me there is not much there to go on.
To put it another way, if they have the guts to remove Crockford that should have enough guts to clearly explain why.
I've been saying this before, and maybe it is just me, but it seems Node.js community somehow attracts a disproportionate number of immature people but with big egos. Because, let's call this for what it is -- childish immature behavior. That's at best, at worst it is getting attention and hurting someone's reputation just for a power trip. "Look how important I am, I kicked Crockford out of a conference with a single tweet".
Well the lesson is when you pick some open source technology, the community comes with it. Maybe even if technology has good merits, it makes sense not to pick it because the community behind it is not compatible with what you think a community should be.
Imagine saying that about anyone, to any group (here it was to the whole world).
Let's say the invite you to a gathering publicly then wrote a tweet about "We will also be removing eli from list of invited guests, to help make the venue a comfortable environment for all".
That is just insulting, because it insinuates something terrible has happened, or you did some shameful unspeakable thing and they are just being considerate and not disclosing it publicly.
Clearer now?
Or they might prefer their pal to come speak at the last few open entries, and Douglas got invited instead.
Or they might be idiots.
Or insane.
Or "professional" touchy-feelers....
"We have asked John Doe not to attend the party as we have heard word that many parents would not be comfortable having him around their children".
Claims nothing, insinuates obvious reputation destroying behavior.
The insinuation made in the actual example with Douglas Crawford isn't exactly this clear cut, but it is still very damaging while lacking documented basis in reality.
Imagine your child was expelled from your local school and the reason given was "she made others feel uncomfortable". And that was the end of the discussion.
you'll have gotten better treatment than Mr. Crockford did, because clearly there wasn't much reviewing done by Nodevember. Otherwise, they could surely fill us in on what they reviewed?
What's legal/within one's rights and what's right is not the same thing.
To be also right, those HN moderators should also have thoroughly investigated (reviewed) those complaints, not just knee-jerk reacted to them (as seems to be the case here).
And even then, they should publicly state the reasons, not just leave an insinuation open.
And if this did had happened to you personally, with all the possible implications in your reputation, job etc, you'll be also demanding this of them too.
That's a really comfortable environment, indeed.
It seems to me like numerous advocacy organizations nowadays have run out of genuine grievances and are now attacking largely innocent things, possibly in turn harming their cause.
If you love reading "I found a UFO!" blogs, pretty soon you're going to see something weird in the sky and think it's a UFO.
If you love reading "I found a misogynist!" blogs...
> The fact that they don't somehow tells me there is not much there to go on.
FWIW organizations will often refuse to disclose the precise nature of these kinds of accusations, because it would (a) impinge on the privacy of a victim, (b) start a circus trial in the Court of Public Opinion (which this thread is already becoming) or even (c) further shame the accused, and it's a favor to everyone involved to stay mum.
As external parties whose involvement probably extends no further than commenting on HN, we're not entitled to an explanation nor should we expect one. It could all be a big screen of plausible deniability, or there could be serious accusations at the heart of this.
Use your own intuition to decide if their behavior is in earnest, but speculating what happened is useless (and distasteful besides).
Given the terrible track record of the JS community with regards to basic behavior, I really have to wonder what is wrong and why anyone should risk their personal reputation by doing public activities in JS.
Perhaps transpiling purely to avoid interacting with caustic elements of the JS community will be the new normal.
Their whole handling of the situation was incredibly unprofessional. Really makes the whole conference sound like utter crap if they can't even handle something like that like adults.
Maybe someone can tell me what's offensive about the first comment. It seems to be poking fun at programmer machismo.
The second quote is more problematic. I'm firmly of the opinion that it is not slut-shaming because it presented both promiscuity and commitment in a positive light. On the other hand, it is perfectly reasonable for a conference to not want sexual metaphors in presentations. The whole "he used the word correctly" in TFA is a non-sequitur when the first definition is clearly sexual, and promiscuity is contrasted with commitment. Still, I would hope that less extreme measures than banning would be used to address this.
Now to one thing not in TFA, but in the linked medium post:
> I’ve never dealt with Crockford in a way that I felt pleasant afterward. He is rude, unrepentant, and completely (one could argue willingly) oblivious to the meaning of his statements. I’ve never seen a person use the word ‘stupid’ so liberally in replacement of constructive criticism.
A conference is more than a bunch of people giving talks, it's a social gathering. If there were a lot of people who agree with Kas on this, then it's a much more reasonable reason to keep him out.
On a much smaller scale, I often run pencil-and-paper RPG groups. Being a jerk is much more likely to find yourself out of my group compared to game-mechanics related issues.
But I agree with you that no matter whether you are ok with the terms, calling it slut shaming is just strange.
I also agree with you that acting like a jerk would be a better reason for banning someone. But I'd also argue that "outing" him is worse than the alleged behaviour in that respect - if they're going to punish him for what has been reported, then they also ought to punish that kind of public shaming that pretty much makes it impossible for said person to get fair treatment.
Eventually they'll get to that. Hopefully they'll denounce TCP as a result and remove themselves from the internet.
I would hope that everybody with a genuine interest in technology finds these people ridiculous, and their constant demands to kick people out of things for nonsensical reasons more offense than anything that was supposedly said.
At the time of the post, Crockford was slated to be an attendee. In fairness, this would imply that Perch be uninvited from the conference for violating the code of conduct. Or does the code of conduct have an escape cause in cases where everyone agrees that the victim has really "gone too far"?
Some of us had been threatening our friend Colby for a long time, because of the way he had been behaving. And now he'd gone too far, so we decided to hang him. Colby argued that just because he had gone too far (he did not deny that he had gone too far) did not mean that he should be subjected to hanging. Going too far, he said, was something everybody did sometimes. We didn't pay much attention to this argument.http://jessamyn.com/barth/colby.html
It's a fantastic story, and while I'll concede that it's only tangential to critiques of codes of conduct, reading the story would almost certainly be more enjoyable than spending time thinking about the inherent contradictions of tolerating intolerance. If you prefer video, I was amazed to find that a couple years ago someone (Chris Rubino) remade Barthelme's classic story as a short film: https://vimeo.com/149832821
Seems to me to be a useless rule, or at least one that needs some clarification. If criticizing others' works is included in that, then having meaningful discussions is not possible. If criticizing others' works is not included in that, then "Your talk was stupid" which is clearly insulting and (in most contexts) non-constructive, would still be allowed.
At its best, it's redundant with "Be kind to others." Its placement immediately after seems to be intended as an example of unkind behavior, but IMO it muddies, rather than clarifies the situation.
But this seems less like an attempt to avoid exposure to DC than an attempt to prevent others from being exposed.
You don't need a public tribunal to understand this failed the reasonable person test.
Listen to actual conferences these two have held. Calling others assholes, subhuman, human garbage and worse simply for dismissing their twisted ideology. Kas has shamed Twitter users lives. All of this would be against Nodevembers CoC.
Disease
One of the more successful "games" we invented for Habitat was the disease. There are three strains currently defined:
Cooties
Happy Face
Mutant (AKA The Fly)
We only were able to test Cooties with live players, but it was a hit. It works like this: Several initial Avatars are infected with a "Cootie" head. This head replaces the current one, and cannot be removed except by touching another non-infected Avatar. Once infected, you can not be infected again that day. In effect, this game is "tag" and "keep away" at the same time. Often people would allow themselves be infected just so he could infect "that special person that they know would just hate it!" Every time the disease was spread, there was an announcement at least a week before, and for at least a week afterward it was the subject of major discussions. One day that the plague was spread, a female Avatar that was getting married got infected 1 hour before her wedding! Needless to say, she was very excited, and in a panic until a friend offered to take it off her hands.
Some interesting variations to try on this are: Touch 2 people to cure; this would cause quite a preponderance of infected people late in the day. The "Happy Face" plague: This simple head has the side effect of changing any talk message (word balloons) to come out as "HAVE A NICE DAY!"... can you imagine infecting some unsuspecting soul, and him saying back to you HAVE A NICE DAY! ??? ESP and mail still work normally, so the user is not without communications channels. The Mutant Plague: The head looks like the head of a giant housefly and it has the effect of changing talk text to "Bzzz zzzz zzzz". We think these all will be great fun.
[1] http://www.crockford.com/ec/anecdotes.html
Given the content of your first remark, I'm strongly inclined to suspect this use of the explicitly masculine pronoun is first-degree trolling.
This serves as a counterexample to your point, because as statements go, it would be simply be factually (rather than politically) correct to have said "they" rather than "he", unless you really do hold an expectation that all conference speakers are male. In other words, neutral language is more rational, not less.
This leads to a toxic atmosphere where people can't be secure in their words, social reality keeps being pulled out from under their feet.
The insecurity you observe is feeling of the erosion of privilege.
http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/hot-allostatic-load/
http://tomwoods.com/podcast/ep-726-how-and-why-progressives-...
So... maybe not the best analogy, but understood.
Having grown up in a society where sexism/racism/casteism is extremely blatant (in urban India), I sometimes find it hard to comprehend the utility of labelling people harshly for what might be innocuous comments. I almost feel those energies must be spent in condemning the "real" racists/sexists, many of whom are still allowed to scream whatever offensive nonsense they please (I have seen many growing up). How do people feel genuine outrage over harmless comments? Are we allowed to ever call out on hypersensitivity?
Also, as a vegan, sometimes I do feel genuinely sad when I see lots of meat being eaten and relished. I feel like giving my friends an explanation or at least attempt to convince them to cut down on the meat-eating but I also realize it can be highly offensive and have never voiced my opinion.
Cry bully trolling and aimless power tripping under the banner of 'social justice' does not provide you any magic cover. I think most people can see thorough it this point and realize your only contribution is harassment and its destructive to communities like this one.
Another point - educated white males are not your enemy. If you're looking for racists, sexists, etc - you need not seek them out by reading between the lines of comments here. There are people proudly spewing garbage you can speak out against (on their own forums and blogs). Why fight against your allies in this?
It's aggrevating, but it's a battle that may already have been lost.
If you're searching for offence, you WILL BE offended, even if no offence was meant by the original poster and by doing this you're actually marginalising the real problems marginalised groups face.
What they are saying is that switching from "he" to "they" is simple and easy, and will make life better for many people. It's correct English, and has been in use since the 16th century, albeit with some push from prescriptivists.
You're right that in the face of things like rape statistics (women are far more likely to be raped by men) or domestic violence (women are far more likely to be killed by male partners) worrying about "he" vs "they" is a small thing.
I get that and if I remember to use it, I will, but when I instinctively do not use it, because well, "he" still comes more naturally to me than "they", it should not be assumed that I am sexist, bigoted etc. because I made a particular choice of words that can be reasonably interpreted as not meant to explicitly exclude people, unless they're looking for it.
> will make life better for many people
It's true that it may make them feel better, if they're looking at every use of a gendered pronoun from a "it's sexist" perspective, but I'd argue that's unproductive and not really making their life any better in a meaningful way
> It's correct English
That's good, but that doesn't mean that it's "intuitive" English for everyone and they shouldn't feel bad for it.
- rape has largely been defined so that it is physically close to impossible for a woman to rape a man.
- The official numbers for IPV are very close and there is a strong reason to believe that female on male IPV is dramatically underreported (female on female IPV apparently has levels similar to male on female). The only statistic I could find for murder was murder-suicide.
It reminds me of the time I recommended (to the Unix team at a major financial institution) that they use ssh rather than telnet, and being rebuffed with "that's the way we've always done it".
In this case, since you want to be specific, the practice of defaulting to "he" correlates with hundreds of years of treating women as chattels, with economic consequences and imbalances that persist today, and continue to be reinforced through structural, unconscious, and explicit biases, and that we'd all be better off without.
The notion that language should reflect thought is as old as Plato.
Er, no. It just means it is the unmarked/unremarkable case corresponding to males being generally worth less and discardable ("save the women"...).
It is also a quirk of some of our languages that the gender-neutral pronouns are considered derogatory when applied to people. German and English have this problem ("it", "es"), whereas French "on" seems to be okay.
So the language requires gendering when no gender is semantically intended. In German, every noun is gendered. So "person" is "she", whereas "human" is "he", "Civilisation" and "Society" are both "she", "state" is "he". "Lampshade" is "he" whereas "Lamp" is she, etc. You can try to read deep meaning into these quirks, or you can just not.
TL;DR: Not only are you reading way to much into linguistic quirks, your analysis is also at best shaky.
I also find it weird that German and Spanish inject gender into every noun, although I do get that there's little meaning behind it (from the little quizzing I've given speakers of each)
Yes, language evolves. Currently, this is almost certainly grammatically incorrect, "they" being the third person plural and (not shown here, but assumed) the speaker being singular.
"They" is being pressed into service as the non-derogatory, gender-neutral third person singular that's missing in english. So "they" has started to mean both third person plural and unspecified third person singular. The previous solution was that "he" meant both "male" and "unspecified". So previously women got their own pronoun, men didn't, now we have a harder time telling whether there's a single person or a group.
Both solutions have their quirks, both work at some level.
"As long as they give a good talk" - you're not talking about one specific person but in fact a general population of speakers.
The pronoun refers to "speaker", singular, yet indefinite, we don't necessarily know who it is.
Let's substitute "they: "problems a speaker at a conference might have, as long as they give a good talk/presentation."
Yep, works for me, but I think the "they" definitely talks about about that single (if indefinite) speaker. Yet we use the plural of the verb ("give"), so the sentence is confused, grammatically. I wonder what will give as this evolves, whether "they gives" becomes acceptable or we simple leave "they" grammatically plural even when it is semantically singular.
Language. Fun times!
"They" has been grammatically correct for single person of unspecified gender for hundreds of years. Do a little research before saying ignorant things.
I think that's what I wrote.
"they gives me the shivers"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they
Grammatically, the "they" is clearly plural, as it is used with the plural verb form "give" and not the singular "gives".
Look up "subject verb agreement".
Maybe it's my age or culture (24, brought up in regional Australia then moved to the city), but I actually find it really disjointing when people use gendered pronounce when talking generics, regardless of whether it's 'he' or 'she'.
My default, myself and everyone I interactive with just default to gender neutral pronouns - not out of any sense of 'political correctness', but it just makes for easier conversation.
English is not my native language, and the language that I first learned to speak has very different rules for gender specific pronouns which results in me being very careful in how I write in English. Despite this, I sometimes(often) make mistakes. One common mistake I've noticed myself making is when I write about a specific person, male or female, I sometimes tend to then use that person's gender as the default pronoun for the rest of my sentence. I have no problem being called out on my mistakes but it makes me nervous that any error I make can be grounds for me being called a troll or a sexist.
I am posting from a throw away account because voicing an opinion such as this is reason enough to be targeted.
My biggest problem with this Taleb piece is that it doesn't really take into account the probability of success from a particular intolerant minority. In practice there's a kind of signal-strength effect where the further up the chain you go the less effective any one person becomes. Once you factor that into the model Taleb's argument falls apart.
My educational experience doesn't really jive with what you're suggesting, either. There was certainly a large and vocal neoliberal/SJW caste at my (large, Canadian) university, but I never saw the administration or faculty kowtow to them in any significant way. However, I'm prepared to believe the problem does exist at some schools.
1: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/08/25/u-chicago-war...
I suspect I'm just as tired of that, as actual conservatives are of their views being mixed in with Trump's.
It's censorship and bullshitocracy.
As someone who considers himself to be liberal left, I'm annoyed by that but I do feel that it's fair to point it out. We shouldn't just bury our head in the sand in the face of an inconvenient reality.
But yes, let's please point out again and again that large parts of the SJW movements have lost track of what being liberal and left is all about, even if that's where they originally started out from.
Things are not going to change until people, including speakers pull out of conferences that display this sort of behaviour.
Its a hard at the moment but more and more people are starting to realize there is a corrosive agenda behind a lot of these movements and personalities. And you can have all the inclusion you want without opening the door to social justice activist to destroy your community and derail the focus into endless navel gazing and radical social activism.
The theories here about sociopaths attempting to exert control are quite exotic and interesting, though :P
That statement is the opposite of reasonable. If you're going to call someone out, publicly, that they're making other speakers uncomfortable to the point where they won't show up if he's there (when he was one of the first confirmed speakers), something is fishy. They can call him out publicly but not share their reasons publicly so he can defend himself publicly? Alternatively if they want to keep the reasons private they could have just said something along the lines of "Crockford will no longer be a speaker at our events due to <some bs>". Something that doesn't insinuate he's a misogynist without proof.
No. Absolutely unreasonable.
We are currently led to believe that the early invitation to speak issued to Mr. Crockford has been rescinded due to some horrible and recent behavior on the part of Mr. Crockford, sufficient to warrant taking said secret allegations seriously enough to both rescind the invitation AND maintain the secrecy of both the allegations AND the identities of the accusors.
While we, the rubber-necking public, are not "owed" any explanation, it's not a reasonable position to not provide one.
The pastebin conversation suffices, meanwhile to show us, the rubber-necking public, the paucity and weakness of evidence being used to dis-invite Mr. Crockford.
This is seriously some stupid shit.
It's not advancing humanity at all, and it's not EVEN worthy of the label "Social Justice Warrior" as it's more American cultural colonialism, forcing the world at large to behave like a stupid American television series of 30-minute-episodic-duration, often set in a domestic kitchenette... but I digress...
The actual Social Justice Warriors are concerned about real issues.
Regarding the other meaning, I could only repeat myself: they state that some other speakers have big problems with Crockford, and that they chose them over him. I think it's totally ok for them to do that, even without providing more information.
In fact, it's totally conceivable that revealing more information could hurt more people, or the same people more, or Crockford himself, or all of this. I fail to see how it would "advance humanity" if they did such a thing.
innuendo ALSO says something...
it says: these charges are big enough and serious enough to grant anonomity to said "other speakers" and grant secrecy to the stated charges.
Bottom line: they are a private entity and can do whatever they wish to, more or less, however, I don't consider their petty behavior reasonable in any way, especially given the context and further info released, inadvertently or otherwise...(pastebin of Slack conversation)
"The correct thing for the organization to do" is also not really a matter of our public concern. They have already made their move, and it's shameful and wrong, IMO.
Our public concern (that which WILL advance humanity) lies in crucifying such behavior as this conference organizer has displayed, to discourage further disgusting displays of intellectual cowardice and perversion of REAL social justice issues.
Once you let privileged bullies grasp a bit of power, they don't tend to let go. It's really quite oppressive, and makes me uncomfortable. (and yes, the ability to get a keynote speaker thrown-off in a public and last minute fashion is a kind of power and privilege wielded like a true oppressor.)
It's certainly not an environment conducive to the safe spaces they seem to be verbally wishing to achieve...
(censorship via an insulting combo of an invitation and then rescinding it in order to no-platform said speaker based upon flimsy evidence of flimsy charges that don't hold-up to the slightest bit of scrutiny. Were "everyones" comfort actually considered in the slightest, the organizers would already have developed a tactic for dealing with troublemakers as such.)
If you believe the organisers' reasons to disinvite him were not "good enough" (whatever that is), well, then just don't go there or get a refund.
Alternatively if they don't want to say because, let's say he did do something awful and saying why would give the victim away, then why the original insinuation in the first place? Instead they should have went the professional route of simply saying he's no longer coming or something.
Ultimately we, while allowed to say almost anything,need to mind what we say about others. If someone is saying unsubstantiated things regarding someone else that could be career ending in this current climate. If it is substantiated then it should be brought to the attebtion of police or perhaps the public depending on what it is.