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So Charles Wood gets banned for wearing a Make America Great Again hat, but Kim can say:

"WHITE MEN, FOR ALL THEIR CHEST BEATING, ARE SO FUCKING WEAK" "[White] Women In Tech Organizations Are Full Of Shit" "I’ll continue to say, white dudes in TECH ain’t Shit"

And this is OK...

America, you are very strange right now.

If you followed some of the drama/dialog on that page (can't say I blame you if you didn't), you'd see that she isn't attending the conference, and there are other allegations (supposedly, according to one person). So far, the only thing cited has been "tone policing", whatever that means. I haven't seen any indication that Kim will be attending, so the alleged double standard doesn't really apply (can't ban someone from an event they don't want to attend)
Reading the banter between Cher Scarlett and Bryan Lunduke in the comments is gold.

+1 for Bryan in my opinion

Here we go again. This is what happens when you enforce a policy such as a CoC and if one person attempts to step out of line they are arrested on the suspicion of wrong-think. If that wasn't insult to injury then why not cancel him too because red MAGA hat == bad.

Its interesting to see that they are continuing this politically-correct attitude with silly purity tests to throw dirt at people like Charles Wood but all for the double-standards for Kim to throw racial insults and gets away with it unscathed.

Ladies and gentlemen and people of all genders, this is hypocrisy at its finest.

They don't see it as hypocrisy because they mistake race/gender for class status. It is essentially "reverse racism" and they have to "punch up" against racism. It's okay to cancel a white guy because he's their version of a "bourgeois" while people of color are their version of a "proletariat."

I don't agree with this assessment by the way. It's just how these people think. To me, it feels like playing musical chairs within a fundamentally broken society and economic system that disregards social justice for profit.

While I think there can be issues with "cancel culture" or whatever, there's a ton of context missing here.

I wasn't sure about all of this, but after seeing far more context (linked from the patreon page) and seeing John S's behavior towards others and the fact that others were defending him... this is far more complex of a situation than is being portrayed here.

All in all I'm surprised at Bryan's responses and lack of desire to view the context, which IMO changes the situation, far different from how he paints it

That said, if a particular person in an industry has pretty toxic behavior, maybe it's more clear cut that they should not be welcome to event X, ... but what about people that defend this person and/or their behavior? I guess that gets stickier but I can see it being a problem- especially when that defense is highly public, on video, and problematic in and of itself.

/shrug

The only link I could find was from Cher Scarlett[1] who got banned from Lunduke's Patreon comments and got mined for gold here on HN in a different comment.

So Charles Wood was defending John with a liberal pro-speech "see where he's coming from" attitude. From what little I've seen, John seems like an outright inflammatory troll against cancel culture and SJWs.

It's clear then that Charles is against cancel culture and SJWs, and he is willing to be in a foxhole with someone like John. He does not make a good case for his position for failing to understand what that cancel crowd is taking offense to.

This whole situation also segued all the way from someone mocking semantics HTML, which prompted a conversation about the toxicity in programming where an unrelated person commented in a very naive manner that made black people upset that their experiences seemed like they were being marginalized. (One of them brought up the anecdote of a Nigerian programmer who didn't complain about walking 5 miles for water to the point where his fingers were too numb for typing.)

This whole phenomenon is a clusterfk that's spiraled out of control between differing philosophical perspectives getting reciprocal fuel for their flame wars. It seems like cable news tier of conversations where people ultimately argue around the core issue of a broken society and economic system that disregards social justice and fairness for profit.

As a side note, I'm not a fan of Lunduke either. I appreciated his Why Linux Sucks talks, but I quickly unsubscribed from his channel when he drags me into these culture war stuff I don't want to get dragged into when I want to learn about Linux.

[1] https://medium.com/@cherp/propaganda-other-lies-we-tell-4325...

> and he is willing to be in a foxhole with someone like John

I resent this attitude, which has become too popular these days. I can defend someone without "being in a foxhole with them", if I think they're being treated too harshly, being misunderstood, ect (and it's not necessarily the "hill I want to die on either"). I might not even like the person, or agree with them. In fairness to you, in this case he does seem to be going out of his way to ally with him.

I find myself skeptical of everyone in cases like these. The linked article has some serious issues in my opinion. Cher makes some good points, but is clearly very biased. That's understandable, however, some of the language she uses is warped to the point of being deceptive. I still feel like I'm not getting the full story here, and getting the full story requires wading through hours of social media drama. I certainly don't trust Lunduke either as there's also issues with his narrative.

I still haven't seen anything that should be a violation of policy worthy of being disinvited. It still seems very much like politically motivated punishment and optics. Inviting someone to engage in a "civil conversation" as Wood did is pretty weasly, but I don't see any harrasment or abuse here.

For an organisation that is supposed to be protecting civil liberties and free speech, I am disgusted in the snowflake handling of this matter. Snowflakes have no place in computer engineering...
I want my computer kernel to be snowflake free...time to investigate grown-up operating systems