Why am I completely unsurprised that “politics-free default” is color-coded to “white”?
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Yeah. In the minds of most white folks, “white” actually comes across instead as “normal,” or “ordinary.” Funny, that.
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But white is rarely used as political colour, the only counter-example* I can think of is the white movement in the Russian civil war.
*) without cheating/googling/visiting wikipedia
I highly recommend everyone read De Goes’ (LambdaConf’s organizer) full statement on the matter. It is entitled “Wrestling With Inclusion at LambdaConf,” and it makes it clear that they have put a lot of thought into the matter. It also includes a statement from Yarvin/Moldbug, sought by conference organizers, where he says he thinks politics have no place at a computing conference. Here are a few excerpts I puled from the post:
In the end, we all converged on the same opinion: that LambdaConf should focus on the behavior of attendees, rather than their belief systems.
Assuming personal safety isn’t an issue (more on that later), we concluded that anyone who can treat others well (as defined by our Pledge of Conduct) should be welcome, regardless of their own personal belief system.
In a world of such abundant diversity, it’s difficult to decide whether and how we can work with people who hold belief systems that are completely incompatible with our own.
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Question for you and @anon15383236: What if he just gives a good talk about functional programming? That is what he has been invited to do, and that is what he has pledged to do. Is that “provid[ing] a platform to a spewer of hateful damaging views” or endorsing his politics?
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and what if he doesn’t?
By the time he does one or the other, it is done.
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I think that’s a fair question… I think that could be a yes, especially if there is no acknowledgement of how odious his views happen to be. Do the conference organizers have a right to point out his views before his gives his lecture and acknowledge what he believes, in order for people who don’t want to hear the guy speak on anything avoid him?
Again, this isn’t someone who is just passively racist/sexist. These are no mainstream views. He believes that slavery was good for black people and that raping a woman is okay. I don’t really understand how any right thinking person is okay with this or how we separate him from these views, even if he doesn’t bring them up. I don’t think a black nationalist or a woman who espouses the views of say Valerie Solanas would get invite - no matter how good their coding, do you?
Again, the end decision lies with the people organizing and attending the conference. I just know, for myself, that no matter how great he is at his job, there needs to be a stronger stance about this stuff in the field in he first place. It’s dominated by white men, and that has little to do with how “much smarter white men are”, as he and his ilk seem to feel. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that women and POC are often actively kept out of the field by low-level harrassment and structural discrimination. I’d hope that more white men would actually care about diversity and work to make it a reality. Giving creeps like this guy a platform actually signals that many don’t actually care about such things. That’s a shame.
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… of white men.
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Here is a team photo of my older org from a few years ago to illustrate. This is the security assurance team for a silicon valley company everyone here has heard of…
Count the number of non-whites and non-males and we are actively trying to recruit both. (To be fair, we have people from about eight or nine different counties here though.)
I’ll let the readers guess which one of these folks is me. At least five of the people in this photo work for me.
The overall maleness and whiteness of the industry is a huge issue.
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It also give signals that will make an otherwise exceptionally smart young non white person go yeah fuck this field maybe I will do something else. It will scare away good talent that just may go on to do even greater things but nope.
And really simply this.
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Is that not the case for all speakers?
Yes, I’m in the same photo, and embarrased for the industry in the same way. And “white men” is just shorthand for a broader group of “people we went to school with, with similar experiences and background, who talk about the same things, who have a friend who might fit in with the company culture.”
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I only spotted you cause of a vague memory of your previous avatar… but yeah that is a lot of white male.
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Hey, you’ve got a two-fer! (Two-for-one: a person of color who also happens to be a woman.)
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Not all speakers are well know public racists and rape apologists. Why give him the benefit of the doubt or any trust?
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I think this pretty much sums up the key issue that swings me to the punt-the-guy side. If the invitee was a black supremacist who stated that white people were intellectually inferior (though more talented at physical labor), advocated overthrowing our democratic society so a black monarch could take over and put the white people in their place (ideally forced to sell themselves into slavery), and was a rape apologist, he’d have been dropped long ago with no comment or discussion as an obviously unacceptable guest regardless of whether his technological marvel looked cool. It’s only the fact that he’s a white guy not only saying, but advocating for this crap that gets him a pass.
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When I was at Microsoft, I worked with a mixed race (presented as black) female lesbian. She used to make jokes about how she was HR’s dream for diversity.
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A real sausage fest. Weisswurst.
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Years ago I had an equipment manager who was a black lesbian and Orthodox Jewish. Her entire household would not answer the phone or the door from sundown on Friday to sundown on Saturday…and the equipment got its heaviest usage during that time because we were a cinema. She personally trained every projectionist and show manager, had backups for the backups, and checked everything once more very carefully on Friday afternoons before leaving. There was NEVER a problem. Ever. But yeah, she used to joke that she wasn’t paranoid: everyone in the general public really did hate at least one aspect of who she was!
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I think the problem is the attendees.
Yoy just need more diverse attendees.
Like the New Black Panthers. Maybe the Crenshaw Mafia.
I would really enjoy seeing Mr. moldrat wet himself in public.
He’s allowed to have his ideas. And he’s a qualified speaker. Doesn’t mean he can get from the car to the parking lot without an escort.
Let him enjoy his infamy.
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