[j-pb]

The point is not about him being a racist or not. As long as he doesn't bring his personal views to a professional setting I don't care about them.

I also don't mind if people don't attend his talks as a form of protest. Heck I probably wouldn't go to them myself.

But demanding somebody be cancelled from a conference because you don't agree with them on something that has nothing to do with the topics of said conference seems to set a bad precedence.

After all that might give others the right to demand people not be permitted to speak because they are communists, gay, hippies, or what else.

As for tolerant people being tricked into allowing intolerance. I'm pretty sure everybody there has a limit on intolerance that they won't tolerate anymore. I firmly believe that everybody has the absolute right for physical protection, so if he had a history of violence there would have been a clear cut line.

However, I don't think that anybody has the right to not be offended, or to be protected from "emotional harm". I expect adults to be able to control themselves enough that this shouldn't be an issue. If all he's done is being an ass, that doesn't justify him being kicked out.

Sticks and stones.

[bad_user]

> The point is not about him being a racist or not. As long as he doesn't bring his personal views to a professional setting I don't care about them.

You're free to have that belief, but like it or not, being included as a speaker at an important conference gives a person prestige and credence for his ideas and others might not like it.

> demanding somebody be cancelled from a conference ... because they are communists, gay, hippies ...

Right here is the mistake that I think the organizers of LambdaConf did.

You cannot compare gays and hippies with white supremacists, because being gay or hippie does not rob others of their humanity. Communism, in the theoretical sense, wouldn't be guilty of that either.

Now, I've heard somebody making a valid point: another speaker happens to work on military drones, that ultimately have been used to target women and children. Why aren't people outraged about that one?

Well, maybe we should be outraged about that one as well, though the context is different, as military drones, like science in general, can be used for both good and evil. For example the same science that gave us a process for producing nitrogen and synthetic fertilizer is also responsible for gas warfare in WWI. So context matters, I'm not ready yet to condemn the work on military drones as being evil (though it probably is), but I sure am ready to condemn racism, because personally I believe that racism represents the worst of humanity, being the justification given to most wars that ever happened.

> I don't think that anybody has the right to not be offended, or to be protected from "emotional harm"

First of all we aren't talking about what is legal. If we are, then having a belief that somebody shouldn't speak at a conference is perfectly within our right for freedom of expression. And this isn't censorship, but Ostracism, an act which again, is perfectly within our right for freedom of association. People are always free to organize events that accept this person (with LambdaConf choosing this path) and the author can even start his own conferences and communities.

That said, in my country at least, the freedom of speech does not hold for hate speech and you can be prosecuted for causing emotional harm due to hate speech targeting groups based on religion, ethnicity, race or sex. Note that whether the author would escape guilt, that's for a court to decide and I'm not a lawyer, but to me his writings sure sound like hate speech.

And don't get me wrong, if he would be found innocent of hate speech by a court, then I expect for people to uphold his right for freedom of speech, but again, that doesn't mean people can't exercise their own freedom of speech or freedom of association.

[j-pb]

> included as a speaker at an important conference gives a person prestige and credence for his ideas

The question is does it give credence to the ideas presented at the conference or does it give credence to all of his ideas?

On a somewhat unrelated note, I find that we place people that give talks at conferences, on a way to high pedestal. It feels like presenting oneself has become more important than writing code.

> Communism, in the theoretical sense, wouldn't be guilty of that either.

Neither does racism "in the theoretical sense" as the author of the article argues. And I'm not buying his argument either, so you simply can't ignore the the fact that communism produced the biggest genocides.

>Why aren't people outraged about that one?

To be honest I actually would be all in to ban a person developing military drones that can be used for "offensive" attacks from the conference.

A person directly developing tools for murder has crossed the line of non-violence I talked about earlier.

> racism ... being the justification ... to most wars ...

So would you ban all religious people because religion has been used as a justification for war over and over again?

To me there is a difference between believing something bad and having the intention to act on it. I don't care about the author as long as he doesn't go out the next day to spit on a black person. And from what I've read the author has this weird "different but equally worth" racism that is somewhat "benign" (as in tumor).

The person developing the drones however is directly ruining peoples lives. Of course he doesn't pull the trigger, but he willingly gives a gun to a psychopath.

> First of all we aren't talking about what is legal.

Why would we? If he had planned on doing something illegal at a conference and then got banned for it there would be zero discussion.

> in my country at least

UK? And I'm pretty sure that you won't be persecuted for causing "emotional harm" but for "disturbing the peace" or "inciting violence" or something similar.

Note that in this case people claim that the emotional harm isn't caused by him giving a racist talk (which would be hate speech and which he's not going to give), but _his mere presence_.

And I think as an adult one should be able to tolerate the presence of another person no matter how much one hates their views.

> people are always free to organize events that accept this person (with LambdaConf choosing this path) and the author can even start his own conferences and communities.

>that doesn't mean people can't exercise their own freedom of speech or freedom of association.

Of course people are free to not attend. But then they should accept the vote people cast and stop the brigading.

I am very sure that the people most vocal about this right now would try to stop and ruin any "racist" conference by putting pressure on sponsors and speakers.