[tptacek]

Everyone who said they wouldn't do business with companies operating in Apartheid South Africa --- or who (further) argued that governments should divest from anything entangled with Apartheid --- was in exactly the same situation. It wasn't enough for them to simply stop patronizing Tesco. They organized and exerted pressure where they could. Overall, the movement was in some significant part credited with ending Apartheid.

So I guess I don't share the principle that you seem to have, that if I don't like a conference I should simply shut up and not attend. I feel, as many others do, that I have a right to use my voice and whatever influence the market has ill-advisedly allocated to me to assert my point of view.

Lambdaconf appears to believe strongly in their point of view. That's fine. If anyone's advocating criminalizing bad decisions about conference speaker slots, well, I'm not on board for that.

You are of course welcome to use your own speech to argue that I should shut up, or that Aphyr should or that Steve Klabnik should shut up, or whatever. You can also use your speech rights to find ridiculous people on Twitter and Tumblr to compare me with. You're allowed to ask for things you're not going to get.

Unlike people like Klabnik and Aphyr, who are to some extent engaged in "functional programming" as its own thing, I'm not so much motivated by the future of Lambdaconf. My motivation for being involved in this discussion is different and nerdier. I'm like the anti-tzs in this debate: there's a sort of conventional wisdom about Yarvin that is dear to nerds and I find it both false and aggravating. That's all!

[tzs]

> I'm like the anti-tzs in this debate: there's a sort of conventional wisdom about Yarvin that is dear to nerds and I find it both false and aggravating.

Did you just imply that I'm a nerd?

Lucky for you the d20 I rolled to see if I was offended came up 20 so I am not.

[tptacek]

No. Well, yes, but we're both nerds, just on opposite ends of this particular debate.

[13thLetter]

> So I guess I don't share the principle that you seem to have, that if I don't like a conference I should simply shut up and not attend

If you want to complain loudly about the conference as you don't attend, go for it. But once you're pressuring sponsors into pulling out, once you're running a weeks-long harassment campaign against the organizers, and especially once you're pitching a fit about the conference managing to find other funding despite your best efforts, that goes way, way, way beyond mere complaining. You are making an affirmative effort to prevent the conference from happening at all, and at the very least I'd suggest that you own it.

[tptacek]

I feel like the comment I just wrote responds to everything in this comment.

Using violence to coerce a preferred outcome is wrong. Abusing a monopoly, or colluding with peers to create an abusive cartel, to coerce a preferred outcome is wrong. Lying to coercively trick people into a preferred outcome is wrong. None of that is happening here.

If any of what's happening here is wrong, so was the apartheid divestiture movement.

There's a perfectly coherent intellectual framework that sees the divestiture movement as wrong, too, but we're unlikely to have a productive discussion if you think that.

[mcphage]

> If any of what's happening here is wrong, so was the apartheid divestiture movement.

That one went by a little quick for me. Some tactics worked on apartheid, so it can also be used to sabotage a conference with a racist speaker? Maybe so, but that's a pretty big leap without explanation.

[tptacek]

The commenter to whom I was responding was suggesting that organizing a boycott is somehow unethical. Clearly that is not the case as a general rule.

[13thLetter]

> If any of what's happening here is wrong, so was the apartheid divestiture movement.

Those actions by themselves are not necessarily right or wrong; it's the reason for the action which makes the difference.

It was right to mount a massive conventional invasion of Europe in order to defeat Nazi Germany's campaign of conquest. It would not be right to mount a massive conventional invasion of Europe because of someone jaywalking in Berlin.

It was right to mount a boycott campaign of South Africa and call the rulers of South Africa racists in order to end apartheid. Is it right to mount a boycott campaign against LambdaConf and call its organizers racists because in a blind evaluation they selected a speaker whose personal politics, which will not be touched on in any way at the convention, you find repellent?

We're unlikely to have a productive discussion if you think that. More accurately, you are unlikely to have a productive discussion in any context whatsoever, because you will be unable to evaluate ideas outside the context of the man who holds them.

[tptacek]

I didn't call the organizers of Lambdaconf racist.

My feelings about De Goes, who I have barely paid any attention to up until this recent slapfight, are much more complicated (and boring) than that.

Other people may have called Lambdaconf itself racist.

Given how De Goes handled this, I'm not surprised.

The whole thing seems calculated for maximum drama.

[13thLetter]

> The whole thing seems calculated for maximum drama.

We live in a culture where people have been primed to go nuclear, not just at the tiniest slight against them, but at the faintest media-driven rumor that some other person somewhere, who may not even exist, may have in theory been slighted. If those people cause drama, it is the fault of those people, not anyone else.

[tptacek]

I'm not sure you followed what I just wrote. I'm implying that De Goes seems to have done everything he possibly could have to synthesize drama out of this decision short of (just barely, at the point) actually endorsing Yarvin's Moldbug posts.