[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.

[13thLetter]

That's, uh. Wow. Quite the accusation.

For starters, how does De Goes benefit from generating this drama? Most of the sponsors pulled out and he's been smeared as a racist from one end of the Internet to the other, in an era where that accusation is literally career-ending. Do you really think he decided to blow up LambdaConf in an enormous suicide bomb, and that all the fellow conference managers were okay with that?

[tptacek]

I am not accusing De Goes of being a racist. Just because his actions had consequences you feel in hindsight were predictable does not mean that he felt that way at the time. He chose to write what he wrote.

[13thLetter]

"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."

That sounded awfully like you were accusing him of doing all this deliberately. But if you think it was all an accident, then okay.

Thought experiment: Your name is De Goes. You strongly believe that people's political opinions or personal characteristics should have no bearing on their professional life; to that point, you made sure to set up a blinded system for choosing LambdaConf speakers so nobody's prejudices, conscious or unconscious, could play a role. As a reward for actually practicing what Internet slacktivists merely preach, you have just discovered that one of the selected speakers turned out to be the infamous criminal Goldst -- er, Moldbug.

What's the PR move that gets you through this without fundamentally betraying your principles by giving in to the baying mob?