How Hack the North wasn’t the bomb
medium.com
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This is a mechanism by which anyone could be expelled for saying anything someone else doesn't like. It's a clear policy, which either you support (by attending their events and avoiding saying anything anyone else might find offensive) or not (by staying home and doing what you like).
(I must disclose I have a juvenile and often offensive sense of humor. At events with codes of conduct - and MLH's is based upon a popular one, O'Reilly's contains similar language - I only act myself with people I know who are comfortable with it, and play my filtered persona otherwise. Putting stuff on an event's Facebook group is like being on stage, you gotta be careful of being yourself - keep jokes to people you know.)
MLH obviously had a commercial relationship with the University and that would likely entitle them to certain authorities. Unless your privy to the contract, or the University has officially stated otherwise, what source are you using to back this up?
But I can say that even if it ends up that they technically had the authority to do this, then us Hack the North organizers were mislead to an extraordinarily large degree about the nature of the relationship between MLH and Hack the North.
Now the trick is to make sure it's applied absolutely fairly and evenhandedly.
The simple approach is to simply allow yourself to throw anyone out who annoys anyone and be the judge of when that annoyance is strong enough to enforce that.
X => "Anyone building a clock for their hack?" Author => "We're building a bomb actually looks just like a clock though" Y => "yeah my clock is the bomb come check it out"
And got thrown out of the event for violating code of conduct.
Relevant South Park IMO: http://www.cc.com/full-episodes/h4o269/south-park-stunning-a...
<irony>That's even more dangerous thank just those joke. I guess the world would be better place if we lock them out.</irony>
Looks like there is a whole class of things that are criminalized/punished that used to be the norm. Like letting your 6 and 10 old walking a mile alone home.
Relevant PG essay: http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
Why they threw out the second guy I don't get at all. I mean, I guess they could have gone completely "thorough" and thrown out the guy asking the question as well if that's the standard.
Kudos to the author for his level-headed post.
In honesty, I completely agree with the actions of MLH in the expulsion. It is their event to run, and they have final say in the kind of discourse they accept from the attendees. It was obviously a joke, but obviously also distasteful so whether the decision was overly punitive is really the only debate.
If I were the author, I wouldn't write about what transpired. There is nothing to gain by taking it publicly and now there is an easy to locate record of your mistake for future event organisers and employers. Should just let it rest.
Edit: To clarify why I find it is distasteful — In context of recent events this is just a poorly and honestly unfunny joke. But the point isn't whether it was a joke though, the point is that universities have a long history of being the centre of vicious and deplorable acts of violence, mass violence. In the context of the university environment, I can see how jokes like this are unsettling and reminiscent of real social media posts that often precede real attacks that maim or kill real people. The authors insensitivity to this is what I find shortsighted.
> There is nothing to gain by taking it publicly and now there is an easy to locate record of your mistake for future event organisers and employers.
Or now there is a great filter for organisers or employers he probably doesn't want to deal with anyways.
This is a non sequitur. Just because you're legally allowed to do something doesn't mean you should.
This in particular struck me from MLH's comment:
> If anything, this incident set Ahmed’s cause back by being insensitive to real issue at hand.
In Ahmed's case, "real issue at hand" is paranoids flinching at terrorism in every shadow, exactly like this. I generally think people ought to try to avoid offensive speech, and if this had even remotely resembled an actual threat I would have been heartily against it, but no reasonable person could have felt threatened here. This is exactly the same kind of thinking that says it's perfectly normal for someone to get cavity-searched for saying the word "bomb" in an airport.
Well said.
In this particular instance I feel it's more likely that whoever reported this incident did so out of malice (due to either a personal grudge or some psychopathic tendency) than a fear for safety, precisely because I can't imagine anyone reading the comment in that context genuinely taking it as a bomb threat.
And it saddens me that whoever it was clearly got the result they wanted.
The problem is that they kicked someone out even though they had no authority to do so. The real people in charge have objected to what happened.
Have they objected publicly, and made it clear that MLH's actions were unacceptable?
Here is a link to the response of one of the Hack the North Directors:
https://www.reddit.com/r/uwaterloo/comments/3ln4cz/two_hacke...
From the link: "For the record: MLH kicked him out. HTN did not. I feel like I definitely need to make it clear that none of the directors of Hack the North were involved in this decision. As for me, personally: I am extremely unhappy about the decision."
https://www.reddit.com/r/uwaterloo/comments/3ln4cz/two_hacke...
From the link: "For the record: MLH kicked him out. HTN did not. I feel like I definitely need to make it clear that none of the directors of Hack the North were involved in this decision. As for me, personally: I am extremely unhappy about the decision."
I disagree. I don't think he should take it any further but publishing a record (especially one as well written as this) is wise. Gaslighting is common in communities like this, and by having his story out in the open, it makes it harder for any false versions of the story to stick (assuming his account is accurate, of course).
Further, social standards may (nay, will) change and what he did may be seen in a different light a few years down the road, and having his written account will be useful so that his actions can instead be judged via the ethics of the future.
Edit: considering how much this is blowing up on Reddit, I can imagine that being a good defence.
What leaves a bad taste in my mouth is punishing someone for making an obvious joke. Probably caused by a single overzealous organizer affraid of being accused of not scrupulously upholding the code of conduct.
In context of recent events this is just a poorly and honestly unfunny joke. But the point isn't whether it was a joke though, the point is that universities have a long history of being the centre of vicious and deplorable acts of violence, mass violence. In the context of the university environment, I can see how jokes like this are unsettling and reminiscent of real social media posts that often precede real attacks that maim or kill real people. The authors insensitivity to this is what I find shortsighted.
It’s 100% obviously a joke, and not a bomb threat, and it obviously has nothing to do with mass violence. Anyone who is unsettled hasn’t been paying attention to the news the last week and/or isn’t thinking very hard.
The unsettling part is the 14-year-old kid getting arrested for bringing a homemade clock to school, not some college students making jokes about it on the internet.
To state it more pointedly, the people who are “unsettled” by a joke like this enough to kick these guys out of their hackathon are the same kind of unthinking authoritarian assholes as the folks who had the high-school clockmaker arrested.
There is a common expression that 'something is about as effective as stabbing someone with a butter knife'. Someone might overhear you using that expression and may unsettlingly remember once being threatened with a butter knife. That sucks and if they told you, you would try not to use that expression around them. That would be a nice thing to do, showing empathy. What would not be a nice or emphatic thing to do for them, is demanding your expulsion from an event for using that phrase. Demanding you not use that expression any more would similarly not be nice or called for.
They are still the one with the problem. If they tell us we should help them and should try to take it into account. But they cannot expect strangers to take it into account, nor can they expect others to always keep it into account. There are too many people with too many different problems for society to function that way.
So, if any mention of a 'bomb', like this one, is 'unsettling' to you, you need help. We have a responsibility to get you that help. We do not have a responsibility to prevent you from feeling 'unsettled'.
This is ... peculiar. Of the total number of off-colour jokes told by people at college campuses, what percentage are followed immediately by shooting sprees? How many decimal points do you need? This is not a usable or workable early warning system. If you genuinely think your hackathon is at risk of a Virginia Tech situation, get a metal detector. Mass murderers are unlikely to check the code of conduct before opening fire.
But then your concern doesn't seem to be that people could actually get shot to pieces, simply that somebody could have been unsettled by a pun. This is a level of inconvenience that nobody has any right to be protected from.
It is utterly unreasonable to expect people to avoid in advance every possible 'trauma trigger', since by definition that's (for practical purposes) an infinite quantity. In reality, the only code of conduct that can reliably avoid all such awkward social situations is the Trappist code of silence. So it would be better all round if people were expected to deal with these things like adults, and instead of looking over Facebook comments with the intention of linking them to terrorist atrocities, campus shooting, or any other terrible thing that it could mean to somebody somewhere, read them as charitably as possible. If you're reading something out of context, find out the context before declaring it 'distasteful', since taste is 100% context.
The take away here should be: codes of conduct of the nature that caught out the OP are necessarily non-transparent (who accused him?), and thus necessarily arbitrarily enforced, and thus necessarily unjust (since justice must be seen to be done).
Anyone even vaguely familiar with the Ahmed/clock story should realise that this joke was not even at Ahmed's expense.
The Internet-at-large responded with many light-hearted jokes in support of the ludicrousness of the tale - personally I tweeted a picture of an alarm clock with a caption along the lines of "frightened the life out of me this morning when woken by my bedside bomb".
I wouldn't have done so if I had anticipated offending anybody (except perhaps the idiots involved in Ahmed's arrest).
Where have I heard this before?
It is his website, and he can do whatever he wants.
The issue isn't whether MLH has the right to kick other people out, it's that they're bad people for exercising that right.
«If a message can be interpreted in several ways, it will be interpreted in a manner that maximizes the damage.»
All I see in this thread are a bunch of whining millennials bickering over policy details. How about: Don't joke about killing people at a public event? Your words and social media posts are your public record and indicate your intent, don't post stupid things online, learn that now before you do something really dumb that gets you fired.
Unfortunately if someone feels unsafe then it's escalated past a joke in poor taste. Personally I think the students should still have been allowed to participate and be barred from placing, but I wouldn't call expulsion an overreaction.
What if I said that your being comfortable with people getting expelled from events over anodyne jokes made me "feel unsafe"? Is it okay for you to get thrown off HN due to my complaint? If not, why not?
That is a pretty arbitrary way to measure things though.
I'm happy to describe myself as a Social Justice Warrior, capital letters and all, but there has to be a limit somewhere, or anyone can screw anyone else by claiming to be offended by the color of their T-shirt. No reasonable person could have taken this as an actual threat. I could see saying "Hey, please don't make jokes like that," but going straight to kicking people out is not reasonable.
(I've shot my mouth off and gotten in trouble for it a few times, and learned not to do this)