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Comment by spicyj | Hacker News Reader

Just so everyone's on the same page, some of the thoughts in question:

https://twitter.com/aphyr/status/606576005667504129

Also, he's no garden variety racist. He's the creator of the "Neoreactionary Movement" http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Neoreactionary_movement

Regardless of whether or not you think a racist should or should not present (be paid to speak? Edit: they are not paid to speak at this conf although some expenses are covered) the founder of a pro slavery, pro facist movement speaking at your conference is a different sort of thing.

FWIW, LambdaConf speakers are not paid.

Correct; we are typically given funding to attend though. (Travel & hotel expenses, free ticket to the conference.)

True, I forgot about the travel expenses as I'm a local speaker.

the founder of a pro slavery, pro facist movement speaking at your conference is a different sort of thing.

Unless he is speaking about pro slavery and pro fascism, I have absolutely no reason to care.

Can we please learn to separate technical concerns from nontechnical concerns? And before anyone starts replying with "they're one in the same!" - only under certain circumstances. If the subject of the talk is garbage collection in a programming language, what the speaker believes about anything other than garbage collection in a programming language is IRRELEVANT.

Why do you care so much what other people think and do? You don't care? Then don't. Other do care? Let them, since you don't care keep not caring?

this seems more like meta-caring. i may not care about what anyone writes in a book, but it can be concerning when people start burning books they dislike.

Nobody's burning books here, a number of people refuse to associate with Moldbug entirely, and one of them had a workshop at lambdaconf which they cancelled. That's about the extent of it.

And then Karunamon comes in and asserts that no, they can't have freedom of association and they must judge others by Karunamon's standards only.

I said nothing of the sort. I said can we please stop having knee-jerk reactions like this? Everyone who would have benefited from the conference was directly harmed by this immature, foolish decision.

That's exactly what I've written: you've decided that you wouldn't mind associating with Yarvin, and that Sterling shouldn't mind either.

For the same purpose, here is some of his technical work. Sometimes lunatics can do good work:

http://urbit.org/docs/theory/whitepaper

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