Comment by 13thLetter | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 13thLetter | Hacker News Reader

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But that's simply victim-blaming.

This is a professional conference about a particular apolitical topic. If the speaker, no matter how controversial or unpopular his unrelated personal views might be, is going to stay on the topic and not bring up politics, then anyone who tries to bring politics into it is being the disruptive force, not the speaker, and that is the person who is creating an unsafe atmosphere and needs to be ejected from the conference.

> it's pretty much impossible that TypeLevel employees would be able to magically argue him out of his existing position, and it's probably equally inevitable that he would be unable to argue them into his position.

Why is it necessary for either of them to argue the other into their position?

> Are you going to have a good Thanksgiving, or are you going to get into it with your reactionary relative for the thousandth time?

I'll tell you what I wouldn't do: I certainly wouldn't demand that my reactionary relative not be permitted to attend, and if she's gracious enough to not start a fight at the dinner table I won't start one myself. If she can be polite, I can be polite.

But typelevel has not cancelled lambdaconf, nor asked for it to be cancelled or even change its speakers lineup. They decided not to hold another event that was affiliated with lambdaconf.

If we're going to keep running with this thanksgiving comparison, they're not asking for the relative not be invited. They're having a party the day after, a party to which the crazy relative was never invited, and decided to cancel that.

> They decided not to hold another event that was affiliated with lambdaconf.

You make it sound like they randomly woke up one day and decided, for no particular reason whatsoever, to not hold an event they had already put enormous effort into planning and scheduling. They are cancelling their event in an attempt to pressure LambdaConf into bowing to their political demands.

> If we're going to keep running with this thanksgiving comparison, they're not asking for the relative not be invited. They're having a party the day after, a party to which the crazy relative was never invited, and decided to cancel that.

How would that behavior make any sense, though, if you're a person who doesn't want to disrupt the Thanksgiving dinner? They already didn't invite the crazy relative to their own party; what more do they want?

No, they are cancelling an event because they feel holding it would endorse views they find disgusting. You might not agree that it does, or that the views are disgusting, but that is irrelevant to their decision. The only people truly inconvenienced by this are: - themselves, because they're throwing away a lot of hard work - the people that wanted to attend their conf, which makes typelevel look bad, not lambdaconf.

Back to the thanksgiving dinner thing: they don't really want anything other than to make it clear what they're having an issue with. But they're not asking for anything, just saying: this is incompatible with my values, I'm taking myself out.

What else do you want them to do? Compromise their values? Who are you to demand that of them? Or demand the crazy relative be booted, making the whole thing horrible for the host? They took the only reasonable action given their values: take themselves out of the equation, and explain why. Anything else would have been either childish or cowardly (again, given their core values, which you might disagree with or not feel quite as strongly about).

> What else do you want them to do? Compromise their values? Who are you to demand that of them?

If their values are "we cannot interact in a professional manner with people who hold views we dislike," their values are bad and they should compromise them. If we can't get along with those with whom we disagree when necessary to accomplish unrelated things, we might as well disband this country and start arming up for civil war, because that's where this road ends.

Has it occurred to you it's entirely possible that some people at typelevel are black? And you're saying that yes, they should interact with and condone the views of someone that would see them enslaved and feels they are inherently inferior and should have fewer rights than him?

Maybe you could. Maybe, if someone had consistently argued that you and your family were of an inferior race and should bow to their will as is your ordained place in the universe, you could shrug it off and say, "let's agree to disagree and get on with things".

I'd guess this has never happened to you though. I'd guess you can have this position because this is not your safety and your rights that are in danger. It's always so much easier to consider hatred acceptable when you're not its target.

Should someone very religious refuse to interact with somebody who is pro-choice? Should a gun-afficionado refuse to interact with somebody advocates for gun-control?

In a professional environment we all have to compromise. You can't expect to only run into people who share your values and/or validate and approve your life style, or even what you feel is your identity.

There's a fairly obvious distinction between not sharing someone's values and asserting that someone is a sub-human and should have lower rights due to not being of the right color.

I'm fine with working with people whose don't share my values. I wouldn't be with someone who very publicly and very repeatedly advocated me and my family being enslaved. If you are, good for you! just don't expect everybody to share your obvious strength of character and forgiving nature.

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