I'm not even going to comment further on this, I have found that arguments, sanity and reason do nothing here.
In other words, it's politics as usual - just in this case, "left-leaning San Francisco" politics in the "technology" space. A pity, as when this happens, it becomes a groupthink exercise and critical thinking is most unwelcome (hampering the realization of real diversity and inclusivity). Instead we're left with the Vocabulary Police game and pluralism is dead.
(To say nothing the "this guy supports a political party I don't like; let's conspire to destroy his livelihood" witch hunts, which are rarer but even more vicious.)
This is intolerance. This is totalitarianism.
Criticizing speech is most definitely part of free speech, but it's the consequences of that speech that is worrying. In the east your professional opportunities dry up when people start accusing you of being an enemy of the state. In the west the same happens when you are declared an enemy of the minority.
Inclusion is fantastic, but not if it means excluding people for trivial examples of speech that people have to work hard to be offended by.
But your basic point is you like free speech so long as it agrees with your pov? And the second someone is criticized in a way you find unacceptable (free speech!) it's wrong?
And people shouldn't be excluded (freedom of association also means the freedom not to associate) if they produce speech xupybd doesn't find offensive (trivial examples blah blah blah)?
I reiterate you and gp are deeply confused.
I'll help: Nothing.
ps -- you are exactly free to associate with someone if they are removed from your professional circle for reasons you don't agree with. Doing so is itself free speech. Now others may disagree with you, or even shun you for doing so. Still free speech. You're free to never go to Nodevember or any conferences the Nodevember principles are involved with. You're free to go to the next conference that invites Crockford just because he's there, and to brag about that on twitter and hn. You're even free to attempt to create your own conference featuring 8 hours of Crockford making bad biceps jokes. More free speech!
> Now others may disagree with you, or even shun you for doing so.
I believe that is what is happening here. A portion of the tech community (of which I am a part) have begun to see this movement[1] as toxic, and are speaking out against it. The desired result is to either come to an equitable compromise, or eject the members of the movement from the community.
[1]: "this movement", meaning what others here have referred to as "SJW". I'm unaware of a term for it that is not implicitly biased, and while I oppose the movement as a whole I recognize that there are underlying issues that must be addressed and am loath to group everyone who would describe themselves as passionate about "social justice" into a single group. It's far more nuanced than that.
I can't tell if you're talking about the inclusivity crowd, or the people who are standing up against it.
I'm criticizing overgard, etc, for claiming that public criticism / not associating with Crockford is somehow anti-free speech on the basis that overgard etc disagree with it.
There's a mountain of tweets discussing this in replies to Nodevember's announcement, but nothing directly affirmed by Nodevember as the basis for their decision. Seems like a lot of outrage being stirred up over bullshit no one can substantiate.
[1]: http://atom-morgan.github.io/in-defense-of-douglas-crockford
[2]: http://nodevember.org/statement.html
[3]: https://medium.com/@nodebotanist/why-i-won-t-be-speaking-at-...
Granted, it still isn't official, but even one of the conference's founders said to look to twitter for more context for the disinvitation of Crockford, so it isn't too off base.
I don't see anything in this chat log that changes anything.
So, again, referencing the tweets & subjects preceding their announcement as context aren't unreasonable as Golden says there's more context on Twitter. Emily Rose, notably, unleashed a series of tweets at them until they capitulated. It's still not the official word you're seeking, but to ignore it seems willfully dismissive.
Moreover, in what manner would a direct affirmation or counterpoint by the Nodevember organizers be advantageous to them? I'm not trying to be conspiratorial about it; being quiet and vague is the far more diplomatic path. It's not in Nodevember's interests to be precise with the particularities of the disinvitation, nor are we, as outsiders, owed any sort of particular explaination. But neither were any details provided to Crockford for him to ameliorate. "It is a mystery to me too." per https://paulstraw.svbtle.com/crockford
1 - support free speech, which includes criticism, even public (maybe even virulent! or unhinged, as long as you don't incite violence!) criticism (free speech!). And the freedom to associate (or not!) Also free speech! Including this thread, which is criticism of the criticism.
or
2 - your idea of "free speech", where you certainly can't criticize someone in public, or not invite them / disinvite to your privately run privately owned conference speaking to individuals who have voluntarily chosen to associate with each other.
I have no problem with you and others criticizing nodevember; they seem incompetent. But you don't understand free speech if you think public criticism is anti free speech.
My point is that the SJW's often escalate a discussion from the realm of words to the realm of actions. It's an extremely passive aggressive style where the implicit threat is "if you don't tow the party line, we will go out of our way to create bad consequences for you". As an example of that happening, well, look right here. Douglas Crockford did not apparently do anything, but his views were deemed "problematic" by someone, and because of this he is now suffering in the actual real world.
Personally, I think that's fucked up and I don't abide by that behavior. I view people that act in such a way as hypocritical cowards.
The legal concept of free speech is not a hammer to solve every problem, and neither is it an instruction manual for how to act in any situation. Free speach is a framework within which communication is implicitly encouraged and explicitly guaranteed, except in certain cases when it causes damage to others, defamation per se being one example.
Your right to say something does not always make it the right thing to say, this is not in any way nullified by the existence of legal protection for the speach in question.
Perhaps you mean "no speech is totally banned". Because it sure as hell it IS banned from being part of the conference.
>Crockford can say whatever the fuck he wants.
Nobody said they established their own dictatorship across the country and prevented him from speaking everywhere, so this "correction" is beside the point.
He is totally not allowed to say what he wants as part of his presentation, because it was cancelled. And that was because some people couldn't accept him saying some things elsewhere either.
What if someone takes offence of your "whatever the fuck he wants" line as sexist? Should you be thrown our from HN?
You'd still be able to say "whatever you want" elsewhere, so no harm, right?
That's the problem though, isn't it?
It's clear from Nodevember's statement[1] that the action was taken because some member of the community felt uncomfortable, and explicitly not because of any specific speech or action on the part of Mr. Crockford.
If this were a movement to censor certain specific speech, I would likely be opposed to it on philosophical grounds but would support and empathize with the motivation. That's not what this movement is about. I see this as an example of a movement based on an extreme political ideology usurping power within a community by shaming its members into submission.
For the million, billionth time, this not about speech being banned. It has never been about speech being banned. Stop talking as if people are claiming his speech was banned.
PG had an essay a while back about things you can't talk about.
I've found lately that there are many topics where you just can't mention them at all online. I will not list these topics. To do so would just invite the kinds of conversations that end in a death spiral.
I'm reminded of the old joke of accusing somebody that they are in denial. Once you do that? There's no way they can reply without agreeing with you. It's a semantic trap.
There are scads of topics like that today. People have taught themselves the appropriate kinds of wordplay such that they are able to declare certain areas off-limits.
Our society, world, and species depends on open and sometimes offensive civil dialogue. I find it depressing that so many people have paid so much money for an education and are not aware of this basic prerequisite for a modern world.
Consider that 100 years ago a picture was a novelty, there was no such thing as perfect recollection.
Today we have a perfect/accurate record of exactly what was said/done on social media; it's led to a culture of virtue signalling and often dishonest but politically correct dialogue.
Don't get me wrong, I love technology and the amazing things it's let us do, but I don't think this aspect is discussed enough.
Our day to day existence as a human being has completely/foundationally/fundamentally changed within the span of a couple generations.
Since recorded history, we've evolved a way of dealing and working with each other that assumes a certain physical world. That world no longer exists.
Couldn't agree with this more. It's going to be interesting to see how things play out.
E.g. how long can the US Federal government continue to borrow "a trillion dollars a year" to fund continuing operations? Not forever, I submit to you.
(And, yes, I know it's dropped to around half of that, but there's no plan to drop it further, and that's not counting things like the Fed keeping interest rates so low.)
I didn't get the whole PC crowd until I read this article. The obvious contradictions in the PC movement can't really be ascribed to any other reasoning then Antonio Gramsci's counter-hegemonic culture war strategy that Fonte chronicles the history of in this article. The strategy seeks to join together all coalitions of those who oppose "hegemonic" values such as meritocracy and other "common sense" in order to seek its overthrow and to pave the way for a utopian revolution.
Edit: I left out any examples of PC contradictions because anyone with critical thinking skills can identify many easily and I wanted to be kind and not inflict hurtful cognitive dissonance on those who are still PC true believers.
I think it's striking how these people seem to be on a crusade, often they don't even seem to be users of the code in question and often barely developers at all.
The person who opened the bug report asked about a process that's relevant to the purpose of the group (flagging inappropriate language early in places that can be hard to change later, like APIs). There was a previous case with a flag named "suicide", which was removed because it was deemed to be in bad taste. The flag was a honeypot for arguing about the tastemaking question, so once the process question was answered, the thread was closed and locked.
Seems reasonable to me. There's certainly distraction around politics-style questions of taste and language, but it's not a bad thing to address the concerns of the community in a formal and standardized way, which is what that thread was nominally about.
Refers to a long list of attempts by social justice warriors to join projects and organisations with the intent to subvert the organisation into a platform for there social activism. Which includes introducing extremely vague codes of conduct and then trying to use these vague guidelines to purge the organization of whomever they see as an obstacle of consolidating power and subverting resources. I am not going to drag in a bunch of links because anyone who has been observing this for the past few years has seen these people attempt this trojan horse tactic multiple times in multiple communities.
One of the most awful episodes was when the gnome foundation was essentially bankrupted by having there entire budget for developer outreach subverted to 'Outreach Program for Women' which essentially entailed giving checks for 5,000 to any women to wanted the money regardless of there qualifications talent or history in open source. Needless to say the director was forced to resign.
http://www.zdnet.com/article/gnome-bled-dry-by-outreach-prog...
AFAICT, the whole point of using that term is as a tribal membership signal.
> problematic language
> [a word] is very difficult for many others to stumble across in the codebase
> a word choice can be problematic/distracting/triggering/offensive
This isn't even something that might reasonably be considered "triggering" material, like a story that might plausibly give someone a PTSD flashback. If someone is so mentally unstable that just seeing a word in an API screws with their head, their problem is sufficiently serious that they ought to seek immediate psychological help.
It almost seems like child-like behavior. "I don't like this, so everyone has to change to fit my whims." Of course, there's almost certainly valid reasons for wanting change - it's probably not a good idea to make rape jokes or similar in your code[0] - but this seems over the top. Things in the world are going to be offensive, and if seeing a word causes that much trauma for someone, then they probably have bigger issues than just a symbol name or something.
[0] Not saying that anyone has done this
Sometimes that means enforcing certain standards of speech and behavior. Which you already agree with, if you are at all functional in society.
The question in this case is not whether inclusivity is a good thing, it's whether Crockford's speech/actions were "bad enough" in the context of a conference. I don't know (and don't care to know) about that, but it's vitally important not to throw the inclusivity baby out with the bathwater.
"terminology sensitivity"
"host may be insensitive, use presenter, entertainer instead"
"disabled may be insensitive, use turned off, person with a disability, people with disabilities instead"
"psychotic may be insensitive, use person with a psychotic condition, person with psychosis instead"
F--- that.
You guys are psychotic....er, people with psychosis.
The female counterpart is hostess.
It's mostly pandering to individuals with an inflated sense of self importance (everybody change the language to cater for our particular use case and "offence"), and it's disgraceful and hypocritical because it leverages previous generations fights for actual discrimination and intolerance (e.g. against gays and lesbians) by taking to extremes from people that have it too easy today (or don't even belong to said minorities, but just "fight the good fight" in their name).
For centuries, "they" has been plural and "he" has been used for gender-neutral singular third-person.
Now, some find that situation unacceptable and are trying to make everyone else change the way they speak and write.
You probably use it daily without noticing.
It is at least a reasonable claim that could be investigated further, as opposed to the claim that singular "they" is always an error, which any corpus will show is false.
That's possible but I've never seen any historical example of this nor I have seen anyone do it (outside of a specific subculture) so I don't think it's true: after all it's usually easy to deduce the gender of someone you haven't met from their name and if you get it wrong nobody (outside of that same specific subculture) will get really angry because of that.
1. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/200700 Pastebin link for non-subscribers: http://pastebin.com/kZFpdTnV
"He" has been the _proper_ usage way back from its roots at the German "er", which has the same usage.
"Man" or "one" (German, "Mann" or "man") has been used in the indefinate case.
We are not talking about grammatical errors here. You're free to declare great speakers and writers through the centuries to be in error, but what are you even claiming at that point? You could declare that saying the word "bread" is a mistake and it would be just as meaningless.
As with most arguments against the singular "they", your argument from German etymology also precludes the singular "you". Do you say "thou" all the time?
> Do you say "thou" all the time?
"You" was not only the plural second-person but also the formal singular second-person (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%E2%80%93V_distinction#Englis...) -- similar to German "sie" and "Sie". So it was always correct.
Anyway, I'm sure the PC crowd will win. It's just an (in this case, innocuous) example how systemically they can change they way we speak and communicate.
The singular "they" has existed throughout modern English. Getting rid of it is an insurmountably awkward and drastic change. People have tried, and they can't even remove it from their own speech.
The generic "he" is a relatively newer affectation that has risen and fallen in popularity in formal writing. I guess you can find a "PC crowd" to blame for its current decline, but this decline supposedly started around the 1960s, so you're not really observing anything new.
The only thing that's recent is (as EdiX pointed out) that there are people speaking out to say that they, as individuals, would prefer to be referred to with the singular "they".
But both "y'all" and singular "they" usage has always been informal, and inappropriate/ungrammatical for more proper contexts, which should instead have the more formal, traditional equivalents.
> ...it has become common in speech and in informal writing to substitute the third-person plural pronouns they, them, their, and themselves, and the nonstandard singular themself. While this usage is accepted in casual context, it is still considered ungrammatical in formal writing.
- Chicago Manual of Style, 16th edition
Do you remember flight stewards before they became attendants?
Better use "presenter" just to be safe.
These sort of social problems don't have unilateral solutions, so the sooner that is recognized by all parties, the better the end result can be.
It was really difficult for me to understand that nodejs (internal?) source code could be that offensive to anyone to require this level of PC commitment, and I am not even a WASP...
It is also quite ironic that they do it on GitHub.