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Comment by trjordan | Hacker News Reader

The part of this article that highlights what Douglas Crockford did to get him removed from Nodevember is fine. A bit boring, but fine.

The part of this article that generally hand-waves towards "inclusivity" as a movement and dismisses them as people with "unicorn-colored hair" is frustrating. There's little here that actually discusses the issue. It points out a couple of things that Douglas said, trivializes the issues that the inclusivity group cares about, and seems to make its primary point by arguing semantics (oh, look, the inclusivity group excludes people, har har).

I get that its an opinion piece, but there's nothing of substance here that I could possibly disagree with, because it's not defined. If you want to get a bunch of people agree with you and give you internet points, it's spot on. But there's not a lot here that's interesting if you're not already on board with this point of view.

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The provided examples of Douglas Crockford's behaviour really do trivialize the issue.

However, if this is all the evidence there is, then that points out that the issue rightfully should be considered as trivial and harmful, because it has real negative consequences (elimination of a speaker) with trivial benefits (as shown by those examples in article).

I'd expect the one of the following responses:

a) Examples that Douglas Crockford did something significantly worse than the examples given in the article;

b) Acknowledgement that there were no non-trivial grounds for cancelling his speech, and that "this 'inclusivity' is not the 'inclusivity'" but an accidental overreaction;

c) Acknowledgement that yes, you consider this particular case as something that should have rightfully been done.

Do note that if you answer (c) then I will consider your [interpretation of the] movement as something harmful and something that should be fought against, because it intentionally does bad things in the name of "good intentions". I'm quite expecting to hear that (a) actually is the case, but if it's not, then the current actions were not okay.

It's worth noting that the details of the reasons Crockford was uninvited have not been confirmed by any of the parties. This article takes speculation from elsewhere as announced truth and proceeds to dismiss inclusivity as a goal on that basis.

Here is a good update I missed: Formal statement from Nodevember[0]

[0] http://nodevember.org/statement.html

"While we have a tremendous respect for Mr. Crockford's abilities as a speaker and his contributions to our craft, we became aware that based on private feedback - not simply the dialogue on Twitter - that his presence would make some speakers uncomfortable to the point where they refused to attend or speak."

Any speakers who are made "uncomfortable" by Crockford's presence are pretty much guaranteed to be the sort of speakers who don't bring anything to your conference anyway.

"We are in over our heads."

Well, that's certainly the truth.

I also notice that while they apologized so unreservedly, they didn't go so far as to reinvite Crockford.

> The part of this article that highlights what Douglas Crockford did to get him removed from Nodevember is fine. A bit boring, but fine.

But that is the important part though. He got removed because he used words like "promiscuous" and "weak" ? How can anyone think a group behind this kind of censoring is a good thing?

> trivializes the issues that the inclusivity group cares about

Actually, the article demonstrates that the group's aims are trivial. "Trivialize" implies that the group is actually trying to do something non-trivial, rather than, say, punish someone for making a few completely inoffensive jokes.

I suppose I just disagree with you, then. From the Inclusivity Working Group Github:

"Increasing inclusivity means making the Node.js project a safe and friendly place for people from diverse backgrounds."

That seems like a solid goal to me. Their tactics may be petty or ineffective (removing Crockford is a pretty bold step), but that's different the strategy.

Do you believe that that goal is not worthwhile? If it's not, why?

It's not a worthy goal, no. It's an actively harmful goal. It takes simply working on a good project to be so overly politicized that everyone has to be constantly on their toes about what they do or say and their priority is becoming pleasing the SJW overlords of their project instead of just doing good work. I'm all for anyone who wants to contribute contributing, but scanning code for words that might offend someone is not contribution, it's childish whining.

> "Increasing inclusivity means making the Node.js project a safe and friendly place for people from diverse backgrounds." That seems like a solid goal to me.

When you have people who have different opinions of what "safe" is, you can end up having a bit of friction.

Weasel words. What exactly is "safe" and "friendly"? What exactly does an "unsafe" project look like in the context? "Friendly" is practically entirely subjective. And frankly, I can make an argument that for group over certain size, the only way "friendly" is a goal would be a censored-ridden groupthink environment. People are different, and like it or not, they are not gonna be friendly toward one another.

Note that the opposite of "friendly" isn't just "hostile" or "animosity". It could also just be "respectful" or "professional".

Oh hey, if I am playing the twist-your-word game, that goal could be rewritten as: "Increasing inclusivity means making the Node.js project a safe and unprofessional place for people from diverse backgrounds."

When they are excluding someone (Crockford in this case), they are excluding people. And the onus is on them to prove that this will be more beneficial in the long run. The bigger problem is that for those feel-good org and goal, there is no accountability ever, and it seems like they are externalizing a lot of troubles to the larger community who doesn't care much about their cause.

Finally, I don't care about their stated goal: sounds like a witch hunt, acts like a witch hunt and you can't stop me from questioning your goal.

"Safe" and "friendly" are so vague as to be useless. I feel "unsafe" around social justice warriors because I have to watch every trivial word I say, or they'll dial things up to 11 and go after my career, and listening to PC talk "triggers" me.

I've come to the conclusion that walking on eggshells is pointless. I know that I am not a bad person, that I have no ill intent, and that I do not seek to offend of exclude anyone regardless of our differences.

This incident reinforces my view - it appears that Mr. Crockford's keynote invitation was rescinded not because of any specific action on his part, but because "his presence would make some speakers uncomfortable to the point where they refused to attend or speak."[1]

That is completely subjective, and as such there is no rational means to judge whether your own words or actions will lead to such treatment or not.

[1] http://nodevember.org/statement.html

I think that in practice people worry that the tactics used indicate that actual inclusivity isn't the true goal, and the true goal is to create a new hierarchy with 'their sort of people' at the top and therefore 'our sort of people' being thrown out - i.e. inclusivity of everybody who agrees with us and let's just round everybody else off to bigots.

My personal opinion is roughly that, yes, that's potentially a failure mode, and one we should watch for, but that people are probably far more worried than they need to be about it - and also that the tendency to dismiss such worries with "but how can you be against inclusivity" is rather missing the point and just makes things worse.

If one interprets: "Increasing inclusivity means making the Node.js project a safe and friendly place for people from diverse backgrounds." as opposing the words 'promiscuous' and 'weak' as in the article, the goal seems shitty to me.

The article makes this assumption and then shows how shitty things are based on that assumption. I like this reply: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12426199

Pretty much every real-world villain ever has spoken in soaring words about how they were dedicated to freedom and liberty and justice. Or, these days, "safety," "friendliness," "tolerance," "diversity," and "inclusivity." Just because somebody uses applause words doesn't make them the good guys; we really should have internalized that by now.

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