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Comment by djsumdog | Hacker News Reader

So what did this person do? Just wear a MAGA hat? What kind of world do we live in where we consider supporting a democratically elected political candidate a code of conduct violation?

I was at the KiwiCon where Ranty Ben got kicked out. I want to be fair: I thought his talk was stupid and not very useful. But I don't think he should have gotten kicked out. The organizers wouldn't even say why he got kicked out. They didn't say how he specifically violated the Code of Conduct. Was it the ASCII art Goatcx in PGP signing art? Was it the comment about how if you did x to secure yourself you'd be "about as inconspicuous as a tr* Polynesian girl in the desert" or "lesbian f* porn" ?

Hackercons have never really been professional. Later on in that same conference, a Mac kernel hacker did a talk on gdb where he said it was so terrible it'd be like grabbing pig balls. He had a Photoshoped image of the organizer holding some pig balls. The organizer came out, looked at it as the audience laughed and walked off. Obviously they were friends; it was a joke, but I ask you ... what if he had chosen one of female organizers instead?

In such an environment, where is the line? We do we even consider kicking someone out because one person was offended? I realize non-hackercons need to be more professional. Yet, we don't throw people out for preferring emacs vs vim, and we shouldn't throw anyone out for their political beliefs.

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You ask what he's done? I and others have been repeatedly asking the same thing, and not one person has provided evidence beyond the initial, flimsy accusation.

In attempting to gather such dead ends under a hash tag, https://twitter.com/hashtag/LinuxFoundationKangarooCourt

The mob generation of these accusations are more thoroughly documented in https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/dtnamp/linux_foundat...

I used to take principled free speech position in these kind of arguments. I have for Maybe 10 years.

I stopped when I realized that not once, in all the hotly debated discussions I had, I found anything of value in the person being censored. Actually in most cases, removing them provided a smoother environment/community/event.

I stopped caring about hate speech removal when it is actually about hate speech. Now I worry about state censorship more and stop defending trolls and Nazis.

Interesting how different your experience was.

I saw the opposite, where repeated removings/suppression of people with different views resulted in the creation of echochambers from which little of value emerges.

I am not talking about removing people with different views, I am talking about removing people who promote hate speech.

Someone has a talk saying "Linux is the worst thing that ever happened in IT", let her in. Someone has a talk saying "Arabs are inferior people and if you shut that opinion down you are a snowflake", shut him down.

Like you, I used to conflate the two, now I see how different it is.

> I am not talking about removing people with different views, I am talking about removing people who promote hate speech.

Who gets to decide what counts as hate speech? You? Why do you get to make that call and not somebody else? The distinction you're attempting to draw does not exist: you're talking about censoring people based on whether they agree with your perspective. Free speech for the purposes of saying only inoffensive things is not free speech.

Hate speech has some fairly clear legal definitions in many places. It is speech that singles out negatively a group based on [make a list of criterion]. Typical list: gender, nationality, ethnicity, sex orientation, skin color, preferred text editor.

Honestly, I have yet to find a minority that I find problematic to include to classify hate speech at a tech conference. I am super vocal about my hostility toward every religion, I just shut it up at tech conferences. And when I do talk about the religions I find stupid, I am not calling their supporters names. That's really that simple.

> you're talking about censoring people based on whether they agree with your perspective.

On inclusion of other people? Hell yeah. Except I am giving objective criterion to judge it.

> Free speech for the purposes of saying only inoffensive things is not free speech.

I agree with that sentiment. However, I see nothing of value in purely offensive speech. Once again, I am still waiting of a single example of hate speech that would be valuable to a discussion and that can't be replace by non-offensive one.

Any time you give people a button labeled "make my opponent shut up", they're going to mash it all day regardless of the ostensible purpose of the button. Preventing someone attending a professional conference because he agrees with half the country on a controversial issue is simply unacceptable in a democracy regardless of what words you use to justify this behavior.

Who are you to demand that people prove that speech is worthwhile before being able to speak? Why should their ability to speak depend on your evaluation of their speech's discursive worth? You're just using a lot of words to claim that you should get to decide what people are allowed to say.

> Any time you give people a button labeled "make my opponent shut up", they're going to mash it all day regardless of the ostensible purpose of the button

Bis repetita, that's why you don't have a button: you have a process.

> Preventing someone attending a professional conference because he agrees with half the country on a controversial issue is simply unacceptable in a democracy regardless of what words you use to justify this behavior.

Please don't refer to US as "the" country, some of us come from another country, maybe even a democracy with gasp different rules.

And well, I agree it is certainly problematic, but the problem lies in the fact that half of your country defends hate speech. Which can be defined objectively, and has been by laws in my country (France). I used to be a fan of the first amendment, to believe in the slippery slope fallacy that it would lead to more violent censorship, that it would lead to the removal of controversial but worth content.

I have yet to find a single example of that.

> Who are you to demand that people prove that speech is worthwhile before being able to speak? Why should their ability to speak depend on your evaluation of their speech's discursive worth? You're just using a lot of words to claim that you should get to decide what people are allowed to say.

Dude, I know I am pretty cool, but why do you think you have to ask me? Where did I propose you send me an email before speaking? Or that I set rules myself? I am merely saying that hate speech is something that can be clearly defined, that it has been in a way actually enforced by tribunals in France, that it does not lead to censorship of worthwhile content and it is applied a posteriori, not a priori.

Believe it or not, we manage to have a healthy democracy while still forbidding people from wearing nazi apparel (which is still illegal in France)

And this process is a kangaroo court, to all appearances, until they show the evidence by which they made their judgment.

> And well, I agree it is certainly problematic, but the problem lies in the fact that half of your country defends hate speech

What definition of hate speech are you using and what event does it apply to?

On a related note, here's some statements that may or may not be hate speech:

1. Africans are stupid and criminal, we shouldn't let them into the country.

2. Transsexuals are crazy people. They need medicine, not coddling.

3. Muslims have evil beliefs and blow people up and I don't want them in my country.

4. Homos are unnatural, spreading disease and sickness. We need to keep our children away from them so they don't catch the gay.

I've written all four to imply a large amount of ignorance and strong emotional motivations, but they are nonetheless a crude attempt to express a public policy and a reason for it. Should they be banned?

Should they also be banned if written in the form of an eloquent 80 page paper with precise terminology, strong citations from numerous studies and polls and a grounding in commonly accepted principles in political science and ethics (assume such a thing were possible)?

Yes, all these 4 statements would fall under hate speech laws in France.

And yes, people have tried to turn these prejudice into eloquent pages with precise terminology or into stand up comedy and have been shut down for it.

Shockingly, France is not a den of conformism yet. It is in the US that Charlie Hebdo covers are censored and where people "agree to disagree" instead of exploring their disagreements.

> Once again, I am still waiting of a single example of hate speech that would be valuable to a discussion and that can't be replace by non-offensive one.

So, you want people to make some statements that, depending upon their country of origin, might result in criminal or social penalties (including losing their job) because if the those statements were ever tied back to them it might be seen as endorsing "hate speech"? You realize how freaking insane that is, right?

You claim to be inviting argument, and yet you endorse a system which would penalize people for accepting that invitation.

Listen, if you really need an example or two of meaningful ideas that might qualify, I'll provide. But it ultimately doesn't matter whether you consider them a valuable contribution to the discussion, what matters is whether other people have the right express what matters to them. If they don't, then the root of these problems can never be addressed.

So you would let yourself be treated by a doctor that is open with wanting people like you to die? You want police that have stated they hate people like you? You'd trust a cleaner that despise you?

I will let you state your opinion, but you don't get to demand immunity from consequences.

Some opinions are genuinely indefensible.

> I will let you state your opinion, but you don't get to demand immunity from consequences.

Oh, you'll let me? How magnanimous.

How about:

* Nobody asked you.

* Who do you think you are that I would need your permission?

* I wasn't asking permission. I was asking for a indication of interest in genuine conversation. Something you clearly lack.

* What opinions I hold regarding controversial issues are my own. What I was offering was examples of (potentially) prohibited things some people believe that are more nuanced than the cartoon bigotry.

* whatever. Didn't say I consider myself as some benevolent dictator. It just means it doesn't seem bad enough on its own to require proactive intervention.

* see above

* your misinterpretation of my comment almost seems deliberate, so "no u"

* while they surely are your own, you don't get to demand that other people must ignore their own concerns if they belive your opinions make you untrustworthy or dangerous to them.

I am allowed to base my own opinions about you on what opinions you say that you have. And I am allowed to refuse to associate with you.

If you openly tell people that you want people like me dead, I will never let you do any job for me where my life might be at risk (like medical jobs or similar). You don't get to demand undeserved trust.

So, just to be clear: I don't want anyone dead, and especially not because of their status as a member of some demographic. Nobody posting here to debate these issues does. Why you even bring it up is a mystery to me.

The whole point of this conversation was the suggestion that there might be non-"hateful" ideas being repressed, and important conversations that are prevented, that are prohibited by hate speech legislation. To suggest that I might actually want other people dead is a far reach.

I'm not quite sure what there is to misinterpret. Whatever your intent may be (and if it is different that what I describe here, please clarify) your words are pretty confrontational. You suggest I might want people dead, and then seem to vaguely imply you might have some ability to stop me if you don't like what I have to say. You talk about "letting" me share, and about "proactive intervention". What exactly would "proactive intervention" look like? Are you a moderator, or someone else with authority here? Are you someone with the ability and willingness to dox random anonymous strangers on the internet? Or are you just another member here with the ability to downvote/flag?

I'm bringing it up because it's relevant because other people do that. What you personally believe isn't relevant to this argument, because this argument of mine is about the worst content which your proposed rules would protect. Because it WOULD protect bullying and racism and other abuse online under the label "protected opinion".

You would make it literally illegal to counteract such behavior online.

Your rule would necessarily punish Facebook for banning stalkers, punish reddit for banning racist subreddits if they're not strictly illegal, and so on.

The rule you suggest would protect their ability to harass others regardless of if that's what you intend or not. You can't just handwave away those consequences.

Can you prove that it's in fact not super trivial to circumvent bans on non hateful ideas (in non-totalitarian states)? Are here not millions of more websites besides Facebook et al? Is it not easy to go to another website?

The fact is that your proposed rule is far worse than the alternatives.

You're suggesting it's a better tradeoff to forcibly kill quality standards online so that everybody can express literally anything that's not illegal, when it's equally possible to just... Not make a law like that, and instead encourage people to go to other websites.

Each and every person should have their individual freedom to set their standards for what opinions and beliefs they approve of (the edge cases where certain collective decisions are socially harmful are covered by antidiscrimination law).

This extends also to website owners. This means that I as a forum moderator (in a different place, on reddit) has the freedom to ban others from my forum for engaging in what I consider abusive behavior. I get to decide if and when I want to take action.

The admins on Hacker News can likewise ban me from here.

Proactive intervention usually involves government censorship or police action, but can also be considered to cover blocklists and spam filters online.

Each and every one of us decides over our own "domains".

In spaces where I'm not a mod/admin (most of them, that is), "letting you" only means not reporting the account, etc.

Today's trade-off is that every person either accepts the rules for approved content that somebody else has set on their own website... Or your start your own website. Or both at once for that matter, it's trivial to visit multiple websites at once since most browsers have tabs.

If your opinion is banned in one place online, it's easy to go to another to post it. That's how the web worked since the very beginning!

> The fact is that your proposed rule is far worse than the alternatives.

What proposed rule? Please quote me so I know what you're talking about.

> Each and every person should have their individual freedom to set their standards for what opinions and beliefs they approve of

Exactly! Which is why I oppose hate speech legislation. I believe that I, as an adult, have the freedom to hear whatever opinions or ideas I wish and the responsibility to come to my own conclusion on the truth of such ideas. To use the force of law to restrict the expression of ideas merely because they cause offense conflicts directly both with my rights and responsibilities.

> Proactive intervention usually involves government censorship or police action, but can also be considered to cover blocklists and spam filters online.

My question to you, is what are you specifically threatening the context of this specific conversation? It sounds like you're not threatening anything beyond the powers granted to every user on this site, which makes your initial comment look like nothing but useless posturing.

I'd worry that the doctor might recommend dangerous and ineffective treatments, that the police officers would arrest me on false pretenses, and that the cleaner would steal my belongings and poison my groceries. So, yeah, I'd fire the cleaner, switch doctors, etc.

But... would I let myself attend an industry conference that's also being attended by someone who voted for a politician whose opinions or policies are hostile to me?

Yes. Of course.

I'd also attend a conference that's being attended by someone who thinks I'm going to hell when I die. I'd even attend a conference where one of the speakers thinks that. Because I don't have to trust conference attendees or speakers with my life or health; I don't have to interact with them at all, and if I do, it'll be in a busy public place; and if they were the kind of person to go into a blind rage when they meet someone like me in public, they probably would've done it already and gotten caught.

There's a very wide range of sleazy but not illegal behavior as well as hard to prove illegal acts which also might affect the equation.

For a conference organizer, the primary question is how to make it a positive experience for as many visitors as possible, and that's the criteria they will use when determining who gets to visit.

If allowing a particular person to visit means several others will refrain from visiting, is it then a good idea to permit that? That's a value judgement for the organizers to make.

And if you think they made the wrong decision, feel free to tell them so or even to boycott it yourself, giving them a reason to consider other potential solutions.

>If allowing a particular person to visit means several others will refrain from visiting, is it then a good idea to permit that? That's a value judgement for the organizers to make.

That's part of it, but it's also a value judgment for everyone else to make.

In many cases, the rest of us in society care enough about how those decisions are made that we've passed laws prohibiting businesses from rejecting customers for certain reasons.

For example, if your market research shows that allowing Jews into your event results in lower overall attendance, because too many of the other potential attendees are anti-Semites who refuse to go to an event that allows Jews, you still don't get to ban them. We've established that making those opportunities equally available to all religions, ethnicities, genders, races, etc. is more important than maximizing profit. Even when that discrimination isn't illegal, it's often frowned upon by the culture.

And one reason for that is that we distinguish between the business deciding you can't visit them, and you deciding you can't visit them. We expect businesses to be inclusive, even if that means more people choose to exclude themselves -- because this way, the people who are excluded at least get a choice.

>And if you think they made the wrong decision, feel free to tell them so or even to boycott it yourself, giving them a reason to consider other potential solutions.

I've got no reason to attend a Kubernetes conference anyway, but I have the same interest as any other member of society in ensuring that people get treated fairly.

We also purposefully do not extend that protection to literally everything distinct about a person. Even stuff like California's laws only protect employees from their employers when engaging in political action.

There's no universal legal protection against an entity responding to another person's general beliefs, if that entity consider those to be harmful.

We do not want to obstruct society from holding people accountable for harmful behavior.

Please do provide.

Why is this question even being asked?

The answer is everybody, in their own respective spaces.

It's not me but not others. It's me AND all others.

If I run a bar, I get to kick out customers who voice despicable opinions. Exact same thing applies if I run a shop, a web forum, or a conference for that matter.

All of us gets to kick out people who behave badly from our own private spaces, nothing obligates me to tolerate abuse.

Free speech does not mean freedom from consequences. It does not mean the right to an audience. It means you get to say your opinion without the government interfering - and then other people get to decide how to react to it.

Freedom of speech without the right to react and respond to what others say would a horrible idea. Partially because it entirely invalidates the reason for why speech is supposed to be free. If you can't change things based on what you learned from what you heard, why even bother letting people speak?

If this means somebody else bans me from their space for being offensive, then so be it.

> If this means somebody else bans me from their space for being offensive, then so be it.

I suspect that if I banned the followers of a religion I found "offensive" from an establishment I owned, you'd be writing a very different post. The problem with the free association argument from censorship proponents is that they've never consistent about it. They're happy to talk up the rights of institutions to exclude right up until the moment that they themselves are excluded.

A functioning society is one in which you don't put your livelihood at risk by agreeing with 50% of the population on a matter of public importance. Violating this principle is tyranny, and I don't care what elaborate justifications anyone comes up with to explain it away. You don't get to try to win political fights by personally ruining regular people on the other side.

Not really. It would be quite illegal in most places, sure, but I simply wouldn't want to go there in the first place if you banned people like me.

Of course that becomes a problem is a large part of society does the same. Which is why such laws against the exists. But I wouldn't be the one pursuing this.

Especially for online spaces. There's just too many options for it to be reasonable to be pissed about getting banned from just one or a few places. It's always possible to create your own online space, if necessary. And right to speech isn't a right to an audience. You get to speak your mind, but people will only listen if they want to.

But keep in mind that there's a bet good reason for why most antidiscrimination laws deliberately limit the contexts in which they're applicable and what groups they protect. Very few jurisdictions protect opinions on their own.

I don't care if an antivaxxers works at a bakery. I'd be pissed if I hear one worked as a nurse at a hospital I go to, and that they refuse to carry out vaccinations. Some opinions are dangerous when held in certain contexts, and requires a reaction. This is simply about safety and protecting society. You can hold an opinion that terrible opinion elsewhere, where you don't hurt people.

At some point, you have to understand that the person putting their livelihood at risk is the person themselves, and that firing them is just as justified as firing a drunkard from a machine shop.

You're not arguing in good faith here.

You'd have to be completely insane to conflate "Linux is bad" with "Arabs are inferior," and I don't believe that you ever did.

Supporting a democratically elected candidate, especially outside of the conference in question, can not be conflated with claiming "Arabs are inferior" at a fucking talk at the conference.

You people are so swept up in ideology that you are willing to immediately jump to completely unrealistic positions, that nobody on the opposite side holds, and sidetrack the original discussion into arguing about the position you imagine that your opponents hold.

You're fighting ghosts to feel self-righteous.

I am answering to someone who conflates hate speech equals to "stating opinions I disagree with". I am glad my example was clear enough to show you how absurd this equivalence was.

> Supporting a democratically elected candidate, especially outside of the conference in question, can not be conflated with claiming "Arabs are inferior" at a fucking talk at the conference.

How about "African countries are shitholes"? "Mexicans are rapists"? You wear a person's symbol, you claim ownership over their ideology. And I know historical comparisons are tired, but there are a few racist and genocidal leaders who were democratically elected.

As a European friend, I am sad you are at that point in the US, but yes, one side of your politics is really fucked up to the point of being toxic. It is racist and misogynistic. A community has to choose between being inclusive of women and minorities and being inclusive of people who reject them.

> You're fighting ghosts to feel self-righteous.

When you grew up in some parts of Europe, you learn to fight when some ghosts rise. More than half of the people I work with could not contribute in a world where sexism and racism would reign.

Why did you assume I'm from the US? I'm from a progressive Scandinavian country and would be considered slightly left of center here (which is far-left in the US.)

Trump never said "Mexicans are rapists," he said something along the lines of "They're not bringing their best people... their rapists" which could be misconstrued as "they're."

He did say that African countries are shitholes, while complimenting my country, which wasn't great for our public image worldwide, but I did chuckle at it. It's the sort of off-hand stupid wording you'd hear at a bar late at night, which I figure is part of his appeal to the people that actually like him. Not a good look for a president to be sure.

Trump is not the ghost of Hitler, it can be fun to argue in that kind of hyperbole but he really isn't. And ~50% of the American voting public chose him over Hillary, because it was a shit sandwich vs giant douche race, you can't reasonably suggest banning all those people from Linux conferences.

> And ~50% of the American voting public chose him over Hillary, because it was a shit sandwich vs giant douche race, you can't reasonably suggest banning all those people from Linux conferences.

That is a very different situation to choosing to wear a MAGA hat. Choosing to wear a MAGA hat at a large event is a conscious decision to broadcast your endorsement of Trump's policies, ideology, and everything else. It means you want people to know you agree with Trump's stance on immigrants, women, and all the other shit.

Maybe such people still shouldn't be banned from a Linux conference, but they absolutely should be considered as racists and misogynists.

If he wore the MAGA hat at the conference, I would actually be somewhat with you on this, in such a case I think staff should initially politely tell the person to take the hat off and escalate from there. My reasoning for this would be that someone walking around with such a hat at a conference is probably just begging for reactions, and US politics doesn't really fit into a conference environment.

However, you're being disingenuous. He didn't wear it at a large event, he thought it would be a fun idea to put it on in front of Trump Tower and share a picture of it with his friends on social media. That's something I might even do as a fun tourist picture, and I really don't like Trump.

This conference is not banning him for conduct at the event, they are banning him for an innocuous social media post on his personal twitter account, a week before the event has even begun. They are just policing the political views of attendees. That's what people have a problem with.

That’s absurd. Should someone walking around wearing a “Black lived matter” hat be banned as well because it’s potentially controversial?

When did it no longer be okay to express unpopular political views?

I find such reasoning absolutely ridiculous. Personally it brings me great sadness that the ideals of free speech - the ideals, not the legal meaning - have been so happily stomped on.

Yeah, I agree that it's a sad state of affairs. But the US political landscape is currently so torn and people are ravenously defending their own team in a fight away from the center, so much that I can just imagine the shitstorm you'd unleash by wearing a maga hat at a primarily left leaning conference like the Linux foundation conference.

It's not good, it's not healthy for anyone, and I'm wondering how long its going to go on for.

You have to keep in mind, that for the most staunch Trump opponents, any mention of him is likened to a personal attack, they honestly believe that supporting him is on the level of full blown white supremacy and fascism.

And in that climate, even thought it goes against my principles, I would advocate for everyone to just keep their political leanings to themselves at all times in these "professional" gatherings where it shouldn't matter where you stand politically. At least until things calm down.

Man I have to sympathize with you here. It seems no matter the opinion you express people are jumping down your throat. I just want to say that, to me, it appears you’re doing a good job of expressing your opinion in a kind way.

I would love to see hostile tensions like these die out online very soon.

You should really watch the clip again before you get behind Trump on this one. He definitely refers to mexican immigrants as rapists, although of course "some, I assume, are good people". I'm surprised by the amount of people trying to play semantic games with what Trump is saying in general, the sentiment is clear to everyone. Trying to deconstruct it in hindsight to his favor is.. pointless.

Argue however you want about that you should be able to express your opinions, but please stop trying to sugar-coat Trump. His rethoric is toxic, it's marginalizing minorities and it's affecting how it is to live as a part of a minority and it shows, not only, from the hate crimes rates.

You yourself are interpreting it the worst possible way, out of context.

What's the context? He was talking about people coming here illegally.

Basic common sense would dictate that many gang members, drug runners, criminals in general that we know are coming here, are doing so illegally. As he said, I'm sure some Mexicans that come here illegally are good people, but pretty much all of the influx of criminals from outside our country come here illegally (including people regularly facilitating illegal travel).

You can choose to lie (to yourself and others) about the context of his statements, as if he was referring to ALL Mexicans, but anyone interested in knowing the truth should indeed find his statements for themselves, completely in context.

He's said enough things to criticize that one shouldn't need to stretch the truth to do so, but the desperation of ideologues knows no bounds.

> I am talking about removing people who promote hate speech.

This is pretty off-topic given that there was nothing interpretable as hate speech done here. But I want to note that was how the two left wing echo chambers I saw started (the right wing ones took a different turn).

Initially they just banned people who made statements that were simple expressions of hatred. But people generally express views on a bit of a bell curve, so all the people whose curves had a portion inside the banned space left (often self-censoring for a while, then leaving). After that, the cultural interpretation of the rule changed a bit and it started including statements about groups (e.g. Mexican immigrants are [way more likely to be] rapists). Once all the people who expressed such a view were gone/silenced there was a popular update to the forum rules that clarified and banned a bunch more things. This process repeated a number of times.

First comes the change in rules, the vocal population changes. Then a cycle of changes in enforcement and interpretation of the rules interleaved with changes in the vocal population. Then another rules change. Repeat a bunch of times to end up with an echo chamber that I think the hn population would consider "full of ridiculous SJW nonesense" based on the commentary I've recently seen here.

> in all the hotly debated discussions I had, I found anything of value in the person being censored

I think history is a better guide because we can more clearly see what was valuable. Things that were censored in the past:

* Heliocentricism

* Evolution, esp of humans from other apes

* Capitalism/market economics (in socialist states)

* Currently mainstream views about biology (e.g. Lysenkoism)

Free speech is a "hits" business: most of the value comes from a few incredibly valuable ideas that someone powerful is trying to censor. The damage done to Russia and China under communism easily exceeds all the extra "smoothness" that they got out of censoring those who disagreed with them.

Yes, which of these views would have been shut down by a policy forbidding hate speech?

I am now mostly worried about state censorship, which do remove things like the items you list.

Censoring hate speech and people who promote exclusion of minorities? I have not a single example of it being detrimental to a healthy debate.

I'm pretty sure that all of those views were censored because they were immoral according to the dominant ideology of the day, and in every case it would have been argued that this time the censorship was good because the dominant ideology was good, whereas previous instances of censorship were bad.

How would someone in the USSR know that censorship of opponents of Lysenkoism was bad? As far as they were concerned, the people being censored were evil counter-revolutionaries of whom nothing good could come.

Wouldn't "only censor/condemn hate that's tied to a protected class" be a decent test? Where protected class is defined as the stuff people cannot change about themselves. This test seems quite timeless and orthogonal to the problematic "immoral."

White male is decidedly a protected class with that definition.

Disclaimer: I am Asian and like to point out irony, don't lynch me.

Yes and? Hate speech against white male would be brought down as well.

Let's dive into that: here are tweets made by the accusers leading to Linux Foundation's judgment. https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/dtnamp/linux_foundat...

Well, have clear rules, clear penalties and due process, saying crap about any skin color is hate speech. You have no shortage of that in the US right now.

That's not my country and not much of my business but if half of your country is fine using its free speech defending KKK apologists and the other half only meets that with apathy, don't be surprised if some Black Panthers come back to life and use their own free speech fighting back.

And maybe I am less shocked by this affair because in many European cities, wearing a MAGA hat would be seen pretty close as wearing nazi insignia. Under it, lies either someone very racist or someone very confused. And either way probably someone that is not going to have a constructive participation.

So yeah, probably lack of clear rules, lack of due process, I hope that's the takeaway they'll get from it.

Arbitrary enforcement of vague rules is authoritarianism, but you can have clear rules and due process to limit hate speech. It has been done successfully in several places.

I agree with having clear standards. I think the proportions in the US are not quite as dire as you portray.

That's true, he is "just" at 40% of support among voters.

He still has won an election in a country that pretends to be democratic, so I'll politely assume he was the choice of the majority.

That's a far cry from 'defending KKK apologists'. Then again, having seen other responses you've made in this post, I'm skeptical I should be trying to persuade you.

What you think MAGA stands for is not what it actually stands for. You're stating all kinds of extremist positions that 99% of people in the US do not hold.

Anyone can stir up outrage against a made up situation.

> in many European cities, wearing a MAGA hat would be seen pretty close as wearing nazi insignia

Which ones?

No lynching here; another comment of mine points out irony as well. That said, white male isn't some sort of exception just because some do/did abhorrent things -- the white males who don't (and they certainly can't control whether they descend from those who did) do abhorrent things don't deserve it. Feel free to define a set of people who suck based on their actions, but white male can't be an analogue for that definition.

I think you're misunderstanding the reasons for free speech.

As soon as some entity gets a license to start banning speech, you have given bad ideas an advantage over good ones.

This is because a bad memeplex can co-opt the censorship apparatus and kill off any competitors without having to face them in a fair fight.

The criterion you mentioned about hate speech etc is extremely flexible and dependent on a bunch of definitions and interpretations that the censors will be in control of - exactly the kind of thing that the free speech principle protects us from!

> and in every case it would have been argued that this time the censorship was good because the dominant ideology was good, whereas previous instances of censorship were bad.

The idea of general progress is a fairly recent one. At the times of Galileo trials, many people would have proclaimed with pride that they were following the pure and unalterable criterion of the glorious classics of antiquities.

Notwithstanding that, our modern understanding of the evils of censorship is not just based on a shift in morality, it is based on a reasoning on the nature of debate, science, uncovering of truth and the importance of controversy.

There are places where, if you have a good argument, one can argue about the differences between genders, ethnicities, religions (<- God knows I waste so much time on that subject) or sexual orientation. One is allowed to propose an argumented view at odd with the majority.

Once that is preserved, I do not see what discussion of value is suppressed by suppressing hate speech.

Using Galileo as an example isn't very useful since even though it turns out that he was right, at the time he didn't actually have real proof so the church was right to tell him not to publish his opinion since he didn't have adequate evidence for his position. The problem the church had with him wasn't that they thought that the sun had to orbit the Earth, but that he wouldn't stop trying to make people use his method without actual proof.

But who decides which opinions are possible to exclude without being detrimental?

Turtles, all the way down!

None of these examples are hate speech.

There is a formal legal definition of hate speech in the countries where these laws apply and it would be nice if people arguing against those laws would accept that, instead of continuously conflating things that are not hate speech.

Interesting argument. By the same token, we should remove all cyclists from all roads, as it would provide a smoother transportation experience.

Well we do so when we want to go very fast e.g. highways.

Right, and going to a conference is like driving on a highway?

I don't know, I don't play football.

Car roads, bike roads, bus roads. With some intersection. I think that's the ideal

Did Mr. Wood engage in hate speech? If so, what did he say that constituted free speech.

One of the other individuals involved in this row has said previously "white men in tech ain't shit". Should this individual be allowed to participate in tech conferences?

I know neither their rules, nor what was said there. I can only tell you that systems exist that allow:

- hate speech to be objectively defined

- due process to exist in processing complaints

> "white men in tech ain't shit". Should this individual be allowed to participate in tech conferences?

All I can tell you is that it would probably be judged hate speech in France and fined if said publicly. I know nothing of the rules and penalties this specific place's CoC implements. And I'll be the first to say that it is problematic if the rules in the matter are not written.

But I am sure the tech world, through its typically clumsy approach of human affairs, will end up having enough jurisprudence to piece out a workable code.

> All I can tell you is that it would probably be judged hate speech in France and fined if said publicly.

Extremely unlikely. Members of the P.I.R. (black/arab racialist party) and other organisations who swim in the same waters have been spouting many many worse things. Or a few of the crazy chicks who took over the U.N.E.F. (student union) and have said stuff like "the whites should be gassed".

Did anyone care to bring their case to court? IF they did, I am pretty sure they would be found guilty.

Hate speech is the only speech that needs to be protected. If speech doesn't offend or upset anyone, then there's nothing that it needs to be protected from. Your reasoning is upside down.

If you find someone's opinion disagreeable, you don't shut it down, you refute it. Shutting it down just tells me you have no counter arguments, so maybe they have a point and I should listen to it.

Understand the Streisand Effect.

Technically it's possible for speech to be offensive/unpopular/blasphemous (and thus need and deserve protection) without being hate speech. Hate speech is a specific kind of offensive speech. Other than that you're spot on though.

Well, someone that finds speech offensive/upsetting/etc can pretty much call it hate speech. So in the end, hate speech can be anything that upsets someone.

I mean, you can reasonably define hate speech as something any reasonable person could agree is actually potentially harmful (like promoting some kind of prejudice in some dangerous ways), and I presume that's how it's defined under legal terms, but colloquially people most likely won't be doing that.

> not once, in all the hotly debated discussions I had, I found anything of value in the person being censored.

This says much more about you than about those people. Shame on you.

No, the CoC violation was for making a video, in his very popular podcast channel, supporting the "right" of Somnez to attack women in tech. Since Woods was coming to Kubecon specifically to podcast it, this made several women going to Kubecon feel very unsafe.

> supporting the "right" of Somnez to attack women in tech

Clearly false, borderline slander.

Actually what Somnez did was trying to take heat away from a specific tech-women being attacked in a twitter flamewar, by instead creating heat for himself.

He did this by being generally obnoxious and impolite, and thus an obvious target to follow/tack on to instead. This part was clearly successful and the harassed woman got less heat for it.

However he told lots of tech-people to "shut up". The problem? Some of those people were women.

If he found their opinion offensive or racists, should he not have told those people off because they were women? Should he have treated them differently? Really?

Personally I don't think so. Because IMO that would be the text-book definition of actual sexism.

That seems to be a key distinction.

If I fire an arrow in the dark, and it kills a person of color, does that make it a racist act of manslaughter?

Of course not. Racism denotes the motive of the attacker, not just the nature of the victim. Both have to be present for racism to be a factor.

That may or may not apply here, but I would need to see the video. Regardless, I've seen the 'ascribed motive' attack applied practically nonstop during this whole debacle, conjuring racist motives on the basis of a person of color making an accusation of racism, and not any acts of Charles Wood himself, including the aforementioned video. If that was key evidence, no one has brought it forward.

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