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Comment by mmtml | Hacker News Reader

I think the point was not properly made on their behalf. That said, do the organizers of the conference have any saying on the politics on their country and actually deserve to be punished because of them?

I don't really think so.

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I am not sure if denying funding can be thought of as a punishment: could they have chosen another country?

But going along with it, allowing the conference to happen should then be considered a punishment against the people who are by law prevented from attending. And now it's not so simple anymore since no matter what the PSF does they have to "punish" somebody.

Indeed. Would the PSF deny funds to an event in the USA due to Trump's Muslim ban? How about if a country has a big pro-Israel or anti-Israel protest that the PSF doesn't like -- is that a legitimate reason to deny funds for events in that country?

An event like DjangoCon in Tanzania is most likely going to be a tiny step forward for LGBT rights there. The organizers are probably more liberal than the average Tanzanian. Organizing a Python event is going to bring liberal westerners to the country, and generally import a bit of the culture of the international Python community, which is LGBT-friendly. I don't see a plausible story for how this DjangoCon could be a step back for LGBT rights.

If I was a leader of the PSF, my approach would be to not worry about this issue by default. If I heard a story through the grapevine about LGBT Pythonistas feeling unwelcome at the conference, I would have a friendly conversation with the organizers to see if there's anything which can be done. If it keeps happening, or if the organizers don't seem to care, that's the point at which I might suggest they seek funding elsewhere.

Great point, but it might be safest to meet virtually.

The board is accountable for relating their mission statement to their budget. The highest bang for their buck might not be an on-prem conference.

Organizations should absolutely have avoided funding events in the US while we had a Muslim ban. The US is a big market so unfortunately some organizations sell out their values and do things here anyway. But we should obviously be held to the same standards as everybody else.

>Organizations should absolutely have avoided funding events in the US while we had a Muslim ban.

But did they actually do so? If not, it seems a little suspicious that the standard may have changed now that the event is in Africa? Perhaps holding everyone to the same standards means staying consistent with the previous precedent, that a few unjust laws shouldn't cause you to abandon an entire country?

That's literally how any 'anti-state' action works, ever. Does an individual Russian have a say in what Putin does in Ukraine? Probably not. But countries are a collection of its citizens. The only way to 'punish' a country is to punish its citizens. Sometimes it's more direct, other times less. But at the end of the day, any and all actions will trickle down to punishing individuals, because that's simply how actions against countries (or any other organized group of people) work.

>"The only way to 'punish' a country is to punish its citizens."

And the rulers of said country do not give a flying fuck about it. They're also protected from the revolt as they have police / army in their pocket to deal with the people.

> But countries are a collection of its citizens [sic]

This seems excessively reductionist. An organized state, borders, a system for generating revenue, an armed force, and other infrastructure seems necessary for a proper country to exist. All of these militate against treating the country as merely a collection of people, or using the people as the fodder to "punish" the country.

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