13thLetter

"I'm implying that De Goes seems to have done everything he possibly could have to synthesize drama out of this decision short of (just barely, at the point) actually endorsing Yarvin's Moldbug posts."

That sounded awfully like you were accusing him of doing all this deliberately. But if you think it was all an accident, then okay.

Thought experiment: Your name is De Goes. You strongly believe that people's political opinions or personal characteristics should have no bearing on their professional life; to that point, you made sure to set up a blinded system for choosing LambdaConf speakers so nobody's prejudices, conscious or unconscious, could play a role. As a reward for actually practicing what Internet slacktivists merely preach, you have just discovered that one of the selected speakers turned out to be the infamous criminal Goldst -- er, Moldbug.

What's the PR move that gets you through this without fundamentally betraying your principles by giving in to the baying mob?

That's, uh. Wow. Quite the accusation.

For starters, how does De Goes benefit from generating this drama? Most of the sponsors pulled out and he's been smeared as a racist from one end of the Internet to the other, in an era where that accusation is literally career-ending. Do you really think he decided to blow up LambdaConf in an enormous suicide bomb, and that all the fellow conference managers were okay with that?

> The whole thing seems calculated for maximum drama.

We live in a culture where people have been primed to go nuclear, not just at the tiniest slight against them, but at the faintest media-driven rumor that some other person somewhere, who may not even exist, may have in theory been slighted. If those people cause drama, it is the fault of those people, not anyone else.

> The main difference is that all of those phenomenon were unidentified: the pilots never had sufficient detail to match their evidence to a real-world experience.

There were no real-world experiences of UFOs, but it's not correct to say that pilots didn't know what to expect -- flying saucers with a very specific description were a well-established part of popular culture. A saucer-shaped object at a great distance that moved quickly, made sharp turns which would be impossible for a fixed-wing aircraft, and which would eventually disappear as if it had moved straight away at high speed, was the standard description. It would have been in the mind of any pilot, and indeed exactly that description popped up innumerable times in the UFO reports.

> If any of what's happening here is wrong, so was the apartheid divestiture movement.

Those actions by themselves are not necessarily right or wrong; it's the reason for the action which makes the difference.

It was right to mount a massive conventional invasion of Europe in order to defeat Nazi Germany's campaign of conquest. It would not be right to mount a massive conventional invasion of Europe because of someone jaywalking in Berlin.

It was right to mount a boycott campaign of South Africa and call the rulers of South Africa racists in order to end apartheid. Is it right to mount a boycott campaign against LambdaConf and call its organizers racists because in a blind evaluation they selected a speaker whose personal politics, which will not be touched on in any way at the convention, you find repellent?

We're unlikely to have a productive discussion if you think that. More accurately, you are unlikely to have a productive discussion in any context whatsoever, because you will be unable to evaluate ideas outside the context of the man who holds them.

I'll give you Point 1, of course, but points 2-4 apply just as well to the UFO reports. Many of them were from experienced professional pilots, reported immediately after the incident and with great detail. UFO skeptics wrote a number of books on the topic back in the '70s; they're worth reading if we're about to go through another period of people reporting mysterious objects in the sky that never quite manage to show up on photos or radar.

> So I guess I don't share the principle that you seem to have, that if I don't like a conference I should simply shut up and not attend

If you want to complain loudly about the conference as you don't attend, go for it. But once you're pressuring sponsors into pulling out, once you're running a weeks-long harassment campaign against the organizers, and especially once you're pitching a fit about the conference managing to find other funding despite your best efforts, that goes way, way, way beyond mere complaining. You are making an affirmative effort to prevent the conference from happening at all, and at the very least I'd suggest that you own it.

It's true that a problem could happen, and I'm glad the risk is being taken seriously, but a lot of these reports (if not the overwhelming majority) feel like pilots' UFO reports from the '60s. There are no photos, there are no radar traces (often over some of the most carefully controlled airspace in the world), there is no any sign that the drone wasn't a bird or something or even existed at all. I'd like to have harder data on how often this is actually happening.

> Similarly, it is legitimate for others to publicly express market preferences for avoiding conferences that feature him.

If the anti-inclusion folks were merely "publicly expressing market preferences" they wouldn't be so furious about how LambdaConf managed to find enough funding to keep going. They're already not going, and they've said so loudly and publicly, right? So why are they so bothered that anyone is going, that the conference continues to exist at all?

It's not about justice; it's about power. Simple as that. It's not enough to not attend a talk by Yarvin, or even to not go to a conference he's attending; it's about making sure he can't speak, anywhere, pour encourager les autres.

> Ads are fine when they help people.

It's really easy to forget this. Ads can be a good thing! Anyone ever pick up Computer Shopper magazine in the '90s? It was a giant phonebook full of practically nothing but ads for computer hardware and software. And not only did people voluntarily read it, they paid money for the privilege, because it was useful to them.

Well, that's the interesting question, isn't it.

Google offered a high quality service for free. (Well, "free" as in they're selling eyeballs to advertisers, but, you know. Internet free.) They aggressively promoted it to the entire world. Literally a billion people took them up on it and, after years of reliable service, have made it a central part of their professional and personal lives.

What is Google's responsibility at this point to not grief those billion people? Whether by bad April Fool's pranks, or anything else?

If the takeaway from your comment is that the world would be better if people paid for their email service, I wouldn't disagree. But how we get back to that point is not at all clear.

What do you think you're gaining by walking up to a white homeless man freezing on the street and explaining to him how much better his life is because of his "privilege"?

If you think that was an unfair summary, well, a) it was, and b) it also quite clearly explains why "privilege" is a losing argument if you're actually interested in increasing the amount of justice in this world. Privilege sounds automatically unfair and feels unfair and people's minds will slam shut. Do you really want to expand the reach of your ideas, as opposed to just virtue-signal to fellow activists? Then drop "privilege."

Just imagine the screaming if someone made a post about this about Muslims.

The "punching up is okay!" excuse is only useful to people who are in it for the punching.

How about if nobody gets punched. Don't roll out demeaning stereotypes against any groups; instead, treat people like human beings. Who knows, it might work out!

All the fascists I know are in favor of allowing people they disagree with to freely speak without risking their livelihoods.

If the stories of people missing out on job offers and so forth are true, Google did real damage to their lives and should make amends somehow.

I'll freely grant that I don't know what, specifically, they should do, but "sorry lol" doesn't really cut it.

I agree that it would make it less funny, but the takeaway from that conclusion is that they simply shouldn't do this prank at all. A joke isn't worth harming gmail's UX like this.

"Brogrammer"? Where did that come from?

> There's always at least a bit of racist motivation for complaints about NBA players' "egos and attitudes".

Oh, is there? That's quite a harsh accusation -- it can get people instantly fired nowadays -- so I'm sure you can back it up.

> It's like a dog whistle in that certain audiences hear the message, and others don't.

You seem to be very good indeed at hearing this alleged dog whistle. Perhaps the problem is a little closer to home than you realize.

"Either person B or C, depending on whether or not they are enforcing laws for the government."

If there's no problem with B's behavior, the takeaway is that no one can say anything that anyone would take offense to, because they'd be putting their employment at risk. No thanks.

There are ways besides government force to chill free speech.

Is it okay to allow a speaker who believes that capitalists should be put into labor camps?

> At exactly the point where you think this actually fucking matters when evaluating the value of those people.

In that case, you must believe that Yarvin is not a racist, because he has stated at great length (not that he's capable of talking at other lengths, of course) that the value of other people has absolutely nothing to do with their intelligence, whether it's 0% genetic or 100%.

It is so weird to see an organization handling this kind of situation in a rational and professional manner instead of instantly caving in to the mob. I'm not used to it. I keep waiting for the punchline.

There is an astonishing amount of self-importance going on in essays like this. People who believe they are striking a blow against fascism by not attending a functional programming conference that an obscure former blogger is going to as well -- this sort of fantasy is quite reminiscent of the sort of online gun-rights slacktivists who picture themselves fighting off armies of looters or government troops with their personal arsenal.

Make no mistake, in an actual fascist regime people like this would be the first to knuckle under.

Especially considering that most of the people grumbling about this now are going to obediently vote the Secretary of State on whose watch it happened into the Presidency in November. Nothing's going to change.

> If I can't have a quiet chat with friends in public making clear I'm a gay, atheist, muslim, vegan, witch, then I'm not free.

Or, for that matter, if you're a fundamentalist Christian, Trump supporter, gay marriage opponent.

Yep, you can see that happening right now in various tech fields. The scope of opinions that one can publicly hold without risking doxxing and mob harassment has been narrowed tremendously, with the result that while many have been bullied into resentful silence the ones still willing to talk have been thoroughly radicalized.

Since you're so concerned about tolerant people being taken advantage of, may we also assume that you'd oppose LambdaConf having a speaker who was a revolutionary Communist? You don't get a much more destructive and intolerant ideology than that one, after all, and there are a lot of people from formerly-Communist countries who would have every right under this philosophy to feel unsafe.

I was curious about the Ramirez aerial surveillance HQ described in the article and managed to find what looks like the spot on Google Earth:

https://www.google.com/maps/@34.0469559,-118.2309557,926a,20...

> 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.