Statement on LambdaConf 2016
statement-on-lambdaconf.github.ioThere's one sentence that stands out:
LambdaConf cannot live up to its goal of being a “friendly community of like-minded souls” when it does not protect current and potential members of that community who are vulnerable to those who would deny their humanity.
Furthermore, the speaker was previously banned from another conference. I have yet to find accounts that such violations have actually taken place at a conference where he gave a talk. Shouldn't the basic assumption in a system based on the rule of law, that you're innocent until proven guilty be the case here as well?
They're 'vulnerable' because they choose to believe that all opposite makes them unsafe.
Call me when they don't let "Death to capitalists" radical communists speak, and then we'll talk about excluding people who are pro-slavery.
They're trying so hard to be the victims here.
I guess 'Debate ideas not people' isn't as important as making sure a man who holds an unpopular opinion isn't welcome at a conference.
I appreciate the sentiment you are trying to espouse, but the world is a very messy place that doesn't reduce neatly to a single logical dictum. Most especially, it contains people who will look at a "rule" like 'Debate ideas not people' and ask themselves how they can exploit or hack it to "win," regardless of whether their exploit or hack conforms to the spirit of the rule.
For example, we did debate ideas around race and opportunity and justice. We debated ideas around the freedom of women to choose what would happen with their bodies. We debated the idea of one citizen, one vote. We debated the idea that people should be free to love a person of whatever gender they pleased.
But such debates never end, because the people who don't like how the debate turns out just keep debating. They are conducing a century-long filibuster, designed to disrupt any attempt by the people they don't like to have ordinary, peaceful lives.
You can see this whenever they re-open old debates. They start off with the same arguments that were conclusively refuted and try to force you to refute them all over again. And again. And again. And again. In this regard, racists behave just like anti-vaxxers, young earthers, and others who have zero interest in "debate," because they believe in some divine truth that transcends evidence, science, or the rights of other people.
They are waging a war of attrition, trying to wear society down by sheer force of stubbornness. And naturally, moderate thinkers avoid having the same toxic discussion over again for the tenth or twentieth time, so gradually bit by bit they receive fewer challenges to their ideas, creating the impression that there multiple, equally valid sides to every issue.
But there aren't multiple, equally valid sides to every issue. We have limits on which ideas are valid in society. We have, for example, constitutional democracies, with judiciaries attempting to operate as a check and balance against certain "popular" ideas being considered valid.
For example, we have this idea that every adult citizen gets to vote. It's full-on wrong to pass a law that says that black people can't vote. We don't have to 'debate' this idea, we did debate it, there was blood shed over it, and the matter has been settled.
The idea that black people should not vote is not "just another point of view," or, "something upon which reasonable people may disagree." It's wrong, and to believe it or to espouse it is to be unreasonable _by definition_ in a constitutional democracy.
LambdaConf can obviously invite whomever it wants, for whatever reason it wants, and you are free to think whatever you want of the choices they make. All I am saying is that for those who disagree with LambdaConf's decisions, it is not a matter of "a man who holds an unpopular opinion." Nor is it a matter of not wanting to "debate an idea."
Certain opinions are so wrong as to not be trivializable as unpopular. Certain ideas have already been debated, and the people still pretending to debate them have not demonstrated any good faith interest in debate.
Whether the person involved in the fracas is such a person, and whether his ideas are or aren't in these categories is, of course, something your could debate. I am not going to, as I was not planning on speaking at LambdaConf, so I had no decision to make on the matter.
While I believe that I see where you are coming from, I cannot reconcile the concept that some ideas are not up for debate with liberalism.
Also this is not a talk about his taboo views on race, they are hoping to prevent him from speaking on functional programming. In a way, they are hoping to exclude him from the marketplace of all ideas because of a single idea.
I can't speak for other people, and I'm sure there are a wide variety of opinions people have about that situation. But I very much doubt this is about speaking-as-in-speaking about functional programming. After all, he can write about functional programming as much as he likes, and I haven't heard anybody suggest that his blog be blocked.
But speaking as in giving a conference talk is a different matter.
Conference talks aren't really about disseminating technical material. They're terrible for that! Conference talks are showmanship, entertainment, motivational speaking, and most crucially, they are cultural signals about what--and whom--is important.
That's why there is a vastly different dynamic of attending a talk in person vs. watching one remotely or on video. You are absorbing the social cues everyone else in the room is transmitting.
So when a conference announces that so-and-so is keynoting, they are announcing that the topic of the keynote is important, and they are also announcing that so-and-so is important, and traditionally, that they are the _most important_.
One rung down is speaking. Announcing that so-and-so is speaking is also announcing that so-and-so's topic is important, and that so-and-so is important in their own right.
My guess is that what this debate is really about is signaling that this individual is important in the community. Which is not, and never will be, completely divorced from all of this individuals choices.
From my reading of LambdaConf's statements, they fully realize this. They are making a political statement about what and who is important, and how the community should judge someone's importance. Likewise, the people who disagree are making a political statement about who should be judged important in the community.
tl;dr: This is not about whether somebody can speak as in communicate, it is about whether they should be judged important. And those people who disagree with LambdaConf's choice in this matter are refusing to implicitly support LambdaConf's chocie with their attendance, not to mention communicating their own opinions, as this individual has done.
Given that the individual, LambdaConf, these signatories, and even you and I have been able to write about this at length without censorship, I'd say that nobody's right to "speak" has been curtailed in any way.
Thats way more reasonable than how I had been think about it. I think about conference talks the way I think about guest lecturers at universities.
I might be really bad at noticing showmanship.