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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 c

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.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
Iv 7y ago
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.
- concordDance 7y ago
  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.
  - Iv 7y ago
    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.
    - quotemstr 7y ago
      > 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.
      - Iv 7y ago
        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.
        quotemstr 7y ago
- rmtech 7y ago
  > 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.
  - Iv 7y ago
    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.
    - rmtech 7y ago
      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.
      - hunter2_ 7y ago
        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."
        7y ago
- ppf 7y ago
  Interesting argument. By the same token, we should remove all cyclists from all roads, as it would provide a smoother transportation experience.
  - Iv 7y ago
    Well we do so when we want to go very fast e.g. highways.
    - ppf 7y ago
      Right, and going to a conference is like driving on a highway?
      - Iv 7y ago
        I don't know, I don't play football.
  - flingo 7y ago
    Car roads, bike roads, bus roads. With some intersection. I think that's the ideal
- lliamander 7y ago
  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?
  - Iv 7y ago
    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.
    - wott 7y ago
      > 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".
      - Iv 7y ago
        Did anyone care to bring their case to court? IF they did, I am pretty sure they would be found guilty.
- Skaruts 7y ago
  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.
  - a1369209993 7y ago
    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.
    - Skaruts 7y ago
      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.
- fche 7y ago
  > 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.
Fellshard 7y ago
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 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_foundation_revokes_attendees_registration/f6xvd46/ https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/dtnamp/linux_foundat...
soyiuz 7y ago
Don't be dense, the rules are simple. Jokes at the expense of minorities are not to be tolerated. Jokes about pigs are crass but fine. Jokes about the LGBT community or the indigenous people are not. If you are confused, consult any child who will happily explain to you these basic ideas from the modern world.
joshberkus 7y ago
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.
- josteink 7y ago
  > 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.
  - Fellshard 7y ago
    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.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

Iv 7y ago

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.

concordDance 7y ago
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.
- Iv 7y ago
  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.
  - quotemstr 7y ago
    > 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.
    - Iv 7y ago
      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.
      - quotemstr 7y ago
rmtech 7y ago
> 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.
- Iv 7y ago
  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.
  - rmtech 7y ago
    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.
    - hunter2_ 7y ago
      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."
      - 7y ago
ppf 7y ago
Interesting argument. By the same token, we should remove all cyclists from all roads, as it would provide a smoother transportation experience.
- Iv 7y ago
  Well we do so when we want to go very fast e.g. highways.
  - ppf 7y ago
    Right, and going to a conference is like driving on a highway?
    - Iv 7y ago
      I don't know, I don't play football.
- flingo 7y ago
  Car roads, bike roads, bus roads. With some intersection. I think that's the ideal
lliamander 7y ago
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?
- Iv 7y ago
  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.
  - wott 7y ago
    > 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".
    - Iv 7y ago
      Did anyone care to bring their case to court? IF they did, I am pretty sure they would be found guilty.
Skaruts 7y ago
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.
- a1369209993 7y ago
  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.
  - Skaruts 7y ago
    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.
fche 7y ago
> 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.

Fellshard 7y ago

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 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_foundation_revokes_attendees_registration/f6xvd46/ https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/dtnamp/linux_foundat...

soyiuz 7y ago

Don't be dense, the rules are simple. Jokes at the expense of minorities are not to be tolerated. Jokes about pigs are crass but fine. Jokes about the LGBT community or the indigenous people are not. If you are confused, consult any child who will happily explain to you these basic ideas from the modern world.

joshberkus 7y ago

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.

josteink 7y ago
> 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.
- Fellshard 7y ago
  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.