
Dan Povey, Developer of Kaldi, Fired from JHU - xucheng
http://danielpovey.com/leaving.html
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gillesjacobs
I have been in similar circumstances at my university where critical servers
were made inaccesible during ongoing research. So I understand Dr. Povey's
frustration first-hand, but breaking into the building (and the protest) was
an escalation unbeholden to a professor.

The banality of some student activist causes gets to me too and often politics
do not align. However educators need to show patience and decorum.

~~~
NE2z2T9qi
Well, it was a building Povey ordinarily had a right to be in until protestors
illegally chained all external doors shut. So, calling it "breaking in" is a
sorta backward way to think about it, in my opinion. His right to be in the
building was curtailed by people who did not have a right to be in the
building (or at least did not have a right to exclude access).

As for the university explicitly telling him not to try to enter the building,
that may be the case, but keep in mind that his personal work and career were
being compromised by an illegal act that had dragged on FAR beyond reasonable
accommodation (the sit-in had been ongoing a month and the chaining of doors
went on over a week). Just because he was curently a Hopkins employee doesn't
mean that his research was owned by Hopkins. Universities aren't like regular
companies. Hopkins had a duty to him to provide safe and reasonable
accommodations for his work. The grant money he obtained probably had a large
payment to the university for these accommodations. Hopkins failed to uphold
their end of the bargain with him by pussyfooting around blatantly dangerous
and illegal activity by protestors.

What he did was imprudent, maybe even fireable. But unless the students who
incited this all are also expelled (I'm pretty sure they weren't), then this
would be a significant injustice against the professor due to selective
enforcement of policy against some but not all Hopkins members.

Also, seeing Hopkins' sleezy firing letter makes it obvious that there is no
good faith on the part of the university. You can tell by how it is written in
"you admitted that we had to fire you!" style, that they grossly and
intentionally mischaracterized statements he made to appease university
lawyers. Dr. Povey doesn't look great, but Hopkins looks like a place where no
decent person should ever hope to work.

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GaryNumanVevo
I think this post perfectly captures white privilege. Getting fired for
breaking into a university building, endangering students, then writing a blog
post filling in the details about how the left is anti-white. All while he's
able to land another (presumably) cushy private sector job.

~~~
1000units
Breaking into a university building with a large group of other people,
obstructing publicly-funded research, and creating a dangerous environment for
hundreds of others _without_ winding up in jail is an example of "protestor"
privilege, for only certain values of "protestor".

Mouth-breathing children have been performing these stunts with increasing
regularity and chutzpah because they know they have no skin in the game, and
it is for the same reason that these "protests" are embarrassingly
ineffectual. They manage to take out a few exceptionally honorable hot-heads
who are unwilling to genuflect towards the idiocy, and then the hot-heads
transition into a cushy tech job with twice the pay and respect.

~~~
dang
You've been posting a ton of inflammatory and flamebait comments lately. We
ban accounts that keep doing that, so would you please stop doing that?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

~~~
1000units
I've reviewed my most recent comments and it seems you are correct. I will
reflect on this and concede my spirit may be injured.

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lidHanteyk
This reminded me of the classic xkcd story of the dedicated sysadmin:
[https://xkcd.com/705/](https://xkcd.com/705/)

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Vosporos
What the fuck man… Quit being so whiny and find a real occupation.

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krapp

        there are many things said by American progressives 
        where if you replace "white patriarchy" and "women 
        of color" with "Jewish capital" and "Aryan youth", 
        and add a picture of a blond boy and a swastika 
        or two, you'd have a very serviceable Nazi 
        propaganda poster. Think about it.
     

[ponders it in deep silence in the Gendo Ikari pose...]

Ok, I thought about it.

So.. progressivism is basically Nazi propaganda, and white men are being
persecuted like Jews by an evil cabal of all progressives, women and people of
color.

No, sorry, not buying it. The author is a bigot and a manchild.

~~~
shawnz
Right.. does he really believe he is experiencing a level of persecution like
being a "gay Jew in the Nazi party" for his whiteness? He doesn't know what it
means to be persecuted.

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zimpenfish
> I'm aware that it's a huge violation of social norms for me to say publicly
> that I think whites, or males, are being discriminated against.

Probably because it's blitheringly stupid to assert something that is
demonstrably not true and also staggeringly insulting to people who are
actually discriminated against.

~~~
ppwwyyxx
> So essentially I am being fired for what might have happened, while the
> students are getting off scot free for things that actually did happen.

It was demonstrated in this exact incident.

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shawnz
An employee and customer get in a fight. The employee is fired but the
customer is not banned. What's surprising about that?

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IfOnlyYouKnew
I have no idea who that is. But it reads like a bad parody of an alt-right
list of grievances.

Seriously: someone who thinks he can make a coherent argument invoking "gay
jews joining the Nazi party" doesn't belong on any unversity's faculty.

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Nimitz14
Disappointing. :(

