A realist view looks at the various players and makes an informed judgment of what their power is. Alex Miller indisputably has final say on who attends the conference. That doesn't make him a dictator. If he doesn't follow people like Steve Klabnik and Alex Payne on stuff like this, the personal and business consequences to him will be immense. As his statement says, he hasn't read Yarvin's political writings. Nevertheless it took him only a few hours to decide that it would not be possible to have Yarvin present. Is that not strong evidence that Miller felt his options were limited?
That’s how it is for dictators, too. They look at the world and make decisions designed to to optimize for the outcomes the desire, without compromising their values.
Let’s say that people on HN decide that they don’t want to attend any conference that has a Code of Conduct, because that interferes with their “right to free speech.”
If a conference organizer decides that HN is enough of a market that they tear up their CoC, that’s their decision. We don’t say that somehow, they have less free will because of the actions of HN. Their options aren’t limited. They chose to do something that involved HN.
If Alex doesn’t like this kind of controversy, Alex can stop running conferences. Sure there are actions by all sorts of players in a complex world, but the buck for every decision stops somewhere, and in this case, it stops with Alex.
It'll be his decision next time too. And now that the Red Guards know he'll succumb to even the slightest bit of pressure, there will certainly be a next time.
I don’t know that we can use words like “succumb.” It’s always that way when you have a strong opinion about a particular matter.
For example, we can praise Obama for listening to scientists on certain matters, than complain he is caving under lobbying pressure on others.
In the end, I prefer to say that it is Alex’s decision. He didn’t crumble, succumb, get browbeaten, or anything else. He decided, and that means you can hang the responsibility around his neck.
People who can’t decide shouldn’t run things, it’s that simple.
> He didn’t crumble, succumb, get browbeaten, or anything else.
How can you possibly know that? People have lost their jobs and have been forced out of their own companies for less than allowing somebody who other people might consider "racist", "sexist" or "homophobic" to talk at their conference. You can't be aware that these things have happened to other people and say that it doesn't influence the decision.
Once it was brought to his attention, the decision Alex faced was either let Curtis go on and eventually be forced out of his own conference or disinvite him and strengthen the atmosphere of political compliance. I think he made the right short term choice for him, which is all you can realistically expect people to do, but in the long term allowing this sort of thing to persist will come and bite him in the ass.
The longer this goes on, the more radical you need to be to not become victim to the political correctness mob. In the end, if you're a straight white male, you will fall prey to it because you're not a protected class. You can see this playing out in video games, movies and SF&F publishing right now. Joss Whedon and Wil Wheaton especially are vocal feminists who have taken a beating by feminists because their views aren't extreme enough.
Look at the people making the accusations. They're all straight, white men. Socialists are typically upper middle class straight white men. Nice try painting me as racist, sexist or homophobic, though.
Look at the twitter hashtag #notyourshield. The PC hatemob isn't liked by women, people of color or LGBT. They tend to dislike straight, white men telling them what it's like to be black, female or gay.
I have a real problem with your telling me what people of colour like and don’t like. Last time I checked, you don’t speak for me either.
And the entire premise of your world-view is broken. When you frame these white liberals as “speaking for” people of colour or speaking for women, or speaking for LGBT people, you are presuming that racism, sexism, and homophobia are strictly issues for people of colour, women, and LGBT people.
And therefore, if someone who isn’t one of these people speaks out against it, they must be some kind of paternal mansplaining social justice warrior.
In reality, some such people exist, but so do people who are egalitarian, and feel that racism, sexism, and homophobia are simply wrong. They aren’t speaking for anyone but themselves, and that is why you get some people pointing that out. But just because they don’t speak for me, for example, doesn’t invalidate that they speak truth to power.
As long as they don’t claim to speak for me, thats fine. Unlike you, who tried to suggest what people of colour think without qualifying your statement by admitting that you want to present some cherry-picked examples that suit your cause.
Painting people who speak out as a “PC Hatemob” really speaks to the fact that you relish taking an extremist position.
So given that you are way out in batshit-crazy tinfoil-hat land, what’s in it for me to talk to you? I doubt that anyone reading our respective words is going to be swayed from whatever position they already held. People who agree with you will mindlessly upvote you for saying what Fox News has been saying for years.
Nothing you have said really provokes any kind of “hmmm...” from me. It’s like talking to a well-written Markov Chain that was trained on a corpus of GamerGate tweets.
I’m loathe to personalize this discussion with a comparison of your anecdotal experiences and mine. And to be honest, once we start bandying about hot-button phrases like “the social justice left,” I have a feeling that we’re on a slippery slope towards ayn rand and men’s rights.
I think this is Alex Miller’s decision.