Yeah, to be clear, my response was just trying to point out the easily-verifiable mistakes. I think almost everything related to Lightcone and Lighthaven is also quite off-base, but I agree that the relevant conversation for that hasn’t happened.
I do think this article is a quite bad context in which to discuss those things. It sets a bad level for the discourse, and I think if anyone wants to talk about this stuff, I would just bring it up in a week or two when we will still face the same decisions, but there isn’t a bunch of angry internet mobs waiting around to take sides, and no badly researched article setting a high level of background confusion about what the actual facts are.
Not confident of this. I certainly won’t stop anyone from wanting to poke at this stuff and discuss it now.
Fwiw this sort of thing was definitely a component of why I didn’t go to Manifest and was initially on the fence about LessOnline. The number one factor was just how busy I am, but I would definitely feel more comfortable going to events like that if there were a stronger policy against racists/fascists/nazis/white supremacists/etc.
(To be clear, for LessOnline we didn’t invite anyone who I think even remotely fits that description, I think? It’s plausible we missed something, but like, actual racism is totally the kind of thing that would have caused me to remove someone from the “blogs we love” list, if it was part of their blogging.
Manifest runs a much stronger “just invite people who are popular and share interests, with less regards for why they are popular” policy, which I think has a bunch of stuff going for it, but definitely produces a very different selection of speakers as I think is apparent from looking at the invited speaker lists.)
Yeah, to be clear, my response was just trying to point out the easily-verifiable mistakes. I think almost everything related to Lightcone and Lighthaven is also quite off-base, but I agree that the relevant conversation for that hasn’t happened.
I do think this article is a quite bad context in which to discuss those things. It sets a bad level for the discourse, and I think if anyone wants to talk about this stuff, I would just bring it up in a week or two when we will still face the same decisions, but there isn’t a bunch of angry internet mobs waiting around to take sides, and no badly researched article setting a high level of background confusion about what the actual facts are.
Not confident of this. I certainly won’t stop anyone from wanting to poke at this stuff and discuss it now.
Fwiw this sort of thing was definitely a component of why I didn’t go to Manifest and was initially on the fence about LessOnline. The number one factor was just how busy I am, but I would definitely feel more comfortable going to events like that if there were a stronger policy against racists/fascists/nazis/white supremacists/etc.
(To be clear, for LessOnline we didn’t invite anyone who I think even remotely fits that description, I think? It’s plausible we missed something, but like, actual racism is totally the kind of thing that would have caused me to remove someone from the “blogs we love” list, if it was part of their blogging.
Manifest runs a much stronger “just invite people who are popular and share interests, with less regards for why they are popular” policy, which I think has a bunch of stuff going for it, but definitely produces a very different selection of speakers as I think is apparent from looking at the invited speaker lists.)