In defence of Douglas Crockford
Unlike the controversies about Strangeloop (which uninvited Curtis Yarvin) and Lambdaconf (which lost the overwhelming majority of its sponsors due to accepting Yarvin), this --- based on the evidence at hand --- seems entirely stupid.<p>Unfortunately, there&#x27;s no rulebook conference organizers (or their Greek choruses on message boards) can consult to say when rejecting a speaker is a good idea or not. It&#x27;s a judgement call.<p>So when you&#x27;ve got a speaker with a reputation as a overt, 1950s-style racist in person, and a miles-long online track record of obscurantist racism, the kind of person who when accepted to talk at a technical conference about programming languages will write many paragraphs suggesting that science has established white people are smarter than black people (but maybe that shouldn&#x27;t matter to us so much!) <i>in his post announcing his talk</i>, then yes, maybe you should avoid inviting that person.<p>On the other hand, you&#x27;ve got a speaker who used the word &quot;promiscuous&quot; as a pejorative in describing technology, and who spoke disrespectfully about someone else&#x27;s favorite conference.<p>If you accept the irrepressibly racist speaker to your conference, you&#x27;re going to lose most of your sponsors. But if you reject the person who implied promiscuity might be problematic in a metaphor, you&#x27;re going to fail too, because anyone will be able to get any talk punted from that conference.<p>Maybe there&#x27;s something else going on that we&#x27;re not entitled to hear about. Those kinds of things also exist.<p>By the way: the implication that flexing and talking about &quot;strength&quot; is sexist <i>is itself sexist</i>, and not in the bullshit &quot;it penalizes men and they have rights too&quot; way, but in the &quot;it reinforces stereotypes about women&quot; way. There are women out there who can kick your ass.