Crockfordgate

Recently, a JS conference, Nodevember removed Douglas Crockford (Author of JavaScript: The Good Parts, creator of JSON, etc.) from its set of keynote speakers due to complaints made by some of the other speakers about how he made them uncomfortable.

This is reasonably well documented here: https://paulstraw.svbtle.com/crockford

I'll note that the thing about dog balls has nothing to do with sex, and is just an analogy for something that basically dangles awkwardly, and is a totally unfair thing to flag as gendered exclusionary speech:

Much later in the talk, at 39:00 [Crockford's talk: "Monads and Gonads"], there is a final reference to testicles:

So, that little pair of parens is really easy to overlook, but it turns out it’s really critical to understanding this. So, just leaving it hanging out there like a pair of dog balls, I don’t think is useful to the reader.

At best, this is a strained metaphor. At worst, it’s an inappropriate, gendered comment.

The gist is that the complaints weren't investigated, seemed to be not much deeper than Crockford didn't go out of his way to be nice, and a single organizer uninvited Crockford without consulting the other organizers and basically publicly shamed him on Twitter.

One of the other organizers stepped down, everyone feels soured on the conference, and there was an explosion of anti Social Justice Warrior sentiment on /r/javascript, with a lot of ire directed toward Perch, in particular, and Rose, to a lesser extent, for instigating.

Crockford is a white guy in his 60s, and has a reputation for being kind of a crotchety old man. Someone on reddit pointed out how beautifully terse his responses tend to be on rejected pull requests and the like on GitHub. Stuff like, "Nope. You're wrong." When you've done as much for tech and JS specifically as he has, I think a certain amount of that is justifiable. When some random asshole is condescending, fuck that guy, but if the father of JSON is, maybe it's because you're actually less important, and he knows from his vast experience that your idea is actually a non-starter, and you'd know that if you took a minute to think about it.

When people respond negatively to you, sometimes it means they're a jerk, or a bigot, but sometimes it just means you're annoying.

I believe in social justice. I think people should feel safe and included, regardless of superficial and irrelevant factors. I don't care what you look like, or who you like to have sex with if you're giving a technical talk at a conference. I mean, if you're a pederast, I wouldn't bring my son (I don't have a son), but outside of fringe cases like that, who fucking cares?

But I also think that when you're going out of your way to include people that represent certain minorities (as Nodevember apparently puts as a top priority), that's still discrimination. Real progress comes from people just seeing each other as people, no less, but also no more. If I'm not nice to you because you're black, clearly I'm a racist asshole, but if I'm nicer to you because you're black, what's that mean? Is playing favorites for blacks somehow better than playing favorites for whites? Are we all equals or not?

I also think that if you must be militant about your social movement, you have to pick your damn battles. Bigotry is alive and well, and there are real people to criticize for it, but when you start jumping on everything that could possibly be construed as exclusionary, generally by ignoring context, as with the Crockford examples, you just make yourself and your colleagues look like hypersensitive idiots, and you do more harm than good. One of the top posts in /r/javascript following this was titled "Inclusivity is a joke." It shouldn't be, but you can make it that way.

I'm Korean, and my girlfriend is white, and there's been plenty of what SJW's would term microaggressions in interacting with her family. But I also have the experience of growing up in a predominantly hispanic neighborhood, where people would yell, "Chino chino chino! Ching chang chong!," at me, and mockingly pull the corners of their eyes back, just for walking past them on the street. People so eager to flaunt their racism, they couldn't be bothered to wait for someone who was actually Chinese. Compare that to the odd comment about the food I eat being weird or being good at math, or being called an Oriental by people who are otherwise loving and kind to me, and what would be the point of getting offended?

I don't think being militant, or being outraged helps anyone. When some SJW gets offended and starts some shit on my behalf because I'm not represented in the room (as Perch advocates), I don't appreciate that. It's just more hostility stacked on top of whatever else was there. I deal with bigotry by just trying to be a good, nice, competent person, and letting that speak for itself. If that's not enough to change a person's mind, berating them certainly isn't going to help.

You want more diversity in tech? You want your group represented? Do great work. Be so good that stalwarts like Crockford can't condescend to you. Be so pleasant and helpful that anyone would feel bad being unkind to you. You can't demand and bully your way to respect. You have to earn it. Just like everyone else.