381–390 of 423 posts
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The rule of law was correctly implemented. Whether the law was morally correct or not is completely orthogonal to that fact.
So is the law implemented in various countries in Africa. It's up to you if you want to break the law by going there or not.
> What counts as “safety”? Which places in the world are truly safe for LGBTQIA+ community? How much of a city, or state, or country needs to be LGBTQIA+ hostile for the whole of it to be declared unworthy of PSF support? What a cheap shot. You don't need a safetyometer or something to determine that a country where same sex relationship is punishable by life imprisonment is unsafe for homosexuals or bisexuals.
At the same time, software should not be tied to politics. People should be able to hold different political views while taking part in software conferences.
Whether or not LGBTQ+ people should be arrested and potentially executed is not at all comparable to holding disagreements about tax policy, or whether bridges should be funded over tunnels. There is no spectrum of possible resolutions, and there is no moral ambiguity. No one should associate themselves with evil, and homophobia is evil.
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Would they come after you if you brought your same sex partner? If you had a rainbow pin? Does it really matter where the exact limit goes? Would you feel safe being in a country where your sexuality was illegal? No way I would take that chance for a python conference.
> Would you feel safe being in a country where your sexuality was illegal? The answer seems to be yes for at least some number of travelers. I have traveled the Muslim world and sub-Saharan Africa extensively and I have met plenty of fellow travelers who are gay, whether individuals or even gay couples. The couples simply don’t show affection in public, but heterosexual couples shouldn’t either. Even sharing a room a…
LBTQ and HR activists often protest international conferences and events held in countries with lacking human rights. To be frank, I don't think that is because we are uninformed.
Of course the risk as a caucasian traveller to get life imprisonment in Tanzania is very low, but life in prison is a risk I would avoid even if the risk is low. Since you have traveled so extensively what would your advice be to my gay friend who had to flee for his life from a neighbouring African country. Is he safe to visit this python conference?
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They can. They feel entitled to funding. Rightly or wrongly, I don't know.
We always have local python conferences in Africa without any outsiders financial contribution. The reason why they expected the contribution is because they are sort of official
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Simple. By preventing me from self-identifying as an asshole by forcing non-asshole behaviors -- you are infringing on my right to free speech, free association ( or non-association ) and many others such rights. If you cannot see it, you yourself are not free.
my right to free speech That's about government retaliation. You don't have a right to be free of consequences for anything you say. What you're looking for is a "safe space".
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> denying funding is another Is it? Since when does anyone have a fundamental right to funding? > A Python conference is not an LGBT entertainment venue. A Python conference is not the place to have a conversation about that at all. If someone shows up in drag, the question is, "what technical topic are they going to discuss?" If you have a dress code in mind for a Python conference, I would suggest that is a politic…
>Is it? Since when does anyone have a fundamental right to funding? No one has a right to funding, just a right to fair consideration. This sort of "no one has a right to funding" rhetoric gives the PSF license to discriminate in whatever arbitrary manner they please. Suppose Tommy Tuberville turns down your funding request because he doesn't like that an organizer is LGBT, and "no one has a fundamental right to fund…
It sounds like they got consideration, problems of timing aside. I do wish the PSF had been clearer and faster in their response and I agree they deserve criticism for not handling the situation as well as they could, but they did consider funding. They gave the organizers consideration and it doesn't seem to me that the consideration was unfair.
> Suppose Tommy Tuberville turns down your funding request because he doesn't like that an organizer is LGBT, and "no one has a fundamental right to funding" -- how does that make you feel?
Is that what happened here? Were they turned down for an identity, or were they turned down because the physical location they selected, independent of anyone's political beliefs, had logistical problems that made it unsuitable for an internationally sponsored community event? Because those are two different things.
> Should we treat a kink differently
We're going to get to this "kink" brush you're painting the LGBTQ community with in a second, but also in the interest of speaking up for kink I'll ask: do you want a truly apolitical, pluralistic conference, or do you want one that makes you feel comfortable? It's okay for you to say that you want some political boundaries on a conference, I would probably feel uncomfortable at a conference with kink as well. Just don't say that you want it to be apolitical or pluralistic then. You can not be simultaneously arguing for pluralism and for people to be invisible. Invisibility is not pluralism.
> just because it happens to be disproportionately common among the LGBT population?
That being said, I would be remiss if I didn't mention that wearing drag is not inherently sexual. And before you get too caught up on drag, we should also acknowledge that of course a trans person not wearing drag but merely wearing appropriate clothing for their gender is obviously not sexual or kink. And to be clear, when you ask attendees to keep their identity under the radar, you are asking for transgender people to misgender themselves, you are denying them agency to wear clothing that would be perfectly acceptable for other people to wear at a conference, and you are denying them that agency based entirely on a political designation of their identity.
Funding was not denied for this conference because they weren't going to allow kink. Funding was denied because the government has threatened to imprison LGBTQ people, and in the defense of "pluralism" you are asking LGBTQ attendees to refrain from behaviors and actions that would not raise a single eyebrow from anyone if performed by someone of another gender. You are asking for invisibility and pretending that it's pluralism.
> Sorry this seems like a total non sequiter to me, you'll have to explain better.
It is not a reasonable cultural compromise to throw someone into prison, and laws that explicitly rule that people can be thrown into prison are the reason why funding was originally denied.
I'm not sure... how to say that more clearly. It doesn't strictly relate to drag in except that drag is yet another thing you could be thrown into prison for. But if you're under the assumption that funding was denied over drag, it wasn't. It was denied over tangible laws and government policy. Accommodation of that policy is not "give and take" and it is completely unreasonable to ask LGBTQ people to tolerate that situation.
> I'm glad you also believe in give and take. Can you give a specific example of a "give" that the LGBT community should be willing to make? See my statement from earlier "Seems like you want LGBT people to do all of the taking and none of the giving." I'm happy to be corrected!
Sure. Suppose we held a conference where people were allowed to attend that were gay, and also people were allowed to attend that were anti-gay. A conference organizer might decide, "yes, we have a position on this, but we're going to tolerate someone who is known to be anti-gay attending, provided no one is making anyone else feel unsafe."
That would be an example of give and take; two communities of people with disagreements temporarily deciding not to be at each others throats or temporarily deciding to tolerate someone's involvement even though they find them detestable. It doesn't require an anti-gay person to stop denying the existence of LGBTQ identity, and it doesn't require LGBTQ people to believe that the anti-gay person is any less of a bigot. But... we live in a pluralistic society and in the interest of keeping that society running we have collectively all agreed that we are going to do our absolute best not to kill each other.
In contrast, suppose we held a conference where people were allowed to attend that were gay, and then some other people said, "what the heck, no, I'd better not even be aware that there are gay people here, if I catch them they are going to be in physical danger." That is an example of one side doing "all the taking." The Tanzania government's position is not compromise. It gives nothing, it is a physical threat.
> Maybe there's a misunderstanding here. I agree that the Tanzanian government are being jerks. What I'm saying is I don't think it's fair to take that out on the Tanzanian people.
I disagree that this is being taken out on the Tanzanian people. The Python Software Foundation did not write the laws. I don't understand why you are looking a situation where a government has forced a tech conference to grapple with political issues to the harm of both the Tanzanian people and the general Python community, and your response is to blame the Python community.
This can stink for the Tanzanian people and that doesn't mean it's the Python Software Foundation's fault that the government makes it impossible to hold a pluralistic or inclusive conference in the country.
> Has there even been an anonymous complaint? Let someone make an anonymous complaint, a trusted community member can verify their identity, then maybe we can think about a venue change. As things are, I think it is reasonable to weigh the cost of a venue change, vs a few gay Africans having to live under homophobic laws that they're most likely quite used to if they travel around Africa.
If this complaint was about a specifically local event or about an exclusion from the community rather than a denial of funding as an official event, I would agree. But it wasn't a local event and it's not an exclusion from the community. I just don't think your characterization here is accurate, this was planned to be an international event, the linked open letter describes it that way. I'm not saying there can't be Python conferences in Tanzania, I'm saying they should not be funded by the Python Software Foundation as officially endorsed, international events -- or at the very least it is not unreasonable for the PSF to be extremely careful about funding those events and to carefully consider them.
> Again, it's not fair to take out frustration with Tanzania's laws out on the people of Africa.
Deciding after consideration not to proactively sponsor an event is not the same thing as taking out frustration on the people of Africa. It is not blaming the people of Africa, it's not punative, it's just acknowledging that unfortunately the Python Software Foundation is not in a position to change the reality on the ground about where it is and isn't safe to hold an international conference.
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my right to free speech That's about government retaliation. You don't have a right to be free of consequences for anything you say. What you're looking for is a "safe space".
Oh? So what will you claim exactly when the situation is reversed and you are not free from consequences of your actions? Societal norms are fickle. Are you sure you want rely on those?
You may as well accept that your actions have consequences since it is reality. Usually this is a lesson taught to young children while they are still learning to talk.
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What strikes me most about this is that, apparently by the timeline described in the open letter, the conference organizers planned the event with the expectation they'd get funding and asked for the funding fewer than five months before the event. That seems like extremely poor planning from my perspective. Maybe that's normal for events given money by PSF, I dunno, but "we've already decided to do this so hurry up…
> asked for the funding fewer than five months before the event The Python Software Foundation says that they need less than 6 weeks for processing grant applications: https://www.python.org/psf/grants/
Definitely over 6 weeks but not as much as I first assumed.
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>Is it? Since when does anyone have a fundamental right to funding? No one has a right to funding, just a right to fair consideration. This sort of "no one has a right to funding" rhetoric gives the PSF license to discriminate in whatever arbitrary manner they please. Suppose Tommy Tuberville turns down your funding request because he doesn't like that an organizer is LGBT, and "no one has a fundamental right to fund…
> No one has a right to funding, just a right to fair consideration. It sounds like they got consideration, problems of timing aside. I do wish the PSF had been clearer and faster in their response and I agree they deserve criticism for not handling the situation as well as they could, but they did consider funding. They gave the organizers consideration and it doesn't seem to me that the consideration was unfair. >…
This seems like the motte and bailey thing again, where if you're not allowed to be a flamboyantly gay in drag at a conference, people are forcing you to be invisible.
By pluralism I mean compromise, not "danShumway gets his way on everything".
>That being said, I would be remiss if I didn't mention that wearing drag is not inherently sexual.
"My dom/sub relationship with my girlfriend is 24/7, it's not inherently sexual. She's my permanent pet and personal servant." Does that mean no one is allowed to complain about our public leash setup?
>And to be clear, when you ask attendees to keep their identity under the radar, you are asking for transgender people to misgender themselves
Again this pretty much seems like motte and bailey, ascribing a position to me that I don't hold, pretending distinctions don't exist. This style of rhetoric may be fashionable; that doesn't mean it's at all thoughtful or reasonable.
>Sure. Suppose we held a conference where people were allowed to attend that were gay, and also people were allowed to attend that were anti-gay. A conference organizer might decide, "yes, we have a position on this, but we're going to tolerate someone who is known to be anti-gay attending, provided they no one is making anyone else feel unsafe."
Thank you for giving an example.
In the same way you think a flamboyantly gay guy in drag is A-OK, I assume you also think a "flamboyantly straight" Christian would also be A-OK? ("Straight Pride", big crosses, maybe even bible quotes about gay sexuality?) After all they're just expressing their identity, it would be oppressive to force them to be invisible? ("God told me to speak my truth, you're going to send me to hell!")
Can you see why people might choose to agree on a norm of more subtle identity expression for a professional conference? And how a Christian who is asked to remove an "I Trust Leviticus" shirt would be acting like a diva if that Christian complained that you were "forcing him to be invisible"? Or if that same Christian says that gay people are oppressing him with their subtle rainbow jewelry because gay sex is gross and disgusting and causes him to involuntarily vomit, activating his gut condition?
Or are we going to define identity expression such that when gays do it, that's just an irrepressible part of their identity, but when Christians do it, they are oppressing others? It seems to me like you're pretty biased in terms of making these judgements, but for pluralism they need to be made in an unbiased way.
I guess what I'm trying to get at here is just, don't be a diva, and try to see things from the perspective of others. That's what's necessary for pluralism. I probably won't reply further here -- the conversation is not seeming especially fruitful to me.