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Comment by foldr | Hacker News Reader

>The controversies and scandals surrounding DEI were not about this

Oh but they were about this. This is the common trend of people thinking that "the good ones" are implicitly exempted from their general and sweeping attacks on $THING. C.f. the hardline anti-immigration voter who thinks that the guy who mows their lawn obviously won't be included in the crackdowns. If you attack the whole concept of DEI (as many did – not necessarily you), then you are in fact attacking events celebrating the achievements of women in fields where they're poorly represented.

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>C.f. the hardline anti-immigration voter who thinks that the guy who mows their lawn obviously won't be included in the crackdowns.

huh, that's pretty bizarre, at least here in Australia (where in recent years immigration has exploded to 2x ~ 3x that of the USA), all the anti-immigration voters are sincerely hoping the guy who mows their lawn grew up across town where his wife's sister now lives.

the crackdowns are for the economic migrants just taking a lifestyle arbitrage

ultimately, immigration into large developed nations is an act of altruism, which, like most things in life, cannot scale indefinitely (much to the chagrin of business owners, women, arts students, etc.) - which is not nice, but is true.

A hardline anti-immigration voter is probably less likely to employ a likely-illegal-immigrant guy to mow their lawn than someone who is pro-immigration.

Similarly, someone who has actually attended the Grace Hopper conference is more likely to be pro-DEI than someone who has never attended and doesn't care about it happening.

I don't see how these probability claims are relevant. To avoid going off on a tangent, let's leave my immigration analogy out of this.

My basic point was that when people attack DEI in general, they create an environment that's more hostile to a conference like this one. They may say "oh, but obviously I wasn't talking about things like that". However, words have meaning. If you attack DEI as such then you attack all instances of it – not just the ones that happen to irk you.

This point has nothing to do with the likely views of the people attending the Grace Hopper Celebration.

> My basic point was that when people attack DEI in general, they create an environment that's more hostile to a conference like this one. They may say "oh, but obviously I wasn't talking about things like that". However, words have meaning. If you attack DEI as such then you attack all instances of it – not just the ones that happen to irk you.

That's one possible response; another possible response is "I've never heard of the Grace Hopper conference, but now that I have heard of it, I was definitely talking about things like that when I attacked DEI in general, I'm glad the people running it aren't getting funding anymore".

My own position as someone who was previously aware of the Grace Hopper conference (I know women who have attended in the past) is that I don't have a problem in principle with celebrating Grace Hopper or even with people of arbitrary demographic groups, such as women, self-organizing to do a thing for themselves; but I did view it as a women-in-tech-specific conference that I would not have attended or sought to attend because I am not a woman. I wouldn't have donated my own money to it, and I'm not particularly upset if the reason they're canceling it now is because they can't find corporate sponsors. Certainly I'm not gonna change my mind about opposing DEI programs on the grounds that it affects corporate willingness to sponsor a particular women-in-tech conference.

Sorry, but you’re just losing track of the thread of discussion here. I was responding to someone who said:

> The controversies and scandals surrounding DEI were not about this, and thus it would appear this may be collateral damage.

You don’t see this as collateral damage, but the person I was responding to does.

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