The first two people you mentioned co-wrote a paper titled "Towards decolonising computational sciences" and certainly anyone at DAIR would also be in that ideological cluster. I don't think an absolute majority of the signatories have those sorts of associations, but a good many do. What's puzzling me is why so many are Dutch?
You may be referring to the result that exposing people to evidence contradicting their beliefs actually increases the strength of those beliefs (older than a few months, though). Pop-sci level article at http://youarenotsosmart.com/2011/06/10/the-backfire-effect/
This doesn't reduce to "impossible to persuade most people of a contrary position." It just means that you have to employ methods of persuasion, i.e. rhetoric. This was obvious in classical Athens, when people heard news and discussed politics in public, but is apparently harder to grasp in our society.
Moldbug's fundamental definition of Left and Right is that the most purely Left organisation makes everything political, because everything is effected by persuasion, and the most purely Right organisation makes nothing political, because everything is by compulsion.
This is becoming a pretty fruitful way for me to analyse sentences along the lines of "the code is political." The interpretation is that if you 'accept' the code in some fashion, you are implicitly persuaded of some political proposition. This is a complete funhouse way of looking at what Yarvin might actually be doing: providing a structure that you can choose to execute, and that will instantiate certain unbreakable rules under which you must (are compelled to) operate. There's no subtext, it's right there in front of you in the most immediate manner possible. You either run it or you do something else.
Two branching lines of thought from here are that a) even as people like Klabnik try to separate the 'acceptable' political thought from the unacceptable residue of racism etc., they are constantly attacking at a political level, and b) looking at a rigorously defined computational system and trying to work out what the deep hidden politics of it are, is rather like the beginning meditator's mistake of thinking that mindfulness involves access to some distant source of knowledge. Rather, mindfulness involves noticing literally the most immediate possible thing, the activity of your own mind, which is with you every moment of your waking life.
Certainly true as a matter of those states' fundamental hypocrisy, but I believe PopeOfNope was referring to the Left's deployment of those terms as offensive weapons - which also happened. For example, the USSR was very big on paying lip-service to anti-colonialism as a form of soft power over the non-aligned block[1]. This did not seem to noticeably affect her behaviour towards Afghanistan in the Soviet-Afghan War[2].
I flatly deny that the process as described is capable of discernment. What happened was: speaker announced, lots of people complain, conference organiser withdraws invitation to avoid focus on "inclusion and/or presence." Note that the organiser explicitly excluded consideration of the merits of the complaints.
Now compare my invocation elsewhere in this thread of the spectre of an anti-Zionist boycott: the complaints would be of a very similar nature, including references to 'racism', the number of complainants could be quite large, particularly if there was an organised attempt to find them (there is in fact a very considerable degree of organisation for anti-Zionist boycotts), and the strength of feeling would be equally high. Therefore it is only a matter of time at this point until Israelis are prevented from attending conferences like Strange Loop, as indeed we already are in much of the world.
I note in passing that those who favour excluding Yarvin have yet actually to state their opposition to this sort of thing.
I'm going to start repeating myself if I get into your first paragraph, and no offence but I'd rather hear what Klabnik has to say. If that's unfair then let it be unfair.
Strange Loop has a two/three phase system, in which applications are blind-ranked, a panel takes the top ranked applications and further filters them based on 'softer' criteria (which may include demographic ones) and the final say is Alex Miller's. That at least is what I gathered from reading the blog about how talks are selected, and also from reading people on twitter discussing how Urbit got by them in the blind review stage.
In any case, it is way past my bed-time after this HN outage.
I assure you that the racism of, for example, Yitzhak Herzog (who heads Israel's main centre-left party), is as obvious to the ideological opponents of Zionism as Yarvin's is to you. If you doubt me, ask them.
It should be clear from my other comments that I am concerned with the principle of excluding people from apolitical fora on the grounds of racism alone. How justified or controversial it is to call someone a racist fails to engage the argument that it's a social evil to apply that test.
As to the technical value of Urbit itself, having passed a process explicitly designed to support neutral evaluation (blind review and ranking) it's unfair to start picking holes. (One thing I saw was a bit of point-and-laugh at the style of the C code used to implement it, which frankly is no worse or different than I've seen used in some more obscure languages like False, for example.)
I'm a Zionist (see my top-level post and its link.) Does that make me unacceptably racist, in your view? I know Deleuze thought Zionism was a racist ideology.
Given that, in a conference as large as Strange Loop, there are undoubtedly people who do think Zionism is a proper subset of racism, would you support them in a call to have me excluded from that conference?
If not, what exactly about either my views or those people's intensity of repugnance for them is insufficient to get me kicked? If so, then as there are by far more racists of the Zionist stripe likely to attend, shouldn't you be looking into that? Why aren't you?
I am not suggesting that racists (however defined) be invited to advocate racism to people who find that repugnant. I'm suggesting that that racism not disqualify them in other matters.
You are quite correct that people can boycott or pressure for no-platform if they want to. Who on earth would benefit from forced contact? What I'm suggesting is that people decide not to do that. Further, that when that does happen, those who disagree speak up about it.
Much as I dislike entering into this sort of (highly off-topic) conversation, it needs pointing out that "Progressive Except Palestine" was coined by people who agree with you. Just search for it and see what comes up.
A realist view looks at the various players and makes an informed judgment of what their power is. Alex Miller indisputably has final say on who attends the conference. That doesn't make him a dictator. If he doesn't follow people like Steve Klabnik and Alex Payne on stuff like this, the personal and business consequences to him will be immense. As his statement says, he hasn't read Yarvin's political writings. Nevertheless it took him only a few hours to decide that it would not be possible to have Yarvin present. Is that not strong evidence that Miller felt his options were limited?
Kicking people from your tech conference because they were racist outside of it hands veto power to whoever determines what racism is and when something is 'too racist'. The same goes for the other beyond-the-pale isms like sexism, fascism, etc.