> My point, which you've ignored, is that we need to take into account the wider context, i.e. "the last few years of speaker exclusions and anti-"brogrammer" activism" I mentioned.

What does this even mean? It's impossible for me to reply to this unless you're more specific about what you're talking about and how it involves the organizers for Nodevember. Also "taking a wider context" is useful for understanding something only once the specifics of what actually happened become apparent. Otherwise its impossible to understand what the context even is.

The last controversy like this I can remember was Curtis Yarvin being disinvited from LambdaConf, and even then people were bizarrely claiming that disallowing a white sepremacist from speaking was uninclusive. I'm not trying to link these events (there's no evidence to claim that the circumstances are the same... though bizarrely the guy who wrote the blog yesterday is trying to link them in some way favorable to Crockford[1]), only pointing out how completely counter-productive it is to attempt to place something "in a larger context" before anything is really known about the details.

> That means inclusive for people like them, and exclusive of people not like them.

This is just a slightly stronger form of what I said above. You have no evidence with which to draw this conclusion.

> They do not seem to particularly care about being inclusive of minorities, who are just a smokescreen (see, e.g., https://www.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/50u77r/douglas_...). They appear to be guided by an intuitive sense of "our sort of people".

Again, on what basis? This comment is from a person saying they'd be in favor of uninviting Crockford if he was responsible for being toxic or inappropriate. They seem to be concerned with accusations about one of the persons involved with calling for him to be replaced as the keynote speaker.

> Don't you think he might be obstinate for a reason? He's responsible for one of the most important pieces of infrastructure in the world: bugs in the Linux kernel could cause life-or-death situations.

I'm so sick of seeing software engineers justify arrogance or invective as though they somehow make maintaining critical software feasible. This is indefensible macho bullshit that needs to dropped. Maintainers have plenty of tools at their disposal for when code doesn't meet their criteria: the primary of which is to not accept change sets. Belittling contributors or engaging in childish invective isn't a valid tool for turning down code. At best it turns away people who could be guided to making productive contributions (and yes, there are plenty of people in the linux kernel community responsible for this), and at worst it scares away other potential contributors who are concerned with their own fallibility and the prospect of being publicly humiliated for making a mistake. Sorry, but no. I don't think he has a legitimate reason for being obstinate.

> The world needs more programmers, and we shouldn't care what they look like, but inclusivity is not an end-in-itself. "Egotism and profound condescension" is terrible if you think the tech community exists to provide a weird social club, but it's essential if the goal is to help programmers write better software - the master programmers have earned their big egos because they know how important it is not to f... certain things up.

Sorry, but I don't buy this "programmer bootcamp" model of teaching developers. There's plenty of psychology and management research out there showing that ostracism and negativity increases stress[2], decreases social cohesion[3], decreases performance[4], etc. In short, this is complete bullshit.

[1]: http://atom-morgan.github.io/in-defense-of-douglas-crockford

[2]: http://webuser.bus.umich.edu/janedut/POS/Heaphy%20and%20Dutt...

[3]: http://psycnet.apa.org/index.cfm?fa=buy.optionToBuy&uid=2009...

[4]: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0278431911...