Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby

1 comment on Hacker News

1. PositivenkurzSep 4, 2016

   Regardless of the whether Perch's accusations toward Crockford are well-founded it would seem undeniable that Perch is insulting and putting down Crockford: https://medium.com/@nodebotanist/why-i-won-t-be-speaking-at-conferences-with-douglas-crockford-anymore-61bc29f028c8

   At the time of the post, Crockford was slated to be an attendee. In fairness, this would imply that Perch be uninvited from the conference for violating the code of conduct. Or does the code of conduct have an escape cause in cases where everyone agrees that the victim has really "gone too far"?

   Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby by Donald Barthelme (1973)

   Some of us had been threatening our friend Colby for a long time, because of the way he had been behaving. And now he'd gone too far, so we decided to hang him. Colby argued that just because he had gone too far (he did not deny that he had gone too far) did not mean that he should be subjected to hanging. Going too far, he said, was something everybody did sometimes. We didn't pay much attention to this argument.

   http://jessamyn.com/barth/colby.html

   It's a fantastic story, and while I'll concede that it's only tangential to critiques of codes of conduct, reading the story would almost certainly be more enjoyable than spending time thinking about the inherent contradictions of tolerating intolerance. If you prefer video, I was amazed to find that a couple years ago someone (Chris Rubino) remade Barthelme's classic story as a short film: https://vimeo.com/149832821