Haskell Interlude 68: Michael Snoyman

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In this episode, we’re joined by Michael Snoyman, author of Yesod, Conduit, Stackage and many other popular Haskell libraries. We discuss newcomer friendliness, being a Rustacean vs a Haskellasaur, how STM is Haskell’s best feature and how laziness can be a vice.

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Disclaimer: this is my personal opinion and not an opinion in my role as moderator of this Discourse. This comment does not represent the opinion of the Discourse moderation team. I have abstained from moderating this thread to create appropriate separation between my role as moderator and my personal beliefs.

I respect his contributions to Haskell and the discussion is insightful, but I don’t feel comfortable hosting people who downplay the genocide in Gaza in our community.

Source: tweets, e.g.

Edit: To be clear, this is an appeal to the Haskell Foundation to retract this episode until Michael Snoyman publicly denounces the genocide in Gaza. I’m willing to “pass over in silence” many questionable opinions, but not genocide denial.

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(post deleted by author)

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On reflection, I’ve deleted my initial response as off-topic. I suggest @jaror does likewise.

In general, there’s a huge software industry in Israel. Likely there’s a small degree of separation to those feeling raw about the conflict. Best to pass over in silence.

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These social media posts are a shameful testament to the extremism and dehumanisation that have been normalised these past years.

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I will reach out to the relevant parties and see what an appropriate path forward might be.

There is no single ‘editor’ of the Haskell Interlude, like almost everything in the Haskell community, it is governed by a group (not sure if they call themselves a ‘committee’ in this particular case). This has its benefits and drawbacks, as you all know, particularly when it comes to being decisive on contentious issues. It would be specious for me to promise anything more concrete at this time.

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First and main - Michael Snoyman posts shows that Snoyman joked about news from Gaza.
But he … didn’t propose to do a genocide to Palestinians or to kill most Palestinians (in Gaza or in whole).
So, please don’t blame him for that!

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We (the podcast team) take this concern seriously. The posts referenced are dehumanizing, making light of non-combatants in a terrible situation and we do not condone them.

The episode steers clear of this topic. It focuses on Snoyman’s technical contributions to the Haskell ecosystem, including five of the top ten most downloaded packages on Hackage.

We will discuss this at our next podcast meeting and decide how to proceed. Thank you for bringing it to our attention.

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When I heard about this secondhand, I honestly had very mixed feelings. I have strong views on international politics, but also understand a group assembled on the basis of a technical project like a programming language ecosystem shouldn’t be expected to share them, or anything similar. It takes all types, and I’m typically not keen on disrupting that sort of polite norm – even if I’m also all for the ability to state those disagreements publicly. I.e. I think debate and open expression is important, including for minority viewpoints or unpopular ones. I also looked briefly at michael’s twitter timeline and didn’t see anything too awful.

But now that I have seen the posts in question, those are really depressing and reprehensible. Its not just political stances – its the callousness towards human suffering or even the humanity of those suffering.

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Unpopular opinion: a purely technical podcast interview with a major contributor to the Haskell ecosystem should not be “cancelled” because the interviewee said unrelated things on Twitter that people don’t like.

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I don’t know. I’m a bit on the fence.

On one hand, I find it rather odd to demand that people must “denounce the genocide in Gaza”, which is a legal term and the primary authority on that (ICC) has not come to a conclusion, yet.

Additionally, the Haskell Foundation Guidelines For Respectful Communication are specifically written in a way that makes clear we do not want to constrain what people think, but how they behave towards us. We also don’t want the Haskell Foundation to become a legal authority on matters of international law.

And yet, I think it’s rather evident that the posts are incredibly dehumanizing and it doesn’t really matter whether they’re relevant to the technical podcast. There are always some boundaries of morals and taste when you give people a platform. And I feel they have been crossed.

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sclv used the words “depressing”, “reprehensible” and “callousness” which are broadly expressing subjective experience. The word “dehumanizing” is not subjective, however, and has been used three times in the comments here. I can’t see how that word applies to these tweets. For example, calling a group of people “vermin” would be dehumanizing; taking people as slaves would be dehumanizing; but I can’t see what’s dehumanizing in these particular tweets. I think it’s really important to make precise claims that stand up to scrutiny. Sorry if I’m being dim. What have I missed?

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Michael is making fun of the death toll numbers:

It’s clear that there is no independent verification of them, but we have very concrete evidence that large numbers of both children and journalists did in fact die.

To me these two tweets are definitely dehumanizing.

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I could describe “making fun of death toll numbers” as perhaps “crass”, “callous”, “cruel” or “brutal”, but not “dehumanizing” because I don’t see how it implies the victims have lesser humanity. But perhaps I just have a misunderstanding of how that word is typically used.

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In fairness, we are often asked to consider all the context when the 7th of October happened.

Maybe we should also ask the contexts that led Snoyman to act the way he did on the internet.

Nothing happened in the vacuum and asking for contexts and considerations goes both ways. Internet doesn’t often present the best part of us, anyways.

I wish we didn’t have to spoil our otherwise excellent episode made by the foundation by this off-topic matter… I really like the episode, as usual.

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I can only speak for myself, but Michael has been a force for innovation and engineering excellence for a long time. He’s the type of person young engineers look up to. That’s why I found those tweets so disappointing… in a way I expected more of him. I wish I hadn’t seen them.

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No one can take away your humanity, no matter what they do to you. It’s not the victim that’s dehumanized, it’s the perpetrator who acts in a less than human way.

Seeing this was brought to light in the very first reply makes me think there might be some history here I’m not aware of. I’d be very interested in hearing that if it exists, before escalating.

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to clarify i did not just say “callousness” but such callousness directed towards “the humanity of those suffering” which is another way of saying, i think, what “dehumanizing” says. one can only say certain things regarding mass death if they view a group of people as less deserving of life, which is to say, less human.

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Those two things are not synonymous to my understanding of them, but I could be mistaken about common usage. Still, I don’t particularly mind the word used to describe a group tweets; I do mind what the group of tweets demonstrates about views of their author. I’m afraid I cannot see how those four tweets demonstrate that their author views a group of people as “less human”. That’s an inference too far for me.

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ok lets stop beating around the bush here. “dehumanizing” i think has been used by people because it is the polite way to put things. the first linked tweet is a “joke” that says in essence that palestinians like to have sex with goats. this is, by any reasonable standard, racist. if you want to draw a semantic line that says “racist” is not “dehumanizing” then you’re welcome to, but it hardly seems to matter.

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