Some of you may remember the problem I had with a shitcoiner at our meetup back in April. Last night, we had an outright, outspoken, and worst of all, savagely interupty, anti-privacy advocate appear in our midst. I'm using the sorcery language because I didn't pick up on any prior warning signs before he transformed right in the middle of my presentation.
The agenda, following up on last month's reading on of A Cypherpunk's Manifesto and a healthy but sad conversation about the Samurai takedown, was to discuss permissionlessness and privacy. Then we would go into how PWA apps and Fedimints help out with this.
Everything seemed to be going well until I pulled out my favorite PWA to demo and this guy just jumped in to let us know that the government was going to throw the app devs in jail. At first it was just annoying, because I had just given a big spiel about how that was exactly why we wanted to use this technology. But he WOULDN'T STOP TALKING. Do other meetup organizers experience these things? Exasperated, I finally clicked my fingers and said his name real loud, as if calling an animal and @dagny761 gave me a look like, "you need to mellow out and act like a grown-up." I basically gave up on the demo at that point and am sad to say that the presentation unraveled.
The incident a couple of months back was hard, but I was at least able to maintain order and I think everyone walked away more knowledgable and still respecting one-another. I wanted to share to get people's thoughts. I don't think this guy was a shitcoiner, but he certainly was a statist...and also a huge jerk. The common thread was, I think both of these fellas just wanted to talk about NGU. Afterwards, I found out that last night's guy is a tech guy for the department of defense. He was giddy to tell me about all of the new tech he was developing that he said is already being used overseas. I'm embarrassed to say that I was too tired too beat down at that point to debate the merits or demerits of developing weapons for a government that he admitted was a black box to the public on what they were doing with this stuff.
Anyway, I share here to ask, is this common? This meetup is coming up on a one year anniversary and we've already had two frustrating nights like this...AND last night I definitely lost the debate. Worst of all, it's not because my points weren't more well received, but because some of them were literally not heard over statist howling. Also, does this guy sound familiar? He apparently goes to bitcoin meetups all the time in Michigan (multiple cities! he mentioned Detroit, Lansing, and Grand Rapids). Are Michigan meetups just NGU discussions or do you guys up there just smack this dude down better than I do?