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Mike Glyer's news of science fiction fandom
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@JJ
The XPS 9550 looks a very decent machine, enough so that I’m seriously considering one myself though maybe from their refurbished outlet. Personally I’d forgo the touchscreen as I’ve never been convinced its a useful interface and would not be running Windows on it anyway so it would be unlikely to work. Tastes vary though and often you need to take touch to get the highest resolution screens.
I think the XPS is still reasonably user serviceable too (for certain values of reasonableness) unlike some of the glued together stuff. I have seen some tales of WiFi issues with drivers/firmware getting blamed.
Good size for a 15″ machine too, about as close to a MacBook Pro as you’re likely to get in the PC world. If you’re willing to risk voiding the warranty and edit some firmware hex it can even run MacOS. Allegedly.
@Meredith
(spells name right on third attempt) Yay!
Frequently not even then alas, confirmation bias in action.
@JJ
Yep the XPS 9550 gets a fair amount of good press.
I wouldn’t recommend the Office subscription, just install LibreOffice. It will do everything that Mike needs. Without knowing Mike’s circumstances it might be better to put the money towards net connectivity.
I’m probably lucky that I’m only getting to see the new covers for the self-published editions which are very much not-Baen in style.
$2,500.
As Meredith said, I acknowledged that publishing the audio is not personal use and would be a violation of the policy.
If we’re going to talk about the code of conduct, I think it’s important to get it right. That’s why I posted what I did.
Before this, I wasn’t aware that people recording panels is controversial. My assumption was that it happens often and I was glad it did, because that meant I’d get a chance to see some panels on YouTube and elsewhere.
I’ve read some people who feel strongly otherwise. If a moderator knows recording is planned to take place (or is doing it herself), the panelists should be told before the event and the audience as well when it begins. Either that or the con should state as policy that all panels may be recorded.
I’ve read that in the 1980s Worldcons used to record every panel and sell the tapes to raise money.
There is a big, huge sign outside the business meeting and notices for the Hugo ceremonies and masquerade that they will be recorded and posted publically. The absence of similar notices for other con functions would be enough to tell me they WON’T be recorded and posted publically, even absent the very clear CoC clause.
I’m having a lot of trouble wrapping my brain around a moderator deliberately pre-planning a major disruption to a panel topic NOT being a clear violation of the trust the con and the audience placed in him. And that’s before one factors in accusing most of the audience and fellow panelists of being pearl clutching special snow flakes.
So, yeah. Private organization boots out member who, with deliberate malice afore thought, betrays the trust they placed in him. Not seeing the issue here, guys.
I don’t think it’s been mentioned, but I spoke to Ann Leckie when she was dismantling her park, and she said that after she’d taken apart her bench to take home, she moved our Ancillary Bench into her park as a replacement, which I thought was extremely appropriate. Her park was quite nice, too. Among other things, she had some memorial pins for, umm, a couple of people who died in the books. Almost wrote the names, but realized they’d be spoilers….
The fan at the Truesdale panel who yelled at Neil Clarke that he was “intolerant” was expelled from the con also, but he didn’t know because he saw the email only after he got back home.
He calls himself a rabid puppy and has written on his LiveJournal about it:
Here’s what he was told in the email from the con by the chair Ruth Lichtwardt:
Last night, I found the comment by the woman who attended the panel and said she began crying, which Meredith mentioned. She said this on Facebook:
In his journal, the rabid puppy acknowledges a woman in front of him might have taken offense:
I’m not offering his perspective on the event to endorse it. Yelling an insult at a panelist from the crowd is abusive and merited expulsion.
@rcade To whom I would have been glad to apologize to if she found it too loud. She left some time later in the middle and I didn’t see her afterward and she didn’t turn around to complain nor come up to me after the panel let out.
It was much more than too loud. One doesn’t cry because someone was too loud per se. Since I can’t be certain she is the one I read on Twitter I can’t comment on her personal feelings.
But I can talk to what many women might be feeling when a guy starts yelling angrily behind me: scared, terrified, freaked out, am I going to be hurt, I he going to get violent, OMG he’s right behind me I’m in the direct line of fist if he decides to strike out.
Those feelings may not occur to you as a normal reaction. But for women angry men are dangerous men. Had he found her to apologize for being loud he would have made things worse for her. He would have terrified her even more. He wouldn’t have been apologizing for the right thing.
I agree that his hypothetical apology didn’t adequately cover the offense. She found herself physically in the middle of an angry verbal confrontation. I can see why she was alarmed, and that’s not a situation anyone should have been put in at a con panel.
@Cheryl:
I’m not suggesting that men don’t or can’t have valuable opinions. What I do believe though is that it’s a mistake to act as if that’s the default, as if the rest of us look at the world through a substantially similar lens.
Very well put, especially this observation.
@IanP:
Personally I’d forgo the touchscreen as I’ve never been convinced its a useful interface and would not be running Windows on it anyway so it would be unlikely to work.
The touchscreens work very well on Linux. It’s a plain old touchpad driver. What doesn’t work on Linux is automatically turning off the keyboard and mouse when you fold the hinges to convert to a tablet. Which is a shame, because Windows did a fairly risible job of wonkily grafting a tablet interface onto their desktop interface, and Ubuntu’s Unity desktop did the job correctly five years ago.
Tablet mode is increasingly the way personal computing is going, programmers excepted, and it’s a nice option for people working in places where the form factor of a laptop or sound of clicking keys might be an issue. It’s pleasantly silent if you’re, say, sitting in the audience of a convention panel and liveblogging. No pressure, Mike.
@andyl:
I wouldn’t recommend the Office subscription, just install LibreOffice. It will do everything that Mike needs.
Seconded. LibreOffice is great. It’s money down the drain to pay for Office.
So the NASFiC and Worldcon site selection details (PDFs) have been posted. Nothing terribly shocking or exciting, though 1,321 voting on a Worldcon site with only 2 contenders feels like a heck of a lot.
I fall into the camp of those who tend to think that if I’m doing or saying something in public (even a quasi-public event like a con panel), I can’t really object to being recorded, filmed or quoted unless said public record is presented in a selective or out-of-context manner. Hopefully, in such an event, I will say or do something witty, wise and awesome.
I’m a bit of an extremist on the subject, I’ll admit. One of my favorite stories is Damon Knight’s “I See You”, which posits the existence of the ozo, a remote-viewing device that can not only tune in on anywhere, but also on anytime from the far distant past to the present. And a world where the ozo is ubiquitous and available to everyone, where there’s universal surveillance with universal access, where EVERYTHING is on the record, is a world where lying and deception is almost impossible. To me, that’s a great example of Utopian SF. But other people have called “I See You” a horror story.
(I’ve had some bad experiences [bleak laughter] with people I trusted and believed feeding me complete and utter bullshit. So there’s that.)
@Petréa Mitchell, well, some of us voted in site selection to get the 2018 membership….
Speaking of which, should we be expecting any kind of notification other than the credit card payment going through? Originally I sent a check, which wasn’t cashed so I emailed and found out they didn’t receive it. Fortunately I checked a few days before deadline so I paid via credit card… but I’m a little gun-shy about whether they got my information given the fact that my original check-and-ballot never arrived….
@Amoxtli
Haven’t been keeping up with the state of Linux touchscreen support I admit as it is a tech I am uninterested in at best.
I’ve got an iPad and use it a lot. In fact since my ~10 year old 2nd hand 15″ MacBook died I’ve been laptopless and use the desktop for anything that requires heavy lifting (photo editing mainly) but miss just being able to pick up the laptop and type. Just prefer the separate device approach versus a convertible.
I just hope the market doesn’t stop providing proper laptops/desktops for those of us who what them though. I’d still prefer a 4:3 laptop. Only ended up with an iPad because at the time the Android tabs were almost universally widescreen jobs and I was more interested in reading than video.
Secondly, go read about the word ‘malice’ especially in a legal sense. My understanding is that it’s the hardest thing to prove in a court of law BECAUSE NOBODY CAN READ MINDS.
If you want to start talking about “in the legal sense”, you might note that what you are relying upon to make your judgment is hearsay, as all recordings are hearsay, while someone who was there would be an eyewitness. Hearsay is always considered to be less reliable than eyewitness testimony, which means that in a legal sense your claim that you are just as capable of determining whether DT’s actions were malicious is a specious one.
DT’s action caused harm. He knew they would cause harm. He said as much in the introduction to his prepared statement. Knowingly causing harm is malicious. Were I to need to prove malice in a court of law, I would have no trouble meeting that standard with the evidence available.
If your position is that my middle-aged white maleness makes my viewpoint irrelevant and John O’Neill’s irrelevant even though he was there, that’s your prerogative.
As to whether DT’s actions were threatening or otherwise caused significant discomfort, your opinions pretty much are irrelevant. You don’t have the frame of reference needed to make that determination, and you’ve been waving off the arguments of the people who do. That’s the tone-deafness you’ve displayed.
I think you’re overreaching there, my fellow irrelevant white man.
Prefacing remarks with the warning that they might be considered offensive doesn’t always prove a speaker has a malicious intent to cause harm. People offer that kind of disclaimer often these days as a trigger warning. No one takes that as a sign of malice. It is regarded as considerate behavior.
I don’t think “if you’re easily offended, you might not want to stay for all of this, or you may want to” indicated a desire to be considerate. But your insistence that he was intentionally malicious requires a level of mind-reading I’m not willing to do.
See also The Light of Other Days. (The novel by Stephen Baxter, not the short story by Bob Shaw. But also, see the short story by Bob Shaw, just because.)
Can we please end the mind-reading discussion. It’s piling onto the damage DT did. Seeing 2 white males arguing over intent when intent is irrelevant it’s the actions which matter is a microaggression to the women, queers, and PoC on File770. I might be overstepping in speaking for others but I’m not the first to ask that intent be dropped who fell into the targeted group.
Thank you 😀
ETA: sorry to spoil you fun
So much this. Too many people, mostly men but not all, don’t seems to know how scary they can be when angry.
OK. I’ll move on to something else.
@rcade: Of course it was malicious. It was self-evidently, transparently, overtly and obviously malicious. I really don’t understand how you can possibly come away with any doubt, unless you’ve never ever ever ever attended any conventions ever in your lifetime. (Which may be the case, and if so I’m sorry to hear that, but then maybe you shouldn’t be offering up opinions on what is appropriate behavior at a con because they can’t possibly be informed opinions?)
I have been going to sci-fi conventions since 1996. I have attended hundreds of panels, I have been on dozens of panels, I’ve moderated a handful of panels. Many people here in the comments have experience commensurate with or surpassing mine. We will all tell you that having a moderator start with several pages of prepared remarks is so far outside the norms of expected behavior for a moderator or indeed a panelist as to be downright unprecedented.
THIS IS NOT HYPERBOLE. My most recent panel was literally a panel on what to do with your panel goes off the rails, with people like Mark Oshiro (who is so nice BTW!) sharing their long and painful experiences of being on panels derailed by cluelessness and malice. Nothing anyone talked about ever rose to the level of a panel moderator bringing several pages of prepared remarks, complete with props, for a speech that was off-topic, insulting to other panelists and audience members, and took up a significant percentage of the panel time. Literally, in a panel about ruining other people’s experiences with panels, we could not come up with something as bad as what Truesdale did.
You can say, “Oh, I think he was clueless,” but fundamentally, that reading relies on him possessing a level of cluelessness that could only be had by someone who had not only never moderated a panel, but had never been on a panel, had never seen a panel, did not know what a panel was and was unfamiliar with the English language and the process of interacting with other human beings. It does not hold water. It does not pass any test of reasonability. You can only defend it with utter willful blindness and a pretense that the existence of EIGHTY YEARS (this October, apparently! We should have a party) of established norms of behavior for science fiction conventions simply don’t exist and that we’re all making up the rules as we go so Truesdale couldn’t possibly know this was a mistake.
He did. It is insulting to our collective intelligence that you are trying to pretend otherwise.
So. With it established that Truesdale was acting maliciously to derail the enjoyable experiences of others, please explain why his membership should be privileged over the dozens of people whose weekend he tried to ruin?
Re the shouting audience member who was also expelled. The audio of his part begins at almost exactly 10mins. He claims he was shouting to be heard over the crowd applauding. The sequence of events on the audio is that Clarke spoke in criticism of Truesdales speech, the crowd broke into applause, and once the applause ends he is then audible shouting at Clarke – the crowd noise has died down at that point (although I’d caveat about the microphone quality possibly not catching quieter crowd chatter). It’s also possible he was shouting during the applause and isn’t audible.
I don’t think his claim that he needed to shout to be heard stands up – once the applause had finished there was no need to shout.
I don’t think “if you’re easily offended, you might not want to stay for all of this, or you may want to” indicated a desire to be considerate. But your insistence that he was intentionally malicious requires a level of mind-reading I’m not willing to do.
But that isn’t all that he said. At this point, it is clear that you are just being disingenuous, but that seems to be your modus operandi in this threads, so I’m not sure why I’m surprised.
I’ve attended around 25 conventions starting in the early 1980s. I used to go to the Dallas Fantasy Fair every year when it hosted the Harvey Awards and I covered con panels as a journalist for the Comics Buyer’s Guide.
Because panels are my favorite thing about cons, I’ve been to hundreds of them.
Trying to pretend? You could be a little less personal in your criticism. Accusing me of falsely taking a position is not accurate.
rcade: I’ve read that in the 1980s Worldcons used to record every panel and sell the tapes to raise money. You have heard incorrectly. IIRC, Noreascon II was one of the few conventions to engage a recording service; permissions were secured from participants beforehand or the item wasn’t recorded. (Harlan’s performance would probably have sold well, but….) The only “profit” the convention saw was a free set of tapes.
To borrow a metaphor from Pterry, perhaps you need to adjust your credibility to an Alp or so, rather than several Everests :).
Petréa Mitchell: 1,321 voting on a Worldcon site with only 2 contenders feels like a heck of a lot. Certainly not in historic terms; Glasgow vs Atlanta for 1995 was ~2500 votes, and Boston-in-Orlando vs Philadelphia for 2001 was ~2000. I \think/ 1321 is \somewhat/ higher than recent competitive years but don’t have the newer figures at my axon tips. It’s not clear number of bids matters; like 2018, 1995 and 2001 were close races, so the bids may have worked harder to turn out the vote.
Bruce Arthurs: I think Sherred’s “E for Effort” exploded the idea that “I See You” would be a utopia — long before the Net brought a practical slant to the question. Unfortunately, Knight’s comment in Better Than One doesn’t make clear how he saw it.
Tablet mode is increasingly the way personal computing is going, programmers excepted,
And writers excepted too. I can’t see any way that a tablet improves on a normal keyboard for writing and editing massive quantities of words.
Also–anybody who is using the same programs they’ve always used finds tablets hard to use. & there are those of us who can’t afford to replace perfectly functional programs with expensive new versions of the same thing. We’re going to be using these old programs for a long time, since we prefer to pay for food and housing first.
Recording panels: I’ve been on a panel that was recorded by the SF Oral History Association; they had all the panelists sign releases. I did some dry runs for a video-blogging project that never came to be where I recorded panels among other things; I got releases signed for everything I posted. The WSFS Business Meeting, as noted, has great big warning signs before you even enter the room, in lieu of releases. IIRC, when Fannish Inquisitions are recorded there is a warning given beforehand. (Can’t remember if there are signs too.)
When Brad Templeton attended Loncon by means of a Beam, he had to discuss with every panel he attended whether he would be allowed in, since this meant images of the panel would be transmitted.
@rcade: Interesting about the other person being thrown out, thanks. This shows the holes in MAC II’s handling of problems, however. (a) Relying on e-mail and (b) no response = you’re booted. As seen in this case, the guy didn’t actually leave because they relied on e-mail and he couldn’t read it till he got home!
Not everyone stays in con hotels, but most do and it sounds like he did. I wonder if they thought to check the con hotels (obviously they knew who he was) and leave a msg with the hotel – if not, why not. Or maybe they do that sometimes, but reserve it for more egregious violations of CoC. Still, it seems odd to presume everyone will be able to check e-mail, for something like this. Great way to bypass the CoC (accidentally or on purpose) for the bad actor, though! 🙁
Chip Hitchcock said:
Well, geez, if you’re going to force me to confront actual numbers… 🙂
Fancyclopedia 3 turns out to have a great archive of detailed site selection results, so here we go for the last 10 years:
2017 (4-way race): 2606 ballots
2016 (KC vs. Beijing)[1]: 758 ballots
2015 (3-way race): 1348 ballots
2014 (unopposed): 932 ballots
2013 (unopposed): 760 ballots
2012 (unopposed): 526 ballots
2011 (semi-opposed)[2]: 763 ballots
2010 (unopposed): 826 ballots
2009 (Montreal vs. KC): 902 ballots
2008 (3-way race): 1561 ballots
While I believe I’m correct to say that 1321 is a lot of votes for a two-way race recently, there are only 2 datapoints to compare to, and one has to have a footnote, so perhaps my perception is also based on the generally low vote count totals due to the run of unopposed bids.
[1] Perhaps technically unopposed due to the inaction of the Beijing bid.
[2] There was a competing bid which had to withdraw a few months of the vote.
@Bruce Arthurs:
I can’t tell from the convention map: Did the con check member IDs at entries to make sure only authorized people got in?
If you can’t ban someone from entry without them knowing you did it and honoring your decision for the rest of the event, that’s a pretty big security issue.
There is at least 1 program that I’ve been using the same version of for more than 20 years now. (And I still use Windows XP and will rue the day when I have to give it up.)
rcade said: “I’ve attended around 25 conventions starting in the early 1980s. I used to go to the Dallas Fantasy Fair every year when it hosted the Harvey Awards and I covered con panels as a journalist for the Comics Buyer’s Guide.
Because panels are my favorite thing about cons, I’ve been to hundreds of them.”
And have you ever–EVER–seen a panel that started with the moderator delivering a prepared speech of over five minutes (whether the eventual length would have been ten or thirty is irrelevant) on a topic that was not the specific topic of the panel? I mean, for that matter have you ever seen a panel that started with the moderator delivering a prepared speech of over five minutes period? Have you ever seen the moderator bring props designed to make a joke at the expense of people who are upset by his off-topic prepared remarks? Have you ever seen a moderator tell panelists to wait until they were done delivering opening remarks before they talked?
I’m guessing the answer is “no, not ever”. I may be wrong in the sense that you have seen it happen once or twice in a particularly crazy convention atmosphere, but I’m pretty sure you know, after “hundreds” of panels, that this is not behavior that is normal, acceptable, or condoned. It is not something you would do, it is not something you would consider acceptable if someone else did it. It is not something that you would consider it reasonable if someone who was conversant with appropriate panelist/moderator behavior did it and acted surprised that it was considered to be inappropriate. In short, you have to be aware, as someone who has attended hundreds of panels, that people just don’t do what Truesdale did and Truesdale must have known that when he did it and went ahead anyway.
Given that, if you’re still trying to defend it as “clueless”, I think it is fair to characterize that as a pretense rather than an actual belief regarding the facts of the situation. Because no reasonable person conversant with the standards of panelist/moderator behavior could come to the conclusion that this was done accidentally or in ignorance of the reaction it would engender.
In all this discussion, I’m surprised no one has mentioned that the phrase “pearl-clutching” is inherently misogynist. Or is that too self-evident to bother mentioning?
Males may find themselves more comfortable with the terms of abuse employed because they were markedly less targeted..
(I’m reminded of the newspaper comic Sherman’s Lagoon, where the female characters (being sharks and such) were indicated by the fact that they all wore pearl necklaces. A turtle character who changed sex had his state change indicated by the sudden appearance of a necklace.)
I’ve seen panels that became wheels-off in many ways. I can recall a few that had a moderator with prepared notes and some with props. I don’t remember any with a long speech planned by a moderator.
(The best panel disaster was when nobody showed up but me and one other person. We got to go on an hour-long walk with Scott McCloud and Jim Woodring.)
This panel’s topic was, “More than just the magazines, short fiction is in a golden age, found in the magazine, online, in anthologies, and chapbooks. The field’s editors come together to talk about what they are seeing, and debate whether there is a short fiction renaissance.”
Truesdale’s premise was that we’re not in a renaissance because writers are afraid to take risks due to political correctness. I think that’s a tendentious, inaccurate and ham-handed position which derailed the ability of the panel to celebrate the work of the star-studded lineup of panelists. But his talk was in the neighborhood of the topic.
He claims that he was going to bring his remarks around to short fiction, but that was in the portion he didn’t deliver. That was expecting way too much indulgence from the panel and crowd, since he already wore out their patience after 7 minutes.
I think his actions were unacceptable enough to drop him from future duties as a Worldcon moderator and take him off this year’s panels. I only question kicking him from the con.
To the main exhibition hall, yes.
rcade said: “But his talk was in the neighborhood of the topic.”
In the same sense that the Mississippi River is in the same neighborhood as the U of M campus. 🙂
Okay, so we’ve established that Truesdale’s behavior was, by your own statement, abnormal and atypical. (“I don’t remember any with a long speech planned by a moderator.”) Let’s move on to the next point: Can you agree that Truesdale, who has been an SFF editor since at least 1975, would have been aware that his decision to make a lengthy prepared statement in advance of letting other panelists speak was outside the generally expected and accepted behavior of a moderator at an SFF convention panel?
Because you’ve been saying that this was “cluelessness” on Truesdale’s part, but that implies an ignorance of accepted social mores that I don’t think is reasonable to believe on his part. Do you think that Truesdale somehow didn’t understand the moderator’s role or wasn’t familiar with it, or do you agree that this was a speech that he knew he should not be giving at this time in this context?
As I see it, there had to be some response. Kicking him from further panels was not an option as he had none. So what other options were there when he clearly didn’t accept any responsibility for what he had done? Maybe he should have been kicked for only one day, but that would have given the exact same result as there was only one day left.
So what measures do you think the convention should have been taking? A stern talking to? This is a man who had already shown his inability to listen to others plenty of times.
@John Seavey: I don’t know Truesdale, personally or by reputation, so my answer would just be a guess. I can’t speak to the norms of Worldcon, so if you’re telling me as a longtime attendee that he was breaking them in a shocking way then I’ll just accept your characterization.
Cons have a wider range of responses than kicking them out or doing nothing.
The con made a public rebuke of Truesdale on its Twitter feed. Instead of announcing his expulsion, it could have made a public apology to those who were upset by his actions at the panel. That would have been a rebuke as well.
Yet he was held in enough esteem by his local con to be asked to moderate a panel.
I’ve bogarted this discussion long enough.
I’ll conclude with some ambivalence. At this point I know more about the scene in the room than I did when we began the discussion a day ago. If the concom said today that it held Truesdale responsible for creating the atmosphere in which a female fan was afraid because she was caught between a yelling fan and a panelist, I’d accept that explanation.
rcade said: “I don’t know Truesdale, personally or by reputation, so my answer would just be a guess”
And right now, your ‘guess’ is that this man who has been active in the SFF publishing industry since 1975 is somehow clueless of acceptable behavior for panel moderators and made a lengthy prepared speech to a hostile and captive audience without realizing that this would be taken as deliberate provocation on his part, while bringing along props that clearly made light of the response he anticipated from this captive and hostile audience.
Does that seem like a good guess to you, or a bad guess?
@Hampus,
Checking IDs.
Were they actually checking the name against some kind of db, or just checking that the person entering had a con badge? IME it is the latter, and that isn’t going to pick up a member who has been excluded so rcade’s point stands.
Completely agree with Tasha, emgrasso and Ipinhome. I’m really tired of white men being given a pass because they are “clueless” or “feel strongly” about something in cases where they pre-plan a stunt that privileges them above everyone else.
And it sure is nice to see that some folks will continue to defend their right to do that long after the point of professional behavior has passed. Good on the Con for not tolerating inappropriate actions.
There were names on the badges.
Rcade:
And everyone here but you have agreed on that being a mistake. So what measurrs should the con have taken that would have affected Truesdale? I stand by my previous comments that you are arguing on brianesque levels regarding this.
Hampus, to be fair, unless the badgers were actually given black-listed names to watch for, they were probably just checking that the badges were valid (for example, not day-passes for the wrong day).
There were badges with names on then. That together with a description of Trusdale should give an idea on what to lock for. Of course he could have slippef by anyhow, but the chance of him being recognized in the exhibition hall after his shennanigans would not be small. And then it would become a mattet for policr with tredpassing on private property.
There’s a huge difference between official recordings by the arrangers of an event, and surreptitious recordings made against the rules.
Even disregarding anything specific that as said, and simply looking at recordings alone, we can see two things: the Code of Conduct states
whereas Truesdale states
In other words, he went into the panel intending to record the audio with the intent to publish it – not “for personal archival use” as would have been the only permitted purpose.
To make it even clearer, he went into the panel deliberately intending to break the rules in the code of conduct.
And not only that: his stated intention (see above) was to use the panel as a springboard not only for his prepared statements, but also as a resource for an article he was planning to write and publish. In other words, he didn’t go to the panel for the panel’s sake, but because he intended to use it to further his own agenda – at the panel itself and in the article that he was already planning to write and which would use the audio that he was recording in blatant disregard of the code of conduct, and without caring about the panel or the attendees.
At this point it doesn’t really matter whether he is intending to be malicious – he has amply demonstrated that he considers himself to be above the rules, and considers everyone else to be less important than himself. As such, he’s not actually safe to have at the Con, and revoking his membership is entirely appropriate, and one might even say necessary.