If his story is true, he was sponsored by the donor the first time he attended. He applied to come back and was accepted on his own merits, and then he was blacklisted. I think it's newsworthy if TED, which is purportedly a forum for sharing ideas, lets donors blacklist attendees. The TED talks are just a highbrow facade for a get-together that is actually all about access. Access (and money) is how they lure the presenters that give some substance to the facade. Sarah Silverman showed that she did not understand the nature of the event; she did not appreciate the privilege of having access to rich and powerful people, and somebody took offense. Apparently this guy was also not sufficiently deferential to some powerful person, so he is not an appropriate attendee for an event that is all about being grateful for their presence.
Group A, (the people everyone would love to meet), and Group B (the people who want to meet those people.) The people in Group B spend the entire TED conference running around with business cards, hoping for, you know, five seconds of face time with Sergey Brin, Bill Gates, Steve Wozniack, Cameron Diaz, or the like.
This part makes Group B sound like a bunch of insufferable assholes (which may be partly true) but when you consider the nature of the event, Group A is almost literally asking for it.
Apparently this guy was also not sufficiently deferential to some powerful person, so he is not an appropriate attendee for an event that is all about being grateful for their presence.
You don't know what his relationship is. Maybe this donor thinks this person molested his daughter, but doesn't have enough proof to get a conviction. At the end of the day a donor has just as much right to pull or use any influence they have as this applicant has to attend a private conference.
I've quite possibly never seen a more worthless piece of writing or topic. Although I'd have to go through the TC archives to be sure.
And we have every right to draw conclusions about TED based on how they react to such pressure.
(On a meta note, rights are a pathetic red herring pulled out when people don't want to defend something on other grounds. Should we refrain from criticizing anything unless we want to ban it? Should we refrain from praising anything unless we want to make it compulsory? If you condemn all criticism as a slippery slope towards taking away people's rights, we don't have much left to talk about.)
There's a reason why people tend to discount anonymous sources, especially when there is no additional content or evidence.
In this case we have an anonymous source, giving one side of a story (this "reporter" doesn't even appear to attempt to validate this story with the "curator" or anyone else), and already comes from a publication that is generally known for sloppy work and biased reporting.
IOW, you have every right to draw conclusions even on the basis of zero information -- and that would be slightly better than what you've done here.
I acknowledged in my first post, which you replied to and therefore presumably read, that the story reported in the link may not be true. What's with the bitter tone?
The bitter tone? My apologies. It's just the writing from TC strikes a nerve in my at how bad and perverse it is. In any case I let that leak through in my response to you and others. Again, sorry about that.
I think it's a bit disingenuous to say that the original vouch from the donor didn't factor into the 2011 invite, and that he was accepted solely on his own merits.
Most likely, having attended a previous TED conf bumps you up on the invite list. The original invite came from a vouch by the donor. It's extremely possible that's the only reason this person got the 2011 invite.
Which makes the de-invite more like not getting that promotion because you slept with the boss's daughter. Politics to be sure, but hardly an attempt for the upper classes to squash the lower ones.
Group A, (the people everyone would love to meet), and Group B (the people who want to meet those people.) The people in Group B spend the entire TED conference running around with business cards, hoping for, you know, five seconds of face time with Sergey Brin, Bill Gates, Steve Wozniack, Cameron Diaz, or the like.
This part makes Group B sound like a bunch of insufferable assholes (which may be partly true) but when you consider the nature of the event, Group A is almost literally asking for it.