Tag: SJW

How to eject an SJW

See, now, this is how you jettison the officious little creatures from your project:

I’ve done my best to create a more welcoming environment: I serve on the Scholarship Committee for UseR 2016 Stanford and the R Foundation Task Force on Women, have written a load of things in blog or twitter form about the need for a stronger community and a more representative Foundation, and helped Kara Woo and Gavin Simpson draft the open letter to the R Foundation that mandated a code of conduct for real-world events. With all of that I think it’s fair to say that while I’m not a Hadley, I’m at least a moderately-useful member of the community.

Rewind a week, to last Monday: I’m wandering around Twitter seeing what everyone is up to, reading through, and spot a tweet that immediately makes me headdesk. It points to a line in the R source code containing a variable called, with all seriousness…

    iGiveHead

I don’t think that this is an intentional sexual reference – far from it, I’m certain it’s just due to an absence of familiarity with one particularly crass English idiom, and I have only ever known the developer who wrote the code (whose first language is not English) to be entirely proper, entirely reasonable, and the model of what a productive Core member should be.

But it needs to go anyway: it’s exclusionary as all hell to have language like this in the core implementation and we can’t expect people to instantly understand intentions.

So I grabbed the latest development version of R, generated a patch that changed the name, and submitted a bug report with the patch that made clear I didn’t think this was anyone’s fault and I was sure it was unintentional and there were no accusations of sexism or bad intent in play here….

Pretty quickly, two email threads kicked off. One involved a lot of members of core individually asking me to stop tapping people in (apparently every Bugzilla email bothers all of core) and explaining that my suspicion that it was unintentional was in fact correct.

The second – oh, the second.

The second was a set of emails from Duncan Murdoch, President of the R Foundation and an R Core member, in which he dismissed my “bug report” (note the skeptical scare quotes he put on it) “about some variable name that you find offensive is clearly an example of nothing more than shit-disturbing” and stated that myself, and those who had commented in favour of changing it, were no longer welcome to participate in R’s bug-tracker.

I independently confirmed that our accounts had been banned and locked – as had the bug, and replied to Duncan explaining my thinking and motivation and asking in what capacity the ban had been made.

The variable name is still there. I never got any reply to my email.

The result

So: unintentionally offensive variable name leads to a patch and the indication that it is much more than one person finding it offensive, leads to the President of the R Foundation dismissing the concerns as “shit-disturbing” and punishing the people who surfaced said concern.

That’s not an environment I want to be a part of. That’s not an environment I want to contribute to. That’s not an environment in which I can have any faith that there is a strong interest in creating a safe and inclusive space for computing.

Don’t cut them any slack. Don’t give them any second chances. Identify, eject, and ignore.

That’s how you treat an SJW. Every single time. Duncan not only handled the situation Like. A. Boss. but he prevented the useless little SJW from wasting dozens of man-hours on pointless SJW-created drama. And he even used the situation to smoke out other would-be thought police.

I don’t know if Duncan read SJWAL, but he’s definitely going to be featured in SJWADD. The best part is the fact that Duncan not only ejected the initial SJW, but everyone who went along with the SJW’s attempt at destructive virtue-signaling. And then refused to explain his action or engage with them. He knows damned well there is no benefit to doing so.

Don’t hesitate. Do likewise.

Quit Facebook

I’ve never been enthusiastic about Facebook. I hated the clunky interface from the start, saw little point in endlessly exchanging pictures and updates with acquaintances, and only set up an account there because it was required as part of a design job I had to do. I never used it – although since I linked my Twitter account to it, many thought I did – and I was content to leave it after Andrew Marston brought it to the attention of the Facebook police and got it deleted under the “real names” policy.

That being said, if I was on Facebook today, I would delete my account due to the way it is now waging open war against nationalists and American gun rights.

Facebook is banning private sales of guns on its flagship social network and its Instagram photo-sharing service, a move meant to clamp down on unlicensed gun transactions.

Facebook already prohibits people from offering marijuana, pharmaceuticals and illegal drugs for sale, and the company said on Friday that it was updating its policy to include guns. The ban applies to private, person-to-person sales of guns. Licensed gun dealers and gun clubs can still maintain Facebook pages and post on Instagram.

The time to choose your social media side is coming. Don’t support the enemy. Delete your account. It’s obvious that all the big social media companies are, at the very least, SJW-friendly, but some like Amazon and Google, and even Twitter, are still playing reasonably fair. Remember, Milo was only unverified by Twitter; he wasn’t banned. Amazon took down John Scalzi Is A Rapist: Why SJWs Always Lie In Bed Waiting For His
Gentle Touch; A Pretty, Pretty Girl Dreams of Her Beloved One While
Pondering Gender Identity, Social Justice, and Body Dysmorphia.due to the legally-questionable title but the same book is still for sale on Amazon under its new name, John Scalzi Banned This Book But He Can Never Ban My Burning Love.

Others, like Facebook, Goodreads, and Wikipedia, are not so much tilting the playing field as refusing to let the Right even enter it. So don’t support them. You don’t have to. You really don’t.

The SJW war on Ruby continues

Despite being warned off by members of the group, and despite the Ruby project founder making it clear that thought policing and enforcement is not going to be permitted, Typhoid Coraline has taken advantage of the founder’s desire to be nice as he continues revising and spinning and attempting to take control of the project. This is his latest attempt after having the poison pill that is his Contributor Covenant knocked back:

As part of our collective culture we believe that the Ruby community should be open and welcoming to everyone, regardless of age, body size, disability, culture, ethnicity, gender, gender identity and expression, level of experience, nationality, personal appearance, race, religion, or sexual orientation.

This document provides community guidelines for a safe, respectful, productive, and collaborative place for people engaging with and contributing to to the Ruby community. It applies to all collaborative spaces and documents, including mailing lists, IRC, submitted patches, big reports, and pull requests.

  •     Participants must ensure that their language and actions are free of personal attacks and disparaging personal remarks.
  •     Participants must agree that the use of sexual imagery, sexual language, and sexual advances are not conducive to a professional environment and must be avoided.
  •     Participants must not publish non-public contact information about other members of the community, including physical addresses or other private information.
  •     Participants who disrupt the collaborative space, or participate in a pattern of behaviour which could reasonably be considered harassment will not be tolerated.

    Anyone asked to stop unacceptable behavior is expected to comply immediately.

Instances of abusive, harassing, or otherwise unacceptable behavior may be reported by sending an email to [INSERT EMAIL ADDRESS]. All complaints will be reviewed and investigated and will result in a response that is deemed necessary and appropriate to the circumstances. Respondents are obligated to maintain confidentiality with regard to the reporter of an incident.

We believe that by thoughtfully abiding by these community guidelines, we help Ruby fulfill its promise to make people happy and to put the needs of the community first.

This is a retreat from the Covenant, which covers all behavior by a contributor, whether it is related to the project or not. But the level of sheer dishonesty it entails is revealed by some of Typhoid Coraline’s SJW supporters.

I would recommend the Contributor Covenant. People complaining that it includes harassment in public spaces are most likely just guilty of doing so. Just because the harassment occurs outside the scope of the project does not make it any more ok!

It’s quite obvious from this thread alone how toxic this community is, I can’t believe so many people are essentially saying they don’t want to stop harassing people by coming up with silly excuses as if a CoC was somehow implementing communism.

The responsibility of enforcing the code of conduct should be handed to a committee comprised of people who have more experience with harassment which is often not recognised by people with more privilege. As well as that, what if Matz or one of the maintainers themselves were to violate the code of conduct? Nobody could stop them, therefore the CoC enforcement task should be carried out members of minority groups who will not violate the CoC. Nobody, not Matz or any maintainers should be exempt from consequences like demotion and banning. And as Matz has already stated, he will probably not have the time or willingness to deal with peoples reports of unacceptable behaviour.

Notice how their priority is not the Code of Conduct, but the committee that is charged with enforcing it. This SJW is considerably clumsier than Typhoid Coraline, in that he openly states how the committee will be stacked by “members of minority groups” who, by their very nature, “will not violate the CoC”. Remember, SJWs always set up rules that do not apply to them. They are above the law; laws are for those lesser people who are insufficiently idealistic.

Only an idiot would accept the establishment of an authority that not only has the ability to demote and ban him, but quite clearly has every intention of doing so. Sadly, there are more than a few naive idiots in the OSS world.

And, of course, anywhere there are SJWs, the First Law of SJW is in action:

I also support adopting a Code of Conduct. I believe CC 1.3 is a good base to work from simply because it is already used on many well known projects. I grew up in a “thick skin” internet age myself, so I personally prefer the “deal with it, fight back, or killfile” approach. That said, I live on top of a giant mountain of privilege. For my projects, I feel that I have a greater responsibility than simply serving my personal ideology. For me, I wasn’t quick to decide that adding a code of conduct to a project was a good thing, and I shared many of the concerns expressed by the non-troll commenters on this thread.

But the net effect of actually taking the time to listen and learn, not just to those active in social justice, but everyday people from many different backgrounds, was to find out… yes, this is a real problem. Sending a signal of support to those who have experienced that problem elsewhere in a way that’s loud and clear is worth doing. A CoC is one of the basic tools that can set the stage for accomplishing that, and if we trust the maintainers of this project, that trust will be preserved even after a CoC is implemented.

However, if the core team decides not to act on this, or acts on this in a way that’s half baked and idealistic, or acts in way that’s meant to preserve the “nice” attitude rather than making an effective decision — you will lose the trust of many who have come to realize that community management involves a lot more than the purely technical aspect of things. There are people in this thread that I’ve totally lost respect for already, who I’ve collaborated with before and previously thought of as very insightful voices in Ruby.

Not only the lies, but the threat is always the same. Do what I demand or I shall disapprove of you! However, it is clear from this Japanese Ruby administrator’s response that patience is wearing thin and the SJW attack has been recognized for what it is.

Currently, in order to maintain the integrity of the discussion in this issue, creating new accounts have been suspended. This means that we considered that this issue may be important, and this issue is occurring some hindrance to the development of Ruby. I hope that everyone who comments to this issue understands that.

After this issue was opened, many new accounts are created. Most of such accounts only commented to this issue. Normally new comers are welcomed, but in this case, sorry, I am watching such accounts with distrust.

My policy should be clear. I stand by the One-Finger Code of Conduct.

Convergence kills

Oxford University learns the hard way that allowing SJWs free rein is an effective and efficient way for an institution to destroy itself:

Oxford University’s statue of Cecil Rhodes is to stay in place after furious donors threatened to withdraw gifts and bequests worth more than £100 million if it was taken down, The Daily Telegraph has learnt.

The governing body of Oriel College, which owns the statue, has ruled out its removal after being warned that £1.5m worth of donations have already been cancelled, and that it faces dire financial consequences if it bows to the Rhodes Must Fall student campaign.

A leaked copy of a report prepared for the governors and seen by this newspaper discloses that wealthy alumni angered by the “shame and embarrassment” brought on the 690-year-old college by its own actions have now written it out of their wills.

The college now fears a proposed £100m gift – to be left in the will of one donor – is now in jeopardy following the row.

The donors were astonished by a proposal to remove a plaque marking where Rhodes lived, and to launch a six-month consultation over whether the statue of the college’s biggest benefactor should be taken down.

But Oriel College confirmed in a statement to the Telegraph: “Following careful consideration, the College’s governing body has decided that the statue should remain in place.”

 At a meeting on Wednesday the governing body was told that because of its ambiguous position on the removal of the statue, “at least one major donation of £500,000” that was expected this year has been cancelled. In addition, a “potential £750,000 donor” has stopped responding to messages from the college, and several alumni have written to Oriel to say “they are disinheriting the college from their wills”.

One of those who has already cancelled their legacy was going to leave a “seven figure sum” and the college is aware that “another major donor is furious with the College… whose legacy could be in excess of £100m”.

The report warns that there will now “almost certainly” be “one or two redundancies” in its Development Office team because of the collapse in donations. And it has cancelled an annual fundraising drive that should have taken place in April. The report also warns that Oriel’s development office could now make an operating loss of around £200,000 this year.

As a general rule, it is a massively stupid idea for an institution to allow it’s decision-making to be influenced, let alone dictated, by the antics of the low-IQ, affirmative-action pseudo-scholars who were foolishly admitted in the name of diversity. It shouldn’t be surprising when the pseudo-scholars engage in all sorts of destructive drama; they’re not capable of succeeding at Oxford and they know it, so they find “more important” activities to serve as a mask for their academic inadequacies.

Social Justice convergence kills.

But the pseudo-scholars are right about one thing. Cecil Rhodes would have been absolutely horrified to see Africans permitted to engage in these antics at Oxford. Everyone knows that Rhodes was a racist and Anglo-Saxon supremacist, but what those who condemn him are failing to consider is this: he was a racist whose opinion of those he called “the most despicable specimens of human beings” was derived from considerably more direct experience of Africans and African culture than those who condemn him today.

Indeed, the destructive and disrespectful behavior of those African students at Oxford is intended to undermine Rhodes’s reputation, but instead it is serving to support his now-controversial opinions.

Unlike most anti-racists, I’ve worked with African students struggling to stay academically eligible at university. And based on my experience, I can say two things: a) they worked harder and put in more time studying than any of the other students on campus, and b) they absolutely should not have been there. Most of them simply weren’t smart enough to grasp the necessary concepts involved. It’s not that they were stupid, but they were at a 2-SD disadvantage to the average student there.

It is more than unfair, it is downright reprehensible to continually push these young men and women into academic situations where they simply cannot succeed. It doesn’t help them, it destroys their confidence and it undermines the success of the few who are actually capable of succeeding.

It’s exactly like giving the nerds from the high school chess club a college football scholarship, then putting them on the field to play Penn State. Sure, they can legitimately call themselves “football players”, but that’s not much consolation when they’re getting crushed by 250-pound linebackers.

Project Big Fork

Tonight at 7 PM EST is the Open Brainstorm where we will be seriously discussing the project I am leading. If you’ve read SJWAL, you know what it is. You can register here; attendance is limited to 500 and 100 VFM are already registered, so if you are seriously interested in supporting a major anti-SJW offensive and are willing to put your money where your mouth is, you should register for the event sooner rather than later.

No transcripts or recordings will be released. A summary will be provided to the VFM who can’t be there.

Mailvox: SJWs in tech media

An anonymous coward provides an update:

I noticed today that someone linked to you on the LWN.net news site, and was banned.  LWN is one of the most respected Linux news websites.  However, the owner is a thoroughly SJW-amenable authority.  There is no benefit to posting there.  The mere use of the phrase SJW there can get you blocked.  Corbet (the owner) says, in all the long history of the site, this is the first time he’s drawn a line in the sand.  He is now deleting comments that discuss or refer to the SJW issue.

The VFM look like they’re doing good work on slashdot, the second most popular Linux site.  Huzzah!

Actually, this is good news as well as an indication of another opportunity. First, since LWN is already converged, that means it is vulnerable to replacement. Something to consider as the cultural war in tech gets hotter.

Second, the fact that the SJW who runs LWN is so concerned about any mention of SJW entryism and convergence that he refuses to permit its discussion, despite it being one of the most important issues in technology at the moment, means that he knows his SJW allies cannot succeed if their efforts are exposed.

The silencing of the tech lambs

An anonymous developer explains why he has to remain anonymous:

Religious wars in software used to be about a fat bearded man named He-macs wrestling a pencil-neck named Vimmy over what text editor to use, but now FOSS devs are concerned about making sure marginalized human beings feel “welcome,” as if someone was trying to physically block newcomers. That opens the door to social justice and other buzzwords that prigs use to feel better about themselves, and utopian visions documented in “Codes of Conduct,” or CoC.

The sentiment behind a CoC is that there is no excuse for being an ass, which sounds great until you realize that only a select few people get to decide who’s an ass. So when open source leaders want to stop you from doing free work they can pretend that its your fault for violating their code instead of admitting they never really wanted to include just anybody. They’ve managed to make exclusivity look inclusive, and it makes me crazy that so few people see that….

They exempt themselves from their own standards and announce their
willingness to proxy dox anyone if persuaded to do so on subjective
grounds. There is no privacy for you: If you look privileged and someone
makes up a story about you, you might get a concerned email from HR
about something making the rounds on Twitter and causing a PR nightmare
for your employer. Whether or not you actually did anything wrong won’t
matter.

Hacker Eric S. Raymond noticed the manipulation at work and indicated that women at tech conferences were targeting male open source leaders with false allegations. Accusations have power, and the 2013 PyCon incident with Adria Richards proved that beyond a shadow of a doubt.

We need to acknowledge the problem. If you are not considered worthy
of protection by ideological CoCs, then there are people out there that
want you to at the very least lose your job. If they see you
demonstrating even the most innocuous affection or humor, they will
likely assume malice and retaliate, especially if you are the wrong
color or sex. These are the same people who humiliated a scientist for
landing on a comet because of a shirt he wore.

If you think it’s bad now, just wait. The next step is going to be taking open source projects and closing them so that they cannot be forked. After all, what is the point of going to all this trouble to take over OSS if the productive people can simply render all their efforts irrelevant by a fork?

They don’t want a seat at the table, they want control. And what good is control if you can’t control everything?

As for those who say it’s not possible because the rules of open source don’t permit it, remember, they don’t only exempt themselves from their own standards, they exempt themselves from anything that limits their ability to pursue their objectives.

I was hoping to do the Open Brainstorm tonight, but we’ll do it tomorrow at 7 PM EST instead. I’ll send out the invites to the VFM tonight, and post the link publicly tomorrow afternoon.

Facebook is not your friend

Facebook has transformed itself into Big Brother. If you’re on it, it’s time to get off the platform:

Facebook began a Europe-wide campaign on Monday to thwart extremist posts on social media, after German politicians in particular raised concerns about a rise in xenophobic comments linked to an influx of refugees.

The U.S.-based group launched its “Initiative for Civil Courage Online” in Berlin, pledging over 1 million euros (1 million pounds) to support non-governmental organisations in their efforts to counter racist and xenophobic posts.

Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said hate speech “has no place in our society”, including in the Internet.

Facebook’s ground rules forbid bullying, harassment and threatening language, but critics say it does not enforce them properly. On Friday, the firm said it had hired a unit of the publisher Bertelsmann to monitor and delete racist posts on its platform in Germany.

One of the first things Facebook has apparently done, as part of this campaign “to counter racist and xenophobic posts”, is to expel over 1,000 members of the Facebook group “#GamerGate & #NotYourShield”. The 2,300-member Facebook group #GG  was also shut down yesterday.

Some have said that it was a group mod who was responsible; I’m not on Facebook and I wasn’t a member of those groups, so I don’t know. All I know is from an email sent by a member of both groups who was expelled from the first one.

Regardless, it is important to understand that Facebook is not your friend. Facebook is your enemy and it is the enemy of Western civilization. So stop supporting it. Stop using it.

UPDATE: Facebook has also repeatedly removed the video of a 15-year-old German girl who expressed her fears of those who have invaded her country on the grounds of xenophobia:

Hello, you can read the newspapers but this video is about the real situation in Germany. I would like to tell everyone about this on Youtube and Facebook. I am almost 16. I would like everyone to know what is going on, what I am authentically feeling at this moment.

And I am so scared everywhere. For example, if my family and I go out together, or if I see a movie with my friends. Usually I stay at home, but sometimes I stay out until 6 pm in winter, and it is so scary. It is just very hard to live day-to-day life as a woman.

I just want to say that I am not a racist. But one day, a terrible thing happened at the supermarket. I ran all the way home. I was so frightened for my life. There’s no other way to describe it.

My aunt and her friend have said you have to grow up. Why should we, children, have to grow up in such fear? It’s not just me, my friends too. You can see on Facebook, a 17 year old attacked, a 15 year old attacked, two 12-year olds attacked, so many. It is really so sad that this is happening … because of YOU PEOPLE. 🙁

Mailvox: a convention, converged

The lesson, as always, is this: don’t ever take McRapey’s advice:

Arisia is a mid-sized sf and fantasy convention in Boston which has been taken over by SJW’s despite some of us attempting to resist them. This year’s GOH was John Scalzi who triggered several changes to the code of conduct.

However, the con chair wasn’t satisfied was that. She insisted that every attendee sign a printed copy of the COC, even though it required 5 point type to fit on a single page. The con cobbled together new registration software and procedures to fulfill this requirement, but there were many problems with it. The registration line reached nearly 3 hours though its peak last year had been about 20 minutes.

Furthermore, faced with this fiasco, the con chair still was unwilling to back off the requirement to expedite registration.

Prediction: attendance at the conventions that have adopted Codes of Conduct that affect the experience in any way will gradually fall off. I know that in the Django project, the amount of emails and posts have already fallen off considerably, because everyone is, quite rightly, afraid that saying anything will make them a target of SJW attack.

This is why you don’t permit their entryists in the first place, and why you certainly don’t give into their demands. Convergence always eventually kills the converged organization unless it can latch onto a host that will financially sustain it.

No Code of Conduct

Paul M Jones provides another good way to address SJW entryst attacks:

What is NCoC

No Code Of Conduct is a groundbreaking new idea. Designed to help you find communities and projects that will not get stuck endlessly debating how members should behave in their communities, only to be found to never be fully resolved to anyone’s liking. What if… we all agreed?

    We are all adults. Capable of having adult discussions.

    We accept everyone’s contributions, we don’t care if you’re liberal or conservative, black or white, straight or gay, or anything in between! In fact, we won’t bring it up, or ask. We simply do not care.

    Nothing else matters!

Q: Great! How do I add this to my project?

Simply copy CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md into the root directory of your project. You may modify it to your needs.

Q: How do I promote No Code of Conduct?

Feel free to talk about, discuss, and promote No Code of Conduct anywhere you wish, and use the hashtag #NCoC on Twitter.

Q: What if, this makes me feel discriminated against?

If you feel this way simply because we do not have a code of conduct, it is hard for anyone to relate to you. This is not intended to discriminate against anyone. Simply because we don’t babysit people on our site to make sure they treat you with respect, does not mean we hope you feel unwelcome, or that you are treated without respect. That is just not something we have time for.

I still favor the One-Finger Code of Conduct myself, but there is certainly a place for the No Code of Conduct as well as the Code of Merit.