Tag: technology

A portrait in SJW convergence

The dark side of Wikipedia:

The promise of accurate, neutral articles and privacy for contributors is often just a mirage, according to two insiders. They say they’ve been left battle-scarred after troubling personal encounters with the world’s most popular encyclopedia.

It’s billed as “the encyclopedia anyone can edit.” But for many, it’s the opposite.

Greg Kohs is among the blocked. Banned, he says, for challenging Wikipedia policies.

Kohs: Just in the past four hours, 500 IP addresses and users have been blocked from editing Wikipedia.

In 2012, Kohs helped start an opposing website called, “Wikipediocracy,” to expose what he calls Wikipedia’s “misinformation, defamation and general nonsense.”

Sharyl: So Wikipedia does censor users?

Kohs: Absolutely. In a given day, Wikipedia administrators typically are blocking about 1,000 different IP addresses.

Sharyl: 1,000 a day?

Kohs: 1,000 a day. Yes.

When Kohs ran afoul of Wikipedia, he was drawn into an unseen cyberworld. One where he says volunteer editors dole out punishment and retaliation, privacy is violated and special interests control information.

Sharyl: Most people don’t know what?

Kohs: Wikipedia is often edited by people who have an agenda.

As I wrote in SJWAL, the near-complete convergence of social media is the reason that it is necessary for the alt-right to develop superior, broad-spectrum alternatives to everything from Twitter and Tumblr to Facebook and Wikipedia.

There will be many challenges, not least of which is resisting the temptation to be bought out by these ludicrously well-funded profitless corporations. I have no doubt that Facebook, for one, will expertly play the Microsoft strategy of acquire and conquer. But those challenges must be met, all the same, because leaving the intersection of money, technology, and media under the control of SJWs means the intellectual enchainment of humanity.

And this behavior on the part of SJW Wikipedians goes well beyond creepy and reaches downright scary. Notice the typical SJW behavior of targeting their opponents’ jobs.

Kohs sees himself as an equalizer. His business helps clients, including supposed victims of unfair edits, navigate Wikipedia’s unbridled landscape. Wikipedia banned him for violating the policy against paid editing and when Kohs criticized the policy and continued under a borrowed account, Wikipedia editors targeted him.

They went to great lengths to track him, using inside information and computer addresses. They researched where Kohs grew up, and traced his movements all the way to Orlando, Florida, where he was making edits while on vacation.

Sharyl: Wikipedia editors that you didn’t know at the time were tracking your movements, speculating that you went home for Thanksgiving?

Kohs: That’s absolutely correct.

He only discovered that he was being tracked because somebody leaked internal Wikipedia discussions about him.

Kohs: And then somebody chimed in, ‘looks like someone went home for Thanksgiving to visit mom and dad,’ so you think you’re editing with some degree of privacy, but if they want to they can really start to investigate.

Names are harassment now

It’s always amusing what contortions SJWs will twist themselves into in order to try to justify their actions beyond “me no likee”. Reddit is suspending accounts for linking to pages “posting the personal information (including the full names) of non-public people.”

As some of you may know, there is a list of “confirmed SJWs” being passed around on various sites.

Do not post or link to it on Reddit. It’s considered personal information, and you will likely have your accounts suspended for it.

We already had one user post it here, and it was removed earlier today by the admins, and the account suspended. Similar issue happened on /r/SJWsAtWork, as well.

This was the ruling given to us:

    Our rules aren’t just against connecting IRL names to reddit user names, they are also against posting the personal information (including the full names) of non-public people.

Just wanted to give y’all a heads-up as to what’s going on, so none of you lose your accounts or think that we’re censoring it.

The funny thing is that despite their attempts to justify banning anyone who links to a list of which they don’t approve, and thereby creating a rule that requires the banning of anyone who links to any page with just one individual’s full name on it, the rule doesn’t actually apply to The Complete List of SJW because it doesn’t feature full names.

It does, however, ban anyone from linking to Facebook, among other sites. Not that it will be applied that way by the moderators, of course, because SJW.

It seems the primitive magicians were right. There is dark power in the knowledge of true names!

Funding suspended

Apparently Kickstarter is not completely converged:

Wave Goodbye to Cyberbullies and Trolls: SocialAutopsy.com

 Funding Suspended

Funding for this project was suspended by Kickstarter about 1 hour ago. 

It’s good to see Kickstarter, unlike Twitter, is willing to enforce its Terms Of Service against SJWs.

This is how the #GamerGate model works. Don’t wait for permission, don’t talk about your clever idea for X, Y, or Z, do something. Or, as they say, shut up and email.

SJW attack on Jim Butcher

This is one of the many, many reasons that an alternative to SJW-run Wikipedia is badly needed. To the admins’ credit, at least it has been tagged as “persistent vandalism”.

It seems to have less to do with his inclusion on the Rabid Puppies list than it does with some SJW activist with a particular axe to grind at a literary celebrity’s expense, but it tends to demonstrate that anyone, no matter how publicly apolitical, is subject to SJW attack.

Personal life

Butcher was born in Independence, Missouri, in 1971.[1] He is the youngest of three children, having two older sisters. He lives in Independence, MO, and has one son.

[Information about Butcher’s personal life redacted.]

Following Spencer’s lead, the moderators of the /r/dresdenfiles sub-Reddit proceeded to threaten any posters making negative comments regarding Butcher with a ban and deletion of their content.[3]

Many Reddit users protested, alleging that the moderators’ actions constituted censorship, a practice that is generally regarded as anathema by artists, authors, and others in the creative fields.

In response, the /r/dresdenfiles moderators proceeded to codify their censorship by requiring users meet certain requirements prior to being able to post comments and also that new users or users with ‘unpopular’ points of view must have their comments approved by a moderator before publishing.[4]

On or around April 9, 2016, several of Butcher’s fans posted an open letter requesting that Butcher comment on the North Carolina transgender law. Other fans requested that Butcher adopt a more public stance, similar to the actions of Bruce Springsteen.

There have been many concerns by Butcher’s fans that Butcher’s books were not friendly to LGBT issues.[5][6][7]

The /r/dresdenfiles moderators proceeded to delete and censor all comments regarding Butcher’s views on LGBT issues, under the posture that those comments were “spam” or “shitposts.” [8]

The /r/dresdenfiles moderators proceeded to post in other sub-reddits regarding LGBT issues and political issues in order to discredit the legitimate concerns of Butcher’s LGBT-friendly fans. [9][10]

This is the great challenge of crowd-sourcing, as we’ve already seen on The Complete List of SJW. The problem is less the purely destructive vandals, who are easily anticipated and blocked, than those who see an opportunity to hijack the platform and try to use it for their own particular interests.

It would be good if we were also able to identify people like the vandal responsible for adding this to the page about Butcher.

As a general rule, if it is even necessary for you to explain your position, let alone rationalize or justify it, it does not belong on a wiki. The moment you find yourself telling someone “well, this is okay because”, the moment you even use the word “because”, just stop and give it up. If it’s not so absolutely obvious that there is no need to explain it, then it does not belong.

If you’re going to contribute to The Complete List of SJW, an excellent place to find SJWs is to look for quotes in articles by SJW journalists. For example, this pair of articles by SJW journalist Tess Townsend, who is running interference for the LambdaConf no-platform campaign, exposes several SJWs. They will readily hang themselves by their own words through their endorsements of no-platforming people on SJW grounds.

Also, Cynic in Chief: a) email me and b) lock it down now. We need admins.

That was quick

You know The Complete List of SJW is going to be important, because the SJWs are already starting to criticize and vandalize it. Time to lock it down, Cynic in Chief. Email me for some admins.

My suggestion is to protect the main page so only admins can edit it, protect the existing pages that have decent proof of SJW already, and have the admins add the new pages to the main page as they come in.

Also, block the vandal’s account. Be a hard target.

An SJW list

It occurs to me that it will be helpful to begin compiling a list of confirmed SJWs, both for those who work for SJW-converged organizations and want to add to their collection as well as for those who wish to keep their organizations free of the creatures.

In either case, it will be useful to know if an individual is an advocate of an ideological movement that promotes the politicization of the workplace, insists that all individuals and organizations make social justice their primary objective, and seeks to disemploy or no-platform everyone who rejects their principles or refuses to submit to their ever-shifting Narrative.

Here is a useful start:

The organizers of LambdaConf, now in its third year, describe it as “one of the largest, most diverse gatherings of functional programmers in the world”. This year, it selected Curtis Yarvin as a speaker—a man known as a founder and advocate of an ideological movement that promotes racist bigotry, and as an apologist for slavery.

Yarvin’s selection as a speaker says to marginalized people that their humanity is considered merely another matter for debate. LambdaConf cannot live up to its goal of being a “friendly community of like-minded souls” when it does not protect current and potential members of that community who are vulnerable to those who would deny their humanity.

We believe that functional programming should warmly welcome those who have been systemically excluded from participating in programming communities. We strongly object to LambdaConf’s actions, which are a step backwards as we work together to share functional programming with a wide audience.

April 8th, 2016

    Joseph Abrahamson (LambdaConf 2015 speaker)
    Andy Adams-Moran
    Carlo Angiuli (Carnegie Mellon University)
    Mario Aquino (co-organizer of Strange Loop, The Climate Corporation)
    Morgan Astra
    Lennart Augustsson
    Timothy Baldridge (developer at Cognitect)
    Gershom Bazerman (co-organizer Compose Conference, LambdaConf 2015 speaker)
    Josh Bohde
    James Brechtel
    Travis Brown (Typelevel)
    Kevin Burke
    Harold Carr (LambdaConf 2014, 2015 speaker)
    Chris C Cerami
    Manuel Chakravarty (UNSW Australia; Haskell language, libraries & tools contributor)
    Tim Chevalier
    Kat Chuang (co-organizer Compose Conference)
    Athan Clark
    Alex Clemmer (Microsoft, !!Con co-founder)
    Declan Conlon
    Laurence E. Day (Haskell developer, Standard Chartered Bank)
    Reid Draper (Helium)
    Richard Eisenberg (U. of Pennsylvania, GHC implementor, LambdaConf 2015 speaker)
    Mark Farrell (LambdaConf 2015 speaker)
    Richard Feldman (LambdaConf 2015 speaker)
    Jonathan Fischoff
    Adam Foltzer (Galois; Haskell.org Committee; LambdaConf 2015 speaker)
    Kenneth Foner (U. of Pennsylvania, co-organizer Hac Phi)
    Phil Freeman (PureScript; speaker, LambdaConf 2014, 2015)
    Harry Garrood
    Gabriel Gonzalez
    Austin Haas
    Coda Hale
    Elana Hashman
    Pat Hickey (Helium)
    Jenn Hillner (Cognitect)
    Libby Horacek (Position Development)
    John D. Hume
    Juan Pedro Villa Isaza (Stack Builders)
    Dan Peebles
    Ranjit Jhala (University of California, San Diego; LambdaConf 2015 speaker)
    Joseph Kiniry (Research Lead, Galois; CEO and Chief Scientist, Free & Fair, LambdaConf 2015 contributor)
    Edward Kmett (Haskell developer, HacBoston organizer)
    Geoffery S. Knauth (Lifelong Friend of GNU)
    Lindsey Kuper (Intel Labs; !!Con co-founder; ICFP Steering Committee member)
    Justin Leitgeb (CTO & Co-Founder, Stack Builders)
    Aaron Levin (SoundCloud)
    Simon Marlow (co-author of the Glasgow Haskell Compiler)
    Vincent Marquez (LambdaConf 2015/2016 speaker)
    Chris Martens (UC Santa Cruz)
    Conor McBride (Mathematically Structured Programming group, University of Strathclyde)
    Andi McClure (LambdaConf 2015 speaker)
    Bartosz Milewski (keynote speaker: LambdaCon 2015, LambdaDays 2016)
    Alex Miller (Organizer of Strange Loop, Clojure team at Cognitect)
    Richard Minerich (co-organizer Compose Conference, NYC F# User Group)
    Adriaan Moors (Scala team lead at Lightbend)
    Jared Morrow (Helium)
    David Nolen (Cognitect)
    Liam O’Connor (UNSW Australia)
    Erik Osheim (Typelevel)
    Daniel Patterson (member/owner, Position Development)
    Greg Pfeil (SlamData)
    Isaac Potoczny-Jones (Author of Haskell Cabal, Former Haskell Prime Chair)
    Prabhakar Ragde (University of Waterloo)
    Tavis Rudd (Unbounce; Polyglot Software Meetup & Conference)
    Miles Sabin (Underscore Consulting and Typelevel)
    Tom Santero (Helium; MoonConf co-organizer)
    Kyle Schmidt
    Austin Seipp (Glasgow Haskell Compiler maintainer, ATX Haskell founder)
    Amar Shah (LambdaConf 2016 speaker – cancelled)
    Chung-chieh Shan (Indiana University; Haskell Symposium steering committee chair)
    Ghadi Shayban
    Satnam Singh
    Aditya Siram (LambdaConf 2016 speaker)
    Leon P Smith
    Jon Sterling (SlamData; PhD student, Carnegie Mellon University; LambdaConf 2015 speaker)
    Bodil Stokke (LambdaConf 2016 keynote speaker – cancelled)
    Asumu Takikawa (Racket developer)
    Patrick Thomson (Helium)
    Seth Tisue (Scala team at Lightbend)
    José Manuel Calderón Trilla (Galois, Inc.)
    Stew O’Connor (Typelevel, speaker: Lambdaconf 2015)
    David Van Horn (University of Maryland)
    Malcolm Wallace (Haskell developer at Standard Chartered Bank)
    John Wiegley
    Brent Yorgey (Hendrix College; former Haskell core library & Haskell.org committees)

Additional Signatories:

    Colin Barrett, 4/9/2016
    Rob Rix (GitHub, Inc.), 04/09/16
    Morgan Chen, 4/9/2016

To this list we can add obvious SJWs such as Anita Sarkeesian, John Flynt aka Brianna Wu (SpaceKat), Jack Dorsey (Twitter), Amber Scott (Beamdog), Dee Pennyway (Beamdog).

If you know others, add them in the comments and eventually we’ll create a PDF that can be distributed with the SJW Attack Survival Guide.

ClarkHat knocks back SJWs

Good to see ClarkHat come out roaring in his first post-Popehat anti-SJW campaign. ESR explains the situation:

 In brief: LambdaConf, a technical conference on functional programming, accepted a presentation proposal about a language called Urbit, from a guy named Curtis Yarvin. I’ve looked at Urbit: it is very weird, but rather interesting, and certainly a worthy topic for a functional programming conference.

And then all hell broke loose. For Curtis Yarvin is better known as Mencius Moldbug, author of eccentric and erudite political rents and a focus of intense hatred by humorless leftists. Me, I’ve never been able to figure out how much of what Moldbug writes he actually believes; his writing seems designed to leave a reader guessing as to whether he’s really serious or executing the most brilliantly satirical long-term troll-job in the history of the Internet.

A mob of SJWs, spearheaded by a no-shit self-described Communist named Jon Sterling, descended on LambdaConf demanding that they cancel Yarvin’s talk, pretending that he (rather than, say, the Communist) posed a safety threat to other conference-goers. The conference’s principal organizers, headed up one John de Goes, quite properly refused to cancel the talk, observing that Yarvin was there to talk about his code and not his politics.

I think they conceded to much to the SJWs, actually, by asking Yarvin to issue a statement about his views on violence. Nobody asked Jon Sterling whether he was down with that whole liquidation of the kulaks thing, after all, and if a Communist who likes to tweet about sending capitalists to “hard labor in the North” gets a pass it is not easy to see why any apologia was required from a man with no history of advocating violence at all.

But, ultimately, they did make the right decision: to judge Yarvin’s talk proposal by its technical merit alone. This is the hacker way.

The SJWs then attempted to pressure LambdaConf’s sponsors into withdrawing their support so the conference would have to be canceled. Several sponsors withdrew (I don’t know details about who; my sources for this part are secondhand).

So far, so wearily familiar – Marxist thugs versus free expression, with free expression’s chances not looking so hot. But there’s where the story gets good. Meredith Patterson and her friends at the blog Status 451 organized a counterpunch. They launched an IndieGoGo campaign Save LambdaConf …and an open society.

The campaign is already fully funded. But I thought some of you in the tech world might like to know about it, and be a part of it. There are many ways to help fund the alt-right’s war against the SJWs, and helping those who are victims of their successful attacks is an important defensive strategy, as it will embolden those who are standing up to them.

And good for LambdaConf for standing by its speakers rather than caving to the SJW-converged sponsors. This is how cultural wars are won, one hard-earned victory after another.

Relativity and the ideological spectrum

I’ve designed a nine-point ideological scale for reasons that will be readily apparent soon, and I’m in need of some clarifying examples. Here is what I have so far, but I feel as if there could be better examples. Ideally, the more famous the individual, the better; accuracy is far less important than familiarity.

One is extreme left, nine is extreme right. The goal is to clarify, not obscure or start arguments, so leave Hitler and anyone else likely to spark debate out of it.

  1. Vladimir Lenin
  2. Karl Marx
  3. Angela Merkel
  4. Bill Clinton
  5. John F. Kennedy
  6. George W. Bush
  7. Ronald Reagan
  8. Thomas Jefferson
  9. Ayn Rand

Another idea would be to provide multiple examples from different fields, from economics, from politics, and from philosophy. I’m entirely open to suggestion here, with one caveat: I am not at all open to suggestions of multiple axes or anything more complicated than a single 9-point scale.

And if you know what this is concerning, please resist the urge to demonstrate as much. When I want to make an announcement, I will make an announcement. In the meantime, keep an eye on your emails tomorrow.

The more things change….

It’s interesting to see how the new media, particularly Twitter, Wikipedia, and Facebook, are blithely walking in the footsteps of the old media:

When Bill Kovach decided circa 1987 that the Atlanta papers needed a bureau in Nairobi, he could afford to do it, because the paper was making a handsome profit from advertising revenue. The fact that advertising ultimately paid the bills — the source of revenue, whereas the salaries of the newsroom staff were an expense — was an aspect of journalism that a lot of Good for Democracy types never really figured out. Bottom-line considerations were far from the minds of most people in our nation’s newsrooms 25 years ago, before Al Gore invented the Internet, and then some guy named Matt Drudge became America’s Editor-in-Chief.

Oh, the pages and pages of classified ads — help wanted, real estate,
used cars, whatever — that were once such a magnificent revenue
generator for newspaper publishers. Oh, the display ads from department
stores, and the full-color advertising inserts stuffed inside that thick
Sunday paper. Nearly all gone now — gone with the wind, along with the
fat profit margins that allowed Bill Kovach the luxury of force-feeding
readers in Atlanta their journalistic broccoli about the famine in
Sudan. Gone, those glory days when newsrooms were so crowded, and every
major metropolitan paper had an “investigative journalism” team of a
half-dozen hotshots whose bylines rarely appeared in print except on
those tedious five-part series written for the eyes of the Pulitzer
Prize judges.

Yeah, once upon a time, every newspaper in every state capital in
America — from Tallahassee to Juneau, from Augusta, Maine, to Honolulu,
Hawaii — had its own local crew of would-be Woodward and Bernsteins who
believed they were producing journalism that was Good for Democracy.

Gone! All gone now!

In the same way the old media chased off its readers with what McCain calls “broccoli journalism”, the new media is chasing off its readers by telling them what they can and cannot say. In both cases, it is because the media wrongly believes it, and not its readers, are in control.

And that is only going to be of benefit to what we might call the next media, or if you prefer, the Alt Right media.

More entryism in Open Source

This is both pathetic and a naked attempt to inspire the useless entryists by giving them credit for trying to impose a Code of Conduct on a project. Techno-virtue-signaling at its finest:

Recognize all contributors, not just the ones who push code

This is a specification for recognizing contributors to a project in a way that rewards any and every contribution
whether or not it be code. The basic idea is this:

Use the project README (the most public part of most projects) to
recognize the contributions of members of the project community.

People are giving of themselves and their free time to contribute to open source projects in so many ways. It can be a real
time sink sometimes and so they should be praised for all their contributions (code or not). Use this project as an example implementation of the all-contributors specification (see the Contributors section below.

After all, where will we be if the contributors who don’t contribute anything feel bad about themselves? That would be like the Holocaust! You know who else didn’t give proper credit to non-coders? That’s right, Hitler.