Tag: technology

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.

    Literally Wu proves SJWAL

    Because SJWs always lie.

     [Larry Correia] and other conservative figures like Adam Baldwin are claiming that Twitter is breaking down on “free speech” and capitulating to the “SJWs,” which I guess means people like me. I have spent much of the last year asking Twitter and other tech companies to improve their harassment policies. There is one problem with Mr. Correria’s claim.

    There is no evidence whatsoever for it.

    None, zilch, zero. It’s a fantasy. A similar lie is going around that Twitter has put Anita Sarkeesian in charge of their Trust and Safety council, which is similarly baseless. I’ve spoken with a lot of tech companies in the last year and I have never heard anyone propose shadowbanning.

    The only “proof” that Twitter is shadowbanning people comes from a disreputable conservative blog, that is so disreputable it cannot even be used as sourcing on Wikipedia. That blog used anonymous sourcing, and was written by someone with a personal axe to grind against Twitter.

    The truth is, companies like Twitter are finally enforcing their own TOS if you threaten someone, dox someone, or set up an account specifically created to harass someone. That has led to some people being banned, and some accounts that perpetually break Twitter harassment rules to become deverified.

    The backlash against Twitter is by people that prefer these system to remain as they are – a place where the women in your life will get rape threats, where anyone can have their private information posted, and where swarms of vicious mobs are destroying people’s reputation with slander.

    The last I checked, almost 100 people have spread Mr. Correria’s baseless claim – and even more with Adam Baldwin. This is an important thing to fact check, and I hope you’ll share this to set the record straight.

    Remember, Literally Wu is so stupid and dishonest that in addition to claiming that he is really a pretty, pretty girl despite conclusive evidence to the contrary, he once harassed himself without forgetting to log out of his other account first. He is as in complete denial of Twitter’s actions as he is of his own sex.

    There is copious documentary and testimonial evidence that Twitter is shadowbanning various individuals on Twitter, among them me. Here is additional proof:

    Samuel B Roberts @SBRoberts10 Feb 22
    He’s so “boorish”! BTW, did the shadow ban thing end? I saw this on my feed.

    ConantheCimmerian ‏@ConanTCimmerian Feb 21
    Even though I follow him, I haven’t seen a direct tweet from @voxday in 2 weeks.

    Taxi Driver ‏@northofdoom Feb 20
    I never see direct @voxday tweets, despite following

    ChateauEmissary Feb 20
    Same here. No direct tweets from vox.

    Some fantasy. It is telling that Twitter’s Committee of Public Safety isn’t saying anything, but has stalking horses running around publicly denying what Twitter is observably doing. Notice that the dates mentioned above just happen to correspond with the otherwise inexplicable decline and subsequent recovery of my impressions despite the number of my tweets being flat and the numbers of my followers increasing during the same period.

    And if you weren’t already convinced that File 770 commenters are literal cretins, here is the relentlessly stupid Tasha Turner again:

    15) BRIANNA WU DEFENDS TWITTER
    A voice of reason

    That, in a nutshell, is why I am more concerned about what my dogs think about the upcoming US presidential election than about anything an SJW might “think”. Any connection between what they say and objective reality is purely accidental.

    Mailvox: why turn your back on conservatives

    Doc Rampage doesn’t understand why I’m not courting conservatives in building a new social media alternative:

    The words in parenthesis are not inherent characteristics of the group, but are prominent in the current environment.

        Left: envy, greed, (hatred)
        Conservatives: justice, propriety, (resentment)
        libertarians: pride, rationality
        Alt-right: clannishness, loyalty, (spite)

    The Left is always talking egalitarian, but a Leftist never passes up a chance to get ahead of his fellows and they are always trying to create hierarchies with themselves on top. This is because they only want egalitarianism due to envy–they don’t want anyone to have an advantage they don’t have.

    Everyone hates conservatives for being unreliable political partners. The reason is that their primary loyalty is not to a group but to abstract principles like justice, and they will follow their idea of justice even at the group’s expense, or even at their own expense.

    Libertarians are drawn to their beliefs in large part because they think that starting on a completely level playing field, they would come out near the top. Many of them are right–they tend to be intelligent and well-educated. But their pride in their own ability makes them unable to sympathize with the fact that most people need social support of various kinds.

    As to the alt-right, it is clannishness and spite that drives someone on the alt-right to capriciously insult conservatives in a message where they might instead be finding common ground and help in a common cause, driving them away instead of inviting them to help.

    It’s interesting to see how Doc Rampage’s observations are so perspicacious while his conclusions about the alt-right are so wrong. It’s not spite that causes me to turn my back on conservatives, but rather, the very conservative unreliability he points out that is why I have no interest in finding common ground with them. They are worse than useless; it would be a tremendous mistake to rely upon them because they are unreliable.

    Moreover, as Red Eagle and I showed in Cuckservative, conservatives don’t actually have any principles. They think they do, but what they really have is an attitude; one can hardly call it a philosophy. That’s why conservatives are forever going on about who is “electable” or which candidate is “serious”; those are not the words of abstract thinkers who reject pragmatism in the name of principle.

    Even their oft-proclaimed self-definitions are unreliable.

    If there are conservatives who want to help because what I’m doing will better serve their abstract principles than the alternatives, that’s great, but I’m not going to depend upon their support because I don’t trust them one little bit. I will place my trust in those who have repeatedly shown they have my back, in those who will not bug out the first time they get called names by SJWs or decide they don’t completely approve of my every word or action.

    What are the VFM? What are the Dread Ilk? Are they conservative? Are they libertarian? Are they alt-right? I neither know nor care. What I know is that they will be there when called. They will show up when needed. They are implacably opposed to my ideological enemies. And that’s all I need to know.

    Conservapedia is a good demonstration of what a social media project that relies upon conservatives looks like.

    “We need alternatives”

    Melampus the Seer sees the future:

    We need alternative platforms. Deplatforming is the very basis of SJW institutional tactics, and it works. Let’s use it ourselves, on our own platforms.

    A related question: why haven’t conservatives built their own platforms? I’ve worked for a number of startups. They were all hard left to the core. Why so few conservative entrepreneurs?

    We do. And literally scores of VFM and Dread Ilk are in the process of making it happen. You will be called on to help in various ways soon. Be ready.

    Why haven’t conservatives built their own platforms? Because conservatives are conservative. I could have built a search engine back when Yahoo was just getting started, but I could see why people would pay to play games. I couldn’t see how one could make money simply by collecting free traffic, and in fact, one can’t do so unless one can a) rely on an unending supply of free labor or b) find investors who are either 1) willing to lose it all in order to be ideologically supportive or 2) are only buying in long enough to flip the company to the public.

    Guess what sort of people are happy to work for free, lose vast quantities of money to further their ideological goals, or work for predatory investment banks? Hint: they’re not conservatives.

    Conservatives are much more likely to build up their businesses organically, often by bootstrapping themselves. They would rather be building up their business than running around trying to play the flim-flam game of “raising money”. And that’s now how any of the social media giants were constructed.

    In the rare instance a conservative is involved in a project like this, he’s often pushed out by his former partners. One of the reasons Wikipedia has been going nowhere for years is because the guy with the actual vision, Larry Sanger, was pushed out by an SJW flim-flam artist, Jimmy Wales, who promptly surrounded himself with mediocrities who don’t know how to do anything but continue what they’ve been doing from the start while begging for money they don’t actually need to not do what they aren’t doing.

    And finally, conservatives tend to be paralyzed by the fear that someone, somewhere, might make money from their efforts. For leftists and SJWs, donating publicly is a form of virtue-signaling. They love to give both time and money and will do so at the drop of a hat if they think doing so is going to generate social credit for them.

    A conservative, on the other hand, doesn’t value that sort of social credit, and has historically been much happier giving to a charity that will buy Rolls Royces and hookers for its executives or a church that will use his money to house illegal aliens next door than to a prospective techno-magnate, because at least the former won’t make any profits off his donation.

    This is beginning to change, of course, now that conservatives realize they have been totally outflanked and lost the techno-cultural high ground. How much it has changed, we will see in the next six months.

    Twitter takes out McCain

    The thought police at Twitter are ramping up their activity:

    Robert Stacy McCain is an American success story. He has built a nationwide, dare I say worldwide following presenting his viewpoint and highlighting the public viewpoints of others who would rather keep their actual words and opinions under the radar because Robert Stacy McCain is loyal to his family, his God, his friends and the Truth.

    I know this because I’m proud to say he is my friend. I’ve learned an awful lot from him the most important thing being there is no substitute for actually being there, gathering factual evidence, seeing for yourself and reporting the truth.

    I guess that’s why Twitter’s new Star Chamber has decided to Suspend him sometime yesterday evening:

        I’m Robert Stacy McCain. I’ve been a journalist since 1986. My account @rsmccain was suspended tonight. #FreeStacy #tcot @ToniMZ81

        — Sex Trouble (@SexTroubleBook) February 20, 2016

        “@citznsoldier: This account suspension stuff is getting stupid. @twitter @rsmccain pic.twitter.com/dlckr17fsw” Very stupid

        — headnev (@headnev) February 20, 2016

    Ironically this caused the hashtag #freestacy to trend on twitter overnight until it suddenly no longer was able to autocomplete

        The hashtag associated with McCain’s suspension (#FreeStacy) was actually allowed to trend, at one point, but as Mike Cernovich points out, now it won’t even autocomplete. That’s one of the tools Twitter has been using to slow down hashtags, as of late. GamerGate no longer autocompletes, either, even though several anti-GG hashtags do.

        #FreeStacy is trending. @instapundit pic.twitter.com/y4C2azmWzr

        — Mike Cernovich (@Cernovich) February 20, 2016

    Now in fairness Twitter is a private company and they do have the right to run their business as they see fit.

    But I submit and suggest to twitter & their investors that the way to success is not to alienate half of your potential customer base particularly in an election year, furthermore as anyone who knows anything about tech can tell you today’s popular site can become tomorrow’s AOL & Compuserve in a heartbeat.

    Glenn Reynolds is not the only one losing patience with Twitter.

    Matz slaps down Typhoid Coraline

    The successful defense of Ruby against SJW infiltrators demonstrates the importance of having a strong project leader rather than a committee, or worse, a democracy, running an open source software project:

    The Ruby Community Conduct Guideline

    We have picked the following conduct guideline based on an early draft of the PostgreSQL CoC, for Ruby developers community for safe, productive collaboration. Each Ruby related community (conference etc.) may pick their own Code of Conduct.

    This document provides community guidelines for a safe, respectful, productive, and collaborative place for any person who is willing to contribute to the Ruby community. It applies to all “collaborative space”, which is defined as community communications channels (such as mailing lists, submitted patches, commit comments, etc.).

    • Participants will be tolerant of opposing views.
    • Participants must ensure that their language and actions are free of personal attacks and disparaging personal remarks.
    • When interpreting the words and actions of others, participants should always assume good intentions.
    • Behaviour which can be reasonably considered harassment will not be tolerated.

    It’s worth noting that this not only defeats the primary, secondary, and tertiary purposes of the Code of Conduct that Typhoid Coraline was attempting to install in order to unseat Matz, but it can obviously be used effectively against SJW entryists.

    No wonder Typhoid is so upset. It’s a superficial victory of absolutely no utility for him.

    Coraline Ada Ehmke ‏@CoralineAda
    This is very disappointing. No one to report abuse to. No recourse for victims of harassment. Poor showing, Ruby.

    Coraline Ada Ehmke ‏@CoralineAda
    Sad that Ruby still doesn’t have a code of conduct. I don’t know what to call that thing.

    Coraline Ada Ehmke ‏@CoralineAda
    Unfortunately I fear that it will take a nasty incident for Matz to change his mind
    about a code of conduct. I feel bad about this.