The dream is real

Elon Musk’s new Starship is not the tall skinny pressurized-aluminum cylinder we’re used to thinking of a real rocket, but a fat cigar-shaped thing made of stainless steel, with tail fins.

I just listened to an elaborate economic and engineering rationale for this. And I don’t believe a word of it.

It had to be that way because Elon Musk grew up on the same Golden Age science fiction magazine cover illustrations I did, and it looks exactly like those.

Has tailfins. Freaking tailfins. And lands on a pillar of fire just like God and Robert Heinlein (PBUH) intended.

The dream is real.

499 comments

  1. He built this rocket on rock and roll! And on hopes and dreams from science fiction.

  2. The Winston endpapers are a fine example of a picture being worth many words.

    I’ve long forgotten the printed words – which wasn’t that good despite some sourcing to famous names – but I will remember the end papers forever.

  3. One thing I find interesting is that from Verne through the 1950s, spaceships were usually imagined as financed by rich people. Once the Space Race started with Sputnik and NASA, spaceships became government projects. Now we’re back to rich people like Musk and Bezos and Branson leading the way.

    1. Going from memory, an essay from I think G. Harry Stein perhaps published by Baen or in the There Will Be War series or maybe it’s Republic and Empire (really, “There Will be Government” Jerry Pournelle said), pointed out that for many many years NASA managed to suppress private industry ventures by their “experts” telling would be funders the proposals would never work. This was strong until NASA’s feet of clay became more and more evident with the Shuttle disasters, the incorrectly ground mirror of Hubble, etc.

  4. Musk seems to have come as close as anyone to beating the rocket equation into submission.

    Or at least fighting it to a draw.

    Next few years should be interesting.

      1. Uranium (plutonium?) for lift-off would be a challenge. Not sure how to start a chain reaction and keep the space ship in one piece, or even multi-atomic pieces. But if we go that route, hydrogen fusion would be the way to go.

        In my opinion, we should think big. Create anti-matter and use controlled mixing with, say, water, for lift-off.

        1. >Not sure how to start a chain reaction and keep the space ship in one piece
          Ask the Russians with their nuclear-powered ramjets.

            1. > The Trust/Weight performance of thermonuclear engines is too bad

              He’s wrong. He’s assuming a thrust/weight ratio of 1.25, but the NERVA was operating close to range back in the 1970’s. With a prototype. Using 1970’s technology.

              The next-gen, flight-ready NERVA was expected to have a thrust/weight ratio of 7 or more.

              1. Lower in the paper he calculates that you need a T/W relation of 10.
                To get payload fractions of zero (a launch vehicle of infinite size) you have to have a T/W at 900 sec Isp of over 10. That’s more than three times the T/W that Stan Borowski projects for his sporty 15K NTR design, which he says will have a T/W of 3.

                Nuclear rockets might be great when you are already in space, but the current technology seems to be totally inadequate for lift off from sea level.

                1. Did you not read the part about “1970’s technology”?

                  7 was for the next-gen prototype (what would have been the first flyable prototype). Again, that was using 70’s materials and slide rule/rule of thumb engineering methods. I’ll bet they would have comfortably exceeded 10 for the final production model even given that.

                  Using modern materials, finite element analysis, and all the other engineering advances?

                  10 wouldn’t be a problem.

          1. Strictly speaking, the Russians are going the way of nuclear (sc)ramjets (not sure of the specifics of their design), not rockets.

            1. The technology for a nuclear ramjet is very similar to a nuclear rocket. You need a lightweight nuclear reactor the heats very large amounts of gas very hot.

              Just stick the ramjet reactor inside a hydrogen/oxygen rocket engine, and turn off the liquid oxygen.

        2. > Uranium (plutonium?) for lift-off would be a challenge. Not sure how to start a chain reaction and keep the space ship in one piece, or even multi-atomic pieces.

          That problem was solved back in the early 1970’s.

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NERVA

          > But if we go that route, hydrogen fusion would be the way to go.

          Maybe for the distant future. Fission rockets can be made to work right now.

        3. “The Orion concept offered high thrust and high specific impulse, or propellant efficiency, at the same time. The unprecedented extreme power requirements for doing so would be met by nuclear explosions, of such power relative to the vehicle’s mass as to be survived only by using external detonations without attempting to contain them in internal structures. As a qualitative comparison, traditional chemical rockets—such as the Saturn V that took the Apollo program to the Moon—produce high thrust with low specific impulse, whereas electric ion engines produce a small amount of thrust very efficiently. Orion would have offered performance greater than the most advanced conventional or nuclear rocket engines then under consideration. Supporters of Project Orion felt that it had potential for cheap interplanetary travel, but it lost political approval over concerns with fallout from its propulsion”

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion)

            1. At least one Niven/Pournelle fan in attendance here would sign that petition right behind you.

      2. FWIW, people who say “you can’t beat the rocket equation” lack imagination. It is an engineering problem. For example, one way to “beat the rocket” equation is to add reusable SRBs to your rocket. You aren’t actually beating the math, but you are focusing on your goal and finding alternative methods to achieve it.

        1. Reusable SRBs are easier said than done. The Shuttle had “reusable” SRBs, and some estimates said they cost more to recover and refurbish than new ones would have. And that’s not including the added cost of the space shuttle that SRBs destroyed.

          Reusable LRBs, OTOH, exist now. Falcon Heavy uses 2, and Elon Musk has said that it would be trivial to increase that to 4.

  5. Hadn’t of been for NASA we’d have hotels on the moon…….

    Here’s to old Queen Isabella of Spain,
    Who was more than a little deranged.
    A bigot, fanatic and greedy for souls –
    To baptize the world was the first of her goals.
    But she bet on a dreamer,
    That’s how the wheel rolls,
    And afterward all the world changed.

    Queen Isabella, where are you today?
    The new Chris Columbus is wasting away.
    The same game is waiting, but no one will play.
    Queen Isabel, where are you now?

    The dream is real but sadly it’s not widely shared. The dream is real but the dreamers are fading away.

      1. I don’t consider it NASA’s fault either.

        Robert Heinlein commented at one point that the biggest mistake he made in early SF was not understanding just how much space travel would cost.

        Early efforts at space travel were government funded because private industry couldn’t do it. The capital costs were enormous, and no individual private firm or consortium of firms could have come up with the money. They would have needed to get outside financing, in the form of debt or equity, and the people who would provide the loans or buy the equity would demand some evidence that the investment would at some point be profitable before committing the funds. For something as speculative as space exploration, such evidence did not exist.

        It’s one instance of government funding something considered socially desirable that doesn’t have an obvious economic benefit in any short or intermediate time frame.

        And a major incentive for doing it was the intense competition with the Soviet Union. The Soviets getting an astronaut into orbit before we did was a rude shock and a call to action. NASA funding rose sharply in the late 50s and peaked in 1966 at 4.4% of the Federal budget, then began dropping sharply as “keeping up with the Soviets” became less of a factor. (If the US had not been in intense “Cold War” competition with the Soviet Union, you can question whether the US would have attempted space travel at all.)

        (And note that NASA’s original funding came as a rider to an unconnected bill – agriculture, IIRC. NASA snuck in through a legisltatvie back door.)

        >Dennis

        1. I’m loathe to put much in the hands of government, but someone pointed out that the discounted value of a dollar in 20 years is effectively zero. So anything large with a payoff that distant or a real probability of no payoff at all will probably be done by government or not at all.

          Methinks NASA did some real good, but we left it in their hands for way too long.

          1. @Michael: So anything large with a payoff that distant or a real probability of no payoff at all will probably be done by government or not at all.

            Precisely.

            Methinks NASA did some real good, but we left it in their hands for way too long.

            I think they’re still doing good. But the need for the government to provide the money to build things like the launch facilities and heavy boosters need to get stuff out of Earth’s gravity well and into orbit or beyond has lessened. The fact that Elon Musk’s outfit can do this at all is the most significant factor I see here.

            >Dennis

            1. @DocMerlin
              “Houses have a 30 year mortgage.”

              But during these 30 years, you are reaping the benefits of “owning” a house. That is different from investing in something that might start to give you benefits in 30 years.

        2. > Robert Heinlein commented at one point that the biggest mistake
          > he made in early SF was not understanding just how much space
          > travel would cost.

          This was at least a common failing. I remember being pretty disappointed in one older book I read where the colonists all came in individual spaceships (well, maybe it was one per family), landed somewhere, then got out and starting building houses, exploring the ruined cities, etc. Though honestly I was more annoyed that the author got the atmosphere so wrong; the density and composition had been known for decades at that point. I can’t recall the title though.

          1. @db48x: “Robert Heinlein commented at one point that the biggest mistake he made in early SF was not understanding just how much space travel would cost.”

            This was at least a common failing.

            Indeed, but writers in SF and (especially) fantasy historically had poor economic literacy, and made blithe assumptions about what was affordable. (Many still do.) I think RAH kicked himself – he was economically literate – and likely assumed he really should have seen that problem coming.

            I’m not sure, but I think the older book you mentioned might have been One in Three Hundred by J. T. McIntosh. Damon Knight reviewed in a <In ?Search of Wonder, and called is “A painful collection of avoidable mistakes”.
            >Dennis

            1. When Heinlein was a young man, you could be an airplane from the Sears, Roebuck catalog. When the Fed made pilot’s licenses a requirement, Sears sold those, too. And *well* into Heinlein’s adulthood, a light plane was within the means of a middle-class buyer.

              The cost for trains, submarines, automobiles, and aircraft had dropped like a rock once production was sorted out. At the time, there was no reason to think the price of spacecraft wouldn’t drop too.

      2. The budget excuse was quite comfortable for NASA, right up until Musk proved it was full of shit. In constant dollars, the annual NASA budget, in the nadir year of 1980, was roughly twenty times Elon Musk’s total net worth in October 2011. The reason NASA has utterly failed to deliver a single new manned spaceflight system in the nearly four decades since the Shuttle first flew is not a lack of funds.

        1. NASA … the Wikipedia article on Arthur Arthur Kantrowitz has it right, I heard this from Kantrowitz’s mouth at a conference in the 1980s:

          According to Jerry Pournelle, “We could have developed all this [i.e. large scale commercial space development] in the 60s and 70s, but we went another path. Arthur Kantrowitz tried to convince Kennedy’s people that the best way to the Moon was through development of manned space access, a von Braun manned space station, and on to the Moon in a logical way that left developed space assets. That didn’t work, because Johnson’s support of the Moon Mission was contingent on spending money in the South: the real objective was the reindustrialization of the South. The Moon mission itself was a stunt.”

          And according to Kantrowitz that increased the Apollo budget by a billion dollars, which would be ~ 8 billion in today’s dollars, if you believe the CPI. Per a quick search, the original budget was $7 billion, “was quickly raised to $20 billion”, and ended up at $25 billion through 1972. Which of course could have included stretch goals.

        2. None of SpaceX’s rockets can give you hotels on the moon, asteroid mines, manned missions to the outer planets, etc. For that you need a nuclear engine, and NASA spent years working on not one but two different types. They did this concurrently with the Apollo program, because they could do the math and see that any serious human presence off Earth requires better efficiency than any chemical reaction can provide.

          The NERVA engine would have been significantly more efficient than a chemical engine, with an Isp around 900 or possibly even better. It’s my understanding that they had done ground tests and built flight-ready hardware for the first flight tests when Nixon cancelled the project.

          The more speculative project was the gas-core nuclear lightbulb that could easily have been 10 times more efficient than a chemical engine, with estimates putting the Isp somewhere between 3000 and 5000. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_core_reactor_rocket

          For reference, the J-2 used by the Saturn V had an Isp of 420 and the RS-25 used by the Space Shuttle got up to 450. Some tests were done on an engine that would burn hydrogen, lithium, and fluorine which got an Isp of 550, but that’s probably got the worst possible fuel and exhaust to deal with, and it gives you just 20% extra performance for your trouble. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_rocket_propellant#Lithium_and_fluorine

          As for the money, it’s certainly true that NASA has spent far more on robotic missions than it would have cost to develop nuclear engines, but NASA’s funding is per-project. That is, Congress allocates money for specific projects rather than allocating money to NASA and letting NASA decide how to spend it. Congress consistently funded the NERVA project, but Nixon simply decided not to spend the money. I guess once the engineers were laid off and the facilities sold or repurposed, restarting the project after Nixon left office just didn’t seem feasible compared to the easier goals.

          1. Important detail about the NERVA project: someone in the late 1980s or early 1990s gathered the still living key? people who worked on it and captured all they could remember about the project. So restarting it shouldn’t be that difficult, but I would guess it would require someone getting out to the asteroids or maybe just one really good one and doing it beyond the reach of the dead hand of Earth law.

        3. Indeed. The real problem was that the budget cuts made von Braun resign. THAT is the NASA’s problem. You cannot replace a genius with a committee of merely quite smart people.

          1. Let me demur. Genius is useful, but what’s really needed is simply direction. Direction can be provided by having 1) goals and 2) leadership. Without direction, no organization ever gets anywhere.

            And, well. Since the paired events of reaching the Moon and von Braun’s transfer to DC, the Marshall Space Flight Center has had neither. Accordingly, it’s been as useless at achieving anything as, say, the Department of Labor.

            One can contrast the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which has at the very least a mission (scientific exploration of the Solar System) that’s generated specific actionable goals, and thus direction. There’s been nothing astonishingly breakthrough about the JPL’s work, but there’s been a nice solid series of useful scientific missions, and an institutional culture that expects things to get done. If the Great Observatories had been JPL’s responsibility rather than Marshall’s, I suspect the Webb would already be operational.

            I don’t know if Musk is a genius, but he’s providing SpaceX with both leadership and direction, and the result has been serious progress on a budget that Marshall would consider laughable. SpaceX has already achieved remarkable success in satellite launch, is a matter of months from putting people in orbit as part of Commercial Crew, and is building Starship prototypes.

  6. That was my first thought as well, but what’s actually intended is for the rockets to use nuclear engines so that they can have some gravity for most of the trip. Maybe he’ll do that for v2.

    1. That also goes back to early science fiction. I vaguely remember a book, I think by Heinlein, which I read in the third grade or so, where the inventor of the rocket makes his plates out of thorium, so he can feed them into the reactor if necessary.

      1. Rocketship Galileo, his first juvenile, but the plates were zinc, that was the working fluid of his nuclear reactor rocket.

        1. Yes: the plot was it was a private project done on the cheap, using what were basically military surplus parts. Not super far from the real economics, but not close enough that Heinlein was happy with it.

          1. @David Collier Brown: And IIRC, the book Heinlein told a story about. He got a long sheet of butcher paper, unrolled it on the kitchen table, and he and wife Virginia independently worked a problem in orbital ballistics to prove that his spaceraft could actually reach the specified destination from the specified starting point in the time he specified in the book. (He wanted Virginia to cross-check his numbers because he thought her math was better than his.)

            He told the story to a West Point cadet who visited he an Virginia in their home in Colorado, and the cadet said “But sir! Why didn’t you just use a computer?” RAH replied “My dear boy, this was in 1947!” The cadet was properly abashed.

            >Dennis

            1. And IIRC, the book Heinlein told a story about.

              He related the story to us in one of the new essays in the 1980 book Expanded Universe, one of his most important books to read. As I recall, the calculations were for Space Cadet, the only orbiting done in Rocketship Galileo was seat of the pants in the very upper part of the atmosphere to bleed off velocity before they could then return the way man is supposed to as esr notes, on a tail of fire. They radioed ahead the important information, exactly when they returned wasn’t a big deal.

              As I recall, it was a Ph.D. who said “Why didn’t you use a computer”, I don’t think service academy cadets were quite so high in his estimation, his being one of them once upon a time. You memory is probably substituting the book name and theme for the guy who didn’t have a good sense of history.

              Which is one of the most important lessons in that book, he noted that to be truly educated you need history, math, and knowledge of a foreign language, the latter so that you’d really know your native language.

          2. the plot was it was a private project done on the cheap, using what were basically military surplus parts.

            And one wave of his hand, he was still in the phase of hoping for an international system for regulating all things nuclear. The adult scientist was a registered nuclear engineer or whatever, he’d left his old firm when no one could come up with turbines that could handle the output of high velocity zine vapor from his system, and the company wasn’t interested in applications like flight.

            That status as a UN? registered engineer got him free atomic piles for the asking … I suppose that would be one way to incentivize scientists and engineers to not work on the sly. That plus the military surplus (including M1 Garands that were cheap compared to scoped bolt actions!!!), and the free except for food skilled labor of the teenagers, was just enough to put it all together on a shoestring cash budget.

            1. One thing that struck me that Heinlein did not consider having the guys use M-1’s was feeding in a new clip of ammo into it wearing spacesuit gloves. Puts a whole new meaning to M-1 thumb…..

              1. I’ve never had a problem with the bolt pushing my thumb out of the way when feeding a clip, as far as I know “M1 Thumb” comes from either not being careful when closing the bolt on an empty magazine, you’ve got to put your something down deep in the magazine well, or pulling on the operating rod handle with your hand upright when it fires, its handle hitting the web between thumb and forefinger.

                The former problem would not be much of an issue in the story, and is easily avoided by making you right hand rigid, so the op rod is pushed back with the knife edge of your hand, while the thumb depresses the catch. Then rotate your whole hand out of the way. A spacesuit gloved hand might even be able to pull this off….

          3. I believe G. Harry Stein did a similar, shorter, work on the topic. The ship failed to reach orbit because cables used to control something-or-other were used, taken from a motorcycle. An angel investor came ’round at the end and promised better funding if they’d only buy new parts…

  7. I suspect it’s a bit of both. He asked for the Heinleinmobile, and his engineers did their sums and said it actually had some benefits, so they ran with it.

    Something similar happened in aerospace – the thing where a lot of new planes have raised wingtips apparently started as a marketing thing, not an engineering thing. The engineers found it actually reduced drag slightly, so they became common, but that was (at least, per the oral history I’ve heard) not where the idea originated.

    1. Actually, Whitcomb winglets were used from the beginning for efficiency gains, not marketing. They did double duty on many Rutan designs, by doubling as vertical fins for yaw stability.

  8. Since we’re talking about cost: the assumption in most of the early science fiction was that moon rockets (and Mars, Jupiter, et al rockets) would be *nuclear* powered. Granted that they still would have astronomical costs (no pun intended), the cost might now or at least soon be within the reach of the richest people on earth today.

    Unfortunately, the anti-nuclear movement has made that impossible. Chemical fuel interplanetary rockets are barely within the financial reach of entire nations.

    1. SpaceX’s Starship should be able to take a crew to Mars and back, and that didn’t take the resources of a country, just one person plus some other investors. I think that it’ll still prove to be too expensive to build a colony with it though. A long-duration colony is going to need frequent delivery of consumables and spare parts. With a travel time of 9+ months, that means keeping dozens of ships cycling between Earth and Mars at all times; even with reusable rockets that’ll be quite expensive. A few billion dollars a year is not technically out of reach of a large corporation, but most corporations would prefer to reinvest that money, or pay dividends. Does Apple still have 200+ billion saved up? Maybe they’d like to try spending it all in a decade or two.

  9. I have to say that I’m surprised and disappointed that ESR has had nothing to say about the lynch-mobbing Stallman recently suffered. It’s the Tim Hunt travesty all over again: screaming monkeys hurling shit at a man who has done more for humanity than his detractors ever have or ever will.

    1. >I have to say that I’m surprised and disappointed that ESR has had nothing to say about the lynch-mobbing Stallman recently suffered.

      I have in fact expressed great misgivings about it on the previous comment thread. But there’s a problem – this isn’t like the Tim Hunt case, at all. In the Tim Hunt we know the specific accusation that got Tim fired and we know it was false.

      We don’t know either of these things in RMS’s case. There’s a cloud of possible causes, some of which wouldn’t justify canning him, some of which would. To take two extremes, if he was really fired for saying true but unpopular things on an MIT mailing list, that’s clearly wrong. If he was fired because he committed some behavior with a student that was colorably sexual assault (there’s an unconfirmed rumor to that effect), not so wrong. And RMS himself isn’t talking.

      Under the circumstances I don’t intend to go to war on this until, at least, I’ve heard RMS’s side of the story and know why he thinks he got fired. I’ve sent him email.

      1. What is this “cloud”? I have seen no mention up until now about any bad behavior with a student. Every news report I’ve seen has mentioned *only* the true but unpopular things RMS said on a mailing list, and has given that as the sole reason for his firing.

        1. >What is this “cloud”? I have seen no mention up until now about any bad behavior with a student.

          I have. Seen a picture of the woman in question, too. No proof, though.

          This might not give me pause if RMS were talking. He isn’t, and I wonder why. It’s not like he’s been slow to speak out about free-speech issues in the past.

          There’s also a possibility one of Epstein’s girls got at him. All too possible considering Epstein threw one at Minsky. Fearing an accusation of statutory rape would be a good reason to (a) keep quiet, and (b) not want anyone else stirring up things. Until I know that I wouldn’t be doing more harm to RMS than good, I’m not going to make a public stink.

          1. >There’s also a possibility one of Epstein’s girls got at him. All too possible considering Epstein threw one at Minsky.

            I have to object to your word choice here. Women that have been in coercive sexual situations tend to get really fucked up ideas about their own culpability in the matter. Language like “…one of Epstein’s girls got at him” only exacerbates that. If Epstein threw a girl at RMS in such a way that RMS didn’t clue in (or not until afterward), that’s on Eppstein. If RMS did clue in, that’s on him as well as Eppstein. I have trouble imagining a scenario in which he wouldn’t have clued in, but OTOH, it’s probably not fair to RMS to speculate about the possibility that Eppstein did any such thing unless someone makes a public accusation in that regard.

            And when I talk about the fucked up ideas women get about their own culpability, I’m not even primarily talking about the women likely to object to your statement themselves: they’re at least clued in enough to make such an objection.

            1. > If Epstein threw a girl at RMS in such a way
              > that RMS didn’t clue in (or not until afterward),

              Morally? Yes.

              Legally? No. (assuming she was under age).

              1. True enough, but the point is that, if the scenario that ESR suggests occurred, the culpability attaches at least to Epstein, and very likely also to Stallman, depending on whether you’re talking morally or legally, and what exact scenario you posit. It does not attach to the girl as ESR’s wording of “There’s also a possibility one of Epstein’s girls got at him.” implies. I don’t think ESR intended to imply this, but precision of language matters.

                But it’s probably best not to say more on the matter unless an actual accusation involving Stallman is made. Speculations like this can start nasty rumors, so as I said above, it’s not fair to Stallman to continue with them.

      2. “If he was fired because he committed some behavior with a student that was colorably sexual assault (there’s an unconfirmed rumor to that effect), not so wrong. And RMS himself isn’t talking.”

        The “students” at MIT are all 20+. In the past they would all be in the army or married by then: Either mercilessly slaughtering communists, or creating the next generation of valiant soldiers.

        1. Traditionally, it would matter whether or not there was a quid-pro-quo aspect between the accuser and the accused e.g., professor->student taking his class or lab director–>student working in his lab.

          The old rule gave a nice bright line, but… in these woke days (MIT is still a university), that limiting principle has been greatly blurred. Perhaps even erased out of existence.

        2. The key phrase–which you quoted–is “colorably sexual assault”.

          Since I haven’t heard the rumors, and given the milieu he was in wouldn’t really trust them anyway, I can’t comment past that.

          There’s a lot of self-flagellation that seems to happen with people who identify with the “woke” progressives.

        3. > The “students” at MIT are all 20+

          Impressive. This is both a non-sequitur, and incorrect.

          First, “colorably sexual assault” does not usually include so-called statutory rape, which is the only sexual offense where an older age of the younger party would actually change the nature of the offense.

          Secondly, MIT (like most colleges) has incoming freshman that are as young as 17 every single year. Exceptional cases that are younger happen too.

  10. As it should be!
    “Give me technology we can trust, and give it fins like a Cadillac.” – Tom Smith, “Rocket Ride”
    Musk has given us functional rockets that land on their tails as they ought to, so of course he’ll give us the tailfins. And the polished stainless steel.
    Epic art comes not from government grants but from mad artists with eccentric, wealthy patrons. SpaceX is epic art, with incidental practical benefits.

  11. You put put PBUH after Robert Heinlein and call me certifiably insane for giving Jack Chick far lesser praise. …hmm… I just found out that Jack Chick might even have influenced the Starship design more than Heinlein:

    “So in 1953, Jack got a job doing advertising art and other graphic work for Aerojet-General Corporation, an aerospace company in Azusa, about 20 miles northeast of Los Angeles.” – chick.com

    1. Given that our host is a Heinlein fan to the point of considering Heinlein a role model, and has had high praise for a Chick parody involving Cthulhu, did you really expect anything else?

      I suppose you could be worse. You could be the guy who came in here praising motherfucking Rushdoony

    2. >You put put PBUH after Robert Heinlein and call me certifiably insane for giving Jack Chick far lesser praise.

      Knowing our host, I think there’s much more mockery of Muhammed than praise of Heinlein in that particular turn of phrase, however much of a fan of Heinlein he is. And whatever one thinks of Chick, our host is well known to characterize anyone with the slightest belief in the supernatural as insane, so that he would characterize Chick as such is utterly unsurprising.

      If ESR heard anyone use, “Heinlein (PBUH)” seriously, as if they actually believed that Heinlein was a prophet sent by God, he would mock them twice as hard, and characterize them as absolutely bonkers.

      I don’t like our host dismissing all religion as insane any more than you do, but let’s not descend to unjustified slander. There’s plenty to criticize without construing “Heinlein (PBUH)” as a serious statement.

      1. >If ESR heard anyone use, “Heinlein (PBUH)” seriously, as if they actually believed that Heinlein was a prophet sent by God, he would mock them twice as hard, and characterize them as absolutely bonkers.

        That is correct.

        On the other hand, if anyone was the evangelical prophet of spaceflight, it was RAH. Other people did the heavy technical lifting; but he, as much or more than any other single person, created a popular constituency for it in the 40s and early 50s.

    1. >Is no one out there working on a viable SSTO vehicle?

      The rocket equation makes that pretty tough. With chemical fuels you really need the mass-ratio drop-off from letting the stages loose. It could be done with an Orion drive, but that has…other problems.

      A chem-fueled SSTO might just barely be viable if you could launch it from 10K up a mountain. I’m not aware of anyone trying this.

        1. Now that SpaceX has shown truly reusable TSTO they have proven many Known Truths to be false. One of those facts was the urgent need for SSTO in order to be efficient.

          SSTO can wait till we are using fuels that can reasonably support it.

          1. One of those facts was the urgent need for SSTO in order to be efficient.

            Perhaps. But it does seem to be a stretch to imply we have achieved efficiency when a SpaceX launch costs $57 million.

            Pournelle:
            Since rocket engines are as efficient as jet engines, there is no reason why space operations should cost more than two or three times what long distance air travel costs. In particular, you should be able to buy a ticket to orbit for no more than twice what it costs to buy a ticket to Sydney.

            I think you’re aiming too low.

            1. when a SpaceX launch costs $57 million.

              ……..which is why they pushed the reusable angle so hard. 57 million was the cost for the expendable Falcon 9. Fuel costs are a couple hundred thousand.

              You really need to catch up; it isn’t 2008 anymore, and it’s making you look silly.

            2. >Perhaps. But it does seem to be a stretch to imply we have achieved efficiency when a SpaceX launch costs $57 million.

              Efficiency is relative. To consider ourselves to have achieved efficiency in an absolute sense, the cost of everything would have to be $0, and every human activity would have to break even on entropy.

              Falcon 9 is efficient compared to prior launch vehicles, or compared to the cost of a reusable SSTO. It is far from efficient enough for any of the standard pipe-dreams about spaceflight to be feasible (colonies off Earth, asteroid mining, etc.).

              1. Probably could do asteroid mining IF all the work out in the belt was done by robots.

        2. Comparing the strengths and weakness of the novels Pournelle wrote alone, Niven wrote alone and they wrote together, I deduce that I would trust Pournelle’s opinion on human social interaction from military tactics to politics and I would trust Niven’s opinion on technology and science, and never the other way around.

          Pretty sure Pournelle wrote the social aspects of The Mote and Niven the technological aspects? I mean if it was the other way around, you’d get technology as boring as the CoDominiums, and a social interaction system as unrealistic as the Lordkin.

          So on spaceships, let’s rather check what Niven said.

          1. On the contrary, I’d trust Niven on logical games of many kinds and trust Pournelle on technological possibility.

      1. A much simpler way than a mountain would be the “rockoon” method:

        Take any chemical rocket vehicle: Saturn, Proton, shuttle, whatever. Build it as if it were going to launch from the ground. But add two new features. (1) A large hydrogen balloon from which everything else hangs by a strong steel cable. (2) A packed parachute you can deploy (to get safely to the ground in case the balloon pops or the cable breaks).

        Now fly this thing as a balloon — up to 8,500 or 9,000 feet, as high as it will go — and then light off the rocket (and jettison the balloon).

        Result: You have just added a cheap and lightweight first stage, dramatically increasing how high you can go. Plus you have the added benefit of no longer needing a launch site that can withstand your rocket being lit there.

        1. The altitude difference doesn’t get you that much of a boost. Most of the energy involved in getting to orbit comes from accelerating to 17500 MPH, not gaining 100 miles of altitude.

            1. >100 miles of altitude gets a lot of atmosphere out of your way.

              I’m certain reduced atmospheric drag is negligible compared to the effects of not having to lift mass to 10K to get it higher.

              I just asked regular commenter Ken Burnside, one of the brains behind Atomic Rockets. He says he remembers from a calculation he saw years ago that launching from 20Kfeet buys you about a 15% mass reduction in booster and fuel mass, but doesn’t have other figures handy. It’s not going to scale linearly.

              1. There are also benefits to be had in using vacuum optimized engines on the first stage.

                Of course with this plan you can forget about rapid reusability. Just another case of rocket designers chasing obvious local optimizations to the detriment of the system as a whole.

              2. So according to Wikipedia, combined atmospheric and gravity drag losses are typically in the 1-2 km/s range, and 50% of the atmosphere is below 18,000 ft.

                It’s not entirely easy to disentangle atmospheric from gravity losses: a general principle I’ve learned in playing Orbiter and KSP is that atmospheric losses can be minimized by keeping your velocity down in the lower atmosphere, but this increases gravity losses, because gravity losses are minimized by a high acceleration and a more agressive turn to a horizontal trajectory, but avoiding atmospheric losses requires a lower acceleration, as well as a largely vertical trajectory in the lower atmosphere, in order to clear the lower atmosphere quickly and to avoid having too flat a trajectory before your vertical speed is high enough (flatten out too early and aerodynamic forces may prevent you from keeping your nose above the horizon, in which case You Will Not Go To Space Today).

                Launching from higher altitude helps with all of these factors.

                1. >(flatten out too early and aerodynamic forces may prevent you from keeping your nose above the horizon, in which case You Will Not Go To Space Today).

                  LOL. And you may experience the wonders of…lithobraking.

          1. >The altitude difference doesn’t get you that much of a boost. Most of the energy involved in getting to orbit comes from accelerating to 17500 MPH, not gaining 100 miles of altitude.

            It’s true, but the amount of fuel required to move upwards a foot varies inversely with altitude because of the mass-ratio dropoff. If you lunch from 10K up you don’t have to lift the fuel and tankage that a rocket launched from sea level needs to get to 10K.

      2. At some point someone will lease a chunk of Ecuador for a spaceport, ten thousand feet up and on the Equator.

    2. If the booster stages and upper stages are both reusable, what’s the advantage of SSTO?

      1. There may be no advantage. FWIW, the Nuclear Thermal Turbo Rocket I mentioned previously is an SSTO design.

  12. Who are these bastards trying to take RMS down? It seems they’re trying to get him to suicide. Even if RMS did everything they claim he did, he still didn’t do anything wrong: just is a man.

    Something America hates.

      1. The website has been deleted.

        The Medium piece gives enough detail to conclude: (1) the author’s problem with Stallman was about his words; (2) those words were a hypothetical suggesting that “if [Minsky] had sex with one of Epstein’s victims, she probably did present herself to him as entirely willing” and therefore he did no wrong; and (3) this is an auto-da-fe straight out of SJWs Always Lie.

        The piece does not assert or even suggest that Stallman laid hands improperly on a woman anywhere, and I’m sure the author would not have omitted to say so if there were any way she could make it appear plausible.

        I do not share Stallman’s views about IP. But this should not happen to a dog.

  13. ESR: Some of The Americans seem to be looking into setting their net wider, now that they got RMS.

    https://twitter.com/infil00p/status/1173785404731904001

    >Joe Bowser @infil00p
    >
    >Here is ESR saying that Epstein wasn’t a Pedophile. Not a huge difference from RMS

    >Joe Bowser @infil00p Sep 16
    >Honestly, Open Source is full of fucked up abusers and anyone defending or connected to Epstein should burn.

    “Should burn” – Joe Bowser.
    Sounds almost like a threat to me…

    1. >Sounds almost like a threat to me…

      SJWs accusing me of being evil and threatening me is, like, a day ending in ‘y’ at this point.

    2. Meh. People have been saying worse about Eric for decades.

      What scared me was when they started going after moderates like Linus Torvalds.

      But as I said, we are in the Fourth Age, the old hacker culture having passed into Valinor.

        1. When we win, do not forget that these people want you broke, dead, your kids raped and brainwashed and they think it’s funny.” – Sam Hyde

        2. The irony of that is the quote they use to condemn Eric as a racist — one where he claims that most blacks have an IQ of 85, and thus probably shouldn’t have a gun — Jeff Atwood ignores the fact that Eric also implies that there should never be an IQ test for owning a gun.

          And that’s the funny thing about Libertarian racists, compared to Statist racists. Ask a Statist racist what should be done about inferior races, and they’ll say things like “forced sterilization”, and “segregated housing” and “Jim Crow laws”. They aren’t satisfied unless there’s a government organization forcing non-racists to be racist too!

          Ask a Libertarian racist what should be done about inferior races, and the worst they’ll say is “refuse to do business with them, unless they offer a great product/service at a reasonable price point”, and “defend their rights — particularly gun rights and free speech — so they can fend off ‘superiors’ who wish to harm them for being inferior”.

          There’s a world of a difference between the two forms of racism. The latter is just annoying eccentricity, whereas the former causes genuine harm to anyone who just wants to mind their own business.

          1. To me, classic, no-argument racism says that all members of Race A are inherently, genetically superior to Race B. That’s obviously stupid, because it means (e.g.) that Thomas Sowell is inherently inferior to “Momma June” Shannon. Only the seriously deluded would believe that.

            Now, though, it’s considered racist to say: “On average, members of Race A have higher IQs than members of Race B.” Or: “On average, members of Race A are more often violence than members of Race B.” To me, statements like that are not racist, because they are based on statistics, are a closer fit with common observation, and make no claims about why such disparities exist. Noting overlapping bell curves is not “racism.”

            1. >Noting overlapping bell curves is not “racism.”

              Of course it is, comrade! It is convenient for the Inner Party that this be categorized as racism, therefore it is racism. Update your Newspeak dictionary accordingly.

      1. But as I said, we are in the Fourth Age, the old hacker culture having passed into Valinor.

        I’d say the true successors of the hacker culture are the people doing bitcoin and cryptocurrency. Of course, there also a lot of shills, idiots, and miscellaneous weasels doing that to, but that’s inevitable given how much money can literally be made there.

        1. >I’d say the true successors of the hacker culture are the people doing bitcoin and cryptocurrency.

          That’s not the successors. Mostly, that’s us. If I had no other way of knowing this, the way I’m received when I encounter cryptocurrency folks would be enough of a clue.

      2. >the old hacker culture having passed into Valinor.

        I get several requests a month from people saying “I want to be a hacker” and begging me to apprentice them. Not only are we still here, we’re still attracting aspirants.

        1. You’d get a request from me if I was ten years younger. But since your time would be more appropriately spent on someone who’s not mid-fifties, I haven’t bothered to bother you.

        2. You should borrow Jeff Read’s metaphor, and tell them “That ship has sailed.” And then warn them not to waste their time, or if they’re really persistent, that they probably just don’t have what it takes.

          THEN you’d get a nice crop of very determined hackers. ;)

          “‘My dear,’ said the old wizard, ‘after you have dealt with your thirtieth hero or so, you will realize that they react quite predictably to certain things; such as being told that they are too young, or that they are not destined to be heroes, or that being a hero is unpleasant; and if you truly wish to be sure you should tell them all three.'” — Eliezer Yudkovsky, _Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality_

          1. That’s kind of the mentorship equivalent of the old rule that the best way to find out how to do X in Linux isn’t to go to a forum and ask a question — it’s to go to a forum and loudly proclaim how Linux sucks at doing X and Windows is so much better. Then you will get oodles of people eager to tell you how to do X in Linux.

            (Except where X = “sane, general asynchronous I/O”. Sorry, Linux, you got nothing on Windows overlapped I/O primitives and I/O completion ports.)

            1. If by ““sane, general asynchronous I/O” is meant “the little blue circle spinning whenever you try to do frigging anything”, then yeah, thanks, this past year working in a MS Windows / Visual Studio only shop has given me enough of a dose of that “sanity” to last a lifetime. (At the team meetings I would refer to it as VSNR, because the title bar more often said “Visual Studio Not Responding” than merely the application name.)

            2. I’m so happy that in my new project I don’t have to deal with Windows overlapped I/O, which is an abomination.

              That’s because I’m optimizing for Optane persistent memory, which is fast enough that you don’t need any of that garbage for performance. What you need is careful avoidance of anything that would slow down a memory-based algorithm.

              (Note that I’m primarily a Windows developer although my new project is built for both Windows and Ubuntu.)

      3. “But as I said, we are in the Fourth Age, the old hacker culture having passed into Valinor.”

        No, the Fourth Age was after Sauron had been thrown into the darkness and the only evil left in the world was the evil that flowed from Morgoths original evil. The scab of that old evil, so to say.

        Instead we have illusionists proposing cannibalism, child sacrifice, ritual maiming to the leaders of the world, in the name of making the world perfect.

        Right now we live in Numenor. Sauron has turned most of the high and mighty into direct worship of Morgoth, and the King’s Men are busily purging the Faithful from public life.

        Get a boat, or learn to swim.

  14. @ESR I was thinking about this comment and yours above http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=8415#comment-2269018 simply not really understanding what the discussion is about. And then I realized that “anon” and probably a lot of others imply that accepting a patch from someone = conveying prestige, reputation, status etc. on someone. Sort Gordon Ramsay going on TV and saying “Anders Breivik can cook a great chili, man.” type of thing.

    But it isn’t really so. It only conveys prestige if someone’s name is in the contributor list, or thank-you list or whatever way you tend to hand out reputation.

    So an obvious quick fix would be that “odious” people will be anonymous contributors, without attribution.

    Then again I suppose I haven’t reinvented warm water now but this was figured out ages ago and everybody does this. I mean even before all this SJWry some people were always “odious”, some people made themselves professionally ridiculous by fucking something up badly so adding their name on a project would be bad advertisement in a quite objective sense and so on. So I wonder now if it would not work because those types are not only interested in “odious” people not getting prestige but have more of a purity framework, that “odious” people shouldn’t be touching the project at all because they will somehow make it ritually unclean.

    1. >So I wonder now if it would not work because those types are not only interested in “odious” people not getting prestige but have more of a purity framework, that “odious” people shouldn’t be touching the project at all because they will somehow make it ritually unclean.

      That’s how they talk and behave.

      Also remember there are other associated pathologies. There’s an actual war against merit going on. Some of the leaders in the attempt to hijack hacker culture have said so.

      1. Also remember there are other associated pathologies. There’s an actual war against merit going on. Some of the leaders in the attempt to hijack hacker culture have said so.

        I’m going to say something here that will probably make both hackers and SJW’s mad:

        I am what you have in the past called a “standard nerd”. I tend not to fit in well in mainstream culture, and to fit in in hacker culture and other STEM-ish classically nerdy cultures. And I see mainstream culture (or at least certain mainstream subcultures) trying to assimilate nerd culture, and I find that deeply troubling. But at the same time, I’m profoundly uneasy about how troubled I am about it, because in trying to put that troubledness into words, I keep finding that SJW vocabulary fits best, and I tend to disagree with at least 75% of their ideals and pretty much 100% of their means of persuading people to their cause.

        Namely, I’ve come to the conclusion that the reason I’m so troubled by the attempt to assimilate nerd culture into the mainstream is that nerd culture is a safe space for standard nerds like me: everywhere else we have to play by social rules, which, even if we’re passable at following, we’re always a bit behind the curve on. But in a few subcultures like hacker culture, we’re in the majority and get to call the shots on the social rules.

        Hacker culture isn’t necessarily a safe-space for non-standard nerds like you that can play the social games well but choose not to, but you are able/wiling to be considerate enough to the people whose safe space it is to fit in.

        The problem is, safe spaces are exclusionary. Many members of mainstream culture that try to enter nerd culture do so because nerds aren’t cool, but tech is, and they want the status that comes with being associated with it (I’ll call this type A), but I’ve met many that are genuinely smart and interested in nerdy things (type B), or that fall into both categories (type C). The type A’s can go fly a kite, and will react with rage when told to do so. The type B’s will likely fail to integrate into the culture socially, face criticism on a technical point, and respond along the lines of “how dare you treat me like this?” instead of the expected “your criticism is wrong because facts.”, at which point we nerds have a tendency to assume that the emotional, rather than intellectual, response indicates a deficiency in intellect, and a membership in the “type A” group. This will cause them to doubt themselves, which will make them more likely to react emotionally later down the line, and so things will spiral. Meanwhile, they are likely to be concerned that their association with nerds will reduce their status with their mainstream friends, and the worse their interaction with nerd culture goes, the worse this concern will get, and between not getting anywhere with the nerds and wanting to fit in to the mainstream, they’ll eventually give up. These types could integrate if a nonstandard nerd notices in time, turns up the charm, and briefs them on polite behavior in nerd culture.

        The real thorny problem comes with the type C’s, who actually have a great deal of potential merit-wise, but will absolutely not fit in if the tech-is-cool-and-I-want-status element isn’t dealt with. They also make it easier for type A’s to pass themselves off as aggrieved type B’s.

        Another thing that concerns me about nerd culture as a safe space is that even for the standard nerds, the ones with autism/ADHD type deficiencies in social interaction, I think that a large part of the social skill deficit in adult life comes from a decision to stop caring. I certainly have the social deficiencies, but I also have a very clear memory from around 3rd grade of the moment that I gave up on the social game, so I somewhat feel that having a culture that we dominate to fall back on may be preventing standard nerds from doing as well in social interaction as we actually have the potential for. OTOH, I don’t feel that we really would do that much better if nerd culture just got assimilated into the mainstream without the mainstream meeting us halfway, and I don’t entirely trust them to do that (speaking of assimilation and hijacking, that brings to mind another SJW term: cultural appropriation).

        In the best case scenario, I think approaching the issue from this angle could have the following benefits:

        1) Showing SJWs how exclusionary their safe spaces look from the outside.

        2) Showing SJWs that their attempts to paint the current gender-skew of the tech industry as being all about sexism come across as an attempt to gaslight a group that is mistreated in mainstream culture out of their safe space.nerds to confuse type A’s and type B’s, as the

        3) Showing nerds how exclusionary some of the institutions of nerd culture look to the mainstream.

        4) Showing nerds exactly what SJWs see in their safe spaces.

        And, in the worst case, if SJWs are rnerds to confuse type A’s and type B’s, as the eally unwilling to bend, it at least shows:

        5) In that case, how hypocritical SJWs are.

        SJWs may feel free to respond to 5) with a 6) whose wording should be obvious.

        1. Didn’t bother reading your long dialectical essay when can I show your conclusions are nonsense:

          1) Showing SJWs how exclusionary their safe spaces look from the outside.

          They don’t care, They literally want us dead, but for now have to settle for destroying as much as they can of our personal and professional lives.

          2) Showing SJWs that their attempts to paint the current gender-skew of the tech industry as being all about sexism come across as an attempt to gaslight a group that is mistreated in mainstream culture out of their safe space.nerds to confuse type A’s and type B’s, as the

          See the answer to 1). This is about power. In Jim of Jim’s Blog terms, superior holiness. In Spandrel’s terms, Bioleninism.

          3) Showing nerds how exclusionary some of the institutions of nerd culture look to the mainstream.

          4) Showing nerds exactly what SJWs see in their safe spaces.

          Why should we give a damn, except if there’s some tactical insight to be gained for either protecting ourselves or destroying them before they destroy us?

          And, in the worst case, if SJWs are rnerds to confuse type A’s and type B’s, as the eally unwilling to bend, it at least shows:

          5) In that case, how hypocritical SJWs are.

          They don’t care. They axiomatically believe what they feel and do is right, they use slogans like “no bad tactics, only bad targets”. Did you not read this subthread above, where major figures in software openly wish for esr’s death for merely holding the wrong opinions on a bunch of subjects unrelated to being a nerd? An echo of the attacks just documented on an elderly lady using a walker for the crime of trying to attend a event Antifa declared to be a gathering of Nazis? They want old people with the wrong opinions dead in the worst way, which is why we have to give them complete control of our healthcare system.

          It’s not like we haven’t seen this game played out numerous times during the 20th Century, consuming a bare minimum of 100 million innocent lives. And that the exact pattern goes all the way back to the French Revolution, with its Terror and genocidal attacks on parts of the countryside that didn’t sign onto the program.

          1. Why should we give a damn, except if there’s some tactical insight to be gained for either protecting ourselves or destroying them before they destroy us?

            You just answered your own question. There is tactical insight to be gained for protecting ourselves from following Jon’s suggestions.

            If you just give zero damns and unleash the hounds, you end up looking like the ogre to the people who are just now arriving at the scene, wondering what all the hubbub is about. They’re on the fence, see you punching SJWs, and decide they should help the SJWs. You just made your first and last impression.

            I’ve seen this happen. Hell, I’ve been hit by it. I’d get picked on in school, and in a spark of courage, I punch back, and that’s when the teacher happens to be looking. Result: I end up in the principal’s office, serve detention, and get out in time to get picked on again. It didn’t matter that I was right; what mattered was my timing and planning, which was piss-poor.

            It works differently in adult life – there’s no principal, but instead just other adults serving as your jury on the spot – but it still means the cycle continues. You might be fine with that, but one can be forgiven for wanting to break that cycle and move on to tougher and even more dangerous problems.

            They don’t care.

            Some of them don’t care. You’re not doing this for them; you’re doing it for the people who just arrived, and who still care.

            So yeah, punch people who are in the act of punching. At all other times, you hold your fucking fire.

            1. Anyone who can look at a SJW in today’s Cancel Culture confrontations and decide to help the SJW is axiomatically a self-declared enemy.

              This is not even hard, who is so fresh off the turnip truck they don’t recognize the Left and have an opinion about it? Boomers I’ll grant you are stereotypically set in their ways, but I don’t think you’re including them in your take on this.

              1. The SJW movement isn’t just cancellers. It’s fanatic Antifa, the Twitterati, a handful of writers on Medium, and shitstirrers doing it for a living on behalf of the Russians, but also social workers, your Facebook friend who’s gay and genuinely worried because of what he read from some Russian shitstirrer, another friend who’s black and got some unnerving death threats on his Twitter account, and the extended families of all of these people who are really too busy with their lives to take up with any of this but who still feel at least a little familial loyalty.

                [W]ho is so fresh off the turnip truck they don’t recognize the Left and have an opinion about it?

                (blinks at you, then waves in the direction of a map)

                Are you truly aware how many people there are? In the US alone? Let alone worldwide?

                I am including Boomers in this, by the way. Especially the ones who are retired, have several thousand bucks saved up, and have little else to do with their free time but surf the internet and write their Congresscritter. Except, bless their hearts, they don’t have enough time to get deep enough into the internet to dig into every brouhaha they read about. They skim the headline and the five people they follow on the Twitter their kid set up for them and get an impression.

                1. Bravo!
                  Some of us old farts have been paying attention online since dialup days and newsgroups. I’ve been following ESR for more than a decade and finally read the Cathedral and the Bazaar. We may be old, but we’re not dead yet and we got your back.

          2. @H:

            They don’t care, They literally want us dead, but for now have to settle for destroying as much as they can of our personal and professional lives.

            *Some* of them don’t care. A good deal more want us dead, and a good deal more than that want to destroy us personally or professionally because they see us as a threat. Even more than that don’t actually want to destroy us but have no sense of how much splash damage the weapons they want to use will do when deployed against the people they want to destroy. The ones deeper in are using language very much like your “they want us dead” to convince the ones less deep in to circle the wagons.

            Nobody becomes a full-throated, no-turning-back proponent of any political ideology in a day.

            At the very least we can innoculate their source of potential recruits. With luck, we can potentially get a decent percentage of the actual SJW crowd to actually stand down.

            Why should we give a damn, except if there’s some tactical insight to be gained for either protecting ourselves or destroying them before they destroy us?

            Because:

            A) Understanding what draws people into that crowd in the first place is the key to knowing how to stop them from recruiting and to figuring out how to get the people that can be convinced to defect to do so.

            B) Understanding behaviors of ours that resemble those of SJWs can help us avoid looking like hypocrites to neutrals.

            I wrote:
            And, in the worst case, if SJWs are rnerds to confuse type A’s and type B’s, as the eally unwilling to bend, it at least shows:

            5) In that case, how hypocritical SJWs are.

            Typo correction. I’m not sure what happened here. It looks like something that didn’t make it into the final draft of my post as a complete thought got into my clipboard, and got pasted into the middle of a word somehow. It also appears up around point 2 in my original post. The above should read:

            And, in the worst case, if SJWs are really unwilling to bend, it at least shows:

            5) In that case, how hypocritical SJWs are.

            You said:

            They don’t care. They axiomatically believe what they feel and do is right, they use slogans like “no bad tactics, only bad targets”.

            Some of them do, yes, but they *need* to use slogans like “no bad tactics, only bad targets”, because they need to egg on the less committed SJWs that don’t think that automatically. If every one of them thought that, it would be counterproductive to say it, because it’s noise that can alert targets when they could be waiting in ambush for the perfect moment to strike. But *because* not all of them are fully committed, they need to whip up the less committed ones, and then those need to whip up the even less committed, before they have the numbers they need to do anything.

            And my point wasn’t “In the worst case we show SJWs how hypocritical they are”, I was saying “In the worst case, we show the world how hypocritical SJWs are”.

            And I won’t deny that the worst case scenario may very well come to pass. Even if it’s possible to de-escalate, we might not manage it.

            It’s not like we haven’t seen this game played out numerous times during the 20th Century, consuming a bare minimum of 100 million innocent lives. And that the exact pattern goes all the way back to the French Revolution, with its Terror and genocidal attacks on parts of the countryside that didn’t sign onto the program.

            It goes a lot further back than the French Revolution. I am sure it goes back further than written history. It’s human nature.

            But keep this in mind:

            In Germany in 1932, the Nazis and the Communists were each saying of the other “they literally want us dead”, in order to whip up their respective, less committed allies. And in saying that *they were absolutely 100% right*. The Communists wanted the Nazis, and anyone who had anything to do with them, dead, and the Nazis wanted the Communists, and anyone who had anything to do with them, dead. And the German conservatives took up the Nazi cry of “they want us dead”, and the German liberals took up the Communist cry of “they want us dead”, and eventually the Nazis won and a bunch of Communists, and a bunch of their less committed allies, did in fact end up quite dead. The the Nazis lost the war, and a whole bunch of Nazis, and a whole bunch of German conservatives that weren’t smart enough to head west when the Russians rolled in from the east, ended up similarly dead.

            But it all could have been avoided if the less bloodthirsty members of either wing had been more willing to negotiate with each other than with the extremists on their own side.

            Trying to reason with the other side doesn’t guarantee that people won’t end up dead: You need to figure out who you can trust and what concessions are safe to make and most likely to actually win people over, and there are plenty of people throughout history that have screwed that up royally. But just assuming that the other side wants you dead, *even though it may largely actually be true*, just guarantees that on one side or the other (or both), the people that want people dead will get their way.

        2. I am what you have in the past called a “standard nerd”. I tend not to fit in well in mainstream culture, and to fit in in hacker culture and other STEM-ish classically nerdy cultures. And I see mainstream culture (or at least certain mainstream subcultures) trying to assimilate nerd culture, and I find that deeply troubling. But at the same time, I’m profoundly uneasy about how troubled I am about it, because in trying to put that troubledness into words, I keep finding that SJW vocabulary fits best, and I tend to disagree with at least 75% of their ideals and pretty much 100% of their means of persuading people to their cause.

          That’s because modern SJW culture is in a sense a mockery of Nerd culture, in much that same way Sauron made Orcs in mockery of Elves. Nerd culture is for people with technical skills but poor social skills, thus they end up forming internal hierarchies based on technical ability and accomplishment.

          Inspired by the success of nerddom a lot of people, including many nerds, assumed that everyone who had trouble fitting in actually had technical or other important skills. Thus, people who didn’t fit into mainstream culture but had no technical skills attempted to form their own cultures. Unfortunately, since the subcultures were based on shared social problems rather than technical abilities, the result was that their internal hierarchy is based on who is “most oppressed” rather than anything objective. This results in a highly dysfunctional culture since anyone who succeeds is by definition not the most oppressed and thus doesn’t deserve his success. (Unless he’s successful enough that he can intimidate those who would point this out into keeping their mouths shut.)

          1. >That’s because modern SJW culture is in a sense a mockery of Nerd culture, in much that same way Sauron made Orcs in mockery of Elves. […] Thus, people who didn’t fit into mainstream culture but had no technical skills attempted to form their own cultures.

            That is the most interesting and perceptive thing I have seem you write on this blog.

          2. That’s because modern SJW culture is in a sense a mockery of Nerd culture

            This sounds right. It might be more specific to call it something like a Cargo Cult.

            Much of the shape of SJW Culture can be attributed to the fora from whence it spawned; first academia, then through such as Twitter and Tumblr and on into the wider world once the little sisters of the college gals got infected.

            Which is to say, the original Nerd Culture built these technical spaces, established a surface-level resemblance of being intended for outcasts, then the non-technical outcasts moved into those spaces and began acting like they think the Builders do though without any real understanding. A great big map/territory confusion, resulting in a bunch of primitive tribes acting like any primitive humans do, dancing around the cast-off artifacts of the Builders and very eager with their spears.

            The Tolkien allusion is better, though. For pendant’s sake: ’twas Morgoth who first twisted the Eldar into Orcs; Sauron just happened to be in the room taking notes.

            1. @ktk: The Tolkien allusion is better, though. For pendant’s sake: ’twas Morgoth who first twisted the Eldar into Orcs; Sauron just happened to be in the room taking notes.

              Yep. And Morgoth did so because he could not do his own creation. Only Iluvatar could. He could create beings, but they lived only when he bent his will upon them. He could not give them independent existence. (Aule had the same problem when he created the Fathers of the Dwarves, but Iluvatar hallowed them for him.) Morgoth could get minions only by ruining existing creatures.

              There’s a parallel with folks incapable of doing their own creation moving into spaces formed by those who can do things and attempting to take over to gain the status they think is conferred by being there. The notion that status is conferred in that space because you can do stuff doesn’t seem to occur to them

              (In another Tolkien parallel, this is like Al Pharazon the Golden of Numenor listening to Sauron and believing he could be immortal simply by living in Valinor.)

              >Dennis

              1. >Al Pharazon the Golden

                That’s Ar-Pharazôn the Golden to you, mudman. The King never saw an Arabic definite article in his life, and I am certain he would insist on the crown in the last syllable.

              2. > For pendant’s sake

                Did you mean “For pedants’ sake”?

                > from whence it spawned

                “Whence” means “from where”, so “from whence” means “from from where”.

                (I am frequently described as a “pedant” or engaged in pedantry.)

              3. > There’s a parallel with folks incapable of doing their own creation moving into spaces formed by those who can do things and attempting to take over to gain the status they think is conferred by being there.

                This process has been accurately described as taking the healthy, productive social structure, killing it, skinning it, and wearing the skin, much like the insectoid did in MIB.

          3. Pretty much, yeah. The way I put it is that SJWs, by and large, are normies — shit-tier normies who desperately want to get a seat at the cool kids’ table, but can’t. So they take over the nerd table instead and remake it in their own narcissistic image. Better to rule in hell than serve in heaven.

            However — unlike the SF, comic book, and video game fandoms, which were taken over by groups who cared little about the art form itself — hacker culture is different in that some of the best and most influential hackers have fully signed up for the social justice agenda. Which is why I think we’ll just have to accept that there’s been a shift in the hacker value system.

            1. some of the best and most influential hackers have fully signed up for the social justice agenda.

              That just means they’ll be more surprised when they get denounced and thrown out by the SJWs who don’t care about programming.

            2. >some of the best and most influential loudest-mouthed hackers have fully signed up for the social justice agenda.

              It was ever thus. Yelling and tub-thumping is not an indicator of quality.

              1. The two are not mutually exclusive.

                A single Tweet from classic entryist Steve Klabnik can get a Midwestern conference presentation quickly canceled. Note this is a guy so extreme that in October 2014 he said:

                Thinking about it, the far right has never been as powerful and overtly supported in tech as in this current moment.

                Between GamerGate, Weev, and Moldbug, it’s not even a “conservative tendency” or something, but outright fascism.

                I’m not sure what a ‘tech antifa’ would look like, exactly, but it’s sorely needed.

                Someone with a French name then mentioned the antifa movement there “and they’re often just as violent :-(“, to which Klabnik replied, “yup. 100% okay with that, personally.” The French guy demurred, and got in reply, “the only things fascists respond to is violence. Ignoring them or letting them attack you doesn’t help“.

                See also Anil Dash, not too long ago elevated to CEO of Fog Creek, although I suppose that outfit isn’t really influential anymore, but as far as I know he still is.

                The set of influential SJWs in tech have a proven ability to end people’s conventional software and systems careers. Yes, not an indicator of quality except in manipulating society, but as direct opponents of the conditions that bring about and maintain quality.

                I’ll repeat Sam Hyde, “When we win, do not forget that these people want you broke, dead, your kids raped and brainwashed and they think it’s funny“, and submit that if we dismiss them like I’m sure the Bolsheviks were for a long time by many, we’re going to regret it.

                1. >See also Anil Dash, not too long ago elevated to CEO of Fog Creek

                  Holy shit. That was founded by Joel Spolsky, who was in the top 5 most interestig “tech” bloggers ever, his ideas like “all abstractions are leaky” or “hire people who are smart and want to get things done, not by credentials or experience” are still widely quoted.

                  And then somehow Spolsky turned into a full out SJW. He is one of the very rare cases when it is someone actually talented and succesful doing it. Anil Dash fits into that picture rather perfectly and look at this part of his bio:

                  “He was the director of Expert Labs, a “Government 2.0 initiative that aims to connect United States government projects with citizens who want to become more involved in the political discussion”.

                  I mean, SJWery is mostly a bioleninist recruiting strategy for the new political elite. It sounds tinfoil-hatty to say it is all moved by “feds”, but… pushing it on Silicon Valley does give a lot of people of a certain amount of Beltway smell. And Anil’s rather obvious links to the Beltway here really fit into that picture, that things he goes into do become a sort of a political operation.

                  1. Spolsky may yet get based when he comes across the SJWs’ latent antisemitism. Motherfucker was in the Israeli army — which means he trained to fight the SJWs’ beloved Palestinian Muslims.

                    Atwood I’m not so sure about. Oh, speaking of, StackExchange is blowing up right now because they banned a moderator by applying what I predicted would become the new SJW standard for disciplinary action: suspected risk of CoC violation, not actual CoC violation in fact.

                    What’s worse, it was suspected risk of violating a preferred pronouns clause that hadn’t been finalized yet. By avoiding the use of pronouns entirely.

                    So now if Alex is a person and you avoid the pronoun issue altogether by saying “Oh yeah, I know Alex. Alex lives in Louisiana with Alex’s mother. Alex has three cats.” Etc., that’s hate speech and a bannable offense.

                    Honk honk, motherfuckers.

                    1. I absolutely enjoy how while you are on the far left of economic issues you are very based on this stuff. Is there a unifying principle linking the two? Something along the lines of “Robespierre, you idiot, stop guillotining all these sans-culottes?”

                    2. Oh, for fsck’s sake. I have adopted that strategy for dealing with the surnames of many of the people from Asia who work for ${EMPLOYER}, whom I only know from email/chat, because I have no clear way of knowing which names are male v. female.

                      The old SNL “Pat” sketches are hate speech by now.

                    3. When the story appeared on Slashdot, I read the top 84 comments out of 400 and some (at that time) and the majority of the comments made the points…
                      – humans have two genders
                      – some humans come in psychological problems, and wish they were a different gender.

                    4. Sorry… I edited the wrong sentence…

                      Most Slashdot comments made the points…

                      – Humans come in two genders.
                      – Some humans have psychological problems, and wish they were a different gender.

                    5. @TheMonster the Chinese I work with have all adopted English first names to make things easier for us. Actually not for our sakes, it is apparently a widespread method in teaching foreign languages all across Asia but I have heard it is sometimes used in the US as well that the students adopt a first name in the language taught. So Johnny is sitting in a French class and if the teacher addresses him as Jean-Claude that is supposed to be motivating to do it right or something. Dunno. It weirds me out a bit to be honest. But that is where the English first names they were using came from.

                    6. >the Chinese I work with have all adopted English first names to make things easier for us.

                      When I traveled to Taiwan I made a point of asking each local who introduced him/herself with a Western name to tell me his/her Chinese one. I would then pronounce it, watching the subject’s face to see if I’d botched it (and if so how badly) and asking to hear it again until I could get it right. The delighted smiles when I did were very much worth the investment.

                      However, I caution against trying this with Chinese unless you have Frodo ear – that is, you know you can accurately recognize and reproduce speech sounds that are not in the inventory of a language you speak. It’s easy in Japanese, which has as simple and regular a sound system as Italian or Finnish. But Chinese phonology is tricky, you could easily end up with your best effort producing a wince-inducing parody – and that’s before we even get to the tone contours.

                      Korean is kinda bitchy, too – they have some odd consonants. Thai and Bahasa Indonesian, dead easy. Vietnamese…I don’t think I’d want to try this in Vietnamese, I haven’t heard enough of it to wrap my head around the phonology.

              2. It was ever thus. Yelling and tub-thumping is not an indicator of quality.

                How about being a high-level kernel hacker, like Matthew Garrett is, and Sage Sharp and Valerie Aurora once were (before they peaced out due to lkml toxicity)?

                1. >(before they peaced out due to lkml toxicity)?

                  You just answered yourself. People who can’t play well with others and/or destroy the functioning culture round them are not high quality. This remains true even among hackers who are pretty rhino-skinned about poor social skills and abrasiveness.

            3. Pretty much, yeah. The way I put it is that SJWs, by and large, are normies — shit-tier normies who desperately want to get a seat at the cool kids’ table, but can’t. So they take over the nerd table instead and remake it in their own narcissistic image. Better to rule in hell than serve in heaven.

              No, they’re wannabe normies who don’t realize that “normal” doesn’t exist.

              And many of them are genuinely smart and capable people, but they’re so desperate to be “normal” that they hunker down to avoid being tall poppies in a short field. These particular ones know that they belong at the “cool kid’s table”, but they’re so desperate not to stand out that they try to drag the “cool kid’s table” to wherever they perceive “normal” to be, and try to get the cool kids to hunker down with them. And when the “cool kids” object to this, they think that it’s because the “cool kids” are trying to be cool and want to exclude them, when the fact of the matter is that the cool kid’s table is where it is because for the “cool kids”, the way things are done in normal-land *hurts*.

              And so these particular unfortunates end up posing as posers: They want to fit in with the “normies”, so they play dumb. But they want the smart people to recognize their intelligence, so they walk up and demand that their intelligence be recognized without dropping the dumb act. And the smart people just see a dumb person demanding that their merit and intelligence be recognized without proof, which is the height of rudeness in smart culture, so they get smacked down, hard.

              1. By “cool kids” I meant like Chad and Stacy, not people nerds think are legitimately cool. Think back to high school, or if the memories are too vague or painful, try watching a few John Hughes movies from the 80s, and you’ll get the idea.

                If you look at some of the screechiest voices in the SJW space — your Zoe Quinns and Randi Harpers — you’ll see a pattern emerge. Girl is narcissistic enough to structure her life around getting attention but is too ugly or crazy to get the sort of mainstream sexual attention every girl craves and only Stacys can take for granted. Girl finds nerd subculture that is full of low-tier thirsty betas who go absolutely apeshit if they discover even a modestly hot girl who’s into their hobby. Girl does not give a shit about said hobby, and makes zero effort toward actual competence in said hobby (the only programming I’ve ever seen Zoe Quinn do is posing with an unread copy of SICP on her twitter), but nevertheless demands respect and leadership and cries about harassment, misogyny, toxic masculinity, etc. when it is not given. Beta nerds white knight for girl and become little more than dispensers for the attention and validation she craves, like tiny male anglerfish clinging to the female and becoming little more than sperm emitters.

                The fact that beta nerds are attracted to intelligent women is a vulnerability these girls have learned to exploit — especially since there’s a whole subculture, hipsters, devoted to signalling that you’re more intelligent than you actually are. All it takes is the right pair of glasses, a sham personality and some choice quotes from Foucault, Chomsky, or bell hooks and she can be a brainy dream girl to the sort of nerd who doesn’t know better.

                Maybe your pattern holds truer for the sort of person who actually has displayed some sort of competence, as some of the hacker-culture entryists have.

        3. Nerd culture is not a safe space in the SJW sense of a space where your viewpoint will never be challenged. Quite the contrary; if you want whuffie in a technical nerd space, expect to have your perspective challenged and criticized all the time. And realize that there’s nothing personal in it.

          (For SJWs, everything is personal, the personal is political, and hence every criticism is a microaggression.)

          1. No, but standard nerds aren’t threatened by having our viewpoints challenged. What we can’t stand to have challenged is something else that I can’t quite put my finger on. Attitude(?) maybe, but that doesn’t seem quite right.

            1. @Jon Brase: What we can’t stand to have challenged is something else that I can’t quite put my finger on. Attitude(?) maybe, but that doesn’t seem quite right.

              I’d make it Status.

              Like anyone else, nerds will object to being looked down upon as lesser beings by broader society simply because they are nerds.

              They want to be evaluated on who they are and what they can do, not on what they are that they likely don’t have a choice about being.

              >Dennis

              1. Aye, that rings true, but it hurts because status is what we pride ourselves on giving absolutely zero fucks about. Sour grapes, I guess…

                1. >Aye, that rings true, but it hurts because status is what we pride ourselves on giving absolutely zero fucks about.

                  There is a difference. Normie status is about social games that nobody will give a shit about when all the players are dead. Our status is based on having built stuff that works.

                  1. >that nobody will give a shit about when all the players are dead

                    You are forgetting that at the root it is all about competing for reproduction. The emptiest of the empty suits I have ever saw is Justin Trudeau, but he does have three kids and they probably are getting a better start at life than 99% of people due to all the stupid games daddy plays and often wins.

                    1. If Trudeau were not the son of a famous person, you wouldn’t know his name. So it’s really not the games daddy plays; it’s the games grand-daddy played.

                2. Jon Brase: Not exactly.

                  Giving absolutely zero fucks is relative. It means that within the nerd community, what confers status in broader society is irrelevant. Nerds will certainly be concerned with their status within the nerd community, but it will be conferred and displayed in a different manner.

                  But the nerd community exists within the boundaries of a larger society, and must interact with that society. Being looked down upon for being a nerd can hurt.

                  It’s actually better these days than it once was, and being a nerd or geek is now a potential source of status in larger society. But that brings problems of its own, like the incursion of folks into nerd and geek communities because of perceived status, who don’t have the ability to do the things that get you status in nerd and geek communities in the first place.

                  >Dennis

                3. It is impossible to give zero fucks about status. However, status is in the eye of the beholder, and while usually people interpret status as status in the general mainstream society, in reality everybody has their own reference groups consisting of living, dead and fictional people, and everybody cares about status in their eyes.

                  In fact I am not really even sure there is really such a thing as general mainstream society and status in it, maybe it is just subcultures without one general mainstream culture existing.

                  For example I mentioned sometimes that it seems to me as far as vehicles vs. status go, the high status people are not those anymore who drive a Lambo but those who drive a Prius.

                  However some have expressed their opinon here that they are a small group of people living thankfully far away from where he lives. Yes, but to me that small group seems pretty influential in todays politics and all. Yet, it is not 100% clear that mainstream society exists and Prius types are high status in it. Maybe they are simply a subculture, and while the subculture is in itself influential and powerful, people outside the subculture do not share its status-assigning opinions.

                  I don’t know. To quote Spandrell from spandrell.com, we are being ruled precisely by the kind of people who liked, enjoyed going to school. Partially because they were the cool and popular kids. But cool and popular kids were not, in some sense, actually cool and popular. Everybody pretended to like them but few really did. It was very much like a stock exchange of popularity, you pretended to like people because you expected that expressing public like for them makes you yourself likeable. Schelling-points?

            2. > No, but standard nerds aren’t threatened by having our viewpoints challenged.

              Emacs SUCKS.

        4. I don’t really know about hacker culture as such, but programmer culture in general stopped being a safe space for standard nerds long ago, far before SJW entryism, as the numbers of programmers swelled exponentially and thus more and more normies got recruited. This was far, far before SJWery.

          Not only hackerdom or programming, even “IT” or “computers” in general used to be normie-free spaces, hence the joke “The profession is getting all watered down, some of the latest hires even have girlfriends.”

          Textbook example is DHH of Rails fame (and actually got some kind of a hacker of the year award for it) https://dhh.dk handsome guy with hot wife and a hobby of car racing, about as non-nerdy as possible. Yet an excellent programmer in his own, rather “opinionated” way.

          After a lot of thinking of what makes nerds nerdy, I eventually came to accept the popular opinion that it is some amount of autism spectrum. A very light amount actually. Basically it just results in overly literal-mindedness: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/schrute-facts but “not getting it” leads to social isolation. This makes one excellent at programming as computers, too, are basically overly literal-minded autistic genii, one simply has to be a bit autistic to be good at it as non-autistic people would tend to be frustrated that the computer does what they literally say and not what they mean. At least that’s what I thought until I realized there are excellent non-autistic programmers from ESR to DHH. It is possible that some people are capable of switching in and out of literal-minded and non-literal-minded mode.

          Actually I can do that too. For me autistic literal-mindedness was just a slower learning curve, 30+ I got better and better at reading between the lines and getting the “joke”. [1] However, apparently some people like ESR are doing it the other way around, not having been born literal-minded but yet somehow learned to be when it is necessary (math, programming) later on.

          Before computers became a thing, nerdy people were either into STEM, or in some cases just bookwormery, as in the case of written text the literal meaning and the real meaning is closer to each other. Okay, reading between the lines is still necessary but the gap is narrower in written text as the writer cannot rely on body language and suchlike to get the real meaning across. For example, if you read Dante’s bio on Wiki and then his De Monarchia, it is not really hard to figure out that all his biblican praises to imperial monarchy boil down to giving the middle finger to his personal rivals, the guelf politicians of Florence.

          For this reason, intellectuals, bookworms were IMHO usually a bit on the spectrum. If you like books more than parties, that is often because the real vs. literal meaning gap is narrower.

          [1] It also helped that I learned the theory of how human communication works. Basically in our subconscious there is a module that is obsessed about social status. However our conscious minds are rational and are constantly rationalizing the input from the Social Calculus Module. And we are living in a period of history where sounding rational is in itself high-status creating an interesting feedback loop. The result is that we see people engaging in heated debates quoting 143 statistics of why sportsball team is better than your sportsball team. The trick is not take these entirely seriously, while they sound like those stats are the rational reason for theirs being objectively better, in reality the social calculus module is just emitting “my gang yay, your gang boo” signals and the rest is rationalization. So all this you can ignore or take it as a fun game to play if you feel like playing. But if you want to put people into an actually rational mood for solving a technical problem, you have to frame things so that for them it is somewhere between status-neutral to status-positive, but not overly so, as then you get irrational over-enthusiasm. Also, the harder trick is finding out status in the eyes of exactly which reference group?

          1. >one simply has to be a bit autistic to be good at it as non-autistic people would tend to be frustrated that the computer does what they literally say and not what they mean.

            “Non autistic” people are stupid fucking morons. They also hate anyone with a brain. All they want to do is cummm in muuhh wuuuhhman. They’ll sell their family out for a dollar (because a dollar gets them closer to muuhh wuhhman)

            1. >“Non autistic” people are stupid fucking morons.

              Now, now. I’m neurotypical. You going to call me a moron?

              Neurotypicals aren’t actually all stupid. It just looks that way because so many of them are constantly running in the sociosexual-status hamster wheel, you’ve got that much right. But some have enough brain despite that attention-suck to do things you would find interesting.

              Readily verified observational fact: there are neurotypicals capable enough to do the things you find interesting. Follow the logic; compared to them, you’re the stupid one – they can play where you can’t. It’s true this is a tiny minority of neurotypicals I’m describing, still you ought to think about what their existence implies and maybe cultivate a little less arrogance.

              1. You’re not autistic, but I wouldn’t call you neurotypical

                At the risk of Stallmanesque well-actuallyism, some in the autism advocacy community have coined the term “allistic” to describe those without one of our particular range of afflictions. You may wish to use that term.

          2. The result is that we see people engaging in heated debates quoting 143 statistics of why sportsball team is better than your sportsball team. The trick is not take these entirely seriously, while they sound like those stats are the rational reason for theirs being objectively better, in reality the social calculus module is just emitting “my gang yay, your gang boo” signals and the rest is rationalization.

            And nerds don’t do this? Vi vs. emacs?

            1. @Jeff Read And nerds don’t do this? Vi vs. emacs?

              I think everyone might do it.

              Some programmer forums coined the notion “Religious Argument!”, and invoked it when that sort of argument came up. They recognized that the drivers were emotional, and the underlying belief being defended resided in the same place that opinions on religion did, and arguing about them was a waste of time.. (In SF fandom, a corresponding example is the definition of SF vs fantasy. Discussing what the differences are can be a fun way to spend some time, as long as you recognize the argument will never be settled. The late SF writer Damon Knight talked about SF being “What I point at when I say the word”.)

              Emotional beliefs are not amenable to rational argument, because the beliefs themselves aren’t rational. Trying to counter beliefs like that with rational argument and facts is a non-starter, and don’t try.

              And some beliefs are so deeply held that they are part of the holder’s “sense of self”. Questions of the belief can be seen as attacks on the person holding them, and produce a violent response.

              This is what makes psychotherapy a sometimes dangerous profession for the practitioner. The process of psychotherapy revolves around getting at those unconscious beliefs, and making them conscious and explicit, so the beliefs can be examined and perhaps modified.

              We all carry around an unconscious notion of “This is who I am, and how I fit into the world.” That notion is formed beginning at a non-verbal age, absorbed from the adults around us It is usually set in broad outline between 5 and 7 years of age. Once we have adopted the belief, our prime goal is to defend it. Evidence that supports our belief is clutched happily to our chest. Evidence against it is ignored or rejected.

              The issue, of course, is how well our belief system corresponds to external reality. Beliefs somewhat incongruent with reality produce behavior we call neurotic. Beliefs really incongruent with reality produce behavior we call psychotic. Adjusting beliefs like that to correspond to reality is a complex and very difficult process, and may take years to accomplish if it happens at all.

              >Dennis

              1. >In SF fandom, a corresponding example is the definition of SF vs fantasy. Discussing what the differences are can be a fun way to spend some time, as long as you recognize the argument will never be settled. The late SF writer Damon Knight talked about SF being “What I point at when I say the word”.)

                I used to think this was a perpetual religious war too, until Greg Bear actually cracked the problem in 1994. Rough quote:

                Science fiction is the branch of fantastic literature which affirms the rational knowability of the universe, and has as its most characteristic emotional feature the ‘sense of wonder moment’ in which the reader feels he has achieved a new and larger comprehension of the universe.

                You have to pay attention to every word of that definition; notably, “knowability” without “rational” does not suffice, and you need to know that “fantastic literature” involves the creation of a counterfactual secondary world. But once you have grasped it, you’ll find that it not only bears a lot of weight as a genre characterization but greatly illuminates neighboring genres such as fantasy and horror.

                  1. >By this definition, then, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality would be SF rather than fantasy.

                    I have no difficulty with that conclusion.

                    Another recent edge case would be Brendan Sanderson’s Final Empire books Marketed as “hard fantasy” but well within the ambit of SF. This becomes clearer as the sequence progresses.

  15. I do believe the dream is real and that The Man Who Sold The Moon will eventually happen, sort of; but I really doubt it will be Musk, mostly because of the record he has already built up with Tesla, Solar City, and the Boring Company as well as SpaceX, and what it says about his character and his financial know-how.

    In fact, I’m surprised he’s not already in prison for insider dealing, from when he had Tesla bail out Solar City (mostly at the expense of Tesla’s other shareholders, to benefit himself as the only major investor in Solar City). And with Tesla’s self-driving feature causing repeated wrecks and Tesla cars spontaneously catching fire, I’d be surprised if his next move isn’t to rescue Tesla by tapping the SpaceX treasury.

    Then there’s the fact that both Solar City and Tesla largely designed their products to make money from federal subsidies and not the marketplace.

    But at least he hasn’t been #MeTooed yet. ;-b

  16. In fact, I’m surprised he’s not already in prison for insider dealing, from when he had Tesla bail out Solar City (mostly at the expense of Tesla’s other shareholders, to benefit himself as the only major investor in Solar City). And with Tesla’s self-driving feature causing repeated wrecks and Tesla cars spontaneously catching fire, I’d be surprised if his next move isn’t to rescue Tesla by tapping the SpaceX treasury.

    I wish your last thought wasn’t credible, that SpaceX is what he’s utterly serious about, but he had SpaceX bail out Solar City before he had Tesla buy it.

    Then there’s the fact that both Solar City and Tesla largely designed their products to make money from federal subsidies and not the marketplace.

    Quoting Jim of Jim’s Blog:

    Immediately after the [English Restoration], we see Ayn Rand’s heroic archetype appear, the scientist engineer CEO, mobilizing other people’s capital and other people’s labor to advance technology and make that technology widely available. Often these were people who before the restoration had competed for superior holiness, (analogous to Musk’s subsidized and money burning tesla, solar panels, and solar batteries), but after the restoration competed for creating technology to produce value (analogous to Musk’s reusable booster rocket.)

    (If you read the above link, note how he confounds Pilgrims with Puritans, is called on it, and ignores the correction; rhetoric first, facts second if at all.)

    And:

    Musk is a serial scammer, always hyping technology that does not exist and that he has no real intention of producing, but his reusable booster was a real technological achievement….

    Musk’s electric cars and solar city are scams, which could have only produced a profit through Hillary’s crony capitalism, but he really did intend the BFR, the re-usable earth to orbit and back again rocket.

    Between his reckless behavior, be it “pedo guy” or not playing ball with the SEC, SolarCity panel installations burning buildings due to awful workmanship and maintenance, the genuine scams like Tesla’s “autopilot” pushed way past what it can do…. Latest is people using its remote “come to me” feature witnessing in horror their car crashing into things or going down the wrong way in a one way parking lot lane (it does have a deadman switch, if you take you finger off the button, it stops).

    Add the debacle of the Tesla’s recent production, which includes not making enough? any? spare parts for owners to repair damage like produced by the above, the Gigafactory on Panasonic’s side that has a 15% scrap rate very late in the production process (that’s an appalling story which makes me question the quality of the 3 million per day that do get turned over to Tesla, then again Musk and company plan for individual cells going kaboom as he noted in his advice to Boeing WRT to the 787), and everything I hear about Tesla’s recent financials in the light of the proceeding, it’s questionable he’ll stay in control of SpaceX long enough to see the “Starship” though, and unlikely to the point of colonizing Mars.

    As Jim notes, SpaceX now has the Eye of Soros on it, although that’s not yet showing up in the results (the Crew Dragoon blowup was stupidity, but easily patched to be a one use “get me away from the exploding booster!” necessary function, the land it on a tail of fire function already abandoned for NASA).

    But he has shown what you could do if you set up the right incentives, which NASA and the military ordering ballistic missiles never did for switching those rockets to general commercial use, and he’s built a cadre of aerospace engineers that we lost some time ago, Jerry Pournelle noted at some point about his 70,000 lb SSTO concept that it could no longer be built with the available talent. I witnessed this first hand in the first phase long before then, the early 1970’s aerospace bust, when my family hired an laid-off electronic engineer who was delighted to get back to that field after doing everything including cleaning toilets to avoid becoming homeless. Learned a lot from him.

    1. Meh.

      “Elon is done!” is getting almost as overplayed as “Trump is done!”.

      And that is before we figure in the FUD that has been generated by the short sellers. May they end up bankrupt and penniless.

      1. On the other hand, as we saw from the Theranos fiasco, in today’s business environment it’s possible for a company whose underlying product is 100% fraudulent to stay a media and Wall Street darling for a decades. Maybe even longer, after all it collapsed due to a WSJ expose, not due to running out of money.

        1. @Eugine Neir: That’s not unique to the current business climate. It’s been true about as far back as you care to go. Remember the “dot COM” bubbles of the 90’s, where the notion was a that the Internet was a whole new paradigm, and stock prices would rise forever, in absence of little details like revenues and profits? It took a while for reality to set in.

          From what I could tell, the woman behind Theranos was a typical phenomenon. She had and sold a bright idea that had to potential to revolutionize the industry she was in, assuming the underlying idea was valid and the research proved it out.

          But the research didn’t prove it, independent studies could not reproduce the results she was selling, and the roof fell in. She then dug herself into an ever deeper hole because the last thing she could admit was that she was wrong and she failed, and others would all point and laugh at her. (It’s hardly the first time that ever happened, either. Most of the others it happened to historically were males, by why should a woman be an exception?)

          The usual claim is that the market is rational. Thing like this get used as evidence the market isn’t rational. The market as a whole is rational, but there is no guarantee actors in it are. They might all be total loons, and sometimes are.

          >Dennis

          1. >The market as a whole is rational, but there is no guarantee actors in it are. They might all be total loons, and sometimes are.

            The important point is that markets punish irrationality. As you say, this does not guarantee individual rationality, but over time it means aggregate behavior is asymptotically rational.

            1. @esr: Indeed, markets punish irrationality. We see that in things like market “corrections”, and lots of grimly amusing responses by those getting corrected about why what is happening to them wasn’t their fault and they weren’t idiots for doing what they did.

              I haven’t looked, but I suspect there is a fair amount of commentary from folks who bought into Theranos along that line.

              >Dennis

              1. But let’s not forget Keynes’ comment that “Markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.” In a social mania like the one that has had the West in its grips for so long, since the Left purged “Reaganomics” from its vocabulary….

                But outlaws like Theranos are a bit more difficult, and it was so outlaw that when it set up a “real” testing lab it didn’t hire the legally certified people to run it, follow the legal requirements in running it, etc. The real trick was scientific knowledge, if you didn’t have a sufficient background to realize instantly after reading how what they were trying to do was flatly impossible, who were you going to believe?

                Although watching for illegitimate behavior is useful, and Theranos had its share. For the current example playing out, WeWork’s now ex-CEO but still chairman of the board and I think majority voting share owner was recognized as a self-dealing scammer long ago, buying real estate that WeWork then leased. I’ve seen estimates that he’s extracted up to $700 million out of the company.

            2. I’d rather say they eliminate than punish. It is not about incentives – those tend to be social – but redirecting resources from one market actor to another. It is really not about making bad investments and losing them is painful – it is about having less resources to make bad investments with.

              Anyway, the efficiency of the culling behavior of the market depends on how quickly people are coming up with newer and newer versions of irrationality. I suspect when tech progress goes really quickly, a lot of new and new kinds of irrationality do get generated and they don’t get culled quickly enough. Not saying government would be better, just saying neither would be very efficient. Sort of imagine how Darwinian evolution works in the presence of a very high fertility rate and a very high mutation rate. Not too well?

          2. I’m not sure that’s still true. Specifically, I’m starting to suspect that due to QE, if a company is close enough to the Central Bank spigot for the Cantillon effect to kick in, it can continue running based on rolling over debt and investment without making any actual profit nearly indefinitely, or at least until the whole system collapses.

            1. @Eugine Near That’s nothing particularly new. But being “close enough to the Central Bank spigot for the Cantillon effect to kick in” usually means being politically well connected. That’s nothing new, either. Lots of examples exist of high ranking politicians doing favors for heavy campaign contributors, like funneling government money their way to keep them from going belly up.

              >Dennis

              1. Politicians are small fry. The real power is the permanent bureaucracy.

                That’s nothing new

                What’s new is how much of the economy is operating in this way. It used to be that large companies went bust due to running out of money rather than due to being the subject of a WSJ expose. Heck, there used to be a whole cottage industry of turnaround specialists who would use drastic measures to save or attempt or save companies that were running out of money.

  17. Regarding the project requirement that the vehicle go to Mars and return. Okay. But does all the crew have to?

    Are there no volunteers for a mission that includes, as the reputational-reward, the chance to be among the first to plant their bones in a grave on Mars? Go, stay, run the equipment needed for re-fueling and finding air and water, making tools and products, growing potatoes in manure … go, live as long a possible upon the new world, die fulfilled, having made a home for others to follow? Some later others of whom, maybe, also stay, and some of whom choose to go back. And maybe even some who commute. And of course for some later posterity that uses the foundations laid near the first graveyard on Mars as a springboard to someplace even farther out.

    An Andy Weir “Martian” scenario, but on purpose.

    1. I don’t understand why I keep seeing above-ground buildings being proposed for Mars colonization. The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress got it right: just carve the homes out of the bedrock underground. I don’t know the details about Mars, but on the Moon, instead of the wild temperature swings on the surface, there is a stable -27C or so underground, something Siberians or Alaskans are pretty used to dealing with. Living underground also helps with meteorites not breaching and the air not escaping and all that.

      Granted we don’t have those super efficient cutters as in that novel. But I would just send a robot ship that deploys solar panels and deploys a bunch of dog sized robots with either spider legs and just normal drills and similar tools, and they just periodically connect to the solar charger to recharge. And then just wait. They won’t be very quick but in a few years they could carve out a pretty decent underground city. And send the humans only then.

    2. @Pouncer:
      Regarding the project requirement that the vehicle go to Mars and return. Okay. But does all the crew have to?

      I don’t know if this project is still alive (last I heard they were having some financial difficulties), but the Mars One Project intends to do exactly that.

  18. @Eugine_Nier: What’s new is how much of the economy is operating in this way. It used to be that large companies went bust due to running out of money rather than due to being the subject of a WSJ expose. Heck, there used to be a whole cottage industry of turnaround specialists who would use drastic measures to save or attempt or save companies that were running out of money.

    Those turnaround specialists still exist. There are various outfits who are subjects of controversy who buy distressed companies and use drastic measures to turn them around, with the intent of selling them for a hefty profit once they are a going concern again. (Bain Capital is probably an apposite example, though that’s not all they do.) .The turnaround measures tend to include downsizing and large layoffs, so they aren’t well thought of. The fact that if they didn’t intervene, the company would go belly up and everyone would be out of a job doesn’t seem to penetrate to the objectors.

    Another tactic is the Leveraged Buyout, where the company is taken private to escape market demands for results the company can’t produce, and the restructuring takes place under the radar. (A grimly amusing example is Dell computers, who went private in a LBO to escape market demands it couldn’t meet. But recent tax law changes have made that status untenable, so Dell is looking at an IPO to get back into the public markets.)

    But there are also those who do their best to cover up the losses and keep everyone from realizing the company is running out of money, using fraudulent accounting to disguise the truth and get financing. That sort gets the WSJ expose.

    Again, this is nothing new.

    >Dennis

  19. Technical site layout note: long comment threads are hard/inconvenient ro read in this site layout as comment’s lines get broken at a word or two length and so are the squares around them. This make one read a line vertically.

  20. ESR:
    guix.gnu.org/blog/2019/joint-statement-on-the-gnu-project/

    They’re really trying to take everything from RMS.

    1. https://ethicalsource.dev/

      “The Ethical Evolution of OpenSource”

      Also Christine Peterson created the opensource movement (by extension: all free software), according to the white women. Maaaallleeesssssssss had nothing to do with it.

      I told you not to have the women involved. Men do all the actual work; the women take the credit and rule over the men. That’s how whites live. Man = beast. Woman = slavemaster.

    2. The reason why has a lot less to do with his views on Epstein (many gender studies theorists have even more horrifying views about child sexuality and paedophilia) or his “behavior” towards women and more to do with the fact that he would not adopt a Code of Conduct for the GNU Project. Stallman is a lefty in the vein of Chomsky. He puts individual rights and freedoms first. Codes of Conduct are mainly tools for social-justice enforcement and are promoted by those who favor social justice over individual liberty.

      1. @Jeff Read: The coverage I saw relating to RMS’s resignation from his position at MIT left me thinking his real problem was being clueless enough about the politics to defend Epstein on an internal MIT mailing list. His defense may be factual and accurate, but the lynch mob convened to pillory Epstein will not accept it – it is contrary to their world view and agenda. By defending Epstein, he became another to be cast into the Outer Darkness.

        It’s possible RMS understood what can of worms he was opening and what might occur. I’ve met him, and doubt it. ESR knows him far better and may be able to provide a better picture.

        >Dennis

        1. >It’s possible RMS understood what can of worms he was opening and what might occur. I’ve met him, and doubt it. ESR knows him far better and may be able to provide a better picture.

          I don’t think he clued in either.

        2. My short response is that the Epstein thing was the cover needed for an ouster that was a long time coming.

          My longer response would involve mentioning that RMS never defended Epstein, he defended Minsky. Epstein he thought of as a “serial rapist”. The fact that RMS’s opinion had to be creatively edited by the press to create a more sensational story should be a clue. Journalists collaborate with SJWs all the time; google “GameJournoPros”.

        3. > RMS’s resignation from his position at MIT left me thinking his real problem was being clueless enough about the politics to defend Epstein on an internal MIT mailing list.

          What’s publicly available about MIT Media Center’s financing looks downright skeevy. It doesn’t have the right smell for “money laundering”, but there’s a bunch of things about it that I find questionable.

          It’s entirely possible that, far from being clueless, Stallman has chosen to leave before people start poking around asking pointed questions nobody wants to answer.

          1. Well, while I was at MIT, the Media Lab had the reputation for mostly producing presentations catering to suits and journalists. With most of their experiments consisting of badly duplicating work done by more competent researchers elsewhere at the institute.

      2. > Stallman is a lefty in the vein of Chomsky. He puts individual rights and freedoms first.

        Chomsky is a syndicalist and a socialist, he doesn’t give a fig about “rights” and “freedoms”.

  21. ESR: https://daringfireball.net/2019/10/correction_regarding_an_erroneous_allegation

    Apparently you “smelled disgusting”, according to a proud white woman, though she doesn’t quite recall:

    Quote:

    > OMG, I was referring to the guy on our board, so it must have been Eric Raymond. I’m so sorry. I did conflate them. I guess I assumed there were not two creepy guys talking about free and open software.
    >
    > I’m positive it was Eric Raymond. In retrospect, I don’t know for sure if he smelled or if the woman I worked with and who was propositioned by him merely found him disgusting.

    Can you just sue all these women for libel, please.

  22. [popped out for readability]

    However, I caution against trying this with Chinese unless you have Frodo ear – that is, you know you can accurately recognize and reproduce speech sounds that are not in the inventory of a language you speak. It’s easy in Japanese, which has as simple and regular a sound system as Italian or Finnish. But Chinese phonology is tricky, you could easily end up with your best effort producing a wince-inducing parody – and that’s before we even get to the tone contours.

    I wonder how well I’d do. Mom was born and raised in Hanoi, and Dad worked as a Vietnamese translator in the Army. They’d speak to each other every so often. I picked up a little Vietnamese, nowhere near enough to make complete sentences, but I did hear enough of it that I think I’m familiar with its inventory. Combine with a lifetime of playing the piano and being irritated when people sing off-key, and I’d say I’ve got tonals down. I can even do that weird “Nguyen” sound that makes me want to blow my nose afterward.

    So now I’m wondering if Chinese would have anything I couldn’t notice. (Or mimic, which is another issue. I hear rolled Spanish Rs just fine, but I have the hardest time saying them.)

    Also, I know there have to be a lot of Chinese dialects, but I couldn’t name one except by luck. And I imagine Xi speaks what would be their analog to Midwestern English.

    1. @Paul Brinkley: Also, I know there have to be a lot of Chinese dialects, but I couldn’t name one except by luck. And I imagine Xi speaks what would be their analog to Midwestern English.

      There are a variety. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_varieties_of_Chinese

      Xi will speak standard Mandarin, which is effectively the court language in which law and politics are conducted, and likely will use simplified Chinese characters to write in it. Other dialects will be spoken in various areas. The thing that made China possible was that while various areas might speak mutually incomprehensible dialects, they all used the same ideograms to write it.

      (And to some folks in China, Mandarin is the tongue of the oppressors who conquered their area and became the rulers.)

      Analogous issues exist in India, where something like thirty mutually incomprehensible languages are spoken. Hindi is the court language, and business is conducted in English, so it all sort of works, and India is an actual country.

      >Dennis

      1. >There are a variety.

        Also note, Paul, that the degree of mutual comprehensibility between Chinese “dialects” is not high. I’ve heard it said that, for example, Mandarin and Cantonese are about as divergent as German and Spanish. If not for political insistence, “Chinese” would be an entire language family with a pretty high level of internal variety.

        While Chinese is at an extreme in this regard (along with Arabic), “languages” that are actually collections of mutually incomprehensible dialects flying in loose formation are not unknown in Europe. Italian is the example I know from personal experience – even when I was reasonably fluent in Tuscan (the national standard, more or less) I couldn’t make out barely a word in Sicilian.

        Typically in these cases you get a cladelike structure where geographic adjacent dialects are largely mutually intelligible but divergence increases with distance; if I had known Calabrian dialect I could probably have stumbled my way through Sicilian, and vice-versa.

        It’s also typical for native speakers in contexts like that to be diglossic, moving relatively easily between their local dialect and a national standard language. I have no doubt those Sicilians would automatically have spoken intelligible Tuscan at me if they thought I needed to understand them – they might not even have been consciously aware they were code-switching when they did so.

        There are variations. Mandarin, Tuscan Italian, and Standard German have significant native-speaker populations. Modern Standard Arabic, by contrast, isn’t really a street dialect anywhere; it’s what people on television and in movies speak.

        The dialect spread in English is really quite narrow compared to most languages. You can find mutually unintelligible pairs of local dialects, but you have to work at it harder than in most other languages. And effectively every speaker can also produce a tolerable approximation of either Standard American or BBC English.

        1. “Entire language family” in the sense of Germanic or Romance, you’re saying? I can buy that.

          And, arrrrrgh. This was an actual point of contention at trivia last Thursday. We had to list the ten most commonly spoken languages in the US, and while brainstorming, I mentioned both Mandarin and Cantonese, and we blundered into just putting Cantonese which was counted as singular Chinese by the emcee – and probably counted against several teams. (What really flummoxed me? German doesn’t make the top ten.)

          You say effectively every speaker can do Standard American; I’m not quite that sure. A friend told of a documentary, I think maybe back in the 1990s, of American accents. The Appalachians required a translator. I’m not sure I believe it, but I’ve heard how isolated they can be.

          1. >“Entire language family” in the sense of Germanic or Romance, you’re saying? I can buy that.

            Yeah. Actually broader than that – there’s almost as much divergence in Chinese “dialects” as there is in the entire Western end of the Indo-European family.

            >(What really flummoxed me? German doesn’t make the top ten.)

            German is one of those languages that has been almost completely ineffective at spreading out of its “heimat” – term linguists use for ancestral homeland. Germanic languages are notoriously bad at this, with the sole exception of English.

            >The Appalachians required a translator.

            But they don’t talk that way when they’re not in the mountains, unless you ask them to. Take ’em down a few thousand feet and the accent lightens a lot. That’s kind of your clue that Appalachian is less a dialect than an accent or what sociolinguists call a “speech register”, one of several sets of speech production habits a user of one language carries around to be elicited by different social circumstances.

            1. I think AAVE is the same. The “white voice” from Sorry to Bother You is a thing.

              In college I befriended one of the cafeteria ladies. She was black. One day I overheard her talking to a coworker, also black, and found them quite unintelligible. I said to her, “You whiten your speech when I’m around, don’t you? Because my white ears can’t understand when you’re talking to your friends.”

              Similarly, many years ago there was a TV special on with longtime friends Oprah Winfrey and Gayle King. The accents of both women were more pronounced when they were talking to each other than what they used in their general-audience television appearances (King was a Connecticut news anchor at the time.)

          2. @Paul Brinkley: “Entire language family” in the sense of Germanic or Romance, you’re saying? I can buy that.

            Yep. It gets odder than that. I talked to a guy years back who described a construction project on Montreal. The construction workers would mostly be French speaking Metis. The project hired French foremen from Paris. The version of French spoken in Quebec has diverged remarkably little from the French spoken in Paris when the French colonized Canada. The version spoken in Paris currently has diverged a lot. They wound up sending back the French foremen and hiring English speaking foremen, so at least it was explicit that different languages were being spoken. :-p

            Arabic is another can of worms. I believe there are parts of the Koran no one currently alive can understand, because they are in a really ancient Arabic dialect. And some Arabic dialects have diverged enough that some linguists think they now are different languages. The closest thing to a standard Arabic is the flavor spoken on Egyptian TV, which is seen throughout much of the Arab world. But as Eric commented, it’s not what the locals speak at home.

            The linguist joke is that a language is a dialect with an army and navy.

            Germanic and Romance languages are all part of an overall family called Indo European. Linguists have identified a proto Indo-European language from which they all derived, and using sophisticated techniques have been able to compile a vocabulary of about 2,500 words. (It’s complicated by the fact that proto language apparently had a consonant that has since disappeared.) A recent read here is “The Horse, the Wheel, and Language”. The questions about the proto Indo European language are who spoke it, when was it spoken, and were did the speakers live? The author is an archeologist (and married to a linguist, IIRC,) who thinks he’s discovered the answers to those questions.

            There is no way Cantonese alone should be accepted as singular Chinese. And yes, Cantonese and Mandarin are quite different. A friend speaks Mandarin, and commented about the amount of Cantonese used in Chinatown stores. One reason is that Cantonese is rich in curses. :-)

            I don’t think every speaker can do Standard American either, in the sense of speaking it, though all should understand it when spoken. When I was in elementary school in Philadelphia, a teacher commented that I had no accent. In fact, I did, but it was the Midwestern standard you heard from TV news anchors. What she noticed was that I didn’t have the local accent. Despite growing up in Philadelphia, I never acquired the local Philadelphia accent. I’ve met folks from elsewhere I am pretty certain could not accurately reproduce a Midwestern Standard accent when speaking. They might come close enough to be understood by someone speaking a dialect far enough removed from theirs that comprehension was difficult, but no one would mistake it for the real thing.

            >Dennis

            1. >I believe there are parts of the Koran no one currently alive can understand, because they are in a really ancient Arabic dialect.

              Probably in Syrio-Aramaic, actually. A lot of the Koran is written in Aramaic calques; I blogged about this.

              >A recent read here is “The Horse, the Wheel, and Language”.

              Excellent book, but requires some correction by the paleogenetic evidence. Read my discussion here.

            2. >I’ve met folks from elsewhere I am pretty certain could not accurately reproduce a Midwestern Standard accent when speaking.

              Not functionally necessary. I said “a tolerable approximation” of SAE or BBC English because I meant “readily mutually intelligible with a birth speaker of that reference dialect if they tone down their accent a bit”. Or to put it a bit differently, in English most “dialects” are basically accents or speech registers with a fancy hat and a handful of heirloom lexical items.

              Few languages other than English have a dialect spread so narrow that this is true. Sicilian Italian isn’t just an accent, it’s really serious lexical and grammatical divergence. Two Arabs from different regions have to switch to an MSA that nobody normally speaks. Two speakers of “Chinese” can be completely unable to communicate in speech and have to write ideographs.

              English-speakers think our narrow dialect spread is normal, so we class local speech habits as “dialects” based on differences that would seem almost absurdly fine-spun to, say, an Arab. My point is that this is not normal. Not at all. It’s not completely unique – dialect divergence in Spanish is not very high either – but it is highly unusual.

              1. My point is that this is not normal. Not at all. It’s not completely unique – dialect divergence in Spanish is not very high either – but it is highly unusual.

                Artifact of globe-spanning empires (British, Spanish) with a strong transmission of ruling culture, coupled with the rapidly-increasing rates of communication as obtained in the last 400 years to act as mutation-inhibitor?

                Which is to say, a cultural language mutation-resistance arrived at via bureaucratic necessity.

          3. German is hard to learn for others, but at least English is quite easy to learn for German-speaking people.
            So it was rather natural that the German immigrants switched to English, instead of expecting others to understand them and at least get a basic grip of the grammar.

  23. @esr: Re the distinction between SF and fantasy

    I used to think this was a perpetual religious war too, until Greg Bear actually cracked the problem in 1994. Rough quote:

    It still is a religious war, because the vast majority of folks arguing have never seen Bear’s formulation (and some may not be aware he exists.)

    I just tell folks SF and fantasy are parts of an overarching category called fantastic fiction, and there isn’t a clear dividing line between them. I can think of about six series offhand where the answer to the question “Is this SF or fantasy?” is “Yes.” :-p

    >Dennis

  24. @Jeff Read: You’re not autistic, but I wouldn’t call you neurotypical…

    At the risk of Stallmanesque well-actuallyism, some in the autism advocacy community have coined the term “allistic” to describe those without one of our particular range of afflictions. You may wish to use that term.

    Part of the problem is precisely what is neurotypical. Like a lot of other things in current society, it’s a definition in a state of flux. (And on those lines, I’m not sure there currently is the “normie” society ESR spoke of earlier.)

    Being involved in running SF cons, I interact with a lot of “on the spectrum” folks. For reasons not clear to me, many such attend the cons I run.

    The issues they present are in communications. A major hot button at SF cons currently is males behaving badly to females. A lot of that has roots in being on the spectrum.

    An on the spectrum male attends a con and sees a woman he finds attractive. His mating reflex is stimulated, and “I wonder if she’s willing to have sex with me?” will become a question.

    In our culture, the male is expected to make the first move in the mating dance. He needs to discover whether the object of his attention is legal, available, and willing to have sex with him. The mating dance is initiated.

    Most of the mating dance takes place on a non-verbal level. We discern how people are reacting to us by facial expression, tone of voice, and body language. Many on the spectrum folks simply don’t perceive those cues. They will behave in manners the woman will find offensive because they simply don’t realize they are being offensive. Code of conduct complaints follow and things drop into the toilet.

    My advice to women attending cons like that is that many males there are on the spectrum, and won’t get the non-verbal clues. Their best strategy is to simply say “I’m flattered that you find me attractive but I’m already spoken for and not available Please try elsewhere.” It’s a direct and explicit statement, easily understood, and will probably be a relief to the male involved. He won’t have to guess about how he is perceived.

    Too many women are unwilling to make that direct statement. In some cases it’s social conditioning that you aren’t supposed to be direct in those circumstances. In more pathological cases it’s fear that the rejected male will take possibly violent action against them because she rejected him. Er, not at any SF con I attend, but convincing the woman of that is quite another matter.

    (And I saw a post from an on the spectrum male elsewhere stating that he had learned to interpret facial expressions, but was backing off from trying in many cases. It was hard work, because what other folks do on an unconscious reflex level was something he had to consciously consider while interacting with others. Conscious bandwidth was limited, and attempting to understand facial expressions competed with the reasons he was interacting in the first place and what was needed to accomplish what he was attempting to do.)

    >Dennis

    1. “My advice to women attending cons like that is that many males there are on the spectrum, and won’t get the non-verbal clues.”

      That looks a lot like the “excuse” for violence against women you hear in Arab cultures: Men cannot control themselves, so women are to blame when they are violated.

      If you are bright enough to visit a con/conference etc., you should have learned to control yourself. If you cannot read the non-verbal cues, then you should wait until you get the right verbal cues.

      And for what it is worth, I understand that women consider almost all men to be “on the spectrum”, at least compared to women.

    2. No. You don’t understand it, unfortunately. The situation is not like a man of average attractiveness not picking up cues (because he is from a different culture etc.) Rather most autistic men are considered by women so extremely unattractive, they react with a strong visceral disgust to not only any indication of sexual interest, but even to the very idea that such a critter has sexual interests at all. It is probably the “genes like this shouldn’t be reproduce, ever” evolutionary module firing on max output.

      And we are living in age where people think they are not responsible for their own emotions, their emotions are automatic reactions to the actions of others. In an age where people say “you made me feel sad” and mean it very literally. This emotivism or subjectivism or dunnowhat is typical of this age. People forget that you can learn to control your emotions e.g. with meditation. So if an action of another person made one feel bad, it follows the other person did something bad. Hence it is felt as sexual harassment, assault etc.

      Suppose an action must reach -10 utilons / hedons in the person targeted in order to call it harasssment. It means if a man of -1 attractiveness is moderately pushy, 5 push, that is still kinda okay. If a man of -1 attractiveness is pushing hard, 10 push, then it feels like harassment. If a man of -2 attractiveness is pushing moderately, 5 push, feels like harassment. If a man of -10 attractiveness is doing something very very mild and normal, say 1, it also feels like harassment.

      Example: https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester-news/touching-teenage-girl-way-home-17061816

      The old solution was this: lay down clear rules of etiquette. If someone goes beyond, you can complain. If someone does not go beyond but still makes you feel bad: suck it up, ask politely to stop, or just stand up and leave.

  25. My advice to women attending cons like that is that many males there are on the spectrum, and won’t get the non-verbal clues. Their best strategy is to simply say “I’m flattered that you find me attractive but I’m already spoken for and not available Please try elsewhere.” It’s a direct and explicit statement, easily understood, and will probably be a relief to the male involved. He won’t have to guess about how he is perceived.

    My advice to you is to shitcan giving advice to women. They do not like being patronized, or made to feel they have to tolerate behavior that makes them uncomfortable or fearful. Give advice to the nerds instead. Start with “If you don’t know whether a woman is interested in having sex with you, assume the answer is no and move on.”

    Too many women are unwilling to make that direct statement. In some cases it’s social conditioning that you aren’t supposed to be direct in those circumstances. In more pathological cases it’s fear that the rejected male will take possibly violent action against them because she rejected him. Er, not at any SF con I attend, but convincing the woman of that is quite another matter.

    This is not a pathological case. Violent retaliation against women who reject men is common enough that it is now considered a woman’s right to say nothing or to “ghost” any man she isn’t interested in, if not something of an imperative for her own self-preservation.

    Read the room, mate. The new standard adopted by society is zero tolerance for creepy behavior. If you have a history of making women feel threatened or uncomfortable, then you are considered a danger to all women and society will want nothing to do with you. Every man is Schrödinger’s rapist until he proves himself trustworthy beyond any doubt. Just because you have good intentions doesn’t mean you will even get a chance to prove yourself. Tough. Life isn’t fair. (Also a good one to tell your autistic friends.)

    You have a choice before you: Run a con that’s welcoming to women, or run a con that’s welcoming to creepy nerds. You have to choose one. You can’t have both.

    (And I saw a post from an on the spectrum male elsewhere stating that he had learned to interpret facial expressions, but was backing off from trying in many cases. It was hard work, because what other folks do on an unconscious reflex level was something he had to consciously consider while interacting with others. Conscious bandwidth was limited, and attempting to understand facial expressions competed with the reasons he was interacting in the first place and what was needed to accomplish what he was attempting to do.)

    I know that feeling. Programming is a profession that’s gone from being friendly to autistics (and even allistic introverts) to almost completely hostile to them, because in the 21st century, software is developed by teams, not individuals, so the emphasis is on communication and collaboration. People skills and EQ are at least as valuable as technical know-how in this space.

    1. >Every man is Schrödinger’s rapist until he proves himself trustworthy beyond any doubt.

      “Every woman is a castrating bitch who will plunder your wallet and break your heart.” This doesn’t sound any less paranoid or malignant when it’s turned around – and feminists who actually believe it end up as crazy cat ladies wondering what happened to their fertile period and drowning their sorrows in box wine.

      In fact almost nobody actually believes this; we can tell because if it were a common belief mixed socialization in our culture would look much more like it does in the nastiest low-trust societies where that fear is actually close to being justified.

      We are only told that that “Schrödinger’s rapist” is a widespread belief as a power play, a way to put anyone with a penis at a political disadvantage.

      1. “In fact almost nobody actually believes this;”

        If you socialize with grizzlies or big cats, then you must always be on your guard. Reports of people who do socialize with big predators and get mauled are a dime a dozen.

        Men are not grizzlies, but a typical man can kill a typical woman with his bare hands. Many women need time to forget that, especially those who have experienced it first or second hand.

        “In the United States, domestic violence is the leading cause of injury to women between the ages of 15 and 44.”
        “An estimated 1.3 million women are victims of physical assault by an intimate partner each year.”
        http://www.clarkprosecutor.org/html/domviol/facts.htm

        1. Men are not grizzlies, but a typical man can kill a typical woman with his bare hands. Many women need time to forget that, especially those who have experienced it first or second hand.

          Also Winter: “I want to deny women the means to protect themselves”.

          1. The women I know prefer to not have to defend themselves by force by a very wide margin.

            Having to shoot someone you know tends to result in trauma. I know some men prefer to shoot people over preventing violence. But women seem to abhor that option.

              1. > I see there are elastic uses of words like “people” and “violence” at work.

                Not sure what you are meaning here. I use:
                Violence as in “hospitalization” and “death”.
                People like “85% of domestic violence victims are women. “

                  1. If current statistics are reliable, that proportion is approaching 50%, at least in the middle-to-lower-upper-classes who ultimately define common culture.

                    Granted, I have a strong self-bias on this, being a man who was in a physically, and in all other ways, abusive marriage for 19 years, (and I’m not a stereotypical “beta”… I’m rather socially dominant, actually.)

                    Also, one must consider the fact that domestic violence is a huge problem in lesbian relationships.

                    Bottom line, there’s a hell of a lot more going on here than just testosterone.

                    –Shannon

            1. The women I know prefer to not have to defend themselves by force by a very wide margin.

              Well that’s nice and all, but you are postulating a world where that simply isn’t an option. I don’t get to make my decisions based on owning a personal starship no matter how much I’d like to have one.

              I know some men prefer to shoot people over preventing violence.

              Cute false dichotomy.

              But women seem to abhor that option.

              I suspect this has more to do with the women you know. Over here rates of concealed carry among women are skyrocketing.

              1. “Well that’s nice and all, but you are postulating a world where that simply isn’t an option.”

                I go to meetings, international conferences, where the behavior described here from “cons” is simply not seen. I actually asked several women there and they had never seen that too.

                Neither work-place harassment nor domestic violence are solved by shooting the culprits. The same for obnoxious or dangerous behaviors at “cons”.

                1. Men are not grizzlies, but a typical man can kill a typical woman with his bare hands.

                  You really should make up your mind on what context you are talking about.

                  Neither work-place harassment nor domestic violence are solved by shooting the culprits. The same for obnoxious or dangerous behaviors at “cons”.

                  Well domestic violence covers a wide enough range to have both “stern talking to”, and “empty a magazine into the scumbag” as solutions to various problems within it. But for the rest of the quote; doesn’t anyone remember The Slap?

                  Because (via fiction) I remember The Slap. But I guess that is violence and thus no different than torturing someone to death for a week or something.

                  1. We used to have this notion of “make the punishment fit the crime” Erasing information about the severity of an offense benefits the wrong groups, and can spell doom for ordinary people. I’ve talked about this before. Note that there are adults on the sex offender registry in the US because they tried to kiss a girl at elementary-school age. And there are also reports of school cops arresting six-year-olds.

                    1. Yes, this is a special case of anarco-tyranny. Notice also what happened to Stallman for writing an email that could maybe be construed as defending Epstein, while Epstein’s actual clients seem unlikely to suffer any consequences.

                2. Academic or professional conferences have an implied expectation of professional behavior. There is a much more relaxed, casual atmosphere at fandom cons, which have girls dressing up in sexy cosplay, etc.

                  That said, resolving ambiguity about what kinds of casual and social behavior are acceptable at a fandom con, including sexuality/flirtation, etc. is (or rather should be) the reason why these cons adopt codes of conduct.

            2. The women I know prefer to not have to defend themselves by force by a very wide margin.

              Of course they do. They outsource the use of force to men. This is part of human nature and why historically, in most societies, war was almost always waged only by men, the women only taking up arms when the homefront was breached and there were no men around to protect them. More to the point, we all would rather not visit harm on another person, if we are civilized people of sound mind. But violence, or the threat thereof, underpins every aspect of even our civilized society, and you can’t abstract it away totally; there will always be the risk that violence will visit you whether you be its perpetrator or its victim.

              There’s a libertarian theory of feminism which states that women’s rights only really became possible in a context of pervasive civilian gun ownership, because a gun allowed a woman to wield force just as effectively as a man. “The great equalizer” as it were.

              If the women in a society were dependent on men for personal protection, as most women were before the gun, then they were beholden to those men for defense of their rights, but the gun upset that balance and made women capable of defending their own rights. And in fact, even if you look at pre-gun societies, those whose martial culture favored the bow over the sword and spear admitted more women warriors.

              Force, or the threat of force, underlies all personal defense, all concept of rights that can be protected, and all concept of law itself. The infrastructure that keeps your Dutch society humming along and the dike pumps turning to keep the sea at bay, all that is paid for with money taken from you and every other Dutch citizen by force. You may not mind it — you clearly (and justifiably) prefer to live in such a society — but that doesn’t make it any less true. If you choose not to pay your taxes, men — with guns — will come and take you away and put you in a cell.

              D’you think the Japanese are so polite and nonviolent are that way because of genetics? Fuck no. They’re that way because centuries ago, a samurai could slice you in half if you looked at him funny, so being polite and showing that you mean no harm became culturally-grained survival traits.

              Even the far left’s thought leaders realized the role of violence in civil society. “Power flows from the barrel of a gun” was a meme coined by frickin’ Mao.

        2. Men are not grizzlies, but a typical man can kill a typical woman with his bare hands. Many women need time to forget that, especially those who have experienced it first or second hand.

          Many women in modern Western societies seem to have already forgotten this, if they ever knew it in the first place. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be pushing for women in military combat roles.

      2. and feminists who actually believe it end up as crazy cat ladies wondering what happened to their fertile period and drowning their sorrows in box wine.

        Funny how that works. Almost like humans don’t function particularly well when completely alone. Or when they have zero contact with the opposite sex.

        Maybe if they had analyzed humans instead of fish and bicycles they would have noticed that.

      3. We are only told that that “Schrödinger’s rapist” is a widespread belief as a power play, a way to put anyone with a penis at a political disadvantage.

        Not everyone with a penis, shitlord. You are making the cisnormative assumption that a penis implies masculinity (or its lack implies femininity).

        (This needs a big /s. I can barely keep a straight face typing that.)

        1. Not everyone with a penis, shitlord. You are making the cisnormative assumption that a penis implies masculinity (or its lack implies femininity).

          (This needs a big /s. I can barely keep a straight face typing that.)

          /me blinks in wonderment

          I can remember when you would have earnestly bought into that. The first person I saw the use the word “cisnormative” critically in a conversation I was part of was you.

          What happened? Not that I’m complaining, mind you.

          1. Buncha things. One of them was “Sokal Squared”. Lindsey, Boghossian, and Pluckrose — all leftists, all actually interested in the issues SJWs purport to raise — basically did for social-justice academia what “Doctorin’ the TARDIS” did for the British pop charts: showed all and sundry how naked the emperor is, and how you can be accepted and even highly ranked by simply repeating the expected tropes. Their final flourish was to paraphrase a section of Mein Kampf, replacing “Jews” with “men” and “Germans” with “feminists” and adopting the expected lingustic style and citations to other papers in the field. It got accepted into publication in the Journal of Women and Social Work.

            I’m sympathetic to the plight of trans people. They’re more prone to bullying, harassment, rejection, and unprovoked violence, as well as psychological issues. “I’ve never met a trans person who isn’t fucked up somehow” is something I hear from trans people themselves. All of these things deserve and warrant sympathy. But at the end of the day, the trans community constitute a very small segment of the population. That doesn’t diminish the need to protect their rights, but it does mean that “penis=male, vag=female” is an excellent first-order heuristic, most trans people know this, and their doctors certainly do. Like crime rates among the black community, it’s become one of those blind spots of Things You Don’t Talk About for fear that mentioning it might enable bigots.

            That reminds me, stay tuned for when the truscum vs. tucute feud hits the wider community. Basically, truscum believe that gender dysphoria is a necessary condition for trans identity; tucutes do not. The tucutes will probably get the upper hand and excommunicate and deplatform their truscum counterparts from art, fiction, comic, game, and software communities as well as universities, etc. as the majority of the trans community is vilified as “transphobic”.

            Another was the unfolding saga of Zoe Quinn, who really wants to be seen as a top female game developer, comic writer, novelist, whatever she is this week, despite having no appreciable skill at any of these nor interest in developing such skill. Despite having all the earmarks of a poser, chatlogs reveal that she weaponized her “Crash Override Network”, an ostensible antiharassment service, to harass her enemies, ex-boyfriends, and anyone who might expose her, so again, the fact that she is laughably incompetent became a sort of open secret no one was allowed to publicly acknowledge. Her story culminated last month when another game developer committed suicide after she went public with sexual abuse allegations against him. The allegations were revealed to be likely false.

            I thought feminism was supposed to be about removing the obstacles that prevent capable women from doing the same things capable men do, not giving any woman who asks a free pass because vag.

            The third big thing was the Great Linux Struggle Session of 2018, especially when considered as part of a greater effort to neutralize or excommunicate the old-school hackers, which I believe it is — wretched, evil kulaks that those old-school hackers are. You’ll see more shit like this go down.

            I’m a bit surprised myself; I actually used the phrase “long march through the institutions” to describe the effectiveness of open source entryism.

            1. >I’m a bit surprised myself; I actually used the phrase “long march through the institutions” to describe the effectiveness of open source entryism.

              You give me hope. Maybe the mind-virus has done so much overt, cumulative damage that its virulence is becoming impossible to hide even from people infected with it.

              Now you’ll get to find out what it’s like to be in my shoes – so easy to see what’s going on, so hard to get anyone to actually break out of their bubble.

              1. You give me hope. Maybe the mind-virus has done so much overt, cumulative damage that its virulence is becoming impossible to hide even from people infected with it.

                At the risk of being a broken record… Gamergate really was the set of fifty foot tall flaming letters saying that Tarquin is Evil. Gamers as a culture are even deeper into “stop bothering us and let us do our thing, or at least stop treating us like the literal dregs of society” than even 2A supporters. A lot of people from every part of the political hypercube got woken up. How many can be glimpsed by the number of our current culture warriors who got their start there.

                Trump came along a couple years later and underlined it. All the “zomg gamergate my-soggy-knees elected Trump!1!!!” stories were “false but accurate”.

                The failure of the Long March is now certain. The question is how much Fire & Blood we can avoid, and how many things will be rejected because in the past they became skinsuits for said march.

                1. Gamergate in many ways was the most successful operation of the MRA’s, they had a slight change of tactics just before then and I know for a fact that a bunch of them invaded en mass when it kicked off.

                  They gave the gamers a bunch of the structure of how they were going to be attacked and the talking points of how to fight back.

                  You can still see remnants of this popping up in the culture today, watch the last Dave Chappelle special and see if you can spot the MRA talking point being slipped in that I thought would be another 10 years before it entered the zeitgeist :-D

            2. Another was the unfolding saga of Zoe Quinn, who really wants to be seen as a top female game developer, comic writer, novelist, whatever she is this week, despite having no appreciable skill at any of these nor interest in developing such skill.

              “This will be no mere personality schism, though… Rapture’s genius will be held within her DNA, able to shift into desired patterns at will. A Utopian cannot be confined to a single throw of the genetic dice. When needed, she is a composer. A dancer. An engineer. She truly will be the People’s Daughter.”

              Except, you know, without any of the relevant skills.

            3. Wow, Sarah Mei is a treat:

              PSA: “diversity of thought” is always used disingenuously. It’s in the same category (& used by the same people) as terms like “SJW” and “PC.”

              “Diversity of thought” basically means they’re going to get a bunch of white men together who disagree about stuff.

              I can smell the totalitarianism from here. But that’s probably another word she’ll tell us we’re not allowed to use.

              Is she trans or just homely?

              1. “Diversity of thought” basically means they’re going to get a bunch of white men together who disagree about stuff.

                Which is completely different from the picture of (I think) Vox editors having a meeting. The one with a dozen plus identical white women how all think the same thing.

                Or that someone like Herman Cain got taken out ASAP. Or any other of the endless list of examples.

            4. I’m sympathetic to the plight of trans people.

              So am I, in much the same way I’m sympathetic to the plight of schizophrenics. Doesn’t mean one should indulge their delusions.

              1. ” Doesn’t mean one should indulge their delusions.”

                I for one believe trans people when they say their transformation was the best thing they ever did.

                The hallmark is mental disease is unhappyness. Most Trans people feel much better after transformation. Many can even be considered cured, if you consider them ill before.

                  1. Yep, people often regret medical decisions. Even life saving ones.

                    In my country, no irreversible treatments are performed until children reach the age of 18.

                    Even good psychological care will not prevent some people making decisions they regret later on.

                    I do not know why these people regret their change. I have seen reports from (born again) religious people who regret it out of fear for god or their community. Some cannot cope with the discrimination by family and relatives. And some will simply regret what they decided earlier.

                    And many are happy with the change.

                1. I’m pretty sure some people who cut off other body parts feel much better after their amputations, too.

                2. Didn’t you also say:

                  “I’ve never met a trans person who isn’t fucked up somehow” is something I hear from trans people themselves.

                  1. You’re confusing me with Winter.

                    I know, I know. It’s not like you have a thing against those of us on the left. It’s just that we all look alike to you.

                3. Far as I know, gender transition is the only thing that seems to help. And as long as they aren’t hurting anyone else, why not?

                  Where things get sticky is in things like transgendered women competing in women’s sporting divisions. The powerlifter Janae Kroc, for instance — formerly Matt Kroc — still has a physique that will enable her to outlift any cisfemale powerlifter even in her weight class. There was recently a study that suggested transmen — people who were born female and are on testosterone — were outclassed athletically by transwomen — people who were born male and have NO testosterone, except maybe trace amounts introduced through their HRT.

                  I expect the results of this study to be quashed.

                  1. >Far as I know, gender transition is the only thing that seems to help. And as long as they aren’t hurting anyone else, why not?

                    Um, because the gender reassignment fad is spilling onto children who are being pushed into surgery before they’re anywhere near competent to make their own decisions about the matter?

                    The politics of transgenderism and how it interacts with left-liberal virtue signaling has turned into a monster that mutilates little kids. I don’t have many referents for “pure evil” outside of Communism and Naziism, but I think this counts as one.

                    1. “Um, because the gender reassignment fad is spilling onto children who are being pushed into surgery before they’re anywhere near competent to make their own decisions about the matter?”

                      Which is plain nonsense. What does happen is that after due psychiatric evaluation, puberty is delayed until the children are old enough to decide on a transformation.

                      “The politics of transgenderism and how it interacts with left-liberal virtue signaling has turned into a monster that mutilates little kids.”

                      Which is a clear demonization of doctors and parents.

                      It is clear that human suffering has to take a back seat with you to ideological hatred.

                    2. >Which is plain nonsense.

                      Is it? Consider this.

                      I have friends who are trans, and have for decades. While my skepticism that reassignment surgery is actually a good thing for them has increased recently, I think adults should be free to make their own decisions in the matter without interference from me or anyone else.

                      Minors under the knife or being given puberty blockers is another matter. I don’t hate trans people, but I am beginning to seriously hate trans activists.

                    3. “Is it? Consider this.”

                      I do not see 21 years as sacred.

                      For cosmetic, and other, surgery the age level is 18, and even cosmetic surgery is allowed under 18. Furthermore, the trans cases I see are where teenagers get puberty blocking drugs until they reach the age of consent. If they decide not to follow up, puberty will set in delayed but otherwise normally.

                      “Minors under the knife or being given puberty blockers is another matter. ”

                      Then you should listen to trans children having to go through puberty in a body they abhor. Suicide risks are considerable. Puberty blockers are harmless compared to that.

                      The alternative to puberty blockers is years of heavy anti-depression medication and psychotherapy.

                      Your ideas about “virtue signaling” make their parent look like psychopaths.

                      But I think that is your central idea: All lefties are psychopaths.

                    4. But I think that is your central idea: All lefties are psychopaths.

                      Well, they are making it damn hard to falsify the proposition….

                    5. “Well, they are making it damn hard to falsify the proposition….”

                      Dehumanizing the opposition is the upshot of genocide.

                      But then, the GOP, the champions of the Right, already locked up children, including babies, in cages, and installed concentration camps.

                      So why should I be surprised by this answer?

                    6. But then, the GOP, the champions of the Right, already locked up children, including babies, in cages,

                      Sorry, Obama was not a member of the GOP.

                    7. @Eugine Nier
                      “Sorry, Obama was not a member of the GOP.”

                      Nope that was Trump and the GOP that locked up children in cages. I know that Trump still claims Obama is in charge, but that is his personal delusion. Whether you want to share in his delusions is your personal choice. That still does not make these delusions real.

                      Also, the GOP is responsible for its own human rights violations. Whether or not others did it too is never an excuse.

                      https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2019/06/23/trump-falsely-says-obama-started-family-separation/1540733001/

                      PS, the fact that Trump and you have to resort to lying about this already shows us the devious nature of USA conservatism.

                    8. >PS, the fact that Trump and you have to resort to lying about this already shows us the devious nature of USA conservatism.

                      Trump was not lying in this case. The Obama administration really did start the family-separation stuff. When this first became a public issue the press embarrassed itself by screaming Trump Trump Trump while running “kids in cages” photos that turned out to be from 2014 – two years before Trump was in office, let alone before separating the kids was applied to a wider class of border-jumpers.

                      Probably a good thing, too, though I am not certain of this. A shocking percentage of those kids seem to have been trafficked to illegals not their actual parents.

          2. Need to get him to a GwG. I don’t think it will take much to get him chanting “Repeal the NFA”.

    2. > My advice to you is to shitcan giving advice to women. They do not like being patronized, or made to feel they have to tolerate behavior that makes them uncomfortable or fearful.

      That’s funny. I’ve been told loudly, vehemently, repeatedly, insistently and quite patronizingly that part of living in modern society is that I very much do have to tolerate increasingly many behaviors that make me uncomfortable or fearful, backed up by both legal and extralegal force of “antidiscrimination”.

    3. Violent retaliation against women who reject men is common enough

      Presumably using the same math that says we have a mass shooting every day in the US.

        1. Yes, and most of those are in the, ahem, diverse and vibrant neighborhoods. Not the kind of people who attend cons.

          1. Maybe that’s because racists intent on mass shootings find their favorite targets in “diverse and vibrant” neighborhoods.

            1. Now you need to explain why so many of the Diverse and Vibrant are so murderously racist towards their fellow Diverse and Vibrant.

              Or stop lying about the frequency of mass shootings by lumping them in with the gang warfare your side nurtures so much. That would work too.

              1. “by lumping them in with the gang warfare”

                You mean like the “Gilroy Garlic Festival shooting”? Or the “Virginia Beach shooting”, the “STEM School Highlands Ranch shooting”, the “University of North Carolina at Charlotte shooting”, the “Poway synagogue shooting”, or the “Aurora, Illinois shooting”?

                My impression is that you could not care less about the victims, any victims. You only care about the guns.

                1. The US is a very large country with a disproportionately large violent underclass, and so there’s about forty murders in the US every day. It is impossible to care about every victim. If you want to hold up “The X shooting” the onus is on you to argue the positive case for why that particular set of murders deserves positive attention, especially if the shooting is much less than forty people and should at the outset be assumed to be cherrypicked from background noise.

                  Much the same as if I held up “Left-handed Nigerian-Americans over six feet tall murdered so-and-so many people this year” – doesn’t justify particular scrutiny of tall left-handed Nigerian-Americans without a lot more attention paid to base rates and other corollaries.

                  FWIW, the first shooting Winter mentions here murdered three people.

                  1. @Ex
                    ““The X shooting” the onus is on you to argue the positive case for why that particular set of murders deserves positive attention,”

                    The argument started with “Presumably using the same math that says we have a mass shooting every day in the US.” above where I replied that it was every month. After which comments tried to fake them away by claiming they were all gang war related.

                    The whole point is that the mass-shootings are correlated to extremely high murder rates which are correlated to even higher traffic death tolls, opium crises, and preventable deaths due to lack of medical care.

                    Looking from abroad, I can only conclude that Americans simply do not care much about the life or death of fellow Americans. So they also do not care about yet another school massacre or another 100k deaths from misprescribed opiates.

                    @Ex
                    “The US is a very large country with a disproportionately large violent underclass, ”

                    An underclass which is made and maintained by the USA all by themselves. If your only tool is a gun, all problems become victims.

                    1. The whole point is that the mass-shootings are correlated to extremely high murder rates

                      Except this is only true if you include gang shootings as “mass-shootings”, in which case they also correlate with “diversity and vibrancy”.

                      Looking from abroad, I can only conclude that Americans simply do not care much about the life or death of fellow Americans.

                      And looking from abroud at the Netherlands, I can only conclude that the Dutch are perfectly willing to Euthanize their elderly and anyone with a sufficiently serious medical problem to keep costs down in your socialized medial system.

    4. You have a choice before you: Run a con that’s welcoming to women, or run a con that’s welcoming to creepy nerds. You have to choose one. You can’t have both.

      The latter is what people used to do (at least for your definition of “creepy nerd”). Then feminists insisted on coming to the cons anyway and then insisted that they change their policies to accommodate them.

      1. Hey, I didn’t make the rules, nor did I say I agree with them. I’m just elucidating the rules of $CURRENT_YEAR society as I understand them. Society makes rules, and metes out punishments, above and beyond the law, as it should be. And if the society is pathological, the society is pathological. It still means that in most cases you need to engage with it on its terms, or it will punish you with the tools it has available (exclusion, reputational damage, etc.).

        If you do business in a mafia-controlled part of town, and someone comes to your door demanding you pay protection to your local Don, you’d better pay protection or else. It doesn’t matter that it’s not fair. It doesn’t matter that you shouldn’t have to. In the conditions that prevail right then and there, you will face dire consequences if you don’t pay up, so the smart thing to do is pay up.

    5. >Violent retaliation against women who reject men is common enough

      That sounds like diversity at work. 10 against 1 that 95% of it is not done by middle-class whites born somewhere in the West. There was a video a good looking feminist made, walking while a woman in NY, recording all the catcalls and all that. I couldn’t determine the exact ethnicity of the catcallers but it was pretty much the “global south”.

    6. Give advice to the nerds instead. Start with “If you don’t know whether a woman is interested in having sex with you, assume the answer is no and move on.”

      You realize this is nuts, right?

      A guy notices a woman across the room. He has no idea whether the woman might like to have sex with him. So he should…. move on?

  26. I absolutely enjoy how while you are on the far left of economic issues you are very based on this stuff. Is there a unifying principle linking the two? Something along the lines of “Robespierre, you idiot, stop guillotining all these sans-culottes?”

    Over on Hackernews, using the term “SJW” can get you in real trouble. The term is what RationalWiki calls a “snarl word”, that is a derogatory word that says more about the user than it does about the target. In this case, if you use the term SJW, you will immediately be considered one of the alt-right (or, worse yet, a member of GamerGate, sworn to harass women wherever they be found) and your opinions can be dismissed readily.

    So when discussing why the SJWs are so damned malicious on Hackernews, I put it like this: there are those on the left who, like Noam Chomsky, favor individual freedom. They believe that private property and corporations impede freedom just as much as governments do. But the dominant current of the left in the USA — and elsewhere — favors social justice over individual freedom, “social justice” roughly defined as “equity for certain groups designated as marginalized”. They cannot even take the concept of freedom of speech very seriously; for example in New York City it is a crime, punishable by $250,000 fine, to use the term “illegal alien”. (Yes, this is super unconstitutional, but until it is ruled so by a court the law stands.) If push comes to shove I start naming names and showing receipts. There’s no need to conspiracy-theorize about SJWs because they can’t even get a proper conspiracy together. They’re so drunk with power that they spill their spaghetti all over Twitter on a regular basis.

    But the bottom line is, I come down on the individual freedom side of this divide at the end of the day. Racism, sexism, and anti-LGBTQ discrimination are all serious issues that need solutions. But overhauling entire cultures to pander to them and punishing people for noncompliance/wrongthink is not the answer. My YouTube suggestions are blowing up with people who tick all sorts of diversity checkboxes (black, queer, female, LGBTQ, etc.) who just want to read a good comic book about Iron Man, or use a dependable Linux distro, or watch Star Trek without being assaulted by whatever lol-so-random meme the bluehairs cooked up at their local Sweetgreen. Who’s looking out for them?

    By the way, the Stallman flap has had the effect of making Hackernews based as fuck (by Hackernews standards anyway). It used to be that so much as insinuating that Coraline Ada Ehmke is up to no good with her CoC would get you downmodded to -4 (the lowest you can get on HN) in a heartbeat. But lately when I’ve called her out and other named individuals, I get voted up.

    1. Over on Hackernews, using the term “SJW” can get you in real trouble.

      Yes, unfortunate what happened to it. But given how pwned Sam Altman is, I am not surprised.

      My YouTube suggestions are blowing up with people who tick all sorts of diversity checkboxes (black, queer, female, LGBTQ, etc.) who just want to read a good comic book about Iron Man, or use a dependable Linux distro, or watch Star Trek without being assaulted by whatever lol-so-random meme the bluehairs cooked up at their local Sweetgreen. Who’s looking out for them?

      Are you talking about the people who don’t like what SJWs are doing but will themselves attack anyone who actually fights SJWs?

    2. But the bottom line is, I come down on the individual freedom side of this divide at the end of the day. Racism, sexism, and anti-LGBTQ discrimination are all serious issues that need solutions.

      Doesn’t work that way. If you accept the SJW’s premises, their conclusions logically follow.

      For example, if the differences between races on things like IQ and time prefrences are indeed real than “racisms” isn’t a problem and most so-called “racists” are merely acting rationally based on said differences.

      On the other hand, if the differences aren’t real than the observed difference in outcome must be caused by racism; and since we’ve eliminated overt macro-racism decades ago, the differences in outcome must be entirely caused by covert and micro racism, e.g., evil micro-aggression ray emitted by whites. Hence, there is a moral imperative to root out covert and micro racism by drastic means.

      1. >Doesn’t work that way. If you accept the SJW’s premises, their conclusions logically follow.

        If you think the actual premises of SJWs have anything to do with anti-sexism or anti-racism or anti-prejudice-of-the-weekism, you haven’t clued in enough yet. Those are just the ideomania’s infective hooks. The actual premise – the purpose of the mind virus – is a level deeper, mostly hidden from the SJWs themselves, and reads roughly like this:

        Individualism, high social trust, all competing religions, free markets, free speech, patriotism, objective science, honesty in language, the biological family, and every other tool or basis on which to resist the totalitarianization of society must be discredited and abolished.

        How do we know this? Because we’ve had decades to observe the mind-virus. The surface memes, the cause of the week or the year, mutate constantly as the ideomania finds more mascot groups to use. The underlying direction and effect of the infection is constant.

        1. If you think the actual premises of SJWs have anything to do with anti-sexism or anti-racism or anti-prejudice-of-the-weekism, you haven’t clued in enough yet. Those are just the ideomania’s infective hooks.

          Yes, and I’m talking about SJWism as expressed in the mind of a typical SJW or SJW recruit, as opposed to the whole infrastructure of leftism. And the SJW-memeplex needs to be able to justify itself based on the it’s recruitment hook, which is why said hook also functions as a premise.

          1. And the SJW-memeplex needs to be able to justify itself based on the it’s recruitment hook, …

            As long as there is an undertow of “dissent is treason” ready to drown anyone who changes one jot or tittle of dogma… no, it does not. Once a prospective recruit has been hooked and isolated from alternative viewpoints, the linked threat of total social isolation is enough to guarantee any nonsense can be “supported” by the target’s own rationalizations.

            1. Both are used. Having a false premise means anything can be justified from it since everything flows from a falsehood. The “dissent is treason” is used to discourage people justifying the opposite of the official position using the false premise.

            1. In the spirit of the punishment fitting the crime (even in triviality!) I am unable to upvote the downvote I gave, because “You already voted”.

              1. Heh. You’re right. I can’t even undo the downvote I gave myself. :P

                Eric, I’m not sure that “voting on comments” adds anything but noise. Is this a configurable option in the WP theme you’re using?

                1. >Eric, I’m not sure that “voting on comments” adds anything but noise. Is this a configurable option in the WP theme you’re using?

                  Yes. Anybody else think it’s adding value?

                  1. I like the voting. It shows me how people are responding to comments, and gives me a little dopamine rush when people like mine. I’ve gotten more into Reddit in recent years because I like those fake internet points I get when I make a popular post. But I wouldn’t say they are critically important here.

                    1. The value of respect or praise is a function of whom it comes from. I basically loathe most Redditors, if they would upvote my comments or not ban my throwaway nicks frequently, I would think I am doing something wrong.

                      While the regular commenters are a good bunch here, really. Upvotes here are valuable.

                      The issue is mostly this: I for example regularly forget to vote. I am just not used to it. If many others don’t really vote either, it does not really carry any information.

                      Also, the number of subcomments a comment draws is probably the best metric. That is basically “sort by controversial” On a plebsite like Reddit it would a bad thing, mostly incisive bullshit, but among intelligent and empirical people something controversial is good: it is something that does challenge the accepted scientific orthodoxy about something, but brings enough evidence to not be dismissed out of hand.

                  2. I’d call the voting mostly harmless and very modestly helpful. My druthers would be to keep the voting but turn off the threading, with “turn off the threading” having the higher preference if the two happen to be linked.

                    1. I’d like threading to stay, but with a significantly reduced indent (or a “responsive” theme that turns indenting off on mobile devices).

                    2. I think threading is overrated. Threading makes it more difficult to find update comments with a page refresh, and every so often you want to bring together ideas from several threads for a new comment.

                      For threaded comments, sometimes I wish there was a feature that let you set a particular date and time, and allowed you to jump to comments made after that. The default date/time would be the last time you loaded up the page before you refreshed it; perhaps the feature can even keep track of several refresh times….

                    3. I suspect this site is too active to remove threads. The Beto post has over 900 comments.

                  3. No.

                    At least here it isn’t doing more than a passive rating though. Reddit’s idea of making your comments more valuable and viewable because they’re more agreeable is terrible by design.

  27. How ’bout: “The Council and the Club” ?

    The Town Council meeting has to be open and more or less inviting to everyone. It may be wise to have a formal code of conduct.

    Clubs are different. They also have codes of conduct, formal or informal, but the meetings do not have to be open and inviting to everyone. Clubs, like cons, exist partly as a place people can go where they like the atmosphere, and like being with people that like that atmosphere. But different clubs are different – for example, ya got the chess club and ya got the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club. It would be ridiculous to join a club and then announce that you don’t like the atmosphere, so it must be changed.

    1. “Council” isn’t right.

      I was actually thinking of the classic New England town meetings and community association meetings. Professional and academic conferences would seem to be similar. The local Chamber of Commerce meetings, maybe. Families. Labor unions.

      I am thinking most people move to a New England town because they like the town, not because they like the town meeting. The town meetings are important because the people that live in the town want a voice in what happens to it…. Being open to almost everyone in the town, giving people a voice, and being a forum to propose change, are essential aspects of the meetings. (I gather that in practice, they are the most polite, and most boring places on earth.)

      But clubs are generally different – often quite different and not easy to join. Many clubs go to great lengths to only accept the right sort of people and require sponsorship by an existing member… you know, men’s clubs, country clubs, made men, the Hells Angels.

      So, “The Council and the Club” doesn’t work. “The Family and the Fan Club” works. I suppose that the alliteration isn’t essential.

    1. I’m glad he is defiant. Why is it that we the hackers who actually write the original code are ruled over by do-nothing presenters (sf conservancy etc, who attacked stallman), do-nothing foundations, and do-nothing random women?

      It wasn’t always like this. We used to rule our “communities”, now we are moderated and banned by people who do not do anything. We are like slaves now.

      1. Why is it that we the hackers who actually write the original code are ruled over by do-nothing presenters (sf conservancy etc, who attacked stallman), do-nothing foundations, and do-nothing random women?

        Because, they don’t actually “do nothing”. They spend all day playing political power games.

        1. In my humble opinion, the expected value return of “playing political power games” in open source communities — especially when compared to the same actions within government, corporate, or academic organizations — rounds up to zero.

          1. Don’t be so modest. The Internet runs on open source software. Thus, controlling open source sufficiently lets one control the Internet. This is true both directly, e.g., implementing (or preventing the implementation of) censorship directly into internet protocols, and by inspiration, e.g., the high prestige of open source encouraging people to post content under permissive licenses and run fora as open by default.

            1. I think we’re running into a misunderstanding of definitions; personally, I view “politics” as being social activity undertaken and focused exclusively within some group boundary (with the “default”, unadorned usage referring to national boundaries). When similar interpersonal tactics are used to cross such boundaries it becomes “diplomacy” or “marketing” [depending on context].

              Therefore, the typical value of internal-focused political games is triflingly negative to the project and the participants; however, the expected external marketing value of domination may vary. As part of a “Long March”, I’d expect that value to be extraordinarily high — and partly as since I see the proper response to these sorts of social leadership challenges to be “Fork the project to demonstrate your superior methods”, I personally estimate the value of success as &aleph;-sub-1.

              1. Ugh, two notes/clarifications.
                1. I hate when websites eat HTML entity markup. (I wasn’t going to even hope for MathML compatibility, but not even allowing me one non-ASCII character? Bleck.)
                2. After re-reading this, I realized that I should definitely clarify I mean the marketing value of the present domination without significant resistance as being uncountably infinite. [Even in the “worst-case” scenario, a prolonged-but-eventual victory would still be extremely valuable marketing. The fact that there is limited pushback despite many options to do so is, of itself, a major marketing victory.]

              2. As part of a “Long March”, I’d expect that value to be extraordinarily high — and partly as since I see the proper response to these sorts of social leadership challenges to be “Fork the project to demonstrate your superior methods”,

                I notice a distinct lack of a major fork of Linux or any other project that has had a CoC imposed on it for that matter.

                1. I step away from this discussion for the weekend to try and assemble my thoughts into a succinct order, and elsewhere in this discussion a thread makes a very similar argument to mine — yet distant enough this reply still must be quite long.

                  My discussion with “SJWs” — the “Cordyceps progressivus”, as Ursus Maritimus named it — shows they have a peculiar belief that all hierarchy has in common a desire to “pull the ladder up behind them” and prevent others from ascending to an equal height. The definition of discrimination given here is about the most succinct example I can find. While that definition is accurate in many ways, the C. progressivus interpretation is that unequal allocation or access proves discrimination — which inevitably leads to hyper-egalitarianism.

                  Therefore, the point of saying “fork this” is not to tell any supposed SJW invaders to pound sand — in fact, were that the whole of presentation it would be entirely counterproductive. The goal is emphasize that the open source community values ultimately forbid the unequal resources and access central to their definitions of discrimination! If you read my prior one-liner version as saying “go away kid, you bother me”, that was not the intent. Instead, the goal of this sort of response should be to emphasize the opposition between discrimination as they define it and open source values. Imagine the results of a project lead responding with this longer version:

                  The open source license used by this project is the explicit welcome for all persons to contribute. Indeed, the leadership of this project is held to plebiscite — in a truly significant, albeit mostly invisible way — on this issue (among others) with each and every Git pull request. If the leadership of this project ever fails to meet the broader community’s approval by inappropriately rejecting submissions, there is a clear and unambiguous method for overruling such an error: forking. I see my first duty, even above that of leading this project community, as keeping the path to such action as simple and clear as possible. To do otherwise would be removing the first and best tool for the community to hold project leadership accountable for their decisions, and would be proof of the claimed injustice and oppression.

                  Accordingly, this change to our community guidelines is rejected without appeal. Should you find the above explanation insufficient in answering your concerns, it should also serve to explicitly inform any interested party of the appropriate methods to override this rejection.

                  Phrased that way, it does show that you are asking the very question which is on my mind: If the major open source projects such as Linux are oppressing minorities though rejected submissions, why have none of them been forked yet???

                  1. >If the major open source projects such as Linux are oppressing minorities though rejected submissions, why have none of them been forked yet???

                    The real answer is that even if there were actual oppression going on (which there isn’t) none of the “minority” groups complaining can field enough competent hackers to staff a fork of a major project.

                    Nobody is stopping them – “On the Internet nobody can tell you’re a dog,”, etc. It’s not happening, therefore it is either unnecessary or impractical. I’m going to say “both”.

                    Hmmm…I looked back at this and realized it could be misinterpreted. It is contingently now the case that none of the complaining-minority groups generate hackers in any serious numbers. That this is necessarily true and will never change is not anything I meant to assert about all such groups.

      2. Not all the “random women” are do-nothing. Some of them made valuable contributions. Of course, even Rudi Dutschke said that in order to do the long march through the institutions right, you need to get good at what the institutions do.

        That said, it’s still better to be one of them than a do-nothing man like MikeeUSA, who has seemingly contributed nothing but shitty, ugly game mods and anti-woman screeds.

        1. It is untrue that MikeeUSA has “contributed anti-women screeds”: The anti-women screeds did not include any licensing information and are thus, by default, distributed under the standard Copyright terms: all rights reserved.

          It is true that MikeeUSA has forked numerous free software projects, and has improved them if /Quantity/ is what you like.

          One free software project is Crossfire-Extended; where MikeeUSA (we’re name dropping here, name dropping in a forest of desolation) added 1/3rd of the total world, in terms of maps, aswell as pixel-art sets including the Japanese building set (original), german building set (original), russian-building set (adaptation), many weapons, monsters, and lots of marble floors, as-well as additional systems added in including the ability to build your own houses etc in the world.

          (Note: much of said additions were added to crossfire proper, MikeeUSA being part of the developer team there-of for years).

          MikeeUSA contributed the Tuba model and the trigger_heal code to Nexuiz: the precursor to Xonotic.

          Another free software project is Xonotic; where MikeeUSA first laid the intellectual groundwork for Xonotic to fork from Nexuiz (then when an inflection point was reached, they did indeed fork: MikeeUSA has allready convinced key holder to do so: they were mentally prepared).

          Later MikeeUSA forked Xonotic into Chaos-Esque Anthology.
          The QC code diff for the initial fork vs Chaos-Esque Anthology is over 25MBytes.

          MikeeUSA programmed in about 200 weapons to the game, built over 50 maps for the game, programmed things such as city generation (all buildings have interiors), procedural spawn systems, hand to hand fighting, drinking and eating system (including getting drunk), smell detection system (which can cause monsters to track you over distance), pipe bursting (shooting bullets into pipes causes effects (fire, water, etc), melee weapon damage systems, foliage systems, mounted weaponry, buildable (RTS style) buildings (with interiors) spell casting systems, working prisons and torture devices, and many other things over the last decade. The game went from 0 spells to over 50, from 3 vehicles to over 30, from 0 mounted guns to 20, 7 monsters to 31.

          Over 100 models were built by MikeeUSA for the game, and 2 texture packs were made by him, amongst other things.

          You can try the “shitty mod” here ( moddb.com/games/chaosesqueanthology ) , it’s a stand-alone fork of Xonotic: which MikeeUSA has the right to fork since he laid the intellectual groundwork for the Xontoic fork of Nexuiz in the first place. (last update was a few days ago: MikeeUSA likes the current screenshots so doesn’t update the moddb page).

          MikeeUSA’s old original works include GPC-Slots, GPC-Slots2, RPG1(perl), and various utilites for shell servers. MikeeUSA also contributes free/opensource music.

          MikeeUSA, suffice to say, has contributed more opensource code and content than you ever have, Jeff Read, being at it nearly full-time for over 20 years.

          But what he has /not/ contributed are the Anti-Women screeds: those are All Rights Reserved.

          We hope a correction on your part is forthcoming; MikeeUSA is also an attorney, you know, and doesn’t take kindly to incorrect copyright attributions!

  28. ESR: Regarding “Bell Labs Plans Big 50th Anniversary Event For Unix ” ( tech.slashdot.org/story/19/10/12/1625237/bell-labs-plans-big-50th-anniversary-event-for-unix )

    Where is RMS? He wrote emacs, and the most often used binutils on *nix OS’s, and gas, gcc, etc. Along with starting the free software movement, which spawned opensource, and got us Linux (which linus has now given away and abdicated).

    1. RMS stole Emacs from Gosling — and he never really was a fan of Unix or Bell Labs so I wouldn’t be surprised if he didn’t show, even without everything else that’s going on.

      1. Gosling cloned EMACS from a bunch of people, ( a group which included RMS).

        But… if GNU Emacs is a derivative work of Gosling’s EMACS (not a “clean-room” reimplementation), he could still sue at any time, since it would be a continuing violation. The statute doesn’t toll when a continuing violation is occuring.

      2. AFAIK emacs at the beginning was a commons effort with several people contributing macros, with Stallman being an early player; Gosling and Stallman – possibly others, as it was a common effort – discussed plans for emacs being portable. Gosling wrote the first version to run on Unix. Stallman wrote his version later on — both Gosling’s and Stallman’s had the same memetic roots about being portable etc.

        A quick search confirms part of my recollection here: https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsHistory

        1. >A quick search confirms part of my recollection here:

          Doesn’t address the question of whether RMS illegally appropriated Gosmacs code.

          I don’t know from direct observation, and I was involved very early. Earlier than there was version control, and the ChangeLog convention hadn’t evolved yet – but both my last months of working on Gosmacs and my first months of working on GNU Emacs were before I’d left Rabbit Software, so before 1987. Among the first things I touched were the mail reader (I had just rewritten the Gosmacs mail reader) and the terminal management code — IIRC I taught it to use terminfo rather than termcap.

          Sure there was a resemblance, but that was to be expected for functional reasons. There were also huge differences, notably in the Lisp engine.

  29. Winter said:

    Sorry, but I never said that.

    You’re right. You didn’t. But I did, and that other poster was confusing me with you.

  30. I have friends who are trans, and have for decades. While my skepticism that reassignment surgery is actually a good thing for them has increased recently, I think adults should be free to make their own decisions in the matter without interference from me or anyone else.

    My skepticism that GRS is a good thing for them has increased too, but I still believe that it is, in most cases, one of the best possible things we can do for them given the means we have currently available.

    Minors under the knife or being given puberty blockers is another matter. I don’t hate trans people, but I am beginning to seriously hate trans activists.

    The thing about current-year trans activism is that the litmus test for transphobia is not, say, opposition to Wendy Carlos being able to function normally in society — because it’s difficult to oppose that. Wendy Carlos is a decent (and supremely talented) person, and it takes Westboro Baptist levels of ignorance to object to her being accepted in mainstream society with the full rights and privileges appertaining thereto, and as a woman at that. So, as with racism and sexism, once the big wins were secured the focus shifted to rooting out latent, hidden transphobia and the litmus test is now objecting to horrible people doing horrible things like Jessica Yaniv attempting to compel an aesthetician to wax her male junk.

    LGBTQ activism in general seems to have begun a policy of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. By demanding we support phenomena like preteen drag queens, it is basically playing right into the hands of the LGBTQ community’s hated enemy, conservative Christians. Note that we’re not talking about a kid in his room trying on a dress and dancing to Madonna music. We’re talking about a kid taking off a dress in a club full of gay adult men who wave and toss dollar bills at him. How many decades has the gay community tried to fight off accusations of “they’re coming for your children” from the religious right… and now this?!?!?!?! It’s morally reprehensible and strategically daft. It calls to mind Conquest’s quip that all institutions eventually behave as if run by a secret cabal of their enemies.

    These are the sorts of things that redpill a motherfucker. You wanted to know how it happens.

    1. >These are the sorts of things that redpill a motherfucker. You wanted to know how it happens.

      You’re about five years behind me. I was OK with the gay-rights movement until they scalped Brendan Eich in 2014. That’s when I saw the kind of shit that red-pilled you (“snatching defeat from the jaws of victory”) coming at us like an express train.

      In retrospect, maybe the videos from the Folsom Street gay-pride parades should have clued me in sooner. These were not a plea to live and let live but the exhibitions of a subculture perversely determined to get in everyone else’s face.

      1. 1) It is just naive to think that any group of people fights for equality. At the very least their government sponsors above don’t. Equality is the first step if you are “below”, next step you want to be “above”. Similarly, liberty, e.g. freedom of the press is very often a slogan as long as the opposing group has the power to infringe on that liberty, but once “our” group has the power to infringe on it… as a libertarian you have basically three choices. Either you can sort of try to balance the power of various groups, when each are strong enough to defend their liberty but not strong enough to infringe on the rights of others. That is highly unstable. Or you can try to make the kind of situation where the threat profiles are assymetric, that is, defending liberty is less costly than attacking it, thus you reach a Schelling point where various groups find it in their advantage to respect each others libery. A bit like like WWI before tanks, when the military technology like machine guns gave the advantage to defense, not to offense. This is theoretically possible by e.g. crypto stuff. A third option is to try to have a third party enforce the liberty of all groups. This is the core idea of Constitutionalism, unfortunately, paper does nothing, it is humans interpreting paper who do enforce stuff and humans eventually get caught up in monkey politics.

        2) Read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Would_Be_Queen basically most gay men are truly feminine, it is not a myth. They want to have sex with masculine men, who don’t want to have sex with them. So what can they do? All they can do is to have sex with each other even though they don’t like doing so as each other are not masculine enough for their desires. But they are just stuck with each other. So gay men have to try to get as masculine as they can, so that they can attract gay man sex partners. So they are in a constant tension between their feminine true selves and the more masculine imagine they have to present for attracting other gay men. And this results in something prettty similar to “incel rage”. To sour-grapes envying and disliking the heteros, at least the attractive ones, who apparently have it so easy, they can just be themselves and still attract sex partners. So for this reason there is a lot of pent-up resentment and an incel-style desire for revenge in gay culture. This leads to this kind of stuff. This also makes them excellent revolutionary cadre for the left.

        1. There’s also research suggesting that the majority of “gender confused” kids will naturally become gays or lesbians after puberty and then be happy that way. Gay writer Andrew Sullivan has written some pieces recently using this as justification for accusing the trans lobby of advocating preemptive gay conversion therapy, of the sort that activists like to accuse Chick-Fil-A and Mike Pence of.

      2. The gay-rights movement didn’t really scalp Eich. And it turns out, the feminists didn’t scalp Stallman.

        Hard fact: A leader’s personal political views can cause those under them to question their faith in the leader’s leadership. That’s what happened in Eich’s case and in Stallman’s.

        1. Jeff Read: Hard fact: A leader’s personal political views can cause those under them to question their faith in the leader’s leadership. That’s what happened in Eich’s case and in Stallman’s.

          But it wasn’t “those under them questioning their faith in their leader’s leadership”. I was a few loud voices from outside the organization putting pressure on those in charge to remove them, and those in charge following through in order to avoid a PR headache.

          That’s the weakness, and they’ve learned to exploit it: Get a bunch of people to screech and make a lot of twitter noise, and the leadership will cave in. Every Time.

          1. Eh… yes and no. There are quite a few true believers in the social justice dream high up in GNU and FSF leadership. Mozilla as well.

            Irrespective of that, you’re right: the optics of having a known homophobe head up your make-the-Web-a-better-place foundation are really bad. In light of that, hopefully you will understand why it was for the greater good of the Mozilla Foundation that Eich resigned.

            1. This just reinforces my view that the entire concept of “social justice” is incoherent, unworkable, and poisonous to society. Hayek warned everyone, but many didn’t listen. The result is a major threat to liberty by “social justice” and resurgent socialism. It looks like Trump is the only hope to even slow it down.

              If someone had told me 10 years ago that 2019 would be like this, I’d have laughed. Donald Trump against cultural Marxism. Spygate skullduggery, trans rights, drag queen story time for kids, and leftists outraged that Trump is removing troops from Syria! It’s like a mutant spawn of the Illuminatus! trilogy.

              1. This is why the “clown world” meme is a thing. Sincere social justice closely resembles parodies of left-wing tropes from decades past. Millie Tant used to be a caricature of an extreme wing of the feminist movement. Today she is mainstream feminism.

                Of course the social-justice left’s response to “clown world” fell well within expectations. They simply declared clowns a right-wing hate symbol of white supremacy. This is part of why Joker got bad reviews: not giving a single inch to the fascists or anyone who remotely looks fascist is more important than evaluating a movie on its own merits.

                The result is a major threat to liberty

                Shhh-shhhht! Don’t say the L word too loudly. It’s a telltale sign you’re fash.

                1. So according to this Wingo character, acting in a way “alienating to women” is a fireable offense, but alienating anyone who believes in free speech is fine and dandy, because they are fascists. Clown World indeed.

                  1. More or less, yeah.

                    He also believes that an incorrect answer to the question “what should we do about gender inequality in tech” is a reason not to hire someone. Yes, he thinks hiring managers should ask this question. Gotta screen out the fash.

                    N.b. Please do not let this discourage you from using Guile. It’s great software and Wingo is a good maintainer. Refusing to use a piece of free software on the basis that its maintainer/leadership has the “wrong” political opinions sounds like something an SJW might do.

                    1. N.b. Please do not let this discourage you from using Guile. It’s great software and Wingo is a good maintainer. Refusing to use a piece of free software on the basis that its maintainer/leadership has the “wrong” political opinions sounds like something an SJW might do.

                      Postulates:

                      1) Inventing/Writing/Maintaining a useful and widely used piece of code gives status.

                      2) Status in one field gives lesser but still some status in other fields.

                      3) The Cordyceps progressivus faction ruthlessly smears, unpersons and excludes anyone not dancing to their tune, making things written/invented/maintained by non-C. progressivus seem useless and unused.

                      4) The non-Cordyceps progressivus are willing to use code from both C. progressivus and non-C. progressivus sources. But they are also not immune to FUD.

                      Conclusion: Let this run for while and there will only be the Cordyceps progressivus faction left.

                      Pace Orwell, your recommendation is objectively pro-SJW.

                    2. >Pace Orwell, your recommendation is objectively pro-SJW.

                      Nope, not buying it. Destroying cooperation along political fracture lines is their game; we can’t win by imitating it.

                    3. Except you just endorsed the same position as Wingo. No you can’t go around complaining about Wingo while trying to act as at best Wingo-lite.

                    4. >No you can’t go around complaining about Wingo while trying to act as at best Wingo-lite.

                      Give him time. I don’t think the red pill has taken full effect yet.

                      There are now two Jeff Reads – the based one who’s trying to handle the shock of reality, and the one that occasionally repeats the same old lefty tropes because the mind-virus temporarily has him back. Their prose styles are noticeably different – meme-zombie Jeff still sounds glassy-eyed, whereas new Jeff sounds tough and wry, like…rather like a man who’s won a fight he didn’t expect to survive.

                      It’s a rather remarkable thing to witness.

                    5. Nope, not buying it. Destroying cooperation along political fracture lines is their game; we can’t win by imitating it.

                      Well, we haven’t been winning with our current strategy.

              2. >If someone had told me 10 years ago that 2019 would be like this, I’d have laughed.

                OTOH, it might have been realistic 20 years ago, during the height of the original PC movement.

                IMHO, the PC crazies have always been there; we just ignored them when they didn’t have s hammer to beat us with. During PC 1.0, it was speech codes. Today, it’s cancel culture.

        2. Nope, Jeff, all us hackers are still with Stallman. Hireling wage-slaves may hate him; but they have no agency of their own and are merely servants of their employees.

          Stallman is right, including on the present and past statements that non-persons are complaining about (those without agency are _NOT_ people)

          1. Then why did about thirty GNU hackers write an open letter expressing that Stallman’s behavior was problematic enough to warrant new leadership for the GNU Project? Others, such as Bradley M. Kuhn, have stepped up to issue statements of their own.

            This is why hackers will never eject the SJWs: social justice is a core component of hacker culture now.

            1. >This is why hackers will never eject the SJWs: social justice is a core component of hacker culture now.

              Not yet it isn’t. If it were, I would get a very different reception when I visit live gatherings where there are hackers.

              One of the standard Marxist/entryist tactics is to make buy-in to the entryists look bigger than it is, in order to induce preference falsification in the target population. Don’t be fooled.

    2. > LGBTQ activism in general seems to have begun a policy of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

      An interesting speculation along those lines that I saw on Tumblr:

      yall understand the reason you’re hearing about gay reading hours for kids, eight year old drag queens, “wax the balls, bigot”, and so on, right?

      queers have been groomed as clients of the progressive leviathan for decades. if queer acceptance actually happens, we won’t have as much reason to be clients anymore. it looked like it was gonna happen, so the leviathan has to pull back and make people hate us again so it can swoop in to “help”.

      like, why would the republicans repeal roe v. wade? if they actually do it, they don’t get to dangle that carrot anymore. the people who voted republican just for abortion – where do those votes go?

      1. >queers have been groomed as clients of the progressive leviathan for decades.

        In my language, the Department V mind virus has been using gays as a mascot group for decades. They want gays to stay angry because that furthers the inner, nihilistic goal of the weapon.

        1. It’s strange that you want to see it as something entirely external when there are internal power play reasons for keeping them angry as well. As a loyal recruiting pool for the Leviathan.

          We looked into the black Civil Rights era for example. Yes, found stuff like old Comintern resolutions declaring US blacks are a nation. But also found the Ford Foundation basically bragging they did it all, and Malcolm X in the Message To The Grass Roots Speech saying MLK and others were bribed by the great Foundations. Ford Foundation under McGeorge Bundy. The link between Nelson Rockefeller and MLK has also also been documented later on. And Malcolm X saying the March on Washington was organized pretty much by the Kennedy-voter types. So it was the old astroturf trick, if Power wants to do something some of its voters would not like, organize a popular demand for it and pretend you are just caving in to that. The goal was probably trying to compete with the Soviets in post-colonial scramble i.e. picking up the client states of the weakened European powers in the Third World and making them American, not Soviet client states. For this reason a commitment to anti-racism had to be shown.

          I don’t have similar documentation how internal US power plays led to the weaponization of gays. I have some speculations, like, taking the religious folks down a peg, or changing the accepted tough-guy standards of masculinity which leads to less resistance to Power, but the most logical is the recruiting model. There are tons of smart and successful and influential gay actors, musicians, fashion designers, various artists. They are very very useful for recruiting, hence they have to be kept angry.

          I am not denying the Directorate V actions, but trying to put them into context. There have been American Communists. They tended to call themselves progressives. That is not the same as a liberal. Tulsi Gabbard is a liberal, Saul Alinsky is a progressive. Gabbard is merely a decent person who is misguided, Alinsky had an immense will-to-power and smells of brimstone to me. Read Elizabeth Bentley’s Out Of Bondage. For Bentley to be Communist was just to be Christian in the industrial age. She thought she is using the KGB to engineer an American and world revolution. Neither she nor Alger Hiss thought of themselves as agents of foreign interests, but rather organizers of a world revolution, using the dumb Russkies for that. When Stalin announced socialism in one country and stopped pushing that world revolution stuff, Bentley eventually realized that they are actually a bunch of gangster just representing their own interests and not that of world revolution and were using her, so she turned them in. The point I am making is that it was not entirely external. Bentley turned into a Communist on her own and then later thought she can use the Russkies to engineer world revolution. And she ended up being used. Eisenhower is another interesting case – no, not a Communist as the Birchers said. But somehow who very much wanted to use Communists and ended up being used by them. See: https://foseti.wordpress.com/2011/08/03/eisenhower/
          So don’t see it as something entirely external.

      2. I am glad that more and more people notice clientdom, the core idea that it is not so that the oppressed fight against the oppressors, not some kind of above vs. below vertical struggle, but rather various elite groups are fighting each other and using various lower-status groups as their clients, supporters, goons. So a horizontal struggle.

        But that is not really how clienthood works. Remember the Soviet Union. The whole idea was to use the peasants and workers as tools to get power. But after that was accomplished, they were still using the peasants and workers (I mean, at least those they didn’t kill for being slightly prosperous) recruiting them into the bureaucracy. Perhaps you remember the term “good cadre”. A good cadre was someone who parents were workers and peasants, and thus would be likely politically reliable and loyal. Not out of gratitude, but rather because he had no other avenues to success.

        The reason for this is precisely that elite infighting is the driving force of history. Regimes fail when the elites infight too much. The trick to regime stability is that elites should be cohesive and loyal to each other. Thus they filled up the Party ranks with children of workers and peasants who could be expected to be loyal because they had no other options.

        The same way, people will never accept gays. Not deep down. Those who do are mostly just suppressing their disgust and trying to look progressive but still feel an unease. It is not about being nosy about what other people are doing in their bedroom. It is about feminine behaving men are in the “uncanny valley”, and because gays themselves, as for the above reasons they are not actually happy with each other, always have a chip on their shoulders. So it is not about that.

        Rather, perpetually discontented people are good cadre for recruitment into the bureaucracy. They will be loyal. This does not necessarily mean directly government jobs, but also political comissars at private firms i.e. HR.

        So this kind of things has two phases. In the first phase of grabbing power, the elites need *support from clients. In the second phase of stabilizing power, the elites need their clients as *recruiting pool*. This second phase is what gets ignored in that speculation.

        Or an even simpler example. If look at the Middle Ages, the Church had put a priest into every village. I.e. an ideologically loyal agent/leader/local elite. That’s a lot of small-time leaders, a lot of local elites! If you compare it with early Christianity where only a handful could be considered some kind of priests or leaders, you have to realize they did not only have to win, after they won, they had to recruit in order to stabilize. And they had to recruit from the people who or their parents have showed they are loyal. This is the basic principle of every system. There has to be one person recruited and delegated as a local elite into every “village”. Every small community.

        So the Leviathan not only needs support from gays. After they feel they have won, they need them as a recruiting pool for what will be the local leaders, elites, enforces, representatives, agents, priests, comissars of their system.

        This is not my ideas BTW. Look around here: https://spandrell.com/2018/01/21/leninism-and-bioleninism/

      3. I don’t think there is anything more involved but the impulse to humiliate a defeated enemy, the ritual torture of prisoners, like that articulated by O’Brien in “1984”:

        “Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless.”

    3. How many decades has the gay community tried to fight off accusations of “they’re coming for your children” from the religious right… and now this?!?!?!?!

      We warned you, should have listened.

      Sincerely,
      The Religious Right

      1. >We warned you, should have listened.

        Oh, we listened all right. And heard so much noise that the signal got lost. Rock and roll is the Devil’s music! D&D is Satanic cultism! Evolutionary theory is an evil plot to turn people away from God!

        The Religious Right has a long history of choosing many battles so poorly that it seldom has any cred or reserves left for the few it deserves to win. It’s like that famous crack about the Palestinians never missing an opportunity to miss an opportunity.

        I’m pissed off at the Religious Right for the same reasons I’m pissed off at conservatives in general. You had one job. One job. You were supposed to be conservators – Western civ’s antibodies against ideological corruption and invasive memes. You fucked that one up huge.

        1. In fairness, evolutionary theory as popularly presented very much does seem like an evil plot to turn people away from God, having very little to do with biology.

          The average American science pundit like Bill Nye or Neil deGrasse Tyson is usually a kind of neck-up-Creationist. When the Left party line is to denounce evolutionary psychology as incel pseudoscience, denounce racial differences as racist pseudoscience, denounce sexual dimorphism as patriarchal pseudoscience, denounce genetic intelligence factors as nazi pseudoscience, et cetera, I can see how the Religious Right might have reached the conclusion that “evolution” was a stick for the Left to beat the Church with, rather than a scientific theory with implications for humans.

          (As a personal anecdote, I’ve observed that avoiding “evolution” as a red flag word got at least one group of actual, Ken-Ham-watching Creationists willing to intelligently discuss patterns of heredity and the spread of heritable traits instead with me.)

          1. Which is why the average anti-evolution argument sounds so utterly batshit; it isn’t attacking evolution, but the strawman pop-culture evolution that is just as batshit.

            1. Terminology note: Attacking the position that the majority of your opponents actual hold is not a “strawman”.

          2. Recently, the stakes were raised Perry Marshall’s Evolution 2.0 From a friendly (religious) review:

            ” We know now that cells edit their own DNA in a process called “transposition,” and they purposefully acquire new characteristics from one cell to another in response to environmental pressures through horizontal 4gene transfer, which can occur between any type of cell and any other. It happens in real time, quickly, in some cases within minutes, allowing an entire population of bacteria, for instance, to become immune to an antibiotic within twenty minutes of exposure to the drug. Epigenetics grays out parts of the genome, again due to environmental factors, and these changes to the genome are passed down to offspring. None of this is random nor purposeless, but intentional. Speciation can also occur through symbiogenesis, two separate organisms merging as happened with chloroplasts in plant cells, and mitochondria in animal cells, and through hybridization, also known as genome duplication, neither of which are connected to random mutations.”

            Marshall (and the reviewer) see all this less random, more purposive stuff as argument for Design. Very motivated reasoning, basically an apologia.

            But it also sounds like there might be something in it. That the random-mutation-and-selection-only story might be outdated.

            Purposiveness does not directly imply God. Ed Feser, theologian wrote that the Medievals thought you can see purposiveness everywhere, but you cannot just go “therefore, God” in one step, it is not that simple at all.

            Atheist philosophers like Thomas Nagel are seeing more and more purposiveness.

            From a negative review, Marshall considers it something like a conspiracy that biology students only learn about translocation and symbiogenesis in their sophomore years while in reality it is just that there is too much other stuff they need to learn before.

            Which is fine. But there is a *popular* narrative of evolution, easily understandable by all. And this narrative does not yet include translocation and symbiogenesis. So it might be outdated.

        2. Rock and roll is the Devil’s music!

          Because it’s not like Rock and Roll lead to the collapse of morals, leading ultimately to the collapse of the family, nor to collective psychological problems to the point that over a quarter of Americans need pharmaceuticals to compensate.

          Of course, you liked the collapse of morals since it let you have lots of fun without consequences, and its negative effects haven’t affected you directly. After all, you don’t have children so the collapse of the family hasn’t affected you. Also since you have reasonably high social rank, you don’t have have to deal with the psychological problems your ex-groupies once they become alpha-widows.

          1. Because it’s not like Rock and Roll lead to the collapse of sexual morals.

            It wasn’t music, that came afterwards.

            It began with the industrial revolution when the average woman could support herself and a few others solely on what she could earn. Then The Pill kicked it into overdrive. Then the art happened.

            1. I think, sometimes, that Frank Colton and the others who invented the pill will, in the future, be as reviled as early 20th century European dictators.

        3. I think they are worthy of pity, if a rather annoyed pity.

          The conservatives went into a civilization scale meme war with sub-standard weaponry, against the bleeding edge of memetic weapons, wielded by a foe that already had the high ground, under technological conditions that severely penalized the inferior opponent.

          “We have the Maxim, and they have not” doesn’t even begin to describe the lopsidedness of the fight. More like…. a tramp freighter against a fleet of Death Stars. And no one knows about the exhaust port.

          Of course it is hard to pity the person who won’t shut up about how you need to walk uphill both ways in a blizzard before they will consider that you might have a legitimate complaint about anything.

          1. “We have the Maxim, and they have not”

            Were the English wrong to shoot every single person they could with the Maxim gun.
            Or were they Right?

        4. I’m pissed off at the Religious Right for the same reasons I’m pissed off at conservatives in general. You had one job. One job. You were supposed to be conservators – Western civ’s antibodies against ideological corruption and invasive memes.

          As opposed to the people, yourself included, who were spreading said memes.

          No, you were originally pissed off because we told you you couldn’t do a lot of “fun” things. Now that it’s becoming clear said memes were indeed dangerous, you’re trying to rationalize your previous hatred, preferably in such a way that you don’t have to admit all the fun things you did were wrong.

          1. Dude, I come from the “religious right” memosphere. I agree with a huge number of the “not fun” ideas. And the standard of argument on that side of the culture war is embarrassingly atrocious. Or I should say “was”, because the center and center-left have finally joined the fight against the lunatics.

            It was your side that made such royally epic strategic fuckups like saying for decades that Marriage was about Love and Long Term Relationships, and then had no backstop when the enemy did the obvious and threw that back in your faces with Gay Marriage.

            While also claiming your infinite foresight and wisdom.

            The fact that ESR’s generation fucked it up doesn’t absolve you. Rather, the fact that you had reality itself on your side heaps more condemnation upon you for your abject failure.

            The only thing that mitigates some of the guilt is that you were on the bad end of a technological gradient…… which raises the question of why your side didn’t secure that high ground when they had the chance. You know, because of all the foresight and wisdom you have.

            1. After writing that I remember a quote…

              In certain older civilized cultures, when men failed as entirely as you have they would throw themselves on their swords.

              And that was a comparatively minor security breach….

      2. Hard for people who don’t already agree with you to believe a story of a slippery slope when you say that everything in the entirety of existence is one.

        The liberals see Chesterton’s Fence, scream “That’s Oppressive!”, tear it down, and then get a lot of people mauled by the tiger that was plainly sitting behind it.

        The conservatives saw a dilapidated fence with a 200 year old faded sign labeled “Beware of Aardvark”, refused to look past it to see if there was anything there, and then accused anyone who wanted to check if there was still an Aardvark (or ever had been) of opening up the tiger cage.

        Then the tiger ambled over from the other fence and mauled them.

        1. Hard for people who don’t already agree with you to believe a story of a slippery slope when you say that everything in the entirety of existence is one.

          Not everything, just a lot of things. Well, you know what, a lot of things are slippery slopes. And just because you’re having lots of fun sliding down the slope, doesn’t mean it’s not slippery or that you’ll like what you find at the bottom.

          1. According to your faith, the whole universe is a slope made slippery by Adam, with (conveniently enough) your faith as the only salvation from whatever is at the bottom.

            I’ll take my chances, thank you.

            1. According to your faith, the whole universe is a slope made slippery

              Eh, Entropy is enough to make the universe cruelly slippery.

              0/10, terrible argument.

          2. Well, you know what, a lot of things are slippery slopes.

            Which is why you shouldn’t go inventing fictional ones. Authority, Respect, and similar concepts are not something you just have. They are consumable resources. Every time you use them badly you deplete the supply, until no one bothers to listen to you. Or in a military setting a live grenade mysteriously finds its way into the officer’s tent.

            And just because you’re having lots of fun sliding down the slope, doesn’t mean it’s not slippery or that you’ll like what you find at the bottom.

            There is a huge meta-problem here (in fact The meta-problem of civilization): most of the slopes are very hard to see if you don’t have an understanding of a wide variety of concepts. The fallback for that is to have older people who (hopefully!) have the wisdom of age pass down the lessons of what does and does not work, even if there isn’t a generative theory behind it.

            This is a disaster waiting to happen. All it takes is for the Old & Wise to squander their respect, or for conditions to change, or for random crap to accrete on the rules (and when have human civilizations ever not done that?). Then you have to sift through what is Real Wisdom vs what is garbage.

            Traditionally one way this is done is to go back to the cultural founding documents (“Sola Scriptura”).

            Now look at our civilization’s plight.

            The foundational documents got blown out through a combination of the priesthood (using the term in the most general sense) failing miserably, and active attack from scum like Marx. The conditions changed due to factors like The Pill, or the average person not barely scrambling to stay alive on a daily basis. And then the moral crusaders decided that what they needed to spend their political capital on was reeeeeeing at Penny Dreadfuls, I mean Alcohol, I mean Rock and Roll, I mean draft dodgers (pro-slavery yay!), I mean D&D, I mean videogames. Any time they talked about real problems the lack of ability to give a detailed explanation of why there was a problem guaranteed no one would listen even if they had credibility.

            All of this while the communists were busy taking over all the communication chokepoints, so they could certify that the most broadly known Conservative positions would be the most ridiculous. And then the Smart People go to the left because that is what Smart People are supposed to do, so the problem worsens.

            And as if that wasn’t bad enough we also had the post modernist critique to deal with. You cannot fight post modernism unless you know exactly what you are doing because it is a universal solvent. The conservatives did not have the requisite knowledge to fight it.

            Fast forward a century and we need someone like Peterson to tell the stories that everyone used to know. And he is called a Nazi for his trouble.

            1. I think you have the causality a bit backwards. The essence of much of leftism is to promise power to “Smart People”. Very briefly, it originates with absolutist kings wanting to reduce the power of the aristocracy and thus not rely on them but rather rely on a non-noble bureaucracy they have recruited because of their education credentials, university degrees, the “nobility of the robe”. Then the nobility of the robe, the bureaucracy realized they can rule without a king so got rid of them and the bureaucratic machine became self-moving. But the recruitment was and is still based on education credentials.

              Since power is seductive, and thus few “Smart People” chose to be conservative, chose to alienate their friendships with other “Smart People” and be an enemy to the bureaucracy, most of the time conservatives have been on the average really significantly stupider than liberals or leftists. So they could see the symptoms and not understand the causes.

              There was little incentive for “Smart People” to be conservatives because 1) there is a lot of ruin in a nation and most of the consequences of their ideas haven’t manifested yet 2) elites can to a certain extent isolate themselves from those consequences.

              Today it is different because things got bad enough for “Smart People” to start questioning the system. I mean, look at what happens to those, whom despite all the advice to the contrary, choose the PhD-Academia route. They get shit for pay, overworked, never get tenure, publish-or-perish, at the mercy of “peer review” gatekeepers enforcing boring orthodoxy, constantly get shat on for being white men, constantly get bombarded by “moar diversity” which for them means “we want you out”, and can never find a girlfriend or if they can she is not worth having. And have older friends who are divorced, in ways that is pretty bad for them, they have to contend with either not having kids or quite likely at some point having to move back to an apartment while paying for wife and kids staying in the house.

              So they are pissed. Now the power that the Left offers to “Smart People” is not seductive enough compared to all this. Besides, they aren’t really offering power to whitemales anymore.

              So now I see a lot of academics browsing “Dissident Right” content…

              1. So now I see a lot of academics browsing “Dissident Right” content…

                I’m getting a bad feeling about that.
                Thirsty academics and lawyers were the backbone of Hitlers support, and carried out the gleichschaltung with frenetic energy as soon as they thought they could get away with it.
                They might not “just want to see the world burn” but promise the adjunct tenure, the assistant associate, the associate full, and they’ll bring their own thermite and white phosphorus before you can say “Gomorrah”.

                1. So, with this hilter mkvII do we get an anime future with all the child brides the Japanese promise in it? I wonder if RMS will like that future.

        2. I am not sure I grok your example, but the basic problem with conservatives has always been giving the moral ground to their enemies. As in “What you want would be great, but sadly, sadly, human nature / other objective conditions make it unworkable.” Or the classic Burkeanism “Yes, do it, but slowly, cautiously, lawfully, organically, not in a lawless revolutionary haste.” That is NOT the voice of someone genuinely opposed to liberal stuff. That is voice of a liberal worried that trying to cook the frog too quickly might lead to problems.

          How often did conservatives call socialism something that would be great in theory but does not work in practice? Always. And never said that it is evil in theory, because it is nothing but propaganda for generating societal chaos for grabbing power, and then when they are on the top, a hiearchical, unequal society will be restored again.

          On the ontological, epistemological level, there is the Essentialist view that reality is objective and the Constructivist view that reality is socially constructed. Well, the truth is in between, reality is out there, but we rarely do have first-hand experience about it, so most of we *think* about reality is indeed socially constructed, stuff we heard from other people. Ontologically, the Essentialist is right but epistemologically, the Constructivist is far more to being right because most of what we *think* we know we have heard from other people.

          Conservatives stuck to Essentialist defenses. Leftists attacked with Constructivist arguments. And that was a big mistake, because in society, politics epistemology matters more than ontology (what matters is what people believe in, at least in the short run until the tiger comes over the fence and eats them), and in epistemology Constructivism is 80% right.

          They Right should have created their own Postmodernism. To deconstruct the Leftists via Constructivist arguments, showing how Leftist arguments are just power moves. And it never happened.

          Not only they failed to use Constructivism to attack, they did not even use it to defend! When Leftists said “that is just a social construct, so can be deconstructed”, they just kept defending “that” is objective truth, and didn’t even say basic things like “Maybe, but it is the social construct of my society, to which I am loyal to. Why do you want to deconstruct it, what are you, a traitor?”

          Epistemological Constructivism (reality is objective, but what we *think* we know is mostly just stories from other people) is something the Right needs, it is powerful. Whatever is left of NRx is slowly going in that direction. I recently realized that the giants of modern sociology, Randall Collins for example 1) have very useful frameworks 2) are actually far less leftist than the mediocre sociologists.

          Although, there is something I must say in the defense of conservatives. What actually happened throughout history is that only the “please boil the frog slower and lawfully!” types are the ones we usually know about, as those who have offered *substantial* arguments against the left got memory-holed.

          1. The Right should have created their own Postmodernism

            The Left regularly psychoanalyzes the Right. It rarely goes the other way except for jokes and insults, but there’s a lot that can be said, much of it quite devastating. Leftist activism is often a sort of hallucination, a projection of personal pain onto the larger world. This piece is quite good: Sad Radicals by Conor Barnes.

            1. Reading accounts like this is like reading Mike Rinder or one of the other Scientologists who got out of the church. There are numerous parallels: I think social-justice leftism appeals for many of the reasons Scientology did in the 50s-70s: it attracts sensitive people who genuinely want to make the world a better place. And of course the social-justice methods for dealing with opponents seem cribbed straight from the desk of LRH: spy on them, collect dirt on them, and use that to ruin their reputation so thoroughly that they are never believed again. LRH may have devised the most ruthlessly efficient tactics for destroying his ideological opponents since Lenin.

            2. True, but very superficial. Of course the unhappy, the disaffected, the unsuccessful, the mentally ill are a prime recruiting material for any revolutionary leader just as they are a prime recruiting material for any crazy sectarian cult. But those people are merely being used.

              It is the users, not the used who matter, it is them who need to be analyzed and understood. And that is more sociological than psychological, because it is not particularly complicated that the users are motivated by desires of power and status, these are pretty much human universals. The question is all about how the various individuals and groups competing for power and status look like, who is with whom, against whom, and who uses whom and for what.

              Gaetano Mosca’s The Ruling Class (a bad translation of Elementi di Scienza Politica) well summarized in Burnham’s The Machiavellians https://archive.org/details/BurnhamJamesTheMachiavellians is a very good starting point.

              A very brief summary would be that every social force gives rise to elite groups. That is, if there is capitalism, there will be capitalist elites, worker elites (trade union leaders) and anticapitalist intellectual elites. If religion is an important social force, there will be priestly elites. If the military is an important social force, there will be military elites. If science and intellectualism are important, there will be intellectual elites. If the media is important, there will be media elites.

              And they compete with each other in various coalitions, each recruiting large groups of non-elites for their purposes.

              A useful practice run of this theory could be to figure out how these coalitions looked like the Russian Civil War and Spanish Civil War, and which kinds of non-elites these elite coalitions recruited. I think it just pops out quite clearly.

              Another crucially important observation of Mosca was that culture is generated from the relative power of these elite groups. If you see a lot of militant patriotism, you can guess military elites are powerful. If you see a lot of talk of religion, it is priestly elites being powerful. If you see that education is considered the No. 1 important thing, the answer to everything, well…

  31. There are now two Jeff Reads – the based one who’s trying to handle the shock of reality, and the one that occasionally repeats the same old lefty tropes because the mind-virus temporarily has him back.

    I said it was for the greater good of the Mozilla Foundation that Eich resigned — not us, or the community at large. Mozilla is still playing by corporate rules, where optics are everything — especially when you consider that Mozilla has a pretty woke mission statement. Being based doesn’t change the fact that it’s reasonable to expect Eich’s leadership ability of a woke foundation to be severely compromised after he (heh) came out as unsupportive of gay rights.

    Maybe it’ll turn out to be better for us after all — we do have Brave now.

    1. >he (heh) came out as unsupportive of gay rights.

      Jeff, that’s bullshit. Eich never “came out” at all – observers inside Mozilla don’t even allege that there was any instance of hostility towards gays in his work conduct, and he has since refused to make any kind of statement at all about the matter. He was mobbed after a hostile audit of Proposition 8 donations by third parties.

      Which means they went looking for a place to run a Gaystapo career destruction maneuver just to prove they could, pour encourager les autres. Classic Fascist tactics.

      1. Out of the $40M raised for Prop 8, $30M was raised by Mormons, of whom Alan Ashton of WordPerfect fame donated $1M. Eich with $1K was a very small fish. That in my mind looks like a lukewarm level of support, as if Eich did not really consider it a hill to die on. I think it was this, interpreted as a sign of weakness, that attracted them. Ashton owns a venture investor company now and is basically invulnerable to pressure, but is passionate about it that he would have fought any attempt with tooth, nail and his religious network. (Another aspect is was Eich’s unusual vulnerability, with OK Cupid displaying a message about it to Firefox users. )

        They are going after perceived weakness.

        1. >They are going after perceived weakness.

          Absolutely. This will very familiar to anyone who has studied the run up to the Nazi imposition of totalitarianism in the 1930 – the Gleichschaltung. – or the parallel earlier phenomenon in Fascist Italy.

          When you don’t yet have the formal state power to impose totalitarian control, you build towards it by picking off vulnerable targets with mob pressure, creating a climate of fear in which resistance become progressively more costly for stronger targets. You constrict political life, then you strangle it.

          Troutwaxer, are you fucking listening? This is what the “benign” acceptance of PC tropes by people like you set us up for.

          When the “soft” totalitarianization of society by mob pressure is advanced enough (effective language policing by mob is a major symptom of this stage), the legal transition is almost a formality. And that’s not an accident. This is what the memetic virus leftists are running was designed to do.

          1. @esr
            “When you don’t yet have the formal state power to impose totalitarian control, you build towards it by picking off vulnerable targets with mob pressure, creating a climate of fear in which resistance become progressively more costly for stronger targets”

            No, you build concentration camps where you lock up “other races” that are blamed for all the problems in society. Which is exactly what the US hero of the neo Nazis is doing.

            Several times you have written about how you were appalled about the holocaust and how you wanted to stop it ever happening again.

            Now, they are building new concentration camps under your very nose and you actually defend the politicians doing it. But you do attack those that oppose these concentrations camps.

            1. Winter, you cannot possibly be this dense. Do you really not see the difference between rounding up citizens and detaining people who enter a country illegally?

              1. > Winter, you cannot possibly be this dense.
                Sure he can. He’s an NPC, remember? He only ever does what the Powers That Be program him to do.

              2. A concentration camp is just that, a concentration camp. The excuses and propaganda are different every time, but they are still concentration camps.

                Children in cages, remain children in cages, whatever the excuses used.

                But I do recognize the “moral disengagement” exposed here. I have heard these excuses much too often. The fundamental believe is that some people are less equal than others.

                1. In any civilized country, people who commit crimes are arrested. If they commit crimes with children in tow, the children are separated from them and held separately. Again, this should not be shocking.

                2. Winter: The fundamental belie[f] is that some people are less equal than others.

                  And your fundamental belief is based on misinformation and outright lies by the liberal media machine. You’ve been watching too much CNN. What you’ve been told is happening isn’t actually happening – that’s the source of the disconnect. And I think you’re smart enough to know that, but I also think your ideology prevents you from admitting it.

                3. A concentration camp is just that, a concentration camp. The excuses and propaganda are different every time, but they are still concentration camps.

                  This has to be the least helpful definition of terms I have ever seen. Your first sentence is the most basic of tautologies and contributes absolutely nothing. Your second does nothing to narrow the possible candidates (either through positive or negative attributes) and only excludes certain evidence and argument from consideration.

                  Merely from what you have said so far, I see no reason why such examples as the enclave kingdom of Lesotho — or any other national border, for that matter — should not also be classified as being concentration camps. [Are they human habitation zones — a.k.a. “encampment”, often shortened to “camp”? Yes. Are they “concentrations” of a particular group? Yes. Ergo, all nations are “concentration camps”, with the negative stigma that should imply — and we must ignore any excuse or propaganda to the contrary.]

                  Now, you don’t need to tell me that I’ve just made the most ridiculous “literal definition” argument possible — yet ironically, your own given definition limits disagreement to similar such arguments. After all, anything other than revising the first definition can (and should) be dismissed as mere propaganda!

                  1. Don’t be ridiculous. If you really are so ignorant of history to not know the definition of concentration camp, then the American school system is worse than even I thought.

                    Now then, a concentration camp is a facility where people are detained, extrajudicially and extralegally, on the basis of race, ethnicity, or some characteristic like that. They are not necessarily tortured or killed there, just imprisoned there.

                    The Wikipedia article for “concentration camp” cites the Trump-administration immigrant camps as an example. Scholars who study concentration camps refer to the immigrant camps as concentration camps.

                    They’re concentration camps.

                    What’s so difficult to grasp here? This is like onservative attempts to redefine “torture” after it was revealed that the United States was torturing detainees at Guantanamo Bay (also considered a concentration camp, btw).

                    1. a concentration camp is a facility where people are detained, extrajudicially and extralegally, on the basis of race, ethnicity, or some characteristic like that.

                      Immigration camps contain people who violate immigration laws, so they aren’t “extrajudicial” or “extralegal.” And detention is not based on race, it’s just that most of these lawbreakers are of a certain ethnicity. So no, they aren’t “concentration camps” by this definition. You can’t trust Wikipedia about anything regarding contemporary politics.

                    2. >Immigration camps contain people who violate immigration laws, so they aren’t “extrajudicial” or “extralegal.”

                      That isn’t actually a good argument.

                      I am again speaking from my close study of the Nazi revolution and the Endlösung here. In fact, the early mass detentions in the Nazi concentration camps weren’t extralegal either. The Nazis were careful to interpret existing laws, or make new ones, to give them a legal fig leaf.

                      Rather frequently the Nazi gun control act of 1938 (which 30 years later would become the direct model for the U.S’s GCA of 1968) provided the rationale – persons found to have violated the firearms law were a significant fraction of the early detainees. The U.S. gun culture refuses to forget this.

                      Later in the war the Nazis stopped bothering with the legalities, but this does mean that showing the U.S. detentions to be subsequent to due process under the law (which they are) is not itself sufficient to distinguish them from the Nazi camps.

                      The real distinction is more simple and obvious than that. It is not a goal of the U.S. detention system for the detainees to suffer and die. Nazi policy intended that; ours does not.

                      In fact, concentration camps when they were invented by the British during the Boer Wars didn’t have a Nazi-like purpose either. The British wanted to corral the civilian population to cut Boer guerrillas (the term was not yet in use) off from their sources of supply and intelligence.

                      Whether the U.S. detention centers should be called “concentration camps” is a map argument, not a territory one. It’s about shuffling around emotive labels, not reality. What matters is what they are intended to accomplish and how the detainees are treated.

                    3. > Now then, a concentration camp is a facility where people are detained, extrajudicially and extralegally, on the basis of race, ethnicity, or some characteristic like that. They are not necessarily tortured or killed there, just imprisoned there.

                      Even granting that the ICE facilities meet this definition (which I don’t believe they do), the problem is that the term “concentration camp” has acquired connotations of torture and murder because of the Nazis’ “Final Solution.” So when J. Random Voter hears “concentration camp,” he assumes that they’re saying that horrible torture and murder is taking place at these facilities–which is exactly what Chakrabarti and the left are banking on, in order to stir up hatred against the bad old Orange Man sitting in the White House.

                      If you and Winter want to see what a real concentration camp looks like, I’ll be happy to buy you plane tickets to East TurkestanXinjiang province, People’s Republic of China. Note that there’s no guarantee that, once there, you’ll be able to leave Red China…

                    4. @Eric

                      In that case the people arguing against the camps should explicitly make the arguments against the laws in question, rather than selectively applying what amounts to a universal argument against enforcing any laws.

                    5. >The Wikipedia article for “concentration camp” cites the Trump-administration immigrant camps as an example.

                      LOL @ citing Wikipedia for something like that.

              3. They’re detaining the children of people who enter the country illegally — children who, by U.S. law, are U.S. citizens.

                  1. I believe he’s invoking the current Citizenship Clause[1] of the US Constitution, and the birthright citizenship interpretation thereof. Indeed, that was my understanding as well when when we covered that section of the Constitution in my high school government classes. These children of people who entered the country illegally were nonetheless born in the US, therefore according to the birthright citizenship doctrine, they are US citizens.

                    However, I think some would argue that because these children’s parents are not in the country legally, the birthright citizenship doctrine does or should not apply.

                    On one hand, the situation in some cases is not unlike US vs Wong Kim Ark: the parents have a permanent residence in the US, are carrying out business in the US, and are not employed in a diplomatic or other official capacity by a foreign power. On the other hand, I could see the argument that having done illegal things, like border jumping, and in some cases voting or paying taxes with bogus ID, they’ve cancelled out the conditions established in Wong Kim Ark.

                    IMO, the whole thing is a mess and will probably take a Supreme Court ruling to sort it out. And no matter how that ruling goes, a great many people are going to be upset about it.

                    Frankly, I might have agreed that those illegal aliens who’ve not broken any other major laws and have since been productive members of the society should be offered amnesty and a path to citizenship. I consider the couple who comes here, learns English, starts a family, and establishes a successful drywall business to be quite different from drug gang enforcers coming here to shank the cops who’ve been arresting their smugglers.

                    But, there’s been so much bad faith conflation of those illegals worth keeping and those who are not, or illegal immigrants and immigrants in general, that any such amnesty and path to citizenship is not politically feasible anymore. Your post on destroying the middle ground on gun control seems applicable here.

                    I find that disheartening. I’d rather live in a society that’s willing to forgive transgressions if the offender has gotten their shit together since. And I worry that the backlash against all that bad faith could all too easily be weaponized by evil men.

                    1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizenship_Clause

                    1. >I believe he’s invoking the current Citizenship Clause[1]

                      What I thought I heard was a claim that children entering the U.S. illegally with their parents are somehow citizens.

                    2. >I consider the couple who comes here, learns English, starts a family, and establishes a successful drywall business to be quite different from drug gang enforcers coming here to shank the cops who’ve been arresting their smugglers.

                      So do I. But the ugly truth is that the Democrats don’t much care for that sort of immigrant. Their self-reliance deprives Ds of opportunities to virtue-signal, and they might vote Republican.

                    3. >I consider the couple who comes here, learns English, starts a family, and establishes a successful drywall business

                      Would you regularize them before or after admitting the couple who has been patiently waiting their turn (in some hellhole) for the last 10 years?

                    4. > What I thought I heard was a claim that children entering the U.S. illegally with their parents are somehow citizens.

                      Now that I think about it, I’d be no way surprised if the ease with which that statement could be taken different ways was intentional.

                    5. “Frankly, I might have agreed that those illegal aliens who’ve not broken any other major laws and have since been productive members of the society should be offered amnesty and a path to citizenship.”

                      Yeah, Republicans aren’t falling for that again. Even if hardworking Julio proves a net contributor over his lifetime, his children are statistically more likely to commit crime and be a net drain on the taxpayer.

                      Anyone caught in this country illegally should be deported within 24 hours, no exceptions. It’s the only humane, cost-effective, and sane policy: within a year, the numbers will be reduced to a rounding error.

            2. Seriously? First of all, the Nazis didn’t start building concentration camps until after they had seized state power. So your analogy has already broken down. Second, the ICE detainment facilities are hardly the nightmarish hells the Nazi concentration camps were. Your (really, Occasional-Cortex Saikat Chakrabarti’s) comparison cheapens the actual suffering by the Jews and other who endured the real concentration camps.

              Sometimes I wonder if you’re doing this deliberately just to mess with us.

        2. That would fit the pattern. Zoe Quinn, like many gold-digging sociopaths, likes to target weak-willed men like Alex Lifschitz. She will dump them and throw them under the bus as soon as they become inconvenient.

          One of the reasons why geek-culture entryism is so effective is because one of the entryists’ central claims is false: that the culture is full of “misogynerds” who are numerous enough to constitute “a problem” that needs to be solved through complete overhaul of the social norms of the subculture. In fact, most nerds are pretty sensitive. We’ve seen what misogynerds look like. They look like MikeeUSA. A small minority. Most nerds will go along with near anything to avoid causing offense or to atone for prior offenses. And when it comes down to a woman’s hurt feelings vs. a vigorous defense from another nerd, which do you think a standard nerd would side with?

          1. Why are you so obsessed with this mike fellow? You mention that guy in like every post. That aside: hackers defend hackers or atleast freedom of speech. There aren’t so many in free software anymore.

            1. I dunno. Why are you so obsessed with being able to fuck underaged girls and following the laws of a society who believed manhood was attained at age 13 and slavery and stoning were okay? P.s. your sockpuppets are not fooling anyone.

              1. Jeff, here’s a hint: Young girls are cute.
                It’s not hard to figure out.

                You don’t seem well-read either; it was nearly all societies that allowed man+girl; not just ancient Jewish.

                On the other hand, it is only white men who decided to end this globally, for the sake of the white woman.

                Or to put it another way: Acquiring adorable young girls as brides would benefit me, therefore I am for it. It does not benefit the white woman: therefore the white golems are against it.

                RMS has no hope of finding love, according to his writings.
                Not in the white golem’s society atleast.

                Jeff: You might not be heterosexual if you do not understand why one might want a super cute young girl.

              2. >who believed manhood was attained at age 13 and slavery and stoning were okay?

                White male slaves are very cognizant about attaining “Manhood”.
                This is because the society does not cater to the men, but instead the masters of the men. Thus it says “you must do this and that” to be… what you already are.

                When I lift, I become strong. I do not need approval to know I am strong.
                When I destroy: I have destroyed. Nothing else needs to be said.
                When I build: the thing is evident in it’self.

                But the white. No, when the white wishes to become a Man, he must mould himself to the benefit of his master: the white woman. He must develop himself as a tool for her.

                In other societies, where the males are not slaves, no great feat is required of the male. A man is a man.

                It is funny how much you will do for nothing but “recognition”.
                It shows the white for what the white is.

                1. It shows the white for what the white is.

                  White == evil. Both sides of the horseshoe agree, as usual.

              3. Wait, Jeff, “being able to fuck underaged girls” and ” who believed manhood was attained at age 13″ sound strangely connected. Both express the idea that adulthood starts at puberty.

                The problem is largely that becoming an adult, in the brain, is an ongoing process, not a threshold. I am more adult at 40 than I was at 30. Perhaps I will just keeping becoming more and more adult until another process, namely senility, overtakes this one. 13 year olds are definitely more adult than 9 year olds, 18 year olds are definitely more adult than 13 year olds, 25 year olds are definitely more adult than 18 year olds… AFAIK 18 years old as the threshold for adulthood comes from secondary education ending in that age, doesn’t have much more of a basis. It’s just school’s over, off to work.

                1. Yes, that’s part of my point. The threshold for adulthood was much lower because society was simpler. If you were going to herd sheep or smith swords or make barrels all your life, you could learn all you needed to function independently by age 14 or so in most cases, maybe as young as 11 or 12. Heck, “adolescence” was not really recognized as a thing until the early 20th century or so.

                  Today, standards are different. Navigating society and developing a useful skill got a whole lot more complicated, and it’s getting worse. I feel like today many people don’t actually reach full adulthood till their early 30s. Eighteen was chosen as the age of majority — the age of full citizenship (the ability to vote and hold office where such office does not impose a higher minimum age like e.g. the Presidency does) in the USA because in the 1970s you needed to be 21 to vote but could be conscripted at 18, and young Americans objected to being compelled to serve a country they had no representation in.

                  So yeah, standards change. Young teenagers are more vulnerable now than in the pastures of ancient Israel to exploitation by sinister adults. Oh, and we consider women and girls people, not property of their fathers or husbands. So we pass laws to protect them. It’s real simple.

                  1. “The threshold for adulthood was much lower because society was simpler.”

                    Maybe so.

                    It’s not obvious. Equally it’s not obvious that society was ever static. Just maybe lifelong learning has always been a survival trait.

                    Locally the high schools shut down for harvest and everybody can usefully pitch in at most all the jobs.

                    Time was the young could indeed glean the fields but harnessing and driving a 12 horse hitch is and always has been a skilled job.

                    The path from apprentice to journeyman to master could be such that masters were long past their teens. All the more for shipwrights say. Obs S.F. see Poul Anderson’s tongue in cheek contrast of medieval tech with a technological society in The High Crusade.

                    Perhaps children were emancipated by the death of their parents or otherwise on their own much younger. Haiti is a primitive society by today’s standards. The vivre avec children are vulnerable but not adult by anybody’s standards.

    2. >he (heh) came out as unsupportive of gay rights.

      Or he had some other motivation…for example, the traditional ‘libertarian view’ is that government recognition/support of any/all marriage is discriminatory, and thus, more government recognition/support would be a bad thing. We have no idea what his motivation was.

    3. Being based doesn’t change the fact that it’s reasonable to expect Eich’s leadership ability of a woke foundation to be severely compromised after he (heh) came out as unsupportive of gay rights.

      Except that the Mozilla foundation didn’t become woke until after purging Eich. And in fact, open source organizations shouldn’t be woke since it tends to conflict with making good software.

      1. The major players in the MF were woke before the foundation itself became nominally woke.

        If your project attracts enough woke contributors (as “make the world better” projects often do), an unwoke leader becomes a missing stair. And then they won’t be leader anymore.

        1. See also: why any company which publishes a “how we are making the world a better place” statement that doesn’t directly relate to their products or services needs to be sued into oblivion for breach of fiduciary duty.

  32. RMS is based as fuck.

    So were the Jewish Prophets.
    They seem to agree with each-other on man+young girl relations (note: read the original texts, in their original languages).
    Is RMS a Prophet too?

  33. So Obama is also a “hero to the NeoNazis”, since he put kids into those same “concentration camps” in 2014?

    1. “So Obama is also a “hero to the NeoNazis”, since he put kids into those same “concentration camps” in 2014?”

      Obama was never the hero of Neo Nazi’s. They hated him, and still do. This claim just shows your dishonesty.

      Even outside all the word turning and twisting used by pulpits, everyone is responsible for his own actions. Those who use concentration camps cannot point to others having done the same. They are responsible all by themselves for what they do.

      So, if you run concentration camps, you are not absolved by claiming that Obama did it too. You run them, you are responsible.

      1. > Obama was never the hero of Neo Nazi’s.
        Of course not. He wasn’t claiming that. He was trying to highlight the absurdity of saying that, because Trump operates “concentration camps,” that makes him a hero to the neo-Nazis. And how could Trump be a neo-Nazi hero anyway, when his own descendants are largely Jewish? I’m pretty sure real neo-Nazis hate Trump just as much (or more!) than Obama.

        I have to figure out where they’re keeping your NPC code, Winter, so I can rewrite it to be a bit smarter. :) I mean, I’m a ‘sperg, and even I’m not that dense.

      1. Perhaps a private meet up between the “old guard (the only guard)”: RMS, you, Perens, Theo, (?Alan Cox and Linus (doubt linus would attend)?) could be positive? Such a thing would show him he has friends.

        This last year has been quite an attack on the combined movement you championed.

      2. ESR: how is RMS doing? Is he doing ok?

        Does he know that we who actually hack on software as a hobby for 12, 16 hrs a day sometimes support him and see no problem with what he’s written?

        That it’s only the people working for companies that are told “go contribute small things here and there for awhile to project X, later seek managerial roles” that are against him?

        I, for one, don’t see anything wrong with any of the stuff he wrote that those people are complain about, neither the new thoughts, nor the ideas from years ago. I agree with him in essence and hopes he somehow gets what he wants in life.

  34. Some years ago, Stallman noted to an interviewer that he was miserable: that he almost wished he was never born at all, and that he continued on for the sake of free software; his mission.

    Stallman has also written that he has chosen to remain “child free” in-part because he has observed the vast majority of fathers pay enormous sums, work their whole lives for another (whomever gives them the money), and then are divorced and forced to pay even more for their sacrifice. That this happens to the majority of such men; each thinking that it won’t happen to them at the start. He was not so egotistical to believe he would be some exception. He chose not to start down the path to such a: futile life.

    He has also written some fiction about AI-love affair.

    He has also ‘defended’ paedophillia. Multiple times.

    The ‘normal people’, which include Bradly M Kuhn (neither a programmer, nor a lawyer,yet feels standing to viciously publically libel Stallman (in the non-american sense)) have pieced these things together and see: A programmer nerd, who, rather than become a mule for a woman/society, would rather have either an artificial wife (like seen in japanese Anime), or a child bride.

    What they see is, to use their own new term: “An Incel”.

    They then deduce that Stallman would be much happier in some ways a traditional Muslim society, or an old Jewish society: and hates American society.

    Thus they attack him.
    They’ve infiltrated his projects, attempted to divide him from his friends (by driving them out first and away from him, and taking positions in their place), and are attempting to wrest from him the one thing that keeps him going.

    *(Many of their copatriots have stated they wish he was dead or in prison; some have stated they wish to effect atleast an imprisonment.)

  35. moving back to top level to respond to @Jeff Read:

    If you really are so ignorant of history to not know the definition of concentration camp, then the American school system is worse than even I thought.

    I keep “forgetting” that in text media like online discussions, some people expect every argument to be made with 100% sincerity — or at least, any that aren’t will be marked as being sarcastic or devil’s-advocate. So because you apparently were unaware of [or unable to parse] the subtext leading into the chosen presentation, and why it wasn’t so marked, let me spell a few of those points out:

    1. Winter’s “it is what it is” definition I was responding to can be viewed as a rephrased ‘Potter Stewart definition’. However, since the root argument is over whether Trump’s camps qualify as “concentration camps”, the most direct method to resolve that — specifically, a mutually-agreeable definition which names what features make for a concentration camp, and then checking if Trump’s camps qualify — requires all parties to reject Potter Stewart definitions. By labelling this definition as “unhelpful”, I am asking that anyone on Winter’s side provide a definition (or some other means) by which all parties could potentially reach agreement over what does and does not qualify a thing as being a concentration camp.

    2. As a few other people have pointed out, the use of “concentration camp” itself is emotionally charged language with particular, unsavory connotations. Use of this language is a means to attempt to stifle disagreement — via the implication that if one is comfortable with this milder example, they are comfortable with the full, unsavory connotations of the phrase. My argument can thus be seen as an attempt to both call out and reject such “emotional blackmail” by selecting as a counter-example one which should be emotionally charged in a different manner, no matter how far of a stretch that example may seem.

    3. As another reason to select that particular example: there are those in the US who, in protesting against border controls, make it clear they are protesting against national borders. See for instance these 2017 chanters saying “no borders, no nations, stop deportations” or this speech by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez where she mentions a “right of human mobility” [presumably including across the invisible lines called ‘national borders’]. If someone reading my post agreed with that stance to end nations, they might find themselves at a moment of cognitive dissonance upon seeing an “opponent” lay down an argument which would further such a anti-national movement.

    4. Finally, the “it is what it is” defintion is usually presented as a face-saving means to end an argument: this usage can be explicitly spelled out as {X} is core to my belief structure; as you cannot change that belief, please stop arguing with me about {X}. Therefore, if point #3 didn’t apply, my being as silly and stupid as possible in my “challenge” rejecting Winter’s definition could theoretically be read as affirming their implicit exit. (IMO any argument over definitions only gets stupider and sillier the longer it progresses without both parties examining the root cause of a disagreement over terms, so immediately picking a trollish “counterargument” that realistically should not qualify is only accelerating that devolution. As you shouldn’t feed trolls, silence to such an argument is socially acceptable and thus such trolling affirms a decision to exit the argument.)

    The Wikipedia article for “concentration camp” cites the Trump-administration immigrant camps as an example. Scholars who study concentration camps refer to the immigrant camps as concentration camps. They’re concentration camps. What’s so difficult to grasp here?

    Clarity. Is the argument that the people in these camps being held without proper legal authority, or held without moral authority — and why are the camps seen as lacking? If the camps are improper, are there lawsuits being pursued — more specifically, on what arguments do such lawsuits rest? (Do those lawsuits align with the arguments and rhetoric used by protesters?) Is there some procedural change [i.e. not changing immigration policy, only how it is managed / implemented] which could alleviate or reduce the need for these camps — and if so, why is this not the primary focus of the protest rhetoric?

    And in summation of all of the above: if the use of the term “concentration camp” distracts people from approaching these finer points of potential disagreement [and critically: distracts from coming to a mutually acceptable resolution], why does it persist in being used?

    1. >And in summation of all of the above: if the use of the term “concentration camp” distracts people from approaching these finer points of potential disagreement [and critically: distracts from coming to a mutually acceptable resolution], why does it persist in being used?

      You know why. It’s not meant to bring clarity, but rather to be used as an emotional cudgel.

  36. Probably the best thing I got from that video is how he ripped off The Rocketeer with using the fuel as a coolant too.

  37. @Jeff Read :
    >So yeah, standards change. Young teenagers are more vulnerable now than in the pastures of ancient Israel to exploitation by sinister adults.
    YHWH set man as ba’al (master) of the female. He didn’t do it to “help” the women: it is to help the men. He explicitly allows men to take young girls as brides, (including in cases of rape), if you read hebrew, greek, or latin: children. Not just “young teens”.

    (Or did you think Moses’ men taking the female children for themselves after killing everyone else was to “help” them? No: the girl is an object and then a subject of the man: a prize and a pleasure)

    You whites simply worship women, not YHWH. So everything must bow down before your standards.

    > Oh, and we consider women and girls people, not property of their fathers or husbands.
    Ownership is dominion and control.

    >So we pass laws to protect them.
    Who is “we”?

    > It’s real simple.
    Yes: whites are global enemies of men. White men are devoid of agency and simply do as they are instructed to do should it benefit the white woman. It is real simple: the world is ruled by a rod wielded by cattle; not human beings.

    I will do whatever I can to effect the downfall of your system, if anything is needed of me. However those who have came before have allready thrown open the doors to pro-child-bride immigrants all over the world: as a solid challenge to your white (american) female-worship system.
    _

      1. He is like the SJWs who ascribe everything under the sun to The Patriarchy, and in the end they make “The Patriarchy” sound like the best thing that has ever happened.

        Similarly for this guy everything that has ever been good is attributed to “white men worshiping white women”. The fact that his Great Satan routinely beats the ever loving crap out of his heroes in combat as well as everywhere else raises it from merely funny to hilarious.

        Never thought I’d say it; but I miss the Obnoxious Rooster. He at least could present coherent arguments. One prefers one’s enemies to have a little meat on their bones.

  38. ESR: Why did Bradly Kuhn attack RMS? BKuhn was employed by the FSF for years in the 90s and was paid a fairly good salary for the time, even though he did no programming for the FSF and is not a lawyer either. He made almost half as much as Eben Moglen. For the past two years he has been campaigning to oust RMS however, and has succeeded recently atleast for the airli… the foundation (RMS seems to have decided: ‘fsck the airline, I just do not want them getting into my other pockets’) s/airline/foundation/ s/pockets/projects/ . When I talked to Kuhn about the grsecurity gpl violation he made various entry-level errors in advice, and seemed to want to just run out the clock of the statute of limitations with informal talks when we only had a few known violations and now way to know if this would be a continuing violation (and no way to prove any later violations). Now he “contributes” again by attacking RMS.

    Also why is it that everyone calls RMS a “pedo” now? Is this ment to be an insult? They constantly call him a “pedo jew” on the chans and wish for his death. Why are americans like this? How do they “deduce” that RMS supposedly (in their minds) “likes girls”? Is there a solution to all this? Should RMS leave for a better country, is there one? For him?

    1. Why did Bradly Kuhn attack RMS? BKuhn was employed by the FSF for years in the 90s and was paid a fairly good salary for the time, even though he did no programming for the FSF and is not a lawyer either.

      You’ve just answered your own question.

      1. Eugine: please elaborate.
        He got money when not being the 2 things needed: lawyer/programmer.
        Then he bites the hand, but why?

        1. That always happens, people who get money for nothing come to resent their benefactor.

          1. I found it disgusting, the back biting. While the programmers who get nothing remain loyal.

            I have to say: I do not know BKuhn… but I hate him, or atleast his ideas and his implementation of them in attacking RMS.

    2. Also why is it that everyone calls RMS a “pedo” now? Is this ment to be an insult? They constantly call him a “pedo jew” on the chans and wish for his death.

      Translated from Chanese, and possibly steelmaned, this refers to him being a general radical leftist in his politics. Heck, his promotion of leftist causes among hackers probably contributed to the SJW culture that ultimately got him purged.

      1. The ironic karma aspect of a radical leftist victimized by SJWs does prevent me from being fully sympathetic with RMS. I still think it was an injustice, but to some extent he brought it on himself with his support for that political wing.

        1. These situations remind me of the old science fiction movies where the mad scientist creates a monster and is promptly eaten by it. While that fact itself is karmic, unfortunately the rest of us now have a rampaging monster to deal with.

        2. >I still think it was an injustice, but to some extent he brought it on himself with his support for that political wing.

          The Dantons are often curiously unable to see the Robespierres coming.

          1. He still seems to try to curry favor with them still by agreeing to ripping out jokes the men who actually did the work put in (If I were one of said men, and it was 35 years since the work (gnu emacs is about that old)… I’d use the US Copyright statute to recover my copyright, then when the code was rewritten I’d sue for copyright infringement as the rewritten code would be a derivative work. The copyright assignments would not matter vs the statutory law in this case)):

            https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnu-emacs/2019-10/msg02606.html

            From: Richard Stallman
            Subject: bug#38002: Please remove this joke
            Date: Thu, 31 Oct 2019 22:22:17 -0400

            [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider ]]]
            [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies, ]]]
            [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden’s example. ]]]

            I’m in favor of deleting it. We should not include jokes that put
            anyone down.


            Dr Richard Stallman
            Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://gnu.org, https://fsf.org)
            Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)

  39. Feeling needed but not wanted.

    ESR: In an interview, RMS once said that it seems that people feel he’s needed, but not wanted: that he wishes he was wanted rather than just needed.

    In another he said that the thing that keeps him going is his need to forward the free software movement, but otherwise he is miserable and wishes he was not born.

    On his website he wrote that he long since had given up on the hope of ever finding love.

    Is there anything you and Bruce Perens could do to make him feel wanted?

    1. >Is there anything you and Bruce Perens could do to make him feel wanted?

      Well, I’ve already tried by offering help and telling him that for all we’ve had some differences I think he is infinitely more valuable to the world than these anklebiting SJWs and false friends.

      What he really needs is something I can’t give him, which is a a good marriage made thirty years ago.

      1. Could the Jewish community perhaps give him that? Not necessarily even in America. It’s not to late to marry, he could marry a nice girl from the community.

        You’re correct in what he needs.

        1. The Jewish community largely feels the same way about childfucking that the rest of us do. God(s) forbid you should ever touch a child, but you being such a self-professed legal expert I’d like to be a fly on the wall when you invoke ancient Hebrew law and attempt to offer the child’s father a bride price. My guess is that he’ll settle for no less a bride price than your head blown off with a shotgun.

          And no, a three-year-old bride won’t make Stallman happy. If anything, I’d say that back in the 80s, he should have found a woman between three and ten years older than he and wifed her. His is the sort of brilliance young women find repulsive and older women find immensely attractive.

          Fun fact: When Stallman was defending paedophilia, he was probably just quoting left-wing feminist orthodoxy. Judith Butler, Gayle Rubin, and even Michel Foucault have all gone on record as stating that paedophiles represent a class oppressed based on sexual orientation. Butler is one of the founders of the queer and gender theory that SJWs love so much, and of course Foucault is one of postmodernism’s golden boys.

          Stallman’s later reversal was probably genuine. He may be slow to realize he’s stepped in it, but when he does he takes a hard opposite stance. It’s a pattern of his: Stallman was a supporter of Hugo Chavez until he realized that oops: Chavez was really really fond of Gadhafi.

          SJWs, of course, will defend paedophiles who emerge within their own ranks (see the cases of Nicholas “Sarah” Nyberg and Jonathan “Jessica” Yaniv). But the (justified) taboo against paedophilia in our society is a useful cudgel to wield against people like Stallman who are considered to be “a problem”.

          1. To me RMS’s comments on the age of consent look like philosophical hypotheticals, not a parroting of Foucault or a Walter Breen-esque cover/justification for perversion. I don’t know him, but I don’t get pervert vibes. I don’t think he wants or needs a child bride. He needs a nice, leftist, Jewish, nerd-compatible woman around his age. They aren’t all that rare. He should clean himself up, work out more, and get on Bumble.

            I just finished The Last Closet: The Dark Side of Avalon by Moira Greyland. An often harrowing read. Breen was her father, her mother was Marion Zimmer Bradley, and both were sexually abusive to her. Interestingly, Greyland says the founding documents for NAMBLA were typed on his machine.

            1. I think Stallman took the likes of Judith Butler seriously when they held that paedophilia doesn’t really harm kids and that paedophiles are shunned by society for puritanical reasons. It’s typical Stallman. He has this way of naïvely, but well-intentionedly, stepping in shit by rigorously applying his principles, central to which is individual freedom, to stated circumstances he takes at face value. (Back in the 2000s, to the left it really did look like Chavez was going to liberate the people of Venezuela from American petro-hegemony.) Again, once he was presented with evidence that adult-child sexual relations caused actual harm, he backpedaled hard on those claims he made.

              Note that I never said anything about Stallman wanting a child bride. But MikeeUSA seems to think that child brides are the key to male happiness. I was speaking to Mikee’s justification for perversion — not Stallman’s.

            2. To me RMS’s comments on the age of consent look like philosophical hypotheticals, not a parroting of Foucault or a Walter Breen-esque cover/justification for perversion.

              That seems exactly right to me.

              >I don’t know him, but I don’t get pervert vibes.

              I do know RMS, and have for a very long time. I’ve known multiple of his girlfriends. He has a healthy attraction to fully nubile women. He’s terrible at actually closing the deal, but that’s a different issue.

      2. What he really needs is something I can’t give him, which is a a good marriage made thirty years ago.

        But the Feminists and MTGOWs told me this wasn’t needed! It’s Fish and Bicycles all the way down! No one needs any sort of human contact!

        1. The MTGOWs want human contact, the women will not allow them near young girls.

          And that is why Islam will win: men will gladly betray their country when women rule over them: even if it means their own destruction.

          I know I would. Better dead than woman home rule forever.

      3. >SJWs and false friends.

        Was it figured out who defaced his site a few weeks ago (reportedly it was someone in the FSF)

      4. Eric (and everyone else), is there a good book on how to pick up women that a heterosexual man who is immersed in SJWism won’t immediately reject?

        It might help RMS, and I’m thinking of another person in the hacker community who really needs it.

    1. Was the FSF a coven of gays plus one old MIT hacker?

      Well, the one FSF programmer I knew, or at least was in the room while he was discussing his relationship, was a bottom in a heterosexual relationship. At least he referred to his partner with female pronouns, and this was before trannys were as big a thing.

      Also, consider the kind of people who would be able to stand RMS long enough to work with him in person.

      1. I think the requirement they have of copyright transfer makes only submissives work with the FSF. It’s like “hey cut your legal balls off for us, so you can work for us for free!”

        Free means: take it or leave it. Not doing months long submissive act and letting you know real name of programmer.

      2. In the USA, it is extremely illegal for the male to be anything other than the bottom in a relationship with a woman.

        That is why many of us USA men do not wish anything good for our country anymore: it is not ours.

  40. Popping this thread out to the top level for readability purposes.

    > …what I predicted would become the new SJW standard for disciplinary action: suspected risk of CoC violation, not actual CoC violation in fact.

    Uncle Bob’s recent post[1] on Linux Foundation expelling one Charles Max Wood from KubeCon crossed my radar via HN[2], and someone in the comments there pointed out the similarities to between this incident, and the kerfluffle at Stack Overflow[3].

    By your stated standard of “suspected risk of CoC violation”, with all the evils attributed to Trump and his supporters, wearing a MAGA hat certainly is a clear indicator of risk of CoC violation.

    I find the choice of target instructive. I’ve never heard of this Charles Wood before now. I’d certainly heard of Uncle Bob. I’m not aware of any successful[4] attacks against Uncle Bob, but I don’t doubt many would come to his defense were he attacked. This Charles Wood, however, I’ve not heard of this guy at all. Seems to me it would make more sense, tactically, to go after someone relatively unknown, someone who’s not earned the same order of magnitude of goodwill Uncle Bob has from the wider programming community. Pick those relatively weaker targets to improve your odds of success.

    My initial impulse is to just stay off Twitter, infested by the perpetually-outraged as it is, and try to put my energy into making things, instead. But I’m starting to wonder, just how much longer is that going to remain a safe strategy.

    1. https://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2019/11/08/OpenLetterLinuxFoundation.html
    2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21484347
    3. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21484890
    4. Reading Bob’s blog, I’m aware he’s been attacked before, but I’ve not year head of him being uninvited from conferences, fired, or other common results of rage-mob attacks.

    1. While it’s pretty bad out there, the Linux Foundation has stated that Charles Max Wood did indeed violate their CoC, and it seems that is correct: under current standards, “Make America Great Again”, and expressing support for Trump in general, are considered hate speech and will result in a ban from major conferences. So this does not yet rise to the threshold of banning someone for potential CoC violations. It only serves as an example of how low the threshold is for committing actual CoC violations.

      Uncle Bob currently has too much whuffie to be cancelled. But that day is coming soon; as Sarah Mei says, the only legacy he is actually entitled to is that he harassed and demeaned women.

      1. are considered hate speech

        It seems the standard is, if someone thinks something is hate speech, then that alone is proof that it is, and thus no mercy is given as they monkey-screech and expel the apostate.

        Disgusting animals.

        1. I should correct myself. The stated CoC violation Charles Max Wood committed was “tone policing”. If this were the real reason, it would be silly in its own right. “Tone policing” basically consists of pointing out to an SJW who’s worked themself up into a frothy rage that they’ve worked themself up into a frothy rage and should really calm down, have a stiff drink, and talk things over rationally. Note that SJWs tone-police non-SJWs all the time, even on lkml, with no ill effects. Because, you know, there’s no struggle but the class struggle, and no anger is allowed besides righteous anger against WhiteSupremacistCapitalistPatriarchy[0].

          But I’ve done a little digging, and it seems that banning him for “tone policing” is like arresting Al Capone for tax evasion. See, Charles Max Wood is tight with John Sonmez, a brogrammer who posts all over YouTube and once told Kim Crayton to “shut her damn mouth”. Because Kim Crayton is black and female, that obviously constituted gender- and race-based harassment, and Charles Max Wood’s continued association with John Sonmez made him “problematic”. So some sort of violation he committed had to be found, or synthesized out of whole cloth.

          Note that Kim Crayton is on the record as having made statements like “white men in tech ain’t shit” and “all whiteness is racist by design”. This is acceptable per the CoC because an unstated assumption of most Codes of Conduct is “we prefer the safety of marginalized groups over the comfort of privileged groups”. (This appears, almost verbatim, in the GNOME Code of Conduct.) Meaning that harassment based on race or gender is a CoC violation if it “punches down” but not if it “punches up”. Similarly, John Sonmez telling Kim Crayton to shut her damn mouth is unacceptable, but Sarah Mei telling you to shut the fuck up is okay.

          Uncle Bob should not have written that letter. If it is interpreted charitably by the Linux foundation, no action will be taken. If it is interpreted uncharitably, action will be taken — against Uncle Bob. Because he suggested that the complainants were harassing Charles Max Wood for legitimate punching-up actions, he is punching down, therefore harassing them which is a CoC violation.

          [0]I’m not making this term up; “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy”, sans studlycaps, is the central concept of the writings of bell hooks, arguably the midwife of intersectional feminism and a must-read if you truly want to grok SJWism.

          1. Ironically, a lot of what CoC enforcers do is “tone policing.”

            Again, the “marginalized groups” over “privileged groups”/”punching up vs. down” view strikes at core Enlightenment values. It abandons individual justice for “group justice,” a.k.a. tribalism. It’s regression in the name of progress, racism in the name of anti-racism, oppression in the name of freedom. Simultaneously Orwellian and atavistic. It reminds me of an argument I recently had on Reddit with someone who seriously believed that humanity’s wrong turn was agriculture! Hunter-gatherers “had better lives,” he wrote with his computer in a comfortable room. We see some truly crazy ideas on the left these days.

            1. Ironically, a lot of what CoC enforcers do is “tone policing.”

              Why, yes. And no. Tone policing, like wrecking in the Soviet Union, is by definition an ideological crime: it can, in theory, only be committed by those outside the ideology against those faithful to the ideology. When it is done by one of the faithful it is called “creating a safe space”. See also: “signal boosting”/”brigading”, “fact-checking”/”sealioning”, and “gatekeeping”/”creating a welcoming community”.

            2. Again, the “marginalized groups” over “privileged groups”/”punching up vs. down” view strikes at core Enlightenment values. It abandons individual justice for “group justice,” a.k.a. tribalism. It’s regression in the name of progress, racism in the name of anti-racism, oppression in the name of freedom. Simultaneously Orwellian and atavistic.

              And classic doublethink. Intersectionalism is based on the idea that, for example, the experiences of black women are different from the experiences of white women, so no identitarian movement, no matter how well-intentioned, can account or speak for all women. Want to be intersectionalist AF? Propose the radical idea that since each person has unique circumstances and life experiences, only they are qualified to speak for themselves, and the most society can do for them is protect their rights and inherent dignity as a person without attaching group-identity considerations.

              Except, wait, then you have to take responsibility for yourself, and cannot fall back on your group identity. So intersectionalists never get that far. Instead they are always in a state of tension and conflict, both within themselves and with other intersectionalists — exactly what you would expect of someone who believes a statement and its opposite at the same time.

              1. And classic doublethink.

                And do you oppose this? Or are you like Syme, and consider doublethink a swell idea?

                1. Of course I oppose it. It’s gumming up open source something fierce. Open source was the place where atheist leftists like RMS and conservative Christians like Larry Wall could meet, create, and share code together without regard to whatever disagreements they might have in other areas of life. It was the closest thing to the utopia that was promised to us by marketing agencies looking to build hype for the internet in the 90s.

                  And now these turkeys, many of whom can’t write a lick of code to save their lives, went and broke it.

                  Though it is sometimes kind of amusing to watch them squabble among themselves over, say, how oppressive the skin tone or curve of the hips on fan art of their favorite Steven Universe character is or isn’t. Ever herd together a pack of monsters in Doom close enough to provoke them into attacking each other, thinning their numbers and leaving you with less work to do in killing them all? It’s that kind of satisfying.

                  1. >And now these turkeys, many of whom can’t write a lick of code to save their lives, went and broke it.

                    It’s boring and a waste of everyone’s time to repeat “I told you so!” incessantly, but you have this coming once and you’re going to get it once.

                    I told you this would happen. I was sounding the alarm as early as 2006 and certainly five years ago already. Libertarians (and conservatives) in general knew exactly where the intrusion of left politics and “diversity” into geek subcultures would lead. You, in your arrogant certainty, jeered at us.

                    Through the whole kulturkampf that led up to this – the ragemobbing of Brendan Eich, the politicization of the Hugo Awards, GamerGate – you were cheering on the would-be zampolits. You were part of the problem.

                    I give you respect for actually waking up enough to realize that the effect on the hacker culture and gaming is a disaster, I really do. All too many of your fellow mind-virus victims will never even begin to heal themselves; it took intellectual honesty and moral courage that I didn’t know you owned to even start.

                    But I still have to ask goddammit, what took you so long?

                    Do you understand that you need to be questioning your premises anywhere they come even near politics? Until you can get to the point where, starting with the facts of history, you would have predicted and expected this negative outcome, you may be repentant, but you aren’t done repairing the mind-virus damage even to yourself alone.

                    The next question after that is this one: What are you going to do to atone for and remedy the damage you helped cause to your civilization?

                    I’m not the boss of you, and don’t want to be – you don’t need to tell me your answers to these questions. But you for damned sure owe it to yourself, your neighbors, your nation, and your civilization to find those answers. And to live them.

          2. Uncle Bob should not have written that letter. If it is interpreted charitably by the Linux foundation, no action will be taken. If it is interpreted uncharitably, action will be taken — against Uncle Bob.

            Sorry, this kind of surrender and try to keep your head down approach is not going to work. All it does is encourage the SJW’s to push further.

            Because he suggested that the complainants were harassing Charles Max Wood for legitimate punching-up actions, he is punching down, therefore harassing them which is a CoC violation.

            Don’t play by the SJW’s rules! Even the SJW’s won’t play by their own rules, so why should we?

            1. Over recent years I’ve found myself shifting from eye-rolling at SJW excesses, but wanting rational compromise, to a more adversarial stance. I now think this is a purely poisonous trend that must be stopped before it “fixes” Western civilization and destroys it. And like it or not, it cannot possibly be stopped unless Trump wins in 2020.

            2. Sorry, this kind of surrender and try to keep your head down approach is not going to work.

              More like “do not even try to engage”. If you wander into a bear cave expecting to meet nice friendly bears, the expected result is that you will get mauled to death and possibly eaten.

              1. Except this isn’t a bear cave. This is a house that some of the occupants have allowed bears to enter because they expected nice friendly bears. Uncle Bob is trying to convince people that inviting in bears was a mistake. You are arguing for abandoning the house to the bears.

      2. under current standards, “Make America Great Again”, and expressing support for Trump in general, are considered hate speech and will result in a ban from major conferences

        This is one of the clearest, most explicit attacks on the concept of free speech that I’ve ever seen. The fact that it is happening at all is bad enough. It’s worse that it’s in this community, which I always thought veered libertarian. This isn’t just “leftism,” it’s straight-up totalitarianism. They’ve weaponized the term “hate” and turned it against half the population. (BTW, this is the sort of thing discussed in The Madness of Crowds by Douglas Murray, which I recommend.)

        We all know that the Democratic Party is where most of these little tyrants live, so 2020 is shaping up to be a titanic battle of liberty vs. tyranny. I don’t want to see all you wrongthinkers exiled to professional Siberia for CoC thoughtcrimes or for wearing the wrong hat. I also hope you’re all keeping your noses clean, because if they aren’t stopped they’ll be coming for you next.

        1. Slavoj Žižek, the famous communist philosopher, recently opined that SJWism is really just a distraction to get us to shift our focus away from the real struggle which is between the rich and powerful corporations and the working classes.

          Fairly typical traditional-Marxist vs. neo-Marxist stuff, and the based have a meme for it consisting of a quote from the 2014 movie Godzilla: “Let them fight.” But something I’ve noticed is how corporate the open-source SJWs are. Of course we know about Sarah/Sage Sharp’s previous associations with Intel, and there’s a conspiracy theory circulating suggesting that she was deployed specifically to get Linus to base the kernel’s random-number generator solely on Intel’s hardware RDRAND implementation and to force him to step down if he did not. But one day I was listening to a podcast featuring Aurynn Shaw (she of “ban people because they might be CoC violations waiting to happen” fame), and she was holding forth on why federated protocols are Bad. No nuance, no here are the benefits and drawbacks, none of that. Just straight up, they are Bad and you should not use them because apparently they cause lock-in? Like, you shouldn’t use IRC for your community’s chat. Aurynn Shaw’s proposed alternative? Slack. Fucking Slack, with its >100 MiB proprietary client and its interoperability which has gotten worse over time.

          I really do think that part of the reason why we’ve seen struggle sessions against Linus, RMS, and so forth is because they are significant obstacles to corporations gaining control over the open-source community. Open-source praxis is designed to be resilient against sabotage from hostile parties like corporations and government agencies, but it has a weakness: the currency of open source is the reputation of its hackers, and if you want to control — or, barring that, destroy — the community, a good place to start is by turning those hackers into Milkshake Ducks.

        2. PapayaSF: When they shut your mouth: you speak in other ways.

          You understand. It’s up to you if you have the will to let your understanding get across.

            1. Even /r/linux are getting pretty based about this. And they usually remove or downmod posts/comments about this topic on that sub.

              This may well be a bridge too far for the Linux community at large.

              1. The post was removed from r/linux twice as “poor source,” so I’m not sure what you are referring to.

      3. I saw somewhere in one of the discussions of this issue that in fact he isn’t a Trump supporter; he just thought it would be fun to pose for a selfie with a MAGA hat in front of Trump Tower.

        This reminds me of how, when The Daily Show did a traveling exhibition of “the Trump tweet library”, a humorous presentation of the president’s silly tweets, one of the things in the exhibit was a place where you could pose with various Trump-related props including a MAGA hat, just for the fun of it (the exhibit was obviously not there to SUPPORT Trump). I went to that exhibition when it came to my area, and I’d better not upload the resulting picture anywhere or else I’d be cancelled by the current standards.

  41. ESR: RMS says his life was terribly sad:

    > I could do without the trappings that people are taught to apply to romantic relationships. The only part that I need is to share loving tenderness and sometimes to delight her. But without that, my life would be (and was) terribly sad.

    ( http://www.stallman.org/archives/2019-sep-dec.html#8_November_2019_(Single_person_marriage) )

    Is there nothing that could be done? A life outside of the USA. The USA would never give RMS a girl; but other cultures might.

    1. Oh, give it a rest.

      Stallman is a frequent visitor to South America and speaks Spanish fluently. If the problem were with WhiteUSAFemaleDevil as you keep insisting, there would have been plenty of Colombian, Argentinian, or Brazilian girls who would have thrown themselves at him.

      My guess is that the problem is simple: Stallman doesn’t groom or maintain himself very well. If he were to shave, comb his hair, bathe more frequently, and lift weights and/or engage in calisthentic or martial-arts training like Eric does, he might have better luck. At the least, he’d feel better about himself and women can read that.

      He was a handsome lad in his youth. His current loneliness is largely his own making.

      1. Jeff Read: you have a sophmoric view of women and the society you live in. No amount of workout will bring back youth; and youthful vigor is the draw. Barring that: power (another display of vigor).

        Stallman has neither: and has no way of acquiring such. Nor should he have to.

        (I agree with you on weightlifting etc. I do it too. It’s important to maintain drive and will. But it’s no miracle worker. And women will not be “throwing themselves” at any man no in-charge of other men. They want what they can get: they’re not stupid. Love only really exists with girls, someday you too will know this; but to what end? [but then again… even that is an abuse of the idea of love… only ones mother will really one, in the end])

        When Stallman’s dead; you’ll just tell us all the ways He could have helped himself

    2. ESR: could you maybe visit him, he seems perhaps depressed, and “hanging out” on the web/engaging with the turn-coats infesting his mailing lists isn’t going to help him: only real people might.

  42. Maybe it is now time for an Open Letter and an extended Petition drive, starting with the Linux kernel community…. There needs to be a way for people that want to replace the CC-based CoC to see how many more people agree with them.

    1. ‘course, no one with anything to lose would want to be one of the first hundred people to sign a petition denouncing the CC-COC. A petition that remains secret until it has 250 signatures?

    1. Sure, other than the fact that one wasn’t actually completed with 1990’s technology. I loved the DC-X, and was incensed when NASA picked the dishonestly-named X-33 instead of the DC-Y, but results so far with actual flying hardware suggest to me that a practical SSTO with TODAY’S technology might not be possible. I think Elon Musk has hit on the right configuration – TSTO, with both stages recoverable, while being made of relatively less expensive materials. Optimize one stage for launch from the ground, with relatively low re-entry speeds, then optimize the second stage for vacuum operation, with the necessary materials and systems to survive orbital reentry.

      Note that Blue Origin originally used a shape similar to the DC-X (low fineness ratio, possibly because they were reputed to have hired former members of the DC-X development team), but eventually switched to their current shape (a long tube). IIRC, they lost a prototype in flight, and it could be that they found something wrong in practice with the “short and stubby” shape.

  43. It didn’t help the DC-X that hyrolox is a poor fuel choice for launching from the ground.

Leave a comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *