{"id":7095,"date":"2016-04-03T23:08:53","date_gmt":"2016-04-04T03:08:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=7095"},"modified":"2016-04-04T15:28:21","modified_gmt":"2016-04-04T19:28:21","slug":"this-may-be-the-week-the-sjws-lost-it-all","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=7095","title":{"rendered":"This may be the week the SJWs lost it all"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This may be the week the SJWs lost it all&#8230;or, at least, their power to bully people in the hacker culture and the wider tech community.<\/p>\n<p>Many of you probably already know about the LambdaConf flap.  In brief: LambdaConf, a technical conference on functional programming, accepted a presentation proposal about a language called Urbit, from a guy named Curtis Yarvin.  I&#8217;ve looked at Urbit: it is very weird, but rather interesting, and certainly a worthy topic for a functional programming conference.<\/p>\n<p>And then all hell broke loose. For Curtis Yarvin is better known as Mencius Moldbug, author of eccentric and erudite political rants and a focus of intense hatred by humorless leftists. Me, I&#8217;ve never been able to figure out how much of what Moldbug writes he actually believes; his writing seems designed to leave a reader guessing as to whether he&#8217;s really serious or executing the most brilliantly satirical long-term troll-job in the history of the Internet.<\/p>\n<p>A mob of SJWs, spearheaded by a no-shit self-described Communist named Jon Sterling, descended on LambdaConf demanding that they cancel Yarvin&#8217;s talk, pretending that he (rather than, say, the Communist) posed a safety threat to other conference-goers.  The conference&#8217;s principal organizers, headed up one John de Goes, quite properly <a href=\"http:\/\/degoes.net\/articles\/lambdaconf-inclusion\">refused to cancel the talk<\/a>, observing that Yarvin was there to talk about his code and not his politics.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>I think they conceded to much to the SJWs, actually, by asking Yarvin to issue a statement about his views on violence. Nobody asked Jon Sterling whether he was down with that whole liquidation of the kulaks thing, after all, and if a Communist who likes to tweet about sending capitalists to &#8220;hard labor in the North&#8221; gets a pass it is not easy to see why any apologia was required from a man with no history of advocating violence at all.<\/p>\n<p>But, ultimately, they did make the right decision: to judge Yarvin&#8217;s talk proposal by its technical merit alone.  This is the hacker way.<\/p>\n<p>The SJWs then attempted to pressure LambdaConf&#8217;s sponsors into withdrawing their support so the conference would have to be canceled. Several sponsors withdrew (I don&#8217;t know details about who; my sources for this part are secondhand).<\/p>\n<p>So far, so wearily familiar &#8211; Marxist thugs versus free expression, with free expression&#8217;s chances not looking so hot. But there&#8217;s where the story gets good.  Meredith Patterson and her friends at the blog <a href=\"http:\/\/status451.com\/\">Status 451<\/a> organized a counterpunch.  They launched an IndieGoGo campaign <a href=\"https:\/\/www.indiegogo.com\/projects\/save-lambdaconf-and-an-open-society--3\/x\/13715504#\/\">Save LambdaConf &#8230;and an open society<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>I got wind of this a bit less than two days ago and posted to G+ asking all 20K of my followers to <a href=\"https:\/\/plus.google.com\/+EricRaymond\/posts\/PGrPphhSRNE\">chip in<\/a>, something I&#8217;ve never done before. Because, like Merry, I understand that this wasn&#8217;t actually about Mencius Moldbug at all &#8211; it was about opposing a power play by the political-correctness police. The IndieGoGo campaign was our chance to strike back for liberty.<\/p>\n<p>A day later it was fully funded.  ClarkHat&#8217;s <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/ClarkHat\/status\/716242082696921088\">victory lap<\/a> makes great reading.  <\/p>\n<p>I replied to congratulate ClarkHat: &#8220;@ClarkHat I don&#8217;t often ask my 20K G+ followers to support a crowdfunder,  but when I do it&#8217;s hoping for a victory like this one.&#8221; And today I have 21K followers.<\/p>\n<p>The hacker community has spoken, and it put its money where its mouth is, too. Now we know how to stop the SJWs in their tracks &#8211; fund what they denounce, make their hatred an asset, repeatedly kerb-stomp them with proof that their hate campaigns will be countered by the overwhelming will of the people and communities they thought they had bullied into submission.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m proud of my community for stepping up.  I hope Sir Tim Hunt and Brendan Eich and Matt Taylor and other past victims of PC lynch mobs are smiling tonight. The SJWs&#8217; preference-falsification bubble has popped; with a little work and a few more rounds of demonstration we may be able to prevent future lynchings entirely.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This may be the week the SJWs lost it all&#8230;or, at least, their power to bully people in the hacker culture and the wider tech community. Many of you probably already know about the LambdaConf flap. In brief: LambdaConf, a technical conference on functional programming, accepted a presentation proposal about a language called Urbit, from&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=7095\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">This may be the week the SJWs lost it all<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7095","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hacker-culture","category-politics","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7095","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7095"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7095\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7108,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7095\/revisions\/7108"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7095"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7095"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7095"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}