SJWs Always Double Down: Anticipating the Thought Police (The Laws of Social Justice Book 2)

by Vox Day

  Learn to feed on the Dark Side of the Force. Many people find the hatred and anger directed at them by SJWs to be enervating. I happen find it energizing, and often entertaining. Triggering SJWs is not only a useful marketing tool, it can also be a fun way to enhance the morale of your team that is under attack. When we discovered that the comics SJWs found the character of Rebel to be particularly unsettling, the artists on the Alt*Hero team launched an internal competition to provide the most triggering image of her, the discussions of which led to more than one hysterical outbursts. We haven’t unveiled any them yet, but the heavy favorite is Rebel sitting on the back of the statue of Robert E. Lee’s horse and embracing the stone general, although I suspect the image of her striking an action pose in front of a waving U.S. flag may prove even more upsetting due to the difficulty posed by the seeming contradiction to binary-thinking SJW minds.

  Building SJW-free institutions is necessary if we are going to save America and save Western Civilization. Just remember, vigilance is always necessary, and to paraphrase Robert Conquest, any organization that is not explicitly and intrinsically anti-social justice will sooner or later become converged.

  Appendix A: SJWs in Open Source

  VOX: You were involved in a large open source project on the technical side. How long were you involved with it and what was your primary responsibility?

  OSS: I was involved as a programmer for around four years. In various capacities. On the periphery and all the way up to having some responsibility for key parts of the project. Early in my involvement, the whole project experienced a lot of pain because of leadership problems. I thought I had made the wrong choice about where I was spending my coding time.

  VOX: Was it open source at the time?

  OSS: Open source from the beginning, yes. But it was run in the typical BDFL style. That’s a term we use in open source for the most common type of leadership. BDFL stands for benevolent dictator for life.

  VOX: Like the one utilized by Linus Torvalds and Linux.

  OSS: Yes, he is the classic example of that today. So this leadership style is very popular in many other open source projects. But success depends so much on the single leader you have.

  So, the project had a good leader but he burnt out and just quit the industry. It was really sudden. That void caused problems. The incentives were kind of messed up too. There were also legal problems about licensing and copyright that made it so much worse. The project all but died in that period. There was a lot of pain around then and the project was really on the edge.

  VOX: Was there any code of conduct or inclusivity drive or that sort of thing at that time?

  OSS: Open source is the new frontier for social justice attacks and we’re just not prepared for it. People are just not tuned into this because it has come so suddenly. Codes of conduct came on so suddenly! First a few conferences adopted them, and then suddenly, like almost overnight, every open source project needed to have one checked into their codebase. And if you don’t have one, then you’re a pariah. If you don’t have one, then you’re just not worthy, period. And so, the social pressure to introduce these things was really sudden, and very strong, and was not objected to at all. It just hit us and we couldn’t stop it.

  VOX: Specifically when did it hit your project?

  OSS: I’m pretty sure it didn’t happen under the BDFL leader. It only happened in the last couple of years. Like for every major project. It was relatively recent.

  VOX: But it was after the BDFL leadership style was abandoned?

  OSS: Yes, it was. So around that time when we were rudderless. We had people talking about forks of the project and other people trying to convince those left in control to fix up the mess themselves. In the end, some heavyweight Silicon Valley companies who had an interest, forced change and wrestled the project away and set up new leadership. We got a code of conduct as part of that deal I think. But we got a structure that put leadership in the hands of the people who did the most quality work on the code. You had to invest your skill to be involved in decision making.

  VOX: So, it’s almost a pure meritocracy in that regard?

  OSS: Yes. It was great. You make good contributions then you get to act like an owner of it. Instead of appointing one person as a gatekeeper you have a group of skilled technical people. And once they’ve had enough, they hand off responsibility to the next group who are enthusiastic and who take the project forward. It was just a success all round and lots of fun too.

  VOX: Especially because the people you’re turning it over to are actually, by definition, doing the work and making meaningful contributions.

  OSS: Correct. And so the thing in open source has always been, how do you run a project so that the people that it matters to the most get taken care of? And that is like an open question. That is constantly debated. If you give control to the people doing the work then there’s a good chance you’re giving control to the people that the project matters to. Why else would they give their time? There has been a shift in thinking about this in the open source world.

  Somehow these companies agreed to a flexible system where they give control of the project to the techies. Probably because there has been a lot of experimenting in open source with these non-BDFL leadership styles and mostly they are successful.

  And so there was a lot of maneuvering that had a lot of people who were scattered come back together under this new collective effort and it’s got these corporate names attached to it.

  VOX: But of course, a lot of those corporate entities are heavily SJW converged, and I would imagine they brought in a number of the sort of SJWs who demand a code of conduct, and diversity and inclusivity, and all that.

  OSS: They did. But of course we had rules where the most active code committers run the project. The law was laid down that said the coding team owns it. And the corporates signed up for that. And for a while we managed to keep that going and had an independence from corporate or social justice influence. Mostly. There’s always good coders who are obsessed with social justice too so you can’t get totally free of it. But it was mostly good. So the coders reported to the corporates about what they were doing and there was a lot of respect.

  So we were still isolated from those pressures. And we had managed all this time to keep it very merit based. Unfortunately, during that time, the SJWs in open source were hanging around constantly trying to break into this meritocratic system, which they hate because they don’t contribute. But they have a strong attraction to successful things and want a piece of the action.

  They were able to start diversity and inclusion initiatives and they said it’s all about expanding the types of contributors for the project to expand the underrepresented minorities. Completely ignoring that we had only seen constant growth with the number of contributors with our merit system. The growth was so good. There were committers from around the world. Different countries. Different languages. Lots of different opinions. Kind of wild and lots of fun to be involved in. The language difficulties were a big challenge because so many people don’t speak English as their native language. We already had an incredibly diverse contributor base. And all of the numbers were an upward trend. I mean the numbers were so good for a project that nearly disappeared.

  VOX: But as you’re discovering, that is totally irrelevant because global diversity is not the genuine goal of the inclusivity drive.

  OSS: Correct. So the diversity and inclusion thing sets up and they talk the talk about wanting to create initiatives for unrepresented minorities and you give them most of what they want. There’s lots of corporate support for this too of course. I mean, we all wanted to expand and it all sounds great to reach more people. But their real agenda is at play. It wasn’t clear to me at all from the beginning. A strategy that they pursued from day one was control over the open source social space. They wanted to have control over our collaboration space in order to enforce language rules and steer discussions and even remove people they didn’t l
ike. The stated goal is always to make it more inclusive and more welcoming to unrepresented minorities. They weren’t coding. Not even helping write documentation which you always appreciate. Lots of talking and feeling but not much else.

  VOX: What was the general position of the technical contributors themselves? Are they mostly not paying attention to this takeover attempt? Did they mostly support it? Or did they mostly oppose it?

  OSS: So I think there were some leaders. The more experienced ones, that were pushing back because they had been targets before of the name calling or shaming and the usual tactics. They just didn’t have the patience for the kind of distraction that was being imposed. But mostly I think the leadership was split between people who thought it sounded good and wanted to go along, and others who ignored it all and just wanted to get on with pushing code.

  I mean, if you take it on face value it has a positive ring to it. If you’re building up an open source project it’s the eyeballs that matter and you want to collect as many of those as you can. If there’s sectors of the programming community you’re not reaching then why not? And the peer pressure is there too because everyone’s got these codes of conduct. And everyone is talking about diversity and inclusion. And it’s only really on the noisy forums like Hacker News where counterpoints are being discussed.

  So there’s two reasons we might have objected to these moves. One was that it didn’t fit our meritocratic system. But as you know, the usual SJW talking points about meritocracy get rolled out to deal with that. The other reason is that a lot of the people that push these things are not really very nice people. You get their aggression when they rant about needing a less aggressive culture. They don’t like debate. Logic doesn’t work. They work in mobs and it can be really intimidating. So you get the hint that maybe this isn’t what they say it is.

  It all escalated badly. The mobs, the use of Twitter and other places to shame and gang up on individuals got out of hand. The name calling was the most ridiculous of course, everything short of Nazi. Leaders got burnt out. Some got pushed out. Some just couldn’t work out how to please everybody that was yelling at them. In a meritocratic leadership system you know who to respect. In the main you get to please everybody because there’s a respect for all involved even when there’s sharp division. You move on because you respect each other. But when you turn up the volume and bring in huge social pressure from outside it’s something else.

  VOX: Okay, so what did the leadership look like. Who were the programmers bringing to the fore and did they cave to the inevitable pressure to accept SJW leadership?

  OSS: Some people inside the leadership team were heavily influenced by the outside SJWs. And we did have a couple of SJWs on the programming team. Not entirely SJW, sort of a foot in each camp. Complaints based on the code of conduct were used to push a couple of people out. They were handled really badly. Even now you won’t get a straight story about whether the code of conduct was broken or not or whether something else was going on.

  VOX: But of course, you understand that’s what the code of conduct are for. That is why they are worded in as nebulous a manner as possible.

  OSS: They are pretend legal documents used in legal ways by SJWs as weapons against people who don’t toe the line. That’s exactly what they are for.

  And so the discussion in the public about this was so confused, and they really muddied it, so some people tell the stories as code of conduct violations and other people say no.

  We got personal statements dismissing leadership and talking about how the whole project is a terrible place to contribute. They sent the whole programming team into crisis. All this drama hit the project and key leaders had been removed. And so there was all this scrambling about to deal with it.

  VOX: Have you read SJWs Always Lie?

  OSS: Yes.

  VOX: So you know that is absolutely par for the course.

  OSS: Oh it’s total playbook. And I mean, it’s like Rules for Radicals, the Saul Alinski trash. They are utilizing exactly the same strategies where they attack the individual instead of the institution and all that sort of stuff. And so it’s all playbook stuff.

  VOX: What are the most important lessons that you’ve learned from this experience, and what would you advise people in a new open source project or a new organization that hasn’t yet been infiltrated and attacked by SJWs?

  OSS: Essentially about anticipating and protecting against the attack vectors they use. Be aware of the way that the SJWs see the world in terms of power structures, and that they interpret leadership, even natural leadership, as power. And they are obsessed by power! They always go after power and they engineer these attack vectors accordingly. Protecting against those vectors is vital. And unfortunately, codes of conduct are one of those vectors. Right now, there’s very little going on in the open source world to innovate away from that standard fail. I’d be using some sort of anti-code of conduct, saying, look, if you need a code of conduct to be here, then it’s not for you.

  VOX: It seems it’s also important to make sure that you limit management of the project to those who are actively contributing on the technical side, because it’s pretty clear that SJW convergence is seldom caused by people who are capable of contributing, it’s caused by the people who don’t contribute technically, but come in at it from the marketing angle, from the legal angle, and all the non-technical aspects.

  OSS: Especially talking about community. Yeah. It’s essential to maintain some form of meritocratic leadership structure where the technically capable are able to keep a hand on the wheel.

  The other lesson that I learned from all this is the importance of good leadership. It’s kind of hard because you want to base on technical merit but you want strong leadership too. I don’t know how you balance that. You know, good leaders are not that common, and you can’t expect to hand responsibility to someone who is technically skilled and then have them just turn into a leader. When you get people who have to make difficult calls about these kinds of things and aren’t prepared for it they just stick their head in the sand. Make the drama go away.

  VOX: And the easiest way to make it go away is to give in.

  OSS: Correct. And you set up a situation where people standing up against SJWs get interpreted as being the opposite end of this extremism that they are facing from the SJWs. And so others want to find somewhere in the middle. They don’t know that the middle is owned by the SJWs too.

  VOX: What do you expect the result to be when a project like this is completely converged and the SJWs have to run it? Can it continue running successfully? Will it blow up? Or is it simply going to gradually decay?

  OSS: So what’s going to happen is this social control thing that’s happening all over open source is going to constrict the fun out of development, which is the reason that people like me contribute to open source, which is community built on code. They want to strangle that. You can’t post memes for example. Or there are certain emojis you can’t use. Or we can’t use certain words because it is insensitive to some random group of people you never heard of. Even our technical lexicon is being eroded.

  They will constrict a community to the point where people who are involved start to say, I don’t know why I’m still here. This is not fun anymore. I’m going to go and put my energy elsewhere where it’s fun because that’s why we do it. And then people on the outside who are considering whether or not to get into this thing, are going to say, that really doesn’t look fun, and I don’t really like that kind of hard work, and I don’t even understand the obscure rules about how to relate to people here. You know people will look at the code of conduct and say, I don’t, I don’t get it. I don’t understand what we’re supposed to do here. So I’m just not going to go in.

  They talk about making safe spaces. But what they want to create is not safe for many natives of open source. There’s a scorched earth thing going on where you either fit in or you need to go down the memory hole.

  So pro
jects will be starved of talent, and will be taken over by SJWs. If you have companies involved then they will probably still keep it rolling by pushing in their resources. They will have to put more money into all the technical activities and even start hiring people just to get any work done. It doesn’t really look like open source any more at that point.

  Appendix B: Identifying Gamma

  This is a list intended to permit Gamma males to identify themselves in the interests of self improvement. Not all Gammas are SJWs, but most male SJWs are Gammas. Of course, this list can also be used by women and non-Gammas to recognize when they are dealing with a Gamma and when they are not.

  You can’t recall a single serious online discussion in which you were wrong about anything in the past year.

  In fact, you can’t recall one discussion with any friends or family in which you were wrong about anything in the past year.

  When you are having an argument with someone and it appears you may be wrong, your most common reaction, and the defense to which you habitually resort, is to assume that the other person simply doesn’t understand what you are saying.

  When discussing something with someone, and you begin to suspect that you are maybe, possibly, on the verge of being shown to be wrong, you start to get snarky, crack lame jokes, and generally try to change the subject before it actually happens.

  If someone holds an opinion contrary to yours, and you don’t believe you have a good defense immediately to hand, you start to look for unrelated ways to disqualify the other person as being less knowledgeable about the subject than you, and will sometimes even going so far as to begin trying to demonstrate that they are not a good person.