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Notes -
I want to identify and discuss a stealth-CW trick that I find particularly irritating: the use of (predominately left-leaning) CW positions used as examples in some other piece of work. I mostly notice this in technical articles: you might be reading an article about writing a program that prints to the console, and the example code will say something like:
I find this quite insidious: it normalizes left viewpoints in a way that's hard to argue against. If you try to say anything, you risk being accused of derailing the discussion with irrelevant politics or otherwise being a Bad Person who violates the norms of a forum. Has anyone seen any examples of this and/or successful arguments deployed against it?
Because this is true. The cynical among us might say that is by design. If someone brings up politics in a programming discussion, that guy is derailing the discussion technically regardless of how merited his derailment is. And social desirability bias is a hell of a drug. And this might sound a bit schizo but anything that isn't said in the explicit text but within a string literal or an in-code comment carries with it a higher level of plausible deniability, hence the sneakiness.
There is no polite dismantling of this 'tactic'. It's a dirty move, it's an invitation for you to trip and fall into mud. It's a flag that lets you know that you are deep into "enemy territory" and you should act accordingly. It's just nauseating levels of signaling. No one, literally no one in the world is principled enough about discourse norms and yet puts in a political message in a tutorial and can be convinced of the notion that he shouldn't alienate people in a tutorial, it's not logistically feasible. Be aware of that and act as you will.
But if you were to fight the CW, make a tutorial and put in right-wing messages. You set up your own mud pond and invite his ilk (your enemies) to slip into it.
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