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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 18, 2024

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If you assume these are pathologically controlling busy bodies, which I think you are right to assume, the fact that anybody can program anything probably terrifies them. They barely understand technology to begin with.

It's worse than that. "SJW's can't code" is a dead meme from 2014 or so. The existence of the Rust community proves that there's now a technical community of true believers, not just entryists writing Codes of Conduct.

not just entryists writing Codes of Conduct.

Has there ever been an attempt to write a "conservative" or "anti-woke" code of conduct? If Rust becomes the "woke" programming language, is it possible to turn C++ into the "anti-woke" language?

The corporate overlords of SQLite forced them to adopt a CoC, but the guy managing thought the whole thing is silly, and copy-pasted the rule of St. Benedict, if that counts. They were forced to drop it, and adopt something woke, though.

I hate to oppose a good blackpill, but as far as I can tell, the Rule of St. Benefict remains the entirety of SQLite's Code of Ethics. https://sqlite.org/codeofethics.html

Hate? I love it, you made my day!

Silly of me to go by memory, and not check the current state. Originally they renamed the Rule of st. Benedict as the "code of ethics" and adopted Mozilla's CoC as their CoC. It looks like they ended up removing the Mozilla one by the end of 2020.

Was kinda hoping there would be a more, um... "successful" example, instead of one guy making a brief show of resistance before getting his ass kicked. I guess GPL sorta counts, in that it's (a) not explicitly woke, (b) focused on the software itself and (c) can't easily be gotten rid of.

"successful"

That parameter was not specified in the original query ;)

True. How about like, a sincere attempt at doing it, rather than just a sarcastic joke or dragging their feet? Like, James Damore was unsuccessful, but he did sincerely try to counter wokeness at Google where he worked. He was openly taking a stand. It seems like most everyone on the anti-woke side just dodges the issue or goes for "non-violent resistance," when they're not shitposting anonymously.

Like, James Damore was unsuccessful, but he did sincerely try to counter wokeness at Google where he worked.

I don't think this is an accurate description of what he did when he wrote and distributed his infamous memo. I'd characterize it more as him sincerely trying to help wokeness, under the belief that the woke (or rather, the equivalents at the time, since I don't think "woke" was nearly as commonly used back then) genuinely wanted to accomplish the things they said they did.

You know, I'd never actually sat down to read it. Reading it now... oof. You're right, he did seem to be sincerely trying to help Google accomplish their woke goals, like giving some very practical suggestions on how to attract more women into tech. The whole thing comes across as very apologetic, not a rebellion at all.

I absolutely hate the fact that I think of it in terms of cliches about sex differences, but at the time, the whole thing reminded me of the whole phenomenon of "She told me her problems, I suggested some ways to solve them, and all she did was get mad at me" and "I told him my problems, and instead of comforting me, all he did was provide me with solutions." IIRC Damore is on the autism spectrum, which is obviously associated with being "extremely male," whereas the ideology in question tend to be known for attracting lots of women, which doesn't help matters.

I'd characterize it more as him sincerely trying to help wokeness

Back then that was the sincere anti-woke position, though. I'm only speaking for myself, but 7 more years of black pills made me reconsider all that talk about "equality", but at the time I was all on board for closing gender gaps (I suppose even now, I'm not against "women in tech", but I'd say just do what we did in sports, and have some degree of sex segregation).

The biggest blackpill with Damore is that there were two camps

  1. Damore should be fired because he said bad things about women

and

  1. Damore should be fired because he brought politics to the workplace

Just underscored how anyone against this stuff has no allies anywhere.

More comments

Well... even if this example was sarcastic, I think it would be a good one, if it was successful. CoCs don't really do much, except plant a flag and provide an excuse to purge political opponents from a project, which the rule of St. Benedict would do just fine - which is precisely why it was not allowed to stand by the top brass.

He was openly taking a stand. It seems like most everyone on the anti-woke side just dodges the issue or goes for "non-violent resistance," when they're not shitposting anonymously.

We definitely need to organize, but we're in a bit of a bind. Non-woke techies might be good at building things, but we aren't much good at organizing, in stark contrast to our woke opponents, who have the opposite advantage / disadvantage. It was good for a laugh back when they had very little political power, and we could point and laugh at their attempt to build something, but the joke is on us, since it turns out you don't need to be a builder, when you can just bully the builders. Back on our end, it tuns out that once you have no political backing, and no organizational talent, all those building skills don't amount to anything, and you're stuck with anonymous shitposting as the height of your resistance. There was an old comment back on Reddit outlining similar dynamics among Soviet dissidents (Wooo mama! Look at what I can do, now that functional search is back on the menu!).

For my part, if you happen to have these sort of political / managerial talents, you have my sword, and I'm happy to follow you wherever the road may take us. Hell, I even took a stab at it myself, but I'm mostly fumbling around.

Yeah... I wish I could help, but I'm also terrible at the organizational/political stuff. Good on you for at least starting a project, though.