Neither Social Nor Just Nor Brave

Eric Raymond, who recently passed along a report-from-the trenches of left-wing bullying at tech conferences, has commented further on what is at stake:

It is clear that djangoconcardiff and the author of the Covenant (self-described transgender feminist Coraline Ada Ehmke) want to replace the "cult of meritocracy" with something else. And equally clear that what they want to replace it with is racial and sexual identity politics

The full name of this "Covenant" is the "Contributor Code of Conduct," and its advocates are, in the name of "inclusiveness," complaining to lead developers of software projects about rejections of changes made by "persons of color" in much the same way that civil rights "activists" have called for hiring quotas for decades. Raymond correctly notes that these thugs' actions are consistent with their explicit rejection of "meritocracy," and that both are bad for the objective of creating software that is actually useful. I also fully agree with the below sentiment:

This isn't about women in tech, or minorities in tech, or gays in tech. The hacker culture's norm about inclusion is clear: anybody who can pull the freight is welcome, and twitching about things like skin color or shape of genitalia or what thing you like to stick into what thing is beyond wrong into silly. This is about whether we will allow "diversity" issues to be used as wedges to fracture our community, degrade the quality of our work... [bold added]

Raymond mentions in his post that malfunctioning software can cost lives. This underscores a brief comment I once made to the effect that what "social justice warriors" are after is neither social nor justice. And as for being warriors, the cowardly way they conduct themselves shows that part of term to be wrong as well.

-- CAV