Let’s Talk about ‘Tolerance’

Conservatives who enter progressive domains like the academy or elite media are quite familiar with the idea of tolerance. Such institutions place an enormous amount of emphasis on it, in fact, so much so that they reserve the right to be intolerant to preserve the tolerant ethos of the community, sometimes explicitly. In one of my favorite First Amendment cases, I sued a university that declared in no uncertain terms, “Acts of intolerance will not be tolerated.”

..  We know what the university wanted, a catch-all provision it could use to expel, punish, and silence anyone who ran afoul of the prevailing campus orthodoxy.

.. a person on the left will claim that they’re tolerant because of their regard for “gays, lesbians, bisexuals, asexuals, blacks, Hispanics, Asians, transgender people, and Jews.” But ask that same person a simple question, “What’s wrong with gay people?” and the answer is immediate: “What do you think I am, some kind of homophobic bigot? Of course I have nothing against gay people.”

Then, guess what, you’re not tolerating anything.

.. I like Alexander’s definition of true tolerance: “Respect and kindness toward members of an outgroup” — not respect and kindness toward members of what others would define as an outgroup, but rather respect and kindness toward people that are out of your group.

.. The result of this flawed understanding is that millions of people misapprehend their own values. To the very marrow of their being, they believe that they’re something they’re not.

.. The justification for Kevin’s firing — as repeated endlessly on Twitter — is that women don’t want to “share office space with a man who wants them dead.”

.. He’s the son of a teen mom, born shortly before Roe v. Wade, and narrowly escaped being aborted.

.. Their views on abortion aren’t just tolerable, they’re glorious. They’re liberating. They’re the linchpin of the sexual revolution, the key to women’s liberation. What was intolerable was the notion that a man — no matter how courteous and professional in person — could sit next to them advocating ideas they hate.

.. But in polarized times, “of no party or clique” is a hard space to occupy.

.. progressives be honest about your purpose. You can call  it tribalism. You can call it social justice. Just, please, do not lie and call it tolerance.

The Sliming of Kevin Williamson

Once again a prestige media publication — in this case, The Atlantic — has hired a conservative writer and suffered immediate, furious backlash. Once again, the publication’s leadership is explaining itself to its own staff. The New York Times’ Bret Stephens and Bari Weiss have faced their own internal and external wannabe firing squads. The Washington Post endured a mini-tempest when it hired Megan McArdle.

.. If strongly left-leaning but not specifically ideologically-purposed entities such as the Times, the Post, or The Atlantic do as their critics seem to wish and cleanse their pages of conservative voices their critics deem unacceptable, then the loss to American intellectual life will be immense. Writers who wish to enjoy intellectual freedom will soon find that they’re only truly “free” when working with people of like mind — a condition that contributes immeasurably to cocooning, polarization, and intellectual stagnation.
.. Decide now, progressives, do you want any serious intellectual media space where conservative and progressive ideas clash?
.. Give tolerance a chance.

Trump supporters are already normal

According to liberal critics, the lowlight of the Emmy show was a cameo by Sean Spicer, the former White House press secretary, who did a riff with host Stephen Colbert making light of Spicer’s famous argument with the media over the size of President Trump’s inauguration crowd. Why was this so wrong? Because it served to “normalize” Spicer.

One example reported by The Post’s Morning Mix came from Kelly Dittmar, an assistant professor at Rutgers University, who tweeted, “Do NOT cheer for Sean Spicer. This is how we normalize & excuse unethical, racist, sexist, etc. behavior.”

 That’s the same warning we’ve been hearing about Trump and anyone associated with him since the campaign. Trump and friends cannot be treated like human beings because doing so will “normalize” them. Translation: The anti-Trump citizenry is “normal,” while Trump and millions of Americans who support him are “abnormal.”
.. We can all only hope that in a civilized world, society will become so tolerant as to recognize that Trump Supporter Syndrome (TSS) is not an illness at all. It is perfectly normal behavior that is merely misunderstood by those who do not share it. Those with TSS should be loved and accepted, not ostracized and shunned.
.. In fact, Colbert should be admired for his brave outreach to Spicer. Stephen, some — including many of your Hollywood friends — may ridicule you. But history will prove you right.

Engineering Integrity vs. Cultural Marxism

How ideas rooted in cultural Marxism have been disastrous for software development.

When engineers under pressure annihilate architectural constraints as a side-effect of hurriedly patching in new features, this is called having ‘high velocity’. Appallingly, such ‘velocity’ is the main measure by which engineering progress is judged. Much in the same way that the Soviet shoe factories produced footwear at a high velocity, it produced shoes that fit no one over the age of 10.

.. when companies go abroad to undercut them even further with cheap labor… Well, it seems a terrific insult to the American people, in my view.

.. The Marxist mindset despises any reliance on exceptional talent, for a reliance on such an uncommon trait would create a dependency which cannot be thoughtlessly cut.

.. take advantage of cheap labor pools to hire as many interchangeable mediocrites as possible. In spite all of reason in evidence, they continue to insist that 9 women can make a baby in one month.

.. when you can’t win an argument with rigor, shut down the debate. This is the worst thing you can in an intellectual endeavor like software engineering. Rigorous debate about the technical merits of our given decisions are ugly, time-consuming, painful… and completely necessary.

.. thanks to cultural Marxism taking over our workplaces, we now work by the credo — “Anything you say can, and will, be used against you in a kangaroo court of HR.”

.. where anyone can choose to be offended by anything and go running off to HR to end you… You learn to keep to yourself, thinking sub-optimal thoughts, and ultimately making technical decisions that could haunt you for a very long time.

.. a couple of snowflakes figures out that they can bully others by anonymously tattling any perceived thought-crimes to HR. Marxist HR policy is that anyone can be accused, but no accuser may ever be identified.

.. engineers need to trust each other

.. if you’re in an environment of social assassination and in a constant state of political maneuver, you’ll never know who you can trust — if anyone at all.

.. The mere experience of realizing that one has made a technically incorrect decision with lasting negative impact is a brutal enough. To be told this by an apparently crusading asshole like myself, unforgivable.

.. the uncommon genius and mathematical talent associated with functional programming does violence to the Marxist ideal of human interchangeability.

.. When Marxist leadership needs a 10x engineer, it just hires 10 engineers. Often on visa.

.. in order for cultural Marxism to express its intolerance of white men in tech, it must invent a fiction of overwhelming misogyny and racism in tech.