The left are moving towards disappearing down a rabbit hole to be lost to any function and utility. There is a cost of being leftist: at present it is a form of conspicuous consumption: you are bright enough, you have enough geek points, to deliberately handicap yourself and still succeed.

It is a game for those with resources: wealth, connections, and intelligence. Because it gets stupid quick.

I’m going to quote out-of-order here, using ESR: he is one of the elder statesmen of hacker culture, which he is getting heat from the SJW about. Now ESR is fairly pagan and is not of the left but an anarchocapitalist, but he gets this correct, and he is paying for it.

I was there at the beginning, of course – the day Netscape open-sourced the code that would become Mozilla and later Firefox was the shot heard ’round the world of the open source revolution, and the event that threw The Cathedral and the Bazaar into the limelight. It should be a tragedy – personally, for me – that the project is circling the drain.

Instead, all I can think is “They brought the fate they deserved on themselves.” Because principles matter – and in 2014 the Mozilla Foundation abandoned and betrayed one of the core covenants of open source.

I refer, of course, to the Foundation’s disgraceful failure to defend its newly promoted Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich against a political mob.

One of the central values of the hacker culture from which Mozilla sprang is that you are to be judged by the quality of your work alone. We aspire to be a pure meritocracy, casting aside irrelevancies of race, sex, nationality, and of political and sexual preferences.

Brendan Eich lived those values. Though he was excoriated for donating to California Proposition 8, it was never even claimed – let alone established – that he judged gay hackers on the Firefox project by anything but their code.

Another central value of the hacker culture, intertwined with judgment only by the work, is free expression – the defense of people holding and expressing unpopular opinions. It must be this way, because suppression of dissent prevents us from discovering and acknowledging that our beliefs do not align with reality. That hinders the work.

When Brendan Eich was attacked, the correct response of the Mozilla Foundation from within hacker and open-source values would have been, at minimum “His off-the-job politics are none of our business.” Ideally, it would have continued with an active defense of Eich’s right to hold and express unpopular opinions, including by donating to the causes of his choice.

That’s not what happened. Instead, the Foundation truckled to that political mob, putting Eich under enough pressure that he felt he had no alternative but to resign. By failing to defend and support Eich, the Mozilla Foundation wronged a man who had every right to expect that he, too, would be judged by his work alone

Now I should disclose that I am writing this in WordPress, using a Icedove as a browser: the Debian version of Firefox, and the current default. It is open source after all. And I am using a fairly obscure fork of Debian at that.

Esr has to move ever leftwards, or else suffer persecution, and to prove himself sufficiently left, has to enthusiastically support the ever greater persecution of his fellow leftists. Thus each leftist has to move further left, and has to support the persecution of his fellow leftists even more than he did last year.

The mechanisms of this are those of the Pharisees: it is a matter of being seen as being completely politically correct: to be a Chekist, on the vanguard

The hallmarks of the left — holiness competition, the vanguard of the people, no one more extreme is an enemy — are present whenever anyone discusses a non-political subject that is relevant to the company.

But the people practising this: trying to get into the elite that their grandparents (boomers) made — have not lived: they are young. They have been encouraged to be priggish. They would be horrified to be called the new Puritans, but the lack Puritan humility. They are the new Pharisees.

After the transformation of society brought by the 1960s, a cohort of sentimental liberals naturally flocked to academia. Many of them set up shop in the humanities and social sciences and spread both post-modernism and blank slate fundamentalism (the ideological resistance to biology, genetics and evolution) far and wide throughout the academy. These two mutually reinforcing ideologies have had a massive effect on scholarship and the wider culture.

It would be prudent for us to remember that of the young people who police language and thought on campus today, many have not yet left home yet; their privilege has effectively kept them in a state of intellectual neoteny. While the political movements that their parents were involved in were creative, aspirational and good-hearted, many of these movements have now ossified into the most brittle of orthodoxies. P.C students on campus today are simply foot soldiers for their parents’ ideologies. And before we attack young people for being censorious and priggish, we should remember that this kafkaesque political baggage is what this generation has to bear.

OK. As one of the resident greyhairs of the nutraditionalist christianity (or what I prefer to call mere Christianity) the idea that people are horrified by thought horrifies me. What the half generation — born in the 1940s and 1950s — did was remove for the high school student access to the past. Latin and Greek were removed from the curriculum because they were irrelevant: the older composers, philosophers and authors were not to be used because they did not fit the narrative, because they were dead, and mostly men. Austen lived on for a bit because she was not male, but her very descriptions of marriage became too triggering, and she was dumped.

Since people no longer read good prose, they had no standard to imitate. Because people no longer had to struggle with why the Shrew changed, or how to handle Swiftian scorn, they did not develop intellectual muscles.

And because the older boomers bought in a culture of fear that had killed free range parenting deader than the dodo before I had my children, our children are less fit: the SJW demands on mothers increased as the practical support for them decreased. Our children are neglected, physically flabby, and angry.

For they know there is more, and not where to find it. To which I say: look back three generations. Preferably learn a couple of ancient languages: read your Homer and Seneca: discover both Milton and Augustine: understand Dickens and Scott. Do not let these modern Pharisees stop you from learning.

For the progressive experiment has failed: both soviet and gramscian versions. They are not the only ways society has organized itself. Consider how we self-organize, and that imitate. But do not become shock troops for a failing Pharisaical generation.

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Update.

ESR graciously corrected me on where he stands politically. The text is edited to reflect this.