The Cowardly Everyman Question

Why Nonpolitical Communities Caving to the Mob is Inevitable

Life comes at you fast, and for few people has this been truer than Andrew Tomazos. One of his interests would seem to be the most mundane in existence, being on the working group discussing technical minutiae for a popular programming language called C++. This group, with the creative name of “working group 22” analyzes standardization documentation, making recommendations for improvements and clarifications to existing specifications.

Note this was purely voluntary, as he and many others simply offered their time to give back to the community and to solve technical issues. Even with the inherent bureaucracy of these groups, interesting problems are discussed. One aspect of C++ that interested Andrew was the concept of Undefined Behaviors, essentially corner cases that aren’t specifically outlined by the standards. For those familiar with this popular programming language, it has gone through massive extensions over the years that has always rested on a rather shaky foundation. Still the sheer mass of applications written in the language, along with its still impressive performance, makes it a go-to language for low-level development.

There were three papers already written regarding this discussion, but he felt that they were too technical to get to the core of the issue. Given this was an avenue of interest, he wanted an easy gateway for more people to understand the ideas involved. To rectify this, he wrote and submitted a paper outlining the conversation in a more accessible form, called “The Undefined Behavior Question.” Raise your hand if you see where this is going.

The first cycles went without any issue. The paper went through the safety group (not the woke kind, the kind that determines if the proposal would cause instability). The plan was to have his summary paper as a primer before getting into the other, more technical papers. Given it makes no proposals, it passed the group without incident. So far so good. Then the trouble began. As written by Andrew:

The next day we took the papers to the Evolution group. During the presentation of P3403 The Undefined Behavior Question there was what seemed to me to be an odd comment. I think I heard someone say “you should change the paper title”. Upon hearing this I didn’t really understand, I thought it was a joke about “undefined behavior” being a dirty word or something. So I giggled a little, playing along with what I perceived as a joke, and continued on with the presentation. The other papers were presented as normal.

The next day I received an email from the head of the Standard C++ Foundation delegation informing me there had been formal complaints lodged with the International Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS) about the interaction mentioned in the previous paragraph. After some back and forth I was informed by the delegation head that the reason for the complaint was “The reason people are upset is because they feel the paper title refers to Jewish Question”, with a link to the wikipedia page of the [Jewish Question].

First-hand Account of “The Undefined Behavior Question” Incident

Okay, so some oversensitive ninny made a connection that no one in their right mind would make, and he was clueless what the commenter was even referring to and continued on his way. Note Andrew is a totally apolitical personality. It’s clear he’s not some closet edgelord, and certainly not the type to make a Holocaust joke in such a setting. What he was, however, is a total tech nerd, and totally incapable of reading a room.

Clearly some progressive busybodies in the audience thought he was making fun of the Holocaust and dogpiled him with complaints. Now, it seems here a simple statement that he had no intention of joking about such a topic would quell these people, but they wanted something more. They demanded he change the title.

For most people, they would comply to not create a fuss and continue on their way. Andrew, maybe even subconsciously, knew he was simply being bullied by moral busybodies. He had no real enemies in the group, and from all accounts had an innocuous career up to this point. Still, he had broken a taboo without knowing it, and had to show submission. He was stuck between the hard place of the public morality he largely agreed with and his disgust as the busybodies enforcing such morality in irrational ways.

Then I became a little angry. I suddenly got this feeling as if something wasn’t right here. After thinking things through, I made a moral judgement that I hadn’t done anything wrong. The right thing to do was to respectfully refuse the request and to not explain myself - as I don’t want to live in a world where someone is not permitted to form and ask important questions without explaining themselves. I have a moral duty to act locally in a way that matches with how I would want the world to be globally.

You see, I absolutely believe the question “What is the appropriate status of Jewish people?” is reprehensible and immoral. That question presupposes it is moral to discriminate based on a person’s ethnicity or religion. I find that kind of discrimination disgusting, as individuals should be judged based on the content of their individual character and their individual actions, and not based on their “group identities”.

He knew this had nothing to do with the Holocaust, but a cabal of people who leverage morality like church ladies to leverage power. It’s even worse that the complaints are anonymous, so he couldn’t even confront his accusers. Anonymity, though it has many strengths, allows people to destroy people simply out of spite, often a group of them swarming an unsuspecting victim simply for the thrill. Simply wanting living space in his technical realm, free of coercion, he refused to change the title.

I was then informed by the head of the delegation that they “fully understand that principles are important, but in this case the principles in question also affect the Foundation. If there is no way of mending the situation, we will have to politely excuse ourselves from being drawn into the discussion by rescinding the invitation to be our alternate. At the moment, we are at a place where the title is causing offence and objections from multiple individuals, and that is not acceptable for us.“

I urged the head of the delegation to reconsider their ultimatum, but they took it as me refusing to change the paper title, and said “I'm afraid the Standard C++ Foundation is no longer able to sponsor your WG21 membership.” and I was expelled from the various WG21 services and uninvited from the committee meetings.

It’s really amazing how fast these organizations that can debate minutiae for years without any progress can work in unpersoning thought criminals within days, as anyone who has worked in corporations have also learned. Not only did they remove the paper, but they removed the man in a Night of the Long Pointer Deletion for refusing to bow to the mob.

As can be seen, bureaucracies will do anything to protect themselves. Most of these people are not true-believer progressive, but largely apolitical people who just want to focus on their work, in this case programming. However, that doesn’t mean no one in these groups are, and the urge among the nonpolitical to just cave in to get along with increasingly unhinged demands is incredibly strong, even if it means total injustice to some sad sap. It’s amusing how they say that principles are important, more or less say he did nothing wrong, but insist he change the title anyway to appease the mob. After all, it’s just a title, right? Even the founder of C++, Bjorn Stroustrup, sent a message to Andrew saying it was ridiculous, but that he should have just changed the title to avoid drama.

For anyone in the programming space, this is an all-too-common occurrence, and the massive damage radicals can put on this culture can’t be understated. While corporations are impacted the most by these parasites, it has infiltrated even the Open-Source space, where volunteers are removed from projects for thought-crime outside their actual development work. One of the most influential actors in forcing draconian Code of Conduct in open source under the guise of safety, transexual activist Coraline Ada Ehmke, then wielded it to destroy the lives of contributors, and made a good living for himself in the process, forcing 1488 insane social edicts on people who just wanted to code.

I had to see it, so now you do too.

These activists either have next to no technical experience or are generally lousy developers. Coraline is the latter, being fired from Github for being an abrasive busybody and a lousy coder (what did they expect?). This doesn’t stop them from deeming themselves tech and communication experts, forcing nerds to bend to their progressive agenda. His codes of conduct Contributor Covenant, Hippocratic License, and Organization for Ethical Source all served as bludgeons for radical social transformation in software development spaces, forcing even Linux to bend the knee. For those who broke its edicts, even in personal life, the results were swift and uncompromising. Another example, Eric Raymond, one of the founders of the Open-Source Initiative, was kicked out of the group for wrongthink.

While cases like Andrew in a C++ working group or Eric’s in the Open-Source Initiative are tragic, and there are six million other examples I could give, the real damage is from others in the group who are cowed from giving their opinions. Slowly over time the internal moderation lends itself to take the same moral posturing, and previously apolitical actors gradually take the side of the oppressors. This is true for your everyday person, and it is doubly true for those in the high intelligence range, but lacking skills in social nuances. They will inevitably cling to the most simple and explainable social pieties over depth, nuance, and “reading a room”. Even if the piety is total nonsense, if it’s something that can be blurted out easily and gives an easy mechanism for ascertaining proper discourse, they will end up following those rules like a fanatic.

This is why I always find it funny when people think rule by an impartial technocrat would be anything other than a woke nightmare. While Musk, Jobs, etc. are technocrats with a good understanding of human behavior, most are far from that synthesis and are easily bullied into taking the side of whatever loud activists want. After all, they don’t want to fuss, and it doesn’t really matter, right? Just make that Code of Conduct. It’s just about being respectful, after all. Just remove that person they don’t like. What’s the worst that can happen? It’s a little lie, not a Big Lie.

Because the average man will always gravitate to conformity, organizations will conform with double the enthusiasm. Unless they are run by an uncompromising leader willing to enforce his will, the countless committees and working groups will always consider their standing first and foremost, and will sacrifice efficiency, innovation, and even their own dignity to maintain it. It’s a sad situation, and I don’t know if there really can be a final solution to this cowardly everyman issue.

The more I argued with these weak people, the more I got to know their dialectics. First, they counted on the ignorance of their adversary; then, when there was no way out, they themselves pretended stupidity. If all this was of no avail, they refused to understand or they changed the subject when driven into a corner; they brought up truisms, but they immediately transferred their acceptance to quite different subjects, and, if attacked again, they gave way and pretended to know nothing exactly.

Wherever one attacked one of these normies, one's hands seized slimy jelly; it slipped through one's fingers only to collect again in the next moment. If one smote one of them so thoroughly that, with the bystanders watching, he could but agree, and if one thus thought he had advanced at least one step, one was greatly astonished the following day.

The normie did not in the least remember the day before, he continued to talk in the same old strain as if nothing had happened, and if indignantly confronted, he pretended to be astonished and could not remember anything except that his assertions had already been proved true the day before. Often I was stunned. One did not know what to admire more: their glibness of tongue or their skill in lying.

I gradually began to hate them.

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