Speaking of politics, one of the most interesting practical user-facing things about Urbit that I saw in an earlier video demo was the user choosing his or her political affiliation when registering. The claimed affiliation then acts as a mandatory filter for political conversations. You can opt out of participating in any political discussion but not opt in to more than one camp. I think this is a brilliant idea.
Finding the video (https://vimeo.com/75312418) I see that the four political associations are far-left, left, right, and far-right.
Now I need to know where the Urbit developers are based, because how these terms are interpreted is very, very, very different depending what country you're in...
The idea that technical aptitude and social/humanistic aptitude are orthogonal is bizarre, especially in the context of someone designing something to be used by other people. The intentional obtuseness and unfriendliness of the urbit ecosystem should tell you something.
I'm curious. Did you do some research into what was meant, or did the phrase "post opinions about black people" carry some hidden meaning I am not equipped to detect?
There's a heavy implication, of course, but you mentioned a fact. I'm wondering what fact you reference.
Okay, I read the third post, and it seems like he's saying that he is not a white nationalist but is not afraid to read them.
Okay, fine. I don't see why this is so big and scary.
Personally I think the reason Curtis's writings provoke so much hategasm around here is... well... "methinks you doth protest too much."
If hackerdom and Greater Silicon Valley were bastions of diversity and tolerance, nobody would give a shit about Curtis's alter-persona or any eccentric views he might hold. But they're not bastions of diversity. They're really really really really not.
Back when my own venture was getting off the ground, I did this as part of recruiting research:
I ended up with a monster list of GitHub profiles and projects in the SoCal area, so I started going through them. White dude, white dude, white dude, asian dude, white dude, white dude... I saw probably 2/3 white dudes, 1/3 asian/Indian dudes, and I could count on one hand the number of women I saw without running out of fingers. I mean there are practically no women on GitHub. This is not the result of bigotry on my part. I applied no filter. They are just not there. Why?
There is no significant statistical IQ difference between women and men. There are loads of women in biotech (another field I've studied), and trust me it is no easier than this one. There are more women in aerospace, in actual rocket science. There is no biological or neurological reason there should be no women who hack. There's something wrong here.
Dig a bit and it's not hard to see. Hackerdom is really misogynistic and perhaps also somewhat racist, though the misogyny is in my experience by far the dominant -ism. I mean I am a card carrying penis owner and it annoys me at times.
I think the tech field is self-conscious about this. To cover it over we've applied this thin bullshit veneer of twee politically correct nonsense, and anyone who openly refuses to tow that party line gets scapegoated and blacklisted. But that stuff doesn't work. All it does is drive the bad stuff underground, creating today's spectacle of a field that plays endless lip service to equality and diversity but is made up almost entirely of young white and asian men.
Unfortunately, at this point bigot is a distinctly Orwellian term. Consider, for example, the statement "Italians are more intelligent than Germans." By itself, this statement can't be bigoted, because it simply represents a possible fact about reality. At worst, it's false, or perhaps simply ill-posed (if, for example, one rejects the notion of quantifying intelligence). It's categorically distinct from things like "I don't like Germans because they're dumb" or "She can't be smart, she's German!" or "We don't serve Germans here." Any use of bigot that groups the first statement with the other three creates a false category, using language to attack (possible) reality for particular social and political purposes.
In the colloquial sense of not liking people simply because of their ancestry (or other such categories), I can assure you that the creator of Urbit is not a bigot. But, as with all Orwellian terms, bigot tinkers with the tools you use to think, so the word is best avoided.
[Disclaimer: The following is a digression into political and rhetorical philosophy. Caveat lector.]
Of course, such a rigorous delineation of denotation and connotation is the mark of a decidedly literal mind, and the neoreactos do laud the socio-linguistic adriotness to see both accident and essence. Thus this appeal to pure dialectical interpretation (which I affirm as my preferable norm) of politically sensitive statements seems vulnerable to attack in ways resonant with their assault on arguments for universal human rights - the ideal which is being discussed is not the practicality which the victor hopes to influence.
