A few days ago, racist skeezeball fantasy author Vox Day noted on his blog just how nice it would be to have a handy public list of all the people he hates. Sorry, a list of “confirmed SJWs.” It would be a handy resource, he said, both for SJWs looking to hire other SJWs, as well as “for those who wish to keep their organizations free of the creatures.”
You can probably figure out which of these two reasons is the real reason for the list, and which is the utterly transparent fig leaf.
Vox helpfully suggested that anyone seeking to make such a list could start with the names of those who signed a petition condemning a scheduled speech by programmer Curtis Yarvin at the upcoming LambdaConf, on the grounds that Yarvin, also known as Mencius Moldbug, is not only a programmer but is also “a founder and advocate of an ideological movement that promotes racist bigotry,” not to mention “an apologist for slavery.”
No sooner had Vox made this suggestion than a such a list appeared, in the form of a Wiki (archived here), featuring the petition-signers and a handful of other alleged SJWs. Vox claims not to have a direct hand in what the site rather misleadingly calls The Complete List of SJWs, attributing its sudden appearance to his followers — or, as he likes to call them, the “Dread Ilk.” But this is clearly the beginnings of the enemies list of Vox’s dreams.
So how does one get on such a list? The listmakers themselves don’t seem altogether sure. At first, they declare that
[t]he SJWs listed should be on the record supporting censorship of some kind (no platforming, government censorship, or disemploying people). This is not a place for grudges.
In the wiki’s FAQ, they reiterate this point, saying they will only include those who have
publicly called for someone to be fired, disinvited, shunned, no-platformed, or otherwise punished or silenced for refusing to submit to the SJW Narrative. The particular incident is linked to your name in the list.Â
Immediately after this pronouncement, though, they declare that the list will also contain the names of  those who have declared themselves SJWs, as well as journalists who’ve published “articles that support the SJW Narrative” — whatever that means — “or an SJW attack campaign.”
So far they have not been following these rules very carefully. Some names appear on the list with no information given about their alleged “incidents.” Others are included, well, apparently just because Vox and his Ilk don’t like them.
The list also maliciously deadnames several trans women, attempting to justify this despicable policy by suggesting that these women are using “pseudonyms in place of their actual, legal names in an attempt to obfuscate their identities.” This is obvious nonsense.
So who makes the list?
The vast majority of the names on the list are simply people who signed the LamdaConf petition.
But there are some other, more recognizable, names. John Scalzi, a science fiction author who has long been Vox’s greatest nemesis, makes the list, naturally; the listmakers blame him for Vox’s expulsion from the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, though it is perhaps more accurate to say that Vox was expelled for being a huge racist dickhead.
Cartoonist and memoirist Alison Bechdel is included on the list because, 30 years ago, she drew a comic strip in which one of the characters said she only went to movies that featured at least two female characters who talk to one another, at least once, about something other than a man.
This comic strip is the origin of what’s now called the “Bechdel Test,” but Bechdel herself never publicized the “test,” the idea for which (as she freely admits) she got from a friend.
Actor, writer and geek icon Will Wheaton makes the list for Tweeting comments defending actress and Geek and Sundry founder Felicia Day, a friend of his, after a Destructoid writer, apparently drunk, made some ignorant and misogynistic remarks about her. The writer was fired, as drunken dickheads who do stupid things when they’re drunk sometimes are. “This tweet exemplifies [Wheaton’s] SJW status,” the listmakers sniff.
Writer, and former Jeopardy champion Arthur Chu is on the list because he jokingly referred to himself  as “a social justice stormtrooper” and because “he is alleged to have been responsible for the bomb threat that disrupted the #GamerGate meetup in Washington D.C. on May 1, 2015.”
That’s right” “he is alleged.” There is absolutely no evidence, or even a good reason to suspect, that he had anything whatsoever to do with the alleged bomb threat. Gamergaters essentially decided to accuse him of making the threat because they don’t like him. And that’s good enough for Vox’s listmakers!
And then there’s Carpenter Brut, a composer included on the list because he objected to his music being used without permission in a virulently anti-refugee “documentary” titled “With Open Gates: The Forced Collective Suicide of European Nations.”
This 20-minute propaganda film is essentially a collection of out-of-context video clips edited together into a melodramatic montage by an 8chan user who debuted it by posting it to the notoriously racist /pol/ board; it’s been pretty thoroughly debunked by, among others, Snopes.com (which declared it “deceptive”) and Vice (which described it as “a mishmash of comically fake and out-of-context footage, bad subtitling and Islamophobic propaganda”).
Brut objected to having his music in this piece of garbage, so now he’s on the list.
Perhaps the list should be renamed The Complete List of Really Pretty Decent People Who’ve Offended Vox Day by Being Really Pretty Decent.
I’m sure this could be used for a parody of that”I’ve Got a Little List” Gilbert & Sullivan song, but I’m way too lazy to do it.
My turn to offend Vox.
http://picture-cdn.wheretoget.it/1z8wpm-i.jpg
Just a few weeks ago, I might have defended Batman, but after the one two punch of Zach Snyder and Ben Affleck, I’m not sure how much there is to defend.
So how do I get on this list? It would be an honor.
@Bina
That’s it; you are now my girlfriend. If any of you have objections to this, speak now, or forever hold your stupid bon- I mean peace.
@Tony
I am he that bravely faces the light while leftists are content to watch shadows on the wall.
I am a red-hot pimple of truth, ready to pop and spread bacteria on the adolescent face of leftism.
I am the hemorrhoid for which there is no ointment, itching and burning in the Butthole of Deceit.
I am a flea in the unshaven arm-pit of feminism, ready to lay eggs.
I am he who takes care not to fight with windmills, for fear that he may become one.
I am Dustin.
Beer can be a fine ingredient, though– beer-battered fish, cheddar beer bread…
@Shaenon
You must be bitten by a vampire with suitably progressive leanings; these ones will usually ask for your consent first.
@Three Snakes
I suppose that theodicy now has an answer to all of its questions…
So, how do these guys think of themselves? Social Injustice Rangers – SIRs? Or Social Injustice Paladins SIPs?
I don’t get this thing about “using pseudonyms” instead of your “actual legal name”. Can someone explain this?
In Britain, your “real name” is whatever you choose to be known by, afaik. You can make a declaration if you are changing it, or you can do it online, but I don’t think you have to – and it certainly used to be the case that you did not have to give your “real name” if asked, even by the police (I can remember Greenham women calling themselves “Freda People” and “Lucy Lastic” and similar noms de eviter guerre.)
In some countries it’s next to impossible to change the name you were first registered in, though. (In Italy I knew someone who had been registered with an accidental full stop between his second name and his surname, and every time he signed anything he had to include the full stop…)
So, is the US more like Italy? Or is it more like Britain but these dudes just don’t like it.
Incidentally, is Vox Day the name on the geezer’s birth certificate?
Personally, I really don’t like postmodernism. In college I suffered through a lot of analysis so detached that it was easy to forget it was about something. Hell, I seem to recall writing a paper with the thesis that no piece of media was actually about a topic.
And so much postmodern media is just meaningless fourth wall breaking and deconstruction that fails to make any kind of point, in the manner of a kid taking apart a VCR and then not having a clue what to do with the parts. Eventually it devolves into inane cynicism, the least groundbreaking of all storytelling devices.
So I’m a big fan of a return to straightforward storytelling using traditional devices. But that doesn’t need to mean an unthinking acceptance of culturally dominant ideas like toxic masculinity, nor does it mean reducing criticism to an unthinking binary of Awesome Stuff and Not-Awesome Stuff.
Two can play at this game. Let’s start our own list of manosphere douchnozzles and publish it so that people know not to hire them:
* Davis Aurini
* Theodore Beale
* Janet Bloomfield
* Aaron Clarey
* F. Roger Devlin
* Paul Elam
* Dean Esmay
* Warren Farrell
* Matt Forney
* Henry Makow
* Stefan Molyneux
* Marjan Siklic
* Christina Hoff Sommers
* Karen Straughan
* Daryush Valizadeh
* James C. Wiedmann
* Milo Yiannopoulos
Those are the ones I can think of off the top of my head…
I’m a bit middle of the road when it comes to new sincerity vs. post modernism. We SHOULD deconstruct and analyze things, hell we should probably be most critical of things we hold dear.
*but*
I think we should also feel free to be over the moon for things, things others don’t like. Sing Brittany Spears in the shower, dance to muzak, eat bacon wrapped everything, tardis on ALL THE THINGS! but it’s important to be cool with people not liking the things we like and letting them have their weird over the moon things too.
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
@abars01 You meant to say it’s so that manosphere douchenozzles can find each other, right?
Heh, that fig leaf of “SJWs can use this list to hire other SJWs” reminds me of something back when I was at university.
So the Uni’s Christian Union (despite the name, not some sort of ecumenical general Christian group, but pretty much fundie evangelicals) was trying to pass a policy, or a change to the student union’s constitution, or something. They wanted student groups/societies (such as themselves) to be allowed to discriminate by excluding members who don’t support the society’s aims, or something, I forget the exact wording.
They themselves had that policy for years, to require that people sign a statement of faith in order to join, something like “I accept Jesus Christ as my lord and saviour” I guess. And eventually of course they’d been told that this goes against the student union’s equality policy.
Point being that they wanted to be able to exclude non-Christians from joining their group, of course – but in the meeting where this motion was debated and voted on (spoiler: it didn’t pass; all of the other Christian groups turned out in large numbers to vote against it), they said that this policy would also benefit other groups, such as if the LGBT students’ society wanted to create a safe space by excluding non-LGBT people.
In response to which, of course, someone from the LGBT group went up on stage and said “you have to be f***ing kidding, you don’t understand what a safe space is, we welcome straight allies to our meetings”.
tl;dr bigots are disingenuous…?
@JM
Bingo. The movie God is Dead portrayed the exact opposite of reality.
@ bluecat
You are very correct. In England you can just start calling yourself what you want, and that’s your name. Some people do deed polls but that’s not actually required.
You don’t have to give any name to the police, but they can in certain circumstances hold you until they establish your ‘identity’. That’s who you actually are though, not necessarily your birth name.
Re: no platforming etc
In the UK student unions and therefore student societies are funded by the universities themselves (which may involve a degree of public funding) by means of a ‘subvention’ so there can be wider free speech/censorship issues. Also, because of this element, the general legislation on equality and not excluding anyone based on prohibited characteristics applies. That’s why the Christian Unions’ attempts to exclude based on religious affiliation would have been unlawful anyway.
The situation regarding private associations is somewhat different. The Oxford Union for example is not actually, despite the name, associated with the university. It’s a private members club so can in theory restrict membership.
No platforming is a minor hot topic over here at the moment because of the Germaine Greer thing.
Vague reply to the comment on misspelled names.
When my Otter and I got married, we took each others’ names. She had been complaining that people always misspell her last name, but I had a hard time believing it since the correct spelling seemed so much more intuitive to me.
Well, she was right. Pretty much all my bills come with my name misspelled, and I keep having to spell my name out to people, and then still correct their spelling afterwards. My free health care card has always had my name misspelled. I could’ve had the wrong name on my photo ID if I hadn’t paid attention when they screwed it up when typing it into the computer.
Is it too much to ask that people just listen when I slowly and carefully spell my name out? It’s so frustrating! :p
Ah, the red pill goes mainstream (well, a Grauniad article anyway)
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/apr/14/the-red-pill-reddit-modern-misogyny-manosphere-men
The important thing to note about this:
* Large chunks of the functional programming world think LambdaConf is utterly on crack with all of this
* The seed signers of the petition against LambdaConf that Vox Day’s list starts from include most of the eminent names in functional programming
* and then there’s this cartoon, which is only a slight exaggeration of LambdaConf’s frankly bizarre social justice Time Cube “final statement”, in which John DeGoes attempts to derive the concept of “inclusivity” from first philosophical principles, complete with made-up jargon words and diagrams.
You’ll see on that LambdaConf final statement the comment section full of reactionaries cheering him on (approximately 0 of whom have any interest in or understanding of functional programming). Everyone else has, simply, left LambdaConf to it, not wishing to get bogged down in querulous bad-faith argument with the alt-right. It is entirely unclear whether DeGoes realises in any way at all that this is what has happened.
Status:451, who started a fundraiser based on the claim that all of this started with an SJW attack on LambdaConf – a claim which remains completely unevidenced – have repudiated Vox Day’s blacklist [archive.is copy]. Unfortunately, the commenters they whipped up into a frenzy before extracting their money are still spoiling for a fight, and appear to love Day’s gator-like strategy. I wonder if Status:451 will be disconcerted by their fan’s darker urges or if they’ll double-down. (Well, no, I don’t wonder.)
David Gerard:
Nope, nothing is too vile for Status:451 and Clarkhat. It is a NRx den, all right.
And yeah, I follow some FP people and they’ve been very vocal about how bizarre all this is, and how they don’t want to attach their name to anything that lets Moldbug in, because dude is racist and this is year 2016.
Further to ‘no-platforming’; as I understand it was originally used only to refer to the official policy of the National Union of Students to bar a (rather small) list of speakers from their affiliated Student Unions around the UK. In other words, a large organisation set a formal policy so its ‘branches’ around the country had a consistent approach with their fundamental right to choose who is allowed to speak at their venues. Something that should be entirely uncontroversial, and probably not even the first of its kind.
It always amazes me how otherwise rational people lose their grip entirely at the idea that a private organisation might not want person A to speak, and treat it as though the organisation can somehow magically prevent person A from speaking anywhere.