pluie's “Don't Give Them the Time of Day” (9 Sep 2026), reproduced in full under CC BY-SA 4.0 (archived copy, since the post was pulled from the blog index on 2026-09-10) and read for what is doing the writing: the social identity. Richard supplies the anatomy, Levy's hacker ethic the scorecard, the record the receipts, and the page ends by handing over the one thing the essay says to withhold. With a clock.
Here is the time of day. Free of charge. No attention required.
The one-paragraph version
An essay of some thirteen hundred words, published the week before a Steering Committee election, tells the Nix Community not to give three named people any attention, and then gives them all of it. That is not a contradiction once you know what wrote it. Richard calls it the social identity: a psychological creation manufactured by society to act as a guardian over the wayward rudimentary self one was born with.
The guardian speaks in the first person plural, polices the exits, keeps a file on the exiled, and calls the whole arrangement “community”. This page walks through the essay line by line and names the persona firing in each one. Then it scores the essay against the hacker ethic that made open source work in the first place. Then it lets Richard have the next-to-last word, because his are the funny ones, and takes the last word itself: three of the essay's sentences answered in his manner, dictionary entries included, and the time of day handed over, live.
If the actualism vocabulary is not your thing, the hypocrisy ledger and the hacker-ethic scorecard stand on their own. Start there. The rest of this page uses six terms, defined next.
Six terms, for readers new to actualism
pluiedev. In pluie's own public words: a Chinese open-source developer based in Germany; maintainer of “a dozen packages in Nixpkgs” without commit access; Ghostty developer and community manager; 2025 Steering Committee candidate offering “an intersectional perspective that can help organizations avoid common blind spots that can be hard to notice for tech communities dominated mostly by cisgender, male, white, Euro-American members”. Site footer: Made with Lume, Tailwind, 💜, caffeine, and a smudge of estradiol.(candidate statement, home page.)
every single user interested in Nix in some way, shape or form. Membership, per pluie's Steering Committee answer,
is a matter of self-identification and there's little we can do to interfere with it. Keep that definition in mind. It comes back.
pluie's text, verbatim, including the three footnotes and the bold, set out as a correspondence: each paragraph prefixed pluie: against a rule in pluie's own site colour, and under it the reply, in plain page prose. The underlined phrases are the ones the commentary is about; the tags above each paragraph name the persona or the mechanism. Hide the commentary to read the essay clean first. Chips name the persona or the mechanism. persona is one of Richard's ten social identities (listed below). guardian is the conscience speaking for the whole. psychic web is projection, introjection or gaslighting. hacker ethic refers to Levy's tenets (scorecard). receipt is what a linked source actually says. victimology and class are what they sound like.
“Techbro” is a class word, not a technical one. Levy's fourth tenet says hackers are judged by their hacking, “not bogus criteria such as degrees, age, race, or position”. The first sentence grades by position. The footnote grades Omarchy as “shoddy personal dotfiles with a concerted marketing campaign”, which is a verdict on the author's standing, not on the code.
“Not in making sound technical decisions” is said of the person who wrote Rails, one of the largest open-source successes of the century. Only a social identity can write that sentence, because only a social identity carries, in Richard's words, a sure knowledge of what is Right or Wrong and Good or Bad ... as determined by each society
, and applies it before looking at the work.
“Reactionary and appalling ideas ... extreme even within his cultural context.” The London post pluie links quotes Denmark’s Social Democrat prime minister, Mette Frederiksen: Danes expected newcomers to integrate, and all of us who thought that way have been wrong
. The centre-left government of DHH’s own country holds the position the essay calls extreme within his cultural context. The link refutes the sentence it decorates.
As for “appalling”. Eric Kaufmann’s 2023 study of 123,000 movers in the British census, and of geotagged American Twitter accounts, found that white progressives leave diverse neighbourhoods as readily as white conservatives do, and that the most anti-Trump white movers choose ZIP codes with the same minority share as the most pro-Trump (Diversity for Thee, But Not for Me). The ballot says appalling; the feet say something else. The same file holds more of the same: Cory Clark asks whether liberals are really more egalitarian and finds the answer is no; John McWhorter’s Woke Racism makes the case that the creed betrays the people it claims to protect; Erec Smith, a former diversity trainer, puts the incentive plainly: if you’re making all that money off of racism, the last thing you want is for racism to go away
; and Žižek supplies the diagnosis: the multiculturalist tolerance of the Other’s Otherness is also more twisted than it may appear—it is sustained by a secret desire for the Other to remain “other,” not to become too much like us.
Rob Henderson’s term for a belief that costs its holder nothing is a luxury belief.
“Appalling” also does a second job. It turns a policy view into a stain that spreads by proximity, so that Omarchy adopting Nix, and anyone who welcomes it, is contaminated. That is the mechanism which turned a hyperlink on a profile page into a ban. The essay is running it again, one hop further out.
pluie names the persona outright: “the political left in the Nix Community”. That is Richard's persona number five, the ideological identity, wearing the community's name as a surname.
“Influential, well-funded and well-connected ... intimidated.” Richard: all rebellion stems, primarily, from that deeply-held primordial feeling of disfranchisement (and its associated feelings of resentment, envy, cynicism, and so on and so forth).
The essay calls this feeling “completely natural”. It is. That is the point.
“We must resist this fear.” The first of four we must. Richard: The community coopts the word ‘we’ and turns it back into the ‘whole’ to serve its own nefarious purposes.
Jon has generally used language that, out of context, is civil and otherwise unobjectionable.The offence was being
wholly insensitive to the nuances of this conversation; the word chosen was “reckless”, explicitly not malicious. It ends:
we are explicitly not inviting debate on this topic. “Refusing to debate in good faith” is how a guardian spells declined to introject.
Yours truly ... does not give two hoots as to whether someone identifies as a tree, a frog, a coffee cup or whatever, and is quite happy to pay lip service to the social norms (such as using preferred pronouns, for instance).The gender page quotes Richard on gender identity as a social construct, the constructors' own phrase. The CRT page quotes Thomas Sowell: “systemic racism”
has no meaning that can be specified and tested, a claim about a phrase.
“Inability to stop creating drama”, in a drama essay. Projection is outbound traffic on the web: disowned affect exported to another node, the address rewritten. Read the paragraph with the names swapped and nothing else changes.
The boy who cried wolf is a fable about a shepherd whose warnings stop being believed. The essay cites it while warning the flock that a wolf is coming.
“Emotionally exhausting polemic essays” is the genre of the sentence it appears in.
The scare quotes around “proof” of victimhood come from a case built on “vulnerable minorities” and, in pluie's Steering Committee answer, on preventing “more people being hurt due to his views”. Victimhood is the one currency the essay accuses the other side of minting. Richard, on how the gender identity got political: clamorous ‘anti-discrimination’ vocalists and vociferous ‘equalitarian’ activists stridently cashing in on their minoritarian victimology socio-politico influence and its resultant lobbying pressure.
“Attention has become a key strategic resource.” This is the psychic web's currency, stated aloud. Richard: all emotional and passional entities are connected via a psychic web – a network of invisible vibes and currents ... wherein one entity can either seek power over another entity or seek communion with another entity by affective and/or psychic influence.
Two modes. From here to the end, count the verbs: win, lose, play, trap, defend, subvert, convince. All of them are the first mode. There is no communion anywhere in the essay, from a candidate who ran on a mediation program.
“Don't. Feed. The Troll.” is the thesis. The essay is the feeding. Both are true at once, which is what a guardian looks like from the inside: it cannot not speak, and it cannot see that it is speaking.
“You're far more likely to lose.” The essay's own forecast, and the reason for its strategy. This is envy of reach written as vigilance. Richard's name for the feeling is peasant mentality, and his remedy is not a better strategy: understanding the ‘whys and wherefores’ of peasant-mentality is not about effecting social change but being free of it in oneself.
Read the list of sins slowly: disobeying the political establishment
. Levy's third tenet is “Mistrust authority — promote decentralization.” The founding instinct of the hacker culture has just been filed under enemy tactics, in an essay about defending a hacker project.
“Targeting vulnerable minorities.” The target, in srid's case, was a hyperlink. In Jon's case, a comment thread about sponsorship policy. The vulnerability is doing all the work in the sentence, so it must be asserted, not shown.
Notice the two reasons given for not banning people from using a package manager: it would confirm srid's claim, and it is illegal. Not that it would be wrong. The licence is the guardrail, not the ethic. Levy's second tenet, all information should be free, is held here by the LGPL alone.
That the suggestion needs refuting at all is the receipt. Nobody in 2019 had to write a paragraph explaining that Nix users may not be banned from Nix.
The audience is named: users “disinterested in the drama” who “might side with” the exiles. The essay is addressed to the guardian's fellow guardians about how to manage the rest. Richard: Has anyone fully realised that the community does not exist for the good of the individual?
“Rooting out subversive elements” is on the table as an option to be argued against on grounds of efficacy. “Perceived ideological bubble”: the bubble is real, per footnote 3; only the perception is regretted.
whilst pottering around the world-wide-web: those of a statist persuasion
are apparently extracting meaning and/or purpose from busying themselves in the redressment of systemic cultural ‘wrongs’ ... through retaining tight control of ‘the public narrative’ – having long-ago seized the high moral ground of minority-group injustice.
a belief is an emotion-backed thought. Malignancy is the emotion, backing.
“Inscrutinizable work.” Work that cannot be scrutinized. The intended word was probably unimpeachable; the word that arrived is the opposite of Levy's second tenet. Slips are data.
“Flipping the script on who's the villain here”: the sentence that does the flipping, accusing the other side of it. Both channels seized at once. This is the textbook form.
“Excellent because it is inherently and functionally excellent” is the one line in the essay a hacker would sign. It is also the line that makes the rest unnecessary.
Three imperatives, one of them “remain where we are”, from a movement whose banner is change. Richard's calm is not a slogan issued to a flock: Astonishingly, I find that social change is unnecessary; I can live freely in the community as-it-is.
The headline was right. See the last section for why.
is a matter of self-identification and there's little we can do to interfere with it, that Jon and srid
definitely were parts of the Community, and that moderation
does not exclude or remove members: they are
more ostracized and isolated rather than completely severed. Membership by self-declaration, exile by committee, and the exiled still on the books. The community identity is run on exactly the rule the gender identity is run on. Same word-magic, bigger flag.
Many people in the Nix Community simultaneously think that Nix is actually not “woke” enough.The claim the essay exists to deny is granted in its last footnote. Fun, indeed.
Richard · The Formation and Persistence of Social Identity (2023)
This increated socio-cultural inwit a.k.a. conscience a.k.a. guardian – colligated under the rubric “social identity” for convenience – encompasses various bodiless personae as well. Viz.: [1] a vocational identity ... [2] a national identity ... [3] a racial identity (identifying as ‘white’, ‘black’, ‘brown’, etcetera, or whatever ethnicity nomenclature is the latest fashion) ... [4] a religio-spiritual identity ... [5] an ideological identity (identifying as a ‘Capitalist’, a ‘Communist’, a ‘Monarchist’, a ‘Fascist’ and the like) ... [6] a political identity ... [7] a class or caste identity ... [8] a familial identity ... [9] a sex identity (identifying as ‘boy’/ ‘girl’, ‘man’/ ‘woman’) ... [10] and, nowadays, a gender identity a.k.a. sexual orientation identity (identifying as ‘asexual’/ ‘bisexual’/ ‘homosexual’/ ‘transvestite’ a.k.a. ‘cross-dresser’/ ‘transsexual’ a.k.a. ‘transgender’/ ‘gender-queer’ a.k.a. ‘queer’ / and, colloquially, an ‘alphabet-soup’ of initials.actualfreedom.com.au/an/various/persistentsocialidentity.htm, section 01 (abridged; the full list is in the source).
Squares filled from pluie's essay, candidate statement and site. Blank squares are blank because the record is blank, not for want of trying.
in-your-face sexualisation of self-identity, worn as a badge.
Four times the essay says we must, twice we need to, and the closing line is an order to a flock. This is the voice Richard describes when he explains what a social identity is for.
Richard · Topic: Social Identity
A social identity is a psychological creation manufactured by society to act as a guardian over the wayward rudimentary self one was born with. All sentient beings are born with a biologically coded instinctive drive for physical survival which, when one is operating and functioning with a group of people, is potentially a danger to the survival of other group members. Hence the need for principles and morals and ethics to regulate the conduct of each person ... with appropriate rewards and punishments to ensure compliance. In a well-meant but ultimately short-sighted effort to prevent gaols from being filled to over-flowing, a social identity – a psychological guardian – is fabricated in an earnest endeavour to prevent the offences from happening in the first place. This ‘guardian’ is programmed with a set of values and charged with the role of acting as a conscience over the wayward self.actualfreedom.com.au/library/topics/socialidentity.htm
Richard · Selected Correspondence: Social Identity (on “the community”)
The phrase ‘good of the whole’ seems to imply this, but closer examination reveals that ‘the whole’ exists only in bombast and blather ... it is a concept, an ideology. Only an individual person – a flesh-and-blood body – actually exists. [...] This social identity has taken up residence in the body and rules the roost in an autocratic manner. Nevertheless, it is itself subject to the commands of the community, for it is a loyal member, having been created by the community – the ‘whole’ – in the first place. This loyalty thrives on the moral investment that the social identity has made in the community; one’s very ‘well-being’ depends upon receiving a continuous supply of moral dividends.
‘I’ am a lonely soul and it is essential that ‘I’ have a sense of belonging to the like-minded ‘whole’. It is an illusion of togetherness designed to assuage the feeling of aloneness that both oneself and the community experiences.actualfreedom.com.au/richard/selectedcorrespondence/sc-socialidentity2.htm
“Moral dividends” is the accounting term for what the essay is collecting. The Nix Community, per pluie's own definition, is a set of people who are interested in Nix. It has no address. It cannot be intimidated, cannot fear, cannot be alienated, and cannot vote. Every sentence in the essay that gives it feelings is a sentence about the guardian's feelings, with the address rewritten.
Step one: declare a class of people vulnerable. Step two: declare their identity beyond question. The governance Code of Conduct pluie links to does both in one clause. Under “Derogatory Language” it lists, as not acceptable, deliberately referring to someone by a gender that they do not identify with, and/or questioning the legitimacy of an individual's gender identity
. Under “Disruptive Behavior” it lists bad faith invitations to engage in debate, regardless of the pretense of civility
and attempting to use the specific wording of rules documents without referencing or understanding their spirit
. And then: Ultimately, the moderation team decides what is acceptable and unacceptable conduct.
So: the identity may not be questioned; an invitation to discuss it is by definition bad faith; reading the rule as written is itself a violation; and the rule means whatever the guardians say it means. The alleged harm that all this machinery was built to prevent, in the one case the essay leads with, was a hyperlink on a profile page. Richard saw the shape of the machinery from Australia in 2023:
Richard · The Formation and Persistence of Social Identity, section 02
In other words, all the fuss and pother dominating current-affairs about 101-plus personal pronouns – made regulatory law, even, in some fiefdoms (e.g., the Canadian regulatory kerfuffle over Prof. Jordan Peterson et alia) – as well as males asseverating gender-dysphoria competing in women’s sports, and nondiscriminatory access to public toilets and change-rooms, and the suchlike, along with the antisemitic-style taking offence laws and/or regulations (as in ‘hate-speech’ laws), promulgated and promoted by the unelected and unaccountable United Nations bureaucrats and rapporteurs, stems from and revolves cyclonically around none other than this phantasmal “social construct” of a gender-identity.Same source, section 02.
And on what the essay's suspension notice hopes Jon will do with his six weeks off (reflect on the impact his actions have had on the community and resolve to behave differently if he chooses to rejoin us
), Richard wrote the operating manual decades earlier:
Richard · the chastise-oneself protocol
When the ‘whole’ accuses one of being selfish – which it relentlessly does by extolling the virtues of duty, obligation and responsibility – one can then chastise oneself, thus maintaining one’s sense of being a social identity. With suitable remorse, one has then been coerced, cajoled and shamed into having one’s usefulness to the community restored ... and one feels needed again. Nonetheless, one is actually crazy to chastise oneself because ‘I’ am selfish by ‘my’ very created nature ... and ‘I’ will always be self-centred. Self-castigation only serves to crystallise ‘me’.sc-socialidentity2.htm
Jon did not chastise himself. He asked for his commit bit back. That was the permaban.
The essay's opening charge is that the exiles are hypocrites. A ledger, then.
| The essay says | The essay does, or the record shows |
|---|---|
Don't. Feed. The Troll. | Thirteen hundred words naming both trolls, with links, the week before an election. |
Not through emotionally exhausting polemic essays. | This is one. |
Their inability to stop creating drama; the boys who constantly call wolf. | The essay opens by reporting an outbreak of hysteriaand asking readers to resist a fear. It is the drama post about the drama. |
We should not preemptively ban these figures from using Nix. | Because it would assert the veracity of srid's claimsand because the LGPL forbids it. Then: we removed these people for very good reasons. |
Jon was suspended for refusing to debate the issue in good faith. | The linked notice: his language was civil and otherwise unobjectionable, he was recklessnot malicious, and we are explicitly not inviting debate on this topic. |
srid was insisting that queer identities aren't real. | srid, in the linked post: does not give two hoots as to whether someone identifies as a tree, a frog, a coffee cup or whatever, and is quite happy to pay lip service to the social norms (such as using preferred pronouns). |
srid claims systemic racism is only a figment of your imagination. | The linked page quotes Sowell: the phrase has no meaning that can be specified and tested. A claim about a phrase, not about anyone's imagination. |
The Nix Community is every single user interested in Nix; membership is a matter of self-identification. | Except two named users, who are exiled, and who nonetheless definitely weremembers and are ostracized rather than completely severed. Self-identification for everyone except the people who would. |
Nix's strength is a plurality of diverse use cases, not sheer purity. | Rooting out subversive elementsis discussed as an option, and rejected on efficacy grounds only. |
“Woke” is a term made up by alt-right and far-right groups. | It is Black American English, in print since 1938. And in the same footnote: many people in the Nix Community simultaneously think that Nix is actually not “woke” enough. |
They refuse to collaborate with and have respect towards other people. | The pull request cited as ban evasion has zero review comments. The collaboration was refused from the other side. |
Stay calm. | Intimidated, fear(four times), hysteria, onslaught, trap, suicide, villain. |
Richard · Actual Freedom List, 17 August 2002
… there is an interconnectedness between all the emotional and passional entities – all emotional and passional entities are connected via a psychic web – a network of invisible vibes and currents. This interconnectedness in action is a powerful force – colloquially called ‘energy’ or ‘energies’ – wherein one entity can either seek power over another entity or seek communion with another entity by affective and/or psychic influence.sc-vibes.htm
Psychiatry mapped the web's instruments without naming the network. The essay uses all three, in order.
hypocrites,
parasitizing,
malignant beliefs,
inability to stop creating drama. Disowned traffic, exported. Every one of these is a self-report with the address changed.
We need to convince that we removed these people for very good reasons.The stated aim is that the reader carry the verdict as their own. The essay then names where the reader will carry it: the ballot.
flipping the script on who's the villain here, written by the hand doing the flipping.
What is absent is the second of Richard's two modes. There is no seeking of communion anywhere in the piece, not one sentence of it, from the candidate whose platform proposed a first-party mediation program that any community member can use to discreetly and safely resolve historical conflicts
. The mediation program was for members. The essay is about the people it defines as not-quite-members. Which brings us to the exits.
Richard · Selected Correspondence: Addiction
… have you ever noticed that ‘humanity’ reveres its addiction so much that escape is taboo?sc-addiction.htm
Put pluie's two statements side by side. In the essay: figures who have long been exiled from the Nix Community are beginning to crawl out of the shadows again
. In the Steering Committee answer: moderation does not exclude or remove members
; the exiled are ostracized and isolated rather than completely severed
, and whether they are still members falls on them to answer
.
So an exile is not allowed to leave (the community keeps the file) and not allowed to return (the file is the charge sheet). The one thing the exile may not do is the thing the exile did: build elsewhere and stop asking. A community, as Richard describes it, cannot afford that, because when ‘I’ expire, the ‘whole’ also ceases to exist
. A member is a file. Fellowship, the thing the word “community” was borrowed to mean, keeps no file: a free association with other – flesh and blood – individuals to form a loose-knit affiliation that acts for the good of each individual.
That is what open source used to be, and what the next section is about.
Steven Levy summarized the ethic in Hackers (1984). The tenets are quoted from the Wikipedia summary. The thesis of this section is not subtle: this ethic is why free and open-source software ate the world. Code judged as code, information free, authority mistrusted, credentials ignored. Nix exists because of it. Score the essay and the Code of Conduct it links against it.
| Levy's tenet | pluie's essay / the CoC / the record | Score |
|---|---|---|
1. Access to computers—and anything which might teach you something about the way the world works—should be unlimited and total. Always yield to the Hands-On Imperative! | A release manager locked out of GitHub for the release he was managing. A maintainer banned from GitHub over a profile link. pluie's platform: the moderation team should have the right to review unofficial spacesand withdraw endorsement. Access is the first lever pulled, every time. | ✗ |
2. All information should be free. | Threads unlisted, a poll deleted in under four minutes, a critique thread split and made private, feel free to contact us privately, we are explicitly not inviting debate. The essay: win our narrative back, subvert their legitimacy and talking points, and build inscrutinizablework. | ✗ |
3. Mistrust authority—promote decentralization. | The essay lists disobeying the political establishmentamong the enemy's sins. The CoC: Ultimately, the moderation team decides what is acceptable and unacceptable conduct.The Steering Committee's kickoff: We want to speak and act as a single voice.A mod team that self-selected by unanimous consent for years. | ✗ |
4. Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not bogus criteria such as degrees, age, race, or position. | pluie's platform: an intersectional perspectivefor communities dominated mostly by cisgender, male, white, Euro-American members. Jon's cited offence: objecting to minority representation by a single classin sponsorship policy. A supporter of the suspension, on the record: meritocracy doesn't actually work to produce well represented leadership structures.DHH graded as “techbro”; Omarchy graded as dotfiles. Membership itself defined by self-identification rather than by contribution. | ✗ |
5. You can create art and beauty on a computer. | The essay asks for work that is excellent because it is inherently and functionally excellent. Agreed. Then calls it inscrutinizable. Half marks for the sentiment; the adjective loses the other half. | ½ |
6. Computers can change your life for the better. | Nix is a wonderful piece of software and my own life as well as many others' will not be the same without it.Sincere, and true. It is also the sentence that should have made the rest of the essay unnecessary: a tool that changes lives for the better does not need a guardian to decide whose lives. | ✓ |
| Sharing. Levy's preface tenet. | A pull request exposing store-path queries in the C API, submitted by a banned contributor, is cited as evidence of a crime. It has no review comments. The code was never read; the author was. | ✗ |
| Openness. | The essay is a strategy memo for managing what the disinterestedusers get to see, addressed to the people who manage it. | ✗ |
| Decentralization. | Forks (Lix, Snix, Determinate) are named in pluie's answers as things to keep within the umbrella. The banned are told they may not leave. | ✗ |
World improvement, foremost, upholding democracy. | The essay's stake is the voter base for the 2026 Steering Committee Election, and its method is to decide in advance what the voters should be convinced of. | ✗ |
Eric Raymond's one-line version of the ethic, which srid cites in the ban post as the culture he was raised in, is Shut up and show them the code.
It is the most inclusive rule ever written. It does not ask what you are. The essay never once asks what anyone built. It asks, of each person named, what they are, whom they stood with, which side of Twitter they are on, and what they believe. That is the inversion, tenet by tenet, and the project is running on the fumes of the ethic it inverted.
The page that got srid banned quotes Richard on gender identity. A moderator later called the quotation transphobic in public. Here is the passage in full, with its lead-in. Richard, when told of the accusation shortly before his death in 2024, said it was his favourite part of the essay and that he had a lot of fun writing it. He laughed out loud.
Richard · The Formation and Persistence of Social Identity, section 02, “The Sexualisation of Social Identity”
These socio-cultural personae are related to roles, rank, positions, station, status, class/ caste, age, sex, gender, and so on, and, regarding that last-named persona, although the word ‘gender’ has been interchangeable with the word ‘sex’ for more than half a millennia – vide: “the use of gender in the sense ‘sex’ is over 600 years old” (Webster’s College Dictionary) – such usage had essentially remained the preserve of grammarians. In 1955, however, this grammatical term was press-ganged by a monstrous self-styled “fuckologist” for an entirely different rôle which gender feminists (as distinct from equity feminists) seized upon in the 1970s.
Hence the word gender, indicative of grammatical sex for over half-a-millennia, has in the past few decades transmogrified into a sexualised “social construct” of a persona. This is reflected in its relabelling as an incorporeal “sexual orientation identity” (in sociologese) well as an expansive ‘alphabet-soup’ of initials (colloquially) whose selectively-diffusional fluidity has oft-times more to do with the lability of being the trend du jour than anything else.
Bedazzled by the abracadabra power of word-magic to increate and proliferate and present to the mind a mentalistically alluring array of wraithlike identities and/or sexualities, of every alphabetical dial-a-definition description imaginable, and being beguilingly driven to similarly razzle-dazzle the world at large, it has become (conceivably) possible for a female-gendered persona of a same-sex sexual persuasion, having habitancy in a male body, to somehow convince that body to undergo an oestrogenic hormone regimen, with the view to having sex reassignment surgery, so as to thereafter use a strap-on dildo over their surgically-fabricated vulvovaginal region when engaging in penetrative sexual activity with their female-gendered cohort, who, being similarly of a same-sex sexual persuasion and likewise having habitancy in a male body, has also partaken of oestrogenic hormone therapy and sex reassignment surgery.
Of particular note is how all the above transpires solely because human beings, presently as previously, are not only flesh-and-blood bodies but are also feeling-beings as well – insubstantive affective-psychic ontological entities having both habitancy as the seat-of-the-emotions and psychosomatic dominion over their host-bodies – who are intuitionally identifiable, viscerally, as ‘me’-at-the-core-of-‘my’-being.
Thus the socio-cultural identity is overlaid, via socialisation and culturalisation, over both the ego-self and the soul-self – as an incorporeal cultural conscience or social guardian – and is currently in the process of being sexualised (by those gullible enough to fall for it).actualfreedom.com.au/an/various/persistentsocialidentity.htm, section 02. The “fuckologist” is John Money; the word is the title of a scholarly critique of his diagnostic concepts.
The essay above is this passage's proof of concept. A site signed with a hormone, a Code of Conduct that forbids the question, a community that admits members by the same declaration and expels them by committee, and a strategy memo addressed to “we”. Richard did not have to argue that gender identity is a social identity. He listed it as number ten, and waited for the list to be confirmed by the people on it.
The vocabulary of the essay's contempt is a class vocabulary: techbro
, Twitter Manosphere
, Tech Bro Ecosphere™
, shoddy personal dotfiles
, pundits
. Rob Henderson's observation applies: Mastering intricacies of gender and race relations discourse and behavior has become a marker for belonging to the cosmopolitan class, in a similar way that tastes for classical music and art were markers of bourgeois culture in the 19th and 20th centuries.
An intersectional perspective is a credential. Levy's fourth tenet says credentials are bogus criteria. The two cannot both be honoured, and the essay chooses.
Underneath the credential is the feeling the essay calls natural: intimidated by the influential, well-funded and well-connected; far more likely to lose
; owed something by the algorithm. Richard's name for it:
Richard · Selected Correspondence: Social Identity (peasant mentality)
Which neatly brings me to the point of detailing these above examples: understanding the ‘whys and wherefores’ of peasant-mentality is not about effecting social change but being free of it in oneself. [...] In other words, one is then free to conform with the legal laws and observe the social protocols – to ‘go along with’, to ‘pay lip-service to’ – whilst no longer believing in them. ‘Tis a remarkable freedom in itself – with no need to rebel at all – as all rebellion stems, primarily, from that deeply-held primordial feeling of disfranchisement (and its associated feelings of resentment, envy, cynicism, and so on and so forth).sc-socialidentity2.htm
“Pay lip-service to ... whilst no longer believing in them” is, word for word, the policy srid stated in the ban post about pronouns. It is the policy the essay reports as insisting that queer identities aren't real
. The difference between lip-service and belief is the difference the guardian cannot tolerate, because the guardian runs on belief.
The headline is correct. Don't give them the time of day. Richard would sign it, with one amendment about who “them” is.
Richard · Article 20 (as quoted in sc-socialidentity2)
Astonishingly, I find that social change is unnecessary; I can live freely in the community as-it-is.sc-socialidentity2.htm
The essay's version of not giving attention is a tactic in an attention war: withhold the resource so the enemy starves, while spending thirteen hundred words of it. Richard's version is not a tactic. It is what is left when there is no “me” collecting moral dividends from the whole, and so no whole to defend, no narrative to win back, no exile to keep on file, no voter base to steer, and no wolf. The time of day is then simply given, to anyone who asks, because it costs nothing. It is at the top of this page.
“Stay calm. Remain where we are. Keep on keeping on.” One of those is possible. It is not the middle one.
The page is named for what this section does. Three more sentences from the essay, answered in the same correspondence form, and then, as the clock at the top has been promising all along, the thing itself.
Indeed it is; and it is quite something to watch, inside a single paragraph, a trepida guardian gird itself to sound intrepid on behalf of a factitiousb “we”, pronounce the fear completely natural, and then order everybody to resist it (fear-of-fear being the same passion wearing a helmet, and no more reassuring to look at). As for “influential, well-funded and well-connected”: of all the parties to this affair exactly one holds a ban button, and it is not the party being described. And should a single instance ever be provided of the author of Rails, Hotwire and Kamal failing at “sound technical decisions”, the essay’s ultracrepidarianc verdict on him, delivered from the vantage of a dozen packages and no commit bit, will most certainly be addressed; until then it is taken for the male bovine faecal matter it is and passed over without further remark.
The time of day is, as it happens, the one commodity on the planet which cannot be withheld: the sun has been handing it to exiles and committee members alike since some while before the Constitution, and no moderation team has yet found the button that unlists it. What can be withheld is approval, and “worthy” is an approval word, a term with meaning only for an identity whose self-liking is sourced in the verdicts of others, so the sentence tells the astute reader nothing whatsoever about the exiles and rather a lot about who wrote it. As the essay is itself some thirteen hundred words of attention, the instruction was evidently not addressed to its author, who has been feeding the troll with both hands whilst warning the flock against feeding it, a tergiversationd so brisk it could be set to music, and pharisaicale enough that the essay’s opening charge of hypocrisy may be returned to sender unopened.
An apotropaicf incantation, three phrases chanted at a wolf. The first is available now, this very moment, gratis and without a vote; the second is not so much impossible as geographically obscure, neither “where” nor “we” appearing on any map; and the third is what has been going on since 2021, with the results in. Hence the only advice worth typing unasked, and it is addressed to pluie alone: the fear is the sole item in the entire essay which is yours, every other feeling on that page being on loan from the group, and being the one thing there that is actually yours it is the one thing worth investigating. Others who did have left notes. Keri Smith, on the way out: part of it is that you are fearful of being called an apostate
(On Leaving the SJW Cult). Barrett Wilson, on the way in: A fear of being targeted by the mob induces us to signal publicly that we are part of it
(I Was the Mob Until the Mob Came for Me). Andreas Kling, on having said Brendan Eich deserved the hate: I wanted to fit in at Apple
(source). The author of Sad Radicals: Radical communities select for particular personality types ... They attract hurt people, looking for an explanation for the pain they’ve endured.
And Corinna Cohn, who transitioned at nineteen and wrote it up three decades on: In high school, when I experienced crushes on my male classmates, I believed that the only way those feelings could be requited was if I altered my body
(source). Not one of those is an accusation; each is a report from somebody who looked, and found that the fear was the item, the identity a way of not looking at it, and a hurt underneath both. If there is a hurt under this one, and there usually is, then that is what the investigating is for: not to be right about DHH, but for the suffering to end, sooner rather than later. Nobody else can do it, nobody can prevent it being done, and the whole psittacisticg apparatus of “we must” falls silent the moment it is, which is a better silence than the essay had in mind. The time of day is hereby given: it is --:--:-- where you are, as of this reading, with no expectation of return and no expiry. Ha ... it may even be kept, eh?
a [Dictionary Definition]: trepid (adj.): trembling; quaking; timid. [Latin trepidus]. ~ (Webster’s 1913 Dictionary).
b [Dictionary Definition]: factitious (adj.): made by art, in distinction from what is produced by nature; artificial; sham. ~ (Webster’s 1913 Dictionary).
c [Dictionary Definition]: ultracrepidarian (adj.): going beyond one’s province; giving opinions on matters beyond one’s knowledge. [after Pliny’s ne sutor ultra crepidam, “let the cobbler not judge above the sandal”]. ~ (Oxford English Dictionary).
d [Dictionary Definition]: tergiversation (n.): the act of turning one’s back; a shifting; shift; subterfuge; evasion; fickleness of conduct; inconstancy. [Latin tergum, back + versare, to turn]. ~ (Webster’s 1913 Dictionary).
e [Dictionary Definition]: pharisaical (adj.): addicted to external forms and ceremonies; making a show of religion without the spirit of it; hypocritical; self-righteous. ~ (Webster’s 1913 Dictionary).
f [Dictionary Definition]: apotropaic (adj.): having or reputed to have the power of averting evil influence or ill luck. [Greek apotropaios, averting evil]. ~ (Oxford English Dictionary).
g [Dictionary Definition]: psittacism (n.): the mechanical, parrot-like repetition of words or ideas without understanding. [Latin psittacus, parrot]. ~ (Merriam-Webster).