[libre-riscv-dev] renaming master branch

[Cole Poirier]

On Jun 21 2020, at 7:29 am, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton <lkcl at lkcl.net> wrote:

> On Sunday, June 21, 2020, Yehowshua <yimmanuel3 at gatech.edu> wrote:
>  
>> Probably not worth considering.
>  
>  
> i am so tempted to make an ironical self-deprecating joke here, however
> decided against it because it could be misinterpreted.  and jokes that have
> to have an advance explanation are laaame.  oh well :)
>  
>  
>> Master has come to mean “original”.
>>  
>> Record-master
>> Film-master
>> Tape-master
>> Digital-master
>  
>  
> iinteresting.  i missed that meaning.  it is particularly relevant in the
> case of git and of source control.
>  
> we know what happens when people in office environments try to edit
> documents collaboratively over email.
>  
> the concept of a "master document" prevents that absolute chaos from
> happening.
>  
>  
>> Masters weren’t only slaves rulers…
>> master also means teacher.
>  
>  
> iinteresting.
>  
> another extremely valuable meaning, where it is clearly recognised that,
> actually, the role of a Master is to actually *SERVE* the student.
>  
>  
>> Master I think is sufficiently overloaded.
>  
>  
> indeed.
>  
> this has, sadly, not stopped the PSF from eradicating the word.
>  
> to highlight the absurdity i seriously considered submitting a bugreport
> that my code had stopped working outside of the hours 9 to 5 monday to
> friday and that i had seen the word "strike" and "unionisation" in
> unauthorised data traffic between two pieces of code since upgrading the
> version of python.
>  
> i did not however follow through with it as they may have had a sense of
> humour failure.

I greatly appreciate your calm and reasoned analysis in this present
moment of mass hysteria, Luke, and Yehowshua. I have actually spent some
significant time over the past 5 years engaging with the psychological,
social, and philosophical origins of this inversion of small 'L' liberal
principles of... well not changing the name of the 'master' branch
because in a different time and *CONTEXT* the term was used to refer to
a slaver.

There's a man in Tennessee, USA, who trained as a mathematician, but
over the past ten years has been studying and writing books about
religious philosophy and reason. For the past three to four years he and
three international colleagues have studied the academic literature that
is being used to justify illiberalism for 'progress' sake, and have now
become more educated in these fields than the people who are
academically credentialed in them. Two years ago they were able to get
7(!) (obviously fake to anyone outside of the Critical Social Justice
departments) papers published in the leading journals in Gender Studies
and Critical Race Theory. They even had one paper (about how we should
train men as we train dogs in order to combat 'rape culture') published
and honoured in the journal 'Hypatia' the leading gender studies
journal. It was honoured in their 25th anniversary edition, as an
example of the best scholarship of the year in the field, before its
authors were revealed to be skeptics. It shows the illegitimacy of the
whole edifice of these 'academic' departments that are completely
insulated from any skepticism or criticism, that the article was
retracted not because they didn't think it was quality scholarship in
their field, but because they realized it had been done to expose the
truth of their scam. These fields that purport to study such societally
important topics as gender and race, do not do so with rigour but as an
exercise in sophistry that is *wholly* disconnected from reality because
it believes everything other than 'oppression' to be subjective.
Reasonable people want race and gender to be studied, but they want the
study to be intellectually honest and rigorous, because everyone knows
that that which is not subject to criticism nor tested against reality
is worse than garbage. These fields *could* do genuinely fantastic work
but they will need to be remade in the model of their academically
legitimate and academically rigorous forbears. What they are doing right
now is incredibly harmful, and importantly, *entirely* made up.


This is taken from the article by the scholars explaining why they spent
two years carrying out this audit, as they call it, of the journals in
the fields of Critical Social Justice

"Academic Grievance Studies and the Corruption of Scholarship,"
October 2, 2018, by Helen Pluckrose and James A. Lindsay and Peter
Boghossian (https://areomagazine.com/2018/10/02/academic-grievance-studies-and-the-corruption-of-scholarship/):
```
This is the primary point of the project: What we just described is not
knowledge production; it’s sophistry. That is, it’s a forgery of
knowledge that should not be mistaken for the real thing. The biggest
difference between us and the scholarship we are studying by emulation
is that we know we made things up.

This process is the one, single thread that ties all twenty of our
papers together, even though we used a variety of methods to come up
with the various ideas fed into their system to see how the editors and
peer reviewers would respond. Sometimes we just thought a nutty or
inhumane idea up and ran with it. What if we write a paper saying we
should train men like we do dogs—to prevent rape culture? Hence came the
“Dog Park” paper. What if we write a paper claiming that when a guy
privately masturbates while thinking about a woman (without her
consent—in fact, without her ever finding out about it) that he’s
committing sexual violence against her? That gave us the “Masturbation”
paper. What if we argue that the reason superintelligent AI is
potentially dangerous is because it is being programmed to be
masculinist and imperialist using Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and
Lacanian psychoanalysis? That’s our “Feminist AI” paper. What if we
argued that “a fat body is a legitimately built body” as a foundation
for introducing a category for fat bodybuilding into the sport of
professional bodybuilding? You can read how that went in Fat Studies.
```

The effective leader of this project, the mathematician, has started a
website with several podcasts on it, to provide educational resources
necessary for understanding and combating the problem of bad faith
Critical Social Justice *religious fanatics* trying to use common
people's good will and desire to fight racism, for, in fact, very racist
purposes. As they explain (in "Identity Politics Does Not Continue the
Work of the Civil Rights Movements," September 25, 20184 by Helen
Pluckrose and James A. Lindsay,
https://areomagazine.com/2018/09/25/identity-politics-does-not-continue-the-work-of-the-civil-rights-movements/),
Martin Luther King Jr implored us to, "judge one not by their immutable
characteristics but by the content of one's character." The present
movement seeks to make us, "judge one not by their character nor
actions, but solely through based on their race and other immutable
characteristics." And, further, to use semantically overloaded terms to
convince everyone they are secretly racist and must... treat everyone
only with regard to their race (*actually* racist!!) in order to combat
"the systemic racism of white supremacy that is all around us and is an
unchangeable part of every person white, black or otherwise." Literally,
in the epistemology of Critical Social Justice, specifically Critical
Whiteness Studies, the most recommended text of which is the presently
super popular "Robin Diangelo's 'White Fragility'", there are only two
possible state for an individual to exist in. 1. "A racist who doesn't
acknowledge that they are a racist and doesn't do the 'work' of
constantly examining their 'racism' and confessing, repenting and
prostrating one's self," and 2. "a racist who acknowledges they are a
racist and does do the 'work' of constantly examining their 'racism' and
confessing, repenting and prostrating one's self, but who *despite* this
will never be any less racist because in this epistemological framework,
'racism' is a virus that will always be present in *EVERY* individual,
and will not change even with the Chinese-communist style struggle
sessions that are being prescribed. According to the author of *the*
book that everyone is being told to read and follow at the moment,
"Everyone and everything is fundamentally and unchangably racist, and
always will be. That is what the academic literature that provides
intellectual cover for the revolutionaries refers to as 'structural racism'.

I highly recommend reading this ~2 hour long (to read) academic style,
but approachable, article by James Lindsay, the mathematician and now
philosopher, and Mike Nayna, an mixed-race aussie documentary filmmaker
and now philosopher, about the evolutionary psychological foundations of
why humans have through out time formed religions (and moral
communities, the more general term for describing all religious-like
phenomena), and how this present movement is a religious one. The
important distinction is that throughout most of human history there
were pre-modern religions, whereas the current religious zealotry and
hysteria is coming from a post-modern religion (more accurately 'moral
community', or 'relgious-like phenomenon').
"Postmodern Religion and the Faith of Social Justice," June 18, 2020 by
James Lindsay and Mike Nayna
(https://newdiscourses.com/2020/06/postmodern-religion-faith-social-justice/)

Anyway, this is just material anyone can use to understand what's
currently going on and why we should maintain Martin Luther King Jr's
liberal principles instead of substituting progressive principles of
"inverting the racial hierarchy in order to be antiracist (note
antiracist !== not racist, antiracist === inverting the racial hierarchy
(literally from a book by a Critical Race theorist, called "The
Intersectional Matrix of Oppression") to 'fight' 'racism').

I'm confident our project will not fall into the same pit of despair
that git, LLVM, and much of the world are marching into. I believe that
we can continue to be *not* racist, sexist, etc. because those are the
liberal morals that we all share, and well, the charter is explicitly
liberal :)

Back to work I go,

Cole