Hate mail is part of the job

I'm old and fortunate enough that I've managed to create a fairly prosperous life for myself; in turn, this affords me the luxury of never bending the knee to bullies, and always telling the truth as I see it.  The colloquialism often called Fuck You Money is a real thing; it's hard to run an honest blog taglined "A shill for truth. Defiant heresy on cultural matters." if you fear being fired for what you write.  So, dear reader, should you get a chance at Fuck You Money, take it.

Of course, nobody successful gets to my age without having seen some disagreement.  If often so happens that people don't necessarily see things the way you do, or even the way they really are.  Some people (like me) are happy to disagree and let everyone live their own beliefs in peace — on most things we all believe, we likely do not, and absolutely don't have to agree!

But not everyone can do that.  Some people just can't resist trying to manipulate others.  Some people just can't rest, knowing that others out there have the wrong opinions, and are posting them online without reprisal.

This story is both about a buttinsky who is not able to let everyone live their own beliefs in peace, and about the cultural conditions that led him to be like that.

Earlier today, a good friend of mine pointed out a fairly recent, quite slanderous, public post by one Pierre Bourdon Delroth — a recently-furloughed Google InfraSec employee.  Based on his post, he would appear to have a personal vendetta against me.  Here are his words:

To wit, he claims:

• I am a racist / sexist asshole.
• I was fired from Google 5+ years ago.
• I'm not even stealthy about being racist.
• I am part of a "conspiracy theorist group" that has slowly spread to Linux Weekly News.

These are all serious claims.  With words of such caliber and conviction, one would think he must have both offered unassailable evidence for his statements, as well as have a solid personal reason to hate me so much.

Does he have a personal reason to hate me?  No.  I don't remember ever talking to him, quite honestly.  I haven't even thought of him — I didn't even know he existed for all I know, until this seething post popped up in my radar.  This is a total stranger to me, who nonetheless has very strong, negative opinions of me.

Why would he post something like that?  Are any his claims even true at all?

Let's find out.  We'll first address why he really is doing this.  Then, as a less-important addendum, we'll go over each one of the lies in his post (because the sort of thing where I mock liars and losers is one of my guiltiest pleasures, and I'm not even stealthy about it).

For those of you who are short on time or detest long posts, here's the three bullet point summary:

• Pierre Bourdon Delroth is lying to you about me.
• He doesn't care that he is lying because he hates.
• There is a method and system to the hate.

I will start by stating the obvious — all substantiated in the addendum below — Pierre's post is 95% percent blatant falsehoods, 5% accidental broken clock correct, and 100% loony ideological slander.  Possibly illegal under Swiss law too.

What do we make of this?

Let's ask the obvious question: if he's not my enemy, why go out of his way to (a) behave in this reproachable manner (b) specifically towards me?  Why would an otherwise-ordinary guy, who we ought to assume has [ed: had, lol, ngl] a constructive job at one of the most important corporations in the world — and has never been wronged by me in any material or even imaginary way — go out of his way to "point out the evil dirty racist conspiracy theorist Rudd-O invading our community"?

I think it may just be that (a) he may be part of the woke cult, and (b) I am certainly a material, conscious obstacle to his cult.  And therefore, I am his enemy.

Pierre is likely to have been indoctrinated in the woke cult.  I don't know the particulars of where or how he was — I know Google spent millions in (mandatory-to-management) internal "unbiasing sessions", which were textbook critical social justice indoctrination sessions — I don't even know if it was a formal indoctrination, but I know it probably has happened, because his behavior checks every box of the woke cult — people don't just go online to abuse others by name for sport, they are taught to do this.  Does Pierre need to carry a physical Woke Membership Badge to be part of the cult?  No — all this claim needs to be truthful, is to observe how Pierre performs the cult's methods.

Ten-hour long video sessions about the woke cult exist online; I respect your time so I'm just going to give you a twin-turbo summary of it here:

• The method of the woke (critical social justice) cult is to critique everything until they control everything, while simultaneously claiming the mantle of being the nice people on the right side of history.  You see, they know better than you — they are the superior people, imbued with gnostic wisdom about important!!!stuff!!! like the evil patriarchy, racism, sexism, and gender theory — and therefore you must obey their prescriptions.  In the words of the famed woke guru Anita Sarkeesian: "Everything is racist, everything is sexist, and you must point it all out."  The problem is only "solved" when you give them the power they demand — and even then, the problem isn't solved just yet.  You must give them a little bit more power, so the problem can be solved now!
• For normal people, the expected process of opinion formation is (a) collect facts (b) draw hypothesis (c) test hypothesis (d) confirm or go back to step (a).  In the gnostic cult of woke, that process is inverted — the dogma comes first, and all facts / terminology / perception must be tortured as needed to make them fit the dogma.
• The operational cudgels of the woke cult consist chiefly of the modern critical social theory doctrines of racism, sexism, transphobia and climate catastrophe.  There are others, but these doctrines are practically red flags that identify one of the cult's members among the wider public (which justifiably doesn't have the time or the interest to care about such bullshit).
• As is well-known of all cults, their sympathizers, acolytes and inductees absolutely hate people who point out how their beliefs are absurd nonsense.  As is characteristic of the cult members, they manifest their hate often and loudly, while labeling their targets "hateful" (as per the Iron Law of Woke Projection).  The ability of you to express your opinions freely, is like kryptonite to a woke; they call the expression of ideas they dislike "hate speech", which is short for "speech we hate".
• Whatever the woke can't control, they seek to destroy.   The woke cult harasses, insults, attacks, and sometimes physically injures¹ people who oppose them.  The more woke a person is, the more dangerous he is, because the more motivated he will be to do unhinged or even illegal things in the name of defending the woke cult.  That extreme, by the way, is by design, and it has a concrete name: mid-level violence.
• Whatever means are used to protect the cult and vanquish its enemies are fair game, because members of the cult are acting in the name of the capital-G Good, and therefore evil is at least somewhat permissible by cult members in the name of eliminating the evils of non-cult members.  Principles do not matter to them, and appeals to principle will always fail; for them, your values are merely weapons to be used against you.

So why me?

Well, it's 1-2-3.

A few days ago, I wrote a post in LWN, fundamentally gloating that we, the people, have full access to open source large-language models (LLMs), uncensored, that we can begin to use as personal assistants and for many other uses (the post is archived here).  Critically, this access means that people can now train models to generate outputs outside the boundaries of what megacorporations and States want them to say.  And what an amazing achievement it was — it is certainly a victory against the corporate censors like OpenAI and Google.  Pierre must have read that post, noticed that it was a pro-free-speech post at heart, and something clicked in his brain — he remembered me from somewhere.

Now, have you met my blog?  Maybe he clicked through my profile and that's how he found my blog. Let's be clear: half of its content by weight is woke heresies; hell, all I wanted to do back in 2002 was share cool code and writings about open source... but the woke fucked with me, so here we are.

But I doubt Pierre went off on Mastodon because he clicked through my blog.  He probably did not need to read my blog to know this — because he was probably already aware when I was at Google that I did not subscribe to his critical social justice ideology (and you'll see why below in the addendum)!  We did not work together, but he must somehow know me from Google (depending on whom you ask, I am either a "legend" or "infamous" there).

So that's almost certainly why he singled me out to "make an example of" in his Mastodon.  But why choose to "make an example of" me in his Mastodon?

Dear reader, I invite you to imagine this Pierre guy, seething as he composes his post: "I am so angry at this Rudd-O guy, because he said on Linux Weekly News that he can make his computer AI say the gamer word [ed: no such thing happened]!  And he has written that men are stronger than women on his blog [ed: yes, I have posted about that]!  How dare he!  He can't keep getting away with it!  I bet he was one of the wreckers at Google!  Maybe he was the famed Dark Passenger!  This evil evil Rudd-O guy must be ended, and I must do something about it nao!"  Hahaha!  What exactly went through his mind as he got that rush of endorphins while he furiously fingered his slanderous post, we don't know — but we can certainly speculate and have fun with.

Unfortunately for him, no material revenge is possible:

• Can he fuck with my Google account (as other Google employees have done in vendettas)?  No — even if he was still employed, there's nothing to fuck with, as I have consciously eliminated the use of all Google products in my life (to be clear: promotion-obsessed engineers at Google helped with that, as half of the products I gladly used they killed all on their own).
• Can he delete my blog?  I bet he would very much like to do that, but no, he can't.  He could attempt to commit a crime here, and he might even succeed — but the blog is backed up and will certainly come back online.
• Can he try to fuck with my job?  Unlikely, but let's say for a moment that he is able to commit a crime of tortious interference — the privilege of Fuck You Money means that I can go between six-figure jobs forever, and my solid business network means I don't have to.
• Can he sue me?  For what, exactly, would he sue?  And did he not post baseless, evidence-free slander about me online first?  He is not in America; in Switzerland, his kind of gratuitous online slander is legally actionable, and he doesn't have the defense of truth or even honestly-held beliefs.
• Can he come to my house and injure my loved ones?  He won't, and it would be inadvisable for him, but if he was three wingnut turns woker, he might try¹.

This Pierre guy is just basically impotent and insignificant, beyond — of course — the power of his fully-armed, combat-ready social network battle station.

Oh, his social network!  The Fediverse to the rescue!  His obvious next course of action must be to hold an online Maoist Struggle Session about me.

The game of Struggle Session consists of telling a bunch of lies about, in this case, me, while the audience of his peers all assent and mumble "yeah, what an awful guy, I dunno how these people even exist, something surely ought to be done about that!" — with everyone getting the tacit message that, should they fall out of line with the Struggle, they might just be Struggled next.  The content or veracity of the Struggle Session don't matter, because the Struggle Session is an act in the name of a capital-G Good such as "fighting the Nazis" (for some reason, all these woke types think of themselves as metaphorically being on the D-Day boats which landed in Normandy). 

The fundamental intention of the Struggle Session is to sabotage and demoralize the target in all ways possible.  And sabotage is here clearly on the table: note how Pierre expressly summons the editor in chief of LWN (Jonathan Corbet).  If Pierre successfully cajoles Jon into banning me from LWN, then that would be a productive outcome of the Struggle Session he's holding against me.  Hell, based on what Jon replied, and after reading this (hi, Jon!) he might just proactively ban me from the forum, and thanks for all the fish.  With the "anti-wokes" removed, the woke cult can control the narrative; remember: critique and critique until control is surrendered.

And this, my friends, is basically how you get this hateful, fervent slander he posted.  Just an angry, unhappy guy, brainwashed to think that everyone who doesn't think like him must be a Nazi, to the point that he is hallucinating an invasion of "anti-woke assholes" all around "his turf".  The indoctrination has not made me an enemy of him, but it certainly has made him an enemy of mine — while I've done absolutely nothing to him.

This is how sick and twisted the woke cult truly is.

As for Pierre specifically, the only one intentionally behaving like what he calls an "asshole", is him.  The Iron Law of Woke Projection — when a woke falsely accuses you of what he visibly does — is validated once again.  And no, the irony isn't missed that this type of person is precisely the kind of individual utterly obsessed with how "online harassment and misinformation are such big problems nowadays" — but, remember, when the wokes do it, then it's for the capital-G Good, so it's okay.

A lesson: you may not care about woke, but woke is very interested in you.

Now let's do our due diligencethe fun part and skewer each sentence of his post.

First, Pierre doesn't know me, so he couldn't know if I am an asshole or not.  Most people who know me can say I am decidedly not an asshole — on the contrary, words often used by others to describe me are "generous", "kind", "thoughtful" and "intelligent".  "But that's just you saying that about yourself, no?"  Well, you'll soon see what others who worked with me have said of me — see below and judge for yourself.

Second.  Am I a conspiracy theorist?  Depends, of course, on what the term means to you.  If it means "being right about pivotal facts months or years before most people", then yes, I'm totally a conspiracy theorist.  I embrace the term and double down on it.  You can ask me what I think about individual "conspiracy theories", and it's a fun conversation to have — lotta kooky stuff out there — but in reality Pierre's accusation is either meaninglessly true (in the frivolous "everyone is a conspiracy theorist" sense) or no more than an uncreative lie intended as an insult.

Now onto the claim that "conspiracy theorists have slowly spreading to LWN".  I'm afraid that's incorrect too — the so-called "conspiracy theorists" were at LWN,  probably long before the invasion of the everything-is-racist NPCs (which really only gained a foothold starting 2012 onwards, as you'll see below).

I've been a member of LWN for many years, and many years a dues-paying member too (first in 2009, with a modest grand total of $803 paid, increasing commensurately with my income level).

I was probably an LWN member before he joined.  So the "slowly infiltrating" sentence — which falsely implies I "snuck up on his turf" after he was there — is almost assuredly another fabrication.

On the topic of my employment at Google, I have to say that I've never spoken about this openly on my blog.  But now I will.  The truth?  I resigned.  I wasn't fired, wasn't forced out, wasn't even put in a "performance improvement plan".  I made a conscious decision, and all the loved ones around me supported me when I told them my reasons.  And now you can read about them too.

I think this information puts to rest both the lie that I was fired, and the lie that I'm an asshole.  That is, unless Pierre's underlying claim is that I am an asshole in secret — 100% indistinguishable from a nice person in theory and in practice, but piloted by some sort of dark, evil, invisible passenger that only he knows about, because he somehow has superior methods of gnostic access to knowledge.   Judging from his psychic power level, I'd advise Pierre to stick to InfoSec, as a career switch to paranormal investigations would be catastrophic for him.

Let's move on to the racist and sexist nonsense.

I'm going to explain a key fact of woke culture, by first sharing a bit of background about me.  I must warn you — what you are about to read is not a defense of my character.

I grew up educated in an upper-middle class culture that valued not being racist and not being sexist, where racism and sexism were defined as prejudicial mistreatment of people from other races or the other sex, without exceptions.  These transgressions, of course, I have never been guilty of — because I was properly raised into those values, I stick to them as every decent person should, and I've even written against racism right here.

What you just read is not a defense of my character; a defense of my character is 100% unnecessary about me, and also 100% useless in a woke context.  Here's why.

When a woke-infected individual utters any of these trigger words against you, they do not mean prejudicial mistreatment of people.  That is absolutely and categorically not what these two words mean to them.  To the woke, like Humpty-Dumpty says, "racist" and "sexist" mean whatever the woke want them to mean right now.  Today you repeat a joke casually involving Polish people, and to the woke, that's "racist".  Tomorrow you point out there are statistical differences between the average strength of men and women, that's "sexist"!  And so on, and so forth.  It's strictly a manipulative sleight of word — they trust the audience to feel as if you had e.g. beaten up a woman or maltreated a black person, even though in reality you have done nothing wrong.  And if you try to argue against the accusations, they'll just Kafkatrap you.

When a woke individual hurls the words racist or sexist towards you, he makes you a "racist/sexist" by calling you a racist/sexist — it's little more than a spell or a hex directed at the audience to make them hate you for no justified reason at all.  The only true intent of the message is to paint you as evil so others feel entitled to punish or harm you.  Manipulation, and nothing more.  Of course, this spell has no power when the audience has the neurons to deduce that calling someone a witch doesn't make them a witch.

Facts don't matter when you're accused of any of this nonsense — and that is why fact-based defenses are powerless against the cult.   Fact-based defenses only fall into the frame of the woke — a defense would be tantamount to accepting the credibility of false accusations aimed at manipulating public opinion into virulent and unjustified hate towards me.  I reject the credibility of this hateful bullshit on its face, and so should you because, when you reject it (or, better, agree and amplify), their spell loses its power; you know this is true when you witness how incensed the woke become, if your response to their attacks is to simply ignore, or to mock; their anger when you do this, by the way, has a name: it is the Iron Law of Woke Overreaction.

So, from my own principled standpoint, I'm not a racist or a sexist.  But from Pierre's standpoint, I totally am Putler Incarnate — no justification or facts required.  As a person acting without any justification, he is free to believe that and even write it publicly — as I reserve the right to point out in public that he's not even lying.

To close this skeweringanalysis, let's give Pierre some credit for one thing he said which is right — although not in the way he thinks.  He is right that I'm not "stealthy" at all.  I write publicly and for everyone to enjoy, and I fully stand by what I share here.  I do not hedge or dance around difficult topics with mealy-mouthed words and half truths.  This blog carries the tagline "A shill for truth. Defiant heresy on cultural matters." proudly because I am honest and forthcoming.  Pierre, of course, detests that, which is why he frames this as if it was a vice with the words "not even being stealthy".

I started the post by saying that it was good to have Fuck You Money, and it is — because it lets me actually be an asshole from time to time, to the select few people who rightfully deserve it, without fear of retribution.  And so, today, I will enjoy this privilege as follows:

Fuck you, Pierre
🖕
Go be a loser somewhere else.
You can cope and seethe for all I care.
😂

And much to this dude's chagrin, I will continue to tell the world that there are four lights.  

Footnotes:

¹  I shit you not, I know of at least another woke Google employee that once injured a non-woke one in retaliation for mere words spoken — and Google fired the victim, but that's a story for another post, and you are fully free to pretend it is fictional.  It's not like that stuff doesn't happen routinely!