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No more Mr. Nice Guy

So far I’ve dealt with this topic calmly. But you creeps have made it personal.

I should explain whom I’m addressing. Just as an author may have an ideal reader, I have something similar here. “You” are some kind of undifferentiable progressive (this means far-leftist) working in the technology industry. You might describe yourself as a liberal (in the U.S., a Democrat). You aren’t.

Further, you are almost certainly White, and almost certainly erupt with performative anger at the single capital letter in that word. As a progressive, you are in the grips of a substitute religion, which functions – further – as a lie you tell yourself to justify your actions.

Further still, you as a class are the most vicious, disloyal, vituperative, grudge-cherishing miscreants I have ever had the misfortune to know. Quite apart from improving disabled people’s lives, you make everyone’s lives miserable, starting with your own and certainly including mine.

Accessibility is about accessibility

Q.E.D. It isn’t about diversity, nor is it a subset or variant of diversity.

The last to learn this lesson will be Jeffrey Zeldman’s A List Apart, for whom I used to write. (My article “To Hell with WCAG 2” single-handedly forced the Web Accessibility Initiative to fix the then-fatal errors in its Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.) Zeldman has run not one but two articles – written by females, obviously – lecturing us about how intersectional accessibility is, and how we owe it to some unspecified external cohort to include accessibility in our diversity efforts.

Accessibility has nothing to do with the political pogrom cloaked in the lovable buzzword “diversity.” Zeldman’s writers’ articles were nothing but propaganda.

When presented with a pitch for an article along the lines of the one you are reading here, this former friend and mensch, whose home he was once thrilled to have me visit, turned me down.

I did tell you progressivism was a substitute religion. It is. Heretics are to be ostracized, and ideally destroyed.

Progressives ruin everything, accessibility included

I shall quote Michael Malice well more than once here. The Soviet-American rat bastard is author of a number of books, most relevantly The New Right, in which Malice defines progressivism as a thinly-veiled fundamentalist religion based on egalitarian principles dedicated to world domination via globalist hegemony. That describes Silicon Valley, and probably you. (You won’t read his book.)

Progressives rule the technology industry. They think they’re neutral, but they’re the biggest bullies on the planet. They’re too weak to lace up a boxing glove. Instead, they just mob you online and try to ruin your life. Quite often they succeed.

Right-wing assholes like to say that “diversity” just means anti-White. It does. It also means anti-male and anti-gay (anti-lesbian even more so). But, overall, diversity manifests itself as self-hating, well-educated Whites agitating for “Black bodies.” In the U.S. technology industry, diversity specifically means:

• We will pretend we have not packed the house with foreign nationals (typically Indians and Chinese) labouring, in a form of indentured servitude, under H1‑B and similar visas.

• We’ll also pretend our labour force is not “diverse” even though it demonstrably contains Indians and Chinese, among other racial groups. “Diverse” just means “not enough blacks” (also “too many Whites”). We won’t accept that there really aren’t that many qualified blacks in the first place (or even that many blacks at all resident in many countries where we operate).

• We’ve spent a generation trying to attract females and non-Whites to the technology business. We pretend that those groups are making the wrong choices when they decide to work somewhere else. Progressives need more females and more blacks to make the correct choice to come work with them (then also agree with their White betters on everything).

• Our Fortune 500 employers throw millions of dollars at a problem that can’t be solved (because its ostensible beneficiaries have chosen to do other things with their lives, like becoming the next Thomas Sowell).

• We will pretend that the technology industry has not spent decades actively and illegally discriminating against older workers and applicants (typically White and Jewish males). We will act as though repeated settlements on that issue never occurred.

  We will pretend that other forms of employment discrimination are rampant when in fact older workers are the only persons discriminated against.

• We will destroy you if you point out any of the above, or depart from orthodoxy in any way, shape, or form. Now that we have street teams looting, setting fires, vandalizing, blowing up buildings, and murdering on our behalf, such street teams now actually funded by our multinational employers, when we say “destroy you” we really mean it.

No part of this has anything to do with improving accessibility for persons with disabilities, including disabled “Black bodies.” If you think digital accessibility really needs to step up its game in honouring Black History Month, you’re a missionary, not a developer.

Taken to its logical conclusion:

• Everyone who isn’t black in the accessibility business needs to be fired and replaced with “Black bodies.” We’ll start with the Whites, but curiously we’ll also stop there, because we will not even acknowledge the Indics and East Asians in our cohorts.

• We won’t ship any feature or solve any problem that benefits White disabled people more than others.

Taken beyond even those extremes, paratransit operators won’t give you a ride if you aren’t black (or if you disagree with progressive orthodoxy). Sign-language interpreters and deaf-blind intervenors won’t translate for you, either, under the same conditions. We won’t make the works of non-black or heretical authors and writers accessible, as via DAISY talking books.

And, in the last step, we’ll agitate to have your government disability benefits terminated because you’re racist. (Being racist is the absolute worst thing in the world, except inasmuch as any usage of the word nigger, even by citing it as done just now, is immeasurably worse. Handily, the latter is proof of the former, though we don’t need proof; you’re racist if we say you are, while we remain pristine.)

“You have every right to your feelings”

Accessibility conferences are where the power layback chair’s rubber tires hit the road in the exercise of the misguided substitute religion that is progressivism.

A few so-called codes of conduct from accessibility conferences:

1. “We are committed to inclusivity in our events and providing a welcoming environment to all, regardless of race, colour, national origin or ancestry, creed or religion, sex or gender identity, sexual orientation, marital status, disability, or age.”

2. “We do not tolerate harassment in any form. Harassment includes: the use or enabling of discriminatory language and imagery targeted at gender, gender identity and expression, disability, age, sexual orientation, physical appearance, body size, race, ethnicity, religion, or technology choices; displaying sexual images in public spaces; deliberate or implied intimidation, stalking, following, harassing photography or recording; sustained disruption of talks or other activities; inappropriate physical contact, and unwelcome sexual attention.”

Actually, only one of those codes of conduct was in force at an accessibility conference. The other one came from a furcon. When your accessibility conference is indistinguishable from a one that’s overrun by furfags, you’ve got a problem.

I speak from unassailable moral authority

Unlike Zeldman’s girl writers, I do have the right to sit here and lecture.

• I go back 40 years in accessibility and you don’t. I have a greater record of accomplishment than you.

• I know what neutrality is because half my work has neutrality as a prerequisite. I am an actual sociolinguist and a strict descriptivist. While I am able to guess a person’s nationality, tribe, and language correctly four times out of five, I never assume anything. I chat with and interview persons unlike me. I need to know everything I can about the groups from which they derive, and how they diverge from same, in order to treat them as individuals.

• Apart from having had black boyfriends over the centuries (you have never touched a “Black body”), I have personally known the only gay black fluid mechanist, gay black type designer, and blue-eyed gay black Micmac cartographer. That right there is a greater number of high-achieving blacks than are remotely willing to work as your pets – as affirmative-action diversity hires – in the accessibility business.

• I wrote linguistics papers on sign language. I know interpreters. On the topic of captioning, I am the last independent expert standing. I did peripheral work (really not very much) on relay services. The common theme there is simple: We render what people say. We do not pass judgement.

• I bill myself as a severe technical editor, and I am. But I spent more than a year submitting copy-edits to the leading antifa blog in Canada, because even Marxists who are out to destroy you need to present good type and copy.

• Moreover, as I will detail separately, I have been the subject of a years-long pattern of ostracism and blacklisting, quite often expressed to my face. You’ve all acted like that is the least I deserve, and I have never, even once, heard a single syllable of support from any of you.

  To again paraphrase Malice: It is the role of the evangelical progressive in the technology industry to tell me that any of my suffering is not really happening; is largely my fault; and is good, necessary and unavoidable.

• While you’re lying to yourself that an office packed to the walls with “Black bodies” would be just fine with you (they’d rat you out to the “Black body” in human resources the minute you used the wrong case on “Black”), my direct lived experience is that you evangelical progressives cannot even tolerate being in the same room as me. Not only would I work with you and your kind, I have.

• I’ve been out of the closet for 30 years. I am a pro-life vegan and I’ve got more principles than you have red blood cells.

I am better than you, and I am in a position to judge.

Have you helped a disabled person today?

Or did you spend your time festooning the Internet with accusations that somebody other than you is racist?

Will you refuse to take the Neutrality Pledge because I came up with it?

Have you considered the possibility that you are one of the bad guys?

When are you going to get out of the accusations-of-racism business, the hating-your-White-self business, the ostracizing-heretics business, or the snitching business and get back to the digital fucking accessibility business?

That could be today. Choose wisely.