Corey Dale “Coraline Ada” Ehmke is a software developer. At a 2013 conference, “Ehmke was among a group of people who announced the creation of a community for LGBT technologists called LGBTech. During this announcement, she also came out publicly as transgender.”

Ehmke has become a notorious SJW (“social justice warrior”) and habitually accuses his/“her” critics of “transphobia” and “misogyny.” One of the things that SJWs seek to prohibit as “hate speech,” for example, is the practice of “dead-naming,” i.e., referring to transgender people by their birth names. In many cases, however, this prohibition is intended to enable deception, particularly in terms of concealing possible important information about a person’s past. Convicted sex offenders may use a transgender identity in an attempt to conceal their criminal record.

In the case of Corey/“Coraline” Ehmke, however, perhaps his/“her” involvement in the occult is what he/“she” is trying to hide. Under the pseudonym “Corey Bantik,” Ehmke has spent 20 years promoting himself/”herself“ as a practitioner of “Egyptian Ritual Magick”:

The Reverend Doctor Corey Bantik has been actively pursuing his esoteric studies for almost twenty years. His earliest experiments involved what he called “natural magick”, but his interest soon turned to the study and practice of western esoteric traditions and ceremonial magick. He began the study of Qabala in 1989, investigating traditional Judaic sources as well as the more readily available European interpretations. Rev. Bantik founded and led a small Golden Dawn study group in the mountains of Virginia, and for several years thereafter immersed himself in the works of Aleister Crowley, A. E. Waite, Eliphas Levi and Kenneth Grant.

In the early 1990s, Rev. Bantik became an active member of the small but tight-knit community of online occultists that interacted through the alt.magick Usenet groups and IRC channels like #thelema. This is the community that pioneered such concepts as real-time multi-user virtual ritual spaces and later went on to create Nutmeg, the organization of occultists, mystics, and persons of “alternative spiritualities” organized to explore the community-building potential of the then-new Internet. Rev. Bantik served on the Board of Directors of Nutmeg for several years and helped coordinate the annual gathering of its members from across the world.

The historic association between the satanic Crowley and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn is well-known. The reference by Ehmke/“Bantik” to creating “a small Golden Dawn study group in the mountains of Virginia” evidently refers to Ehmke’s time as a student at Radford University, where he dropped out after his freshman year.

Ehmke is a psychiatric basket case, on medication for “bipolar depression and anxiety.” However, his/“her” mental illness has not prevented Ehmke from trying to tell other people what they are allowed to think:

Ehmke is known for the creation of the “Contributor Covenant,” a list of behavioural rules intended to govern the behaviour of coders working on open source projects. Among the behaviours banned by the covenant are “insulting/derogatory comments,” “public or private harassment,” and “other conduct which could reasonably be considered inappropriate in a professional setting.”

Crucially, contributors to open source projects — who are typically unpaid, freely volunteering their time and skills to improve open source software — are expected to follow the code within open-source communities and everywhere else on the web.

For example, if a coder makes an “insulting/derogatory comment” on Twitter that’s entirely unconnected to their coding work, they are still liable to be kicked out of their open source project if the project is governed by the Contributor Code. It’s a recipe for policing the behaviour of the entire open source community across the whole of the world wide web.

In other words, if you have an opinion that someone else deems “inappropriate” or “derogatory,” you can be banned from a project, even if the subject never comes up in the context of the project. You once said something “inappropriate” on Twitter? Banned!

To understand how this works, consider the so-called “Opalgate” case. Opal is a type of software and one its main developers is Elia Schito, who happens to be a Catholic living in Italy. In June 2015, Schito was talking on Twitter about plans by the Italian government to introduce lessons on “gender” to school students as a young as age 4. When he was criticized about this, Schito said these “gender teachings are purely ideological and detached from reality.” This discussion continued, and Schito said that “not accepting reality is the problem” with transgender ideology.

This caused Ehmke to write a complaint on the open-source site GitHub: “Transphobic maintainer should be removed from project.”

Keep in mind, Ehmke has never contributed anything to the development of this particular software, and Schito had never said anything to or about Ehmke, nor had Schito’s opinion on transgenderism been expressed within the Opal development project. Rather, as a father of two children living in Italy, Schito was complaining about the school curriculum there. Yet for some reason, Ehmke decided to stick his/“her” nose into the Opal development project and demand that Schito be “removed”!

This 2015 episode made Ehmke notorious among coders, but astonishingly, GitHub hired Ehmke a year later as senior engineer for their “Community and Safety” project. Guess how that went? Not well. Ehmke was assigned to a team of fellow diversity-quota token hires:

I was impressed by the social justice tone of some of the questions that I was asked in the non-technical interviews, and by the fact that the majority of people that I met with were women. A week later, I had a very generous offer in hand, which I happily accepted. My team was 5 women and one man: two of us trans, three women of color.

One of Ehmke’s ideas was suggesting “the implementation of a survey of GitHub users . . . that would shed light on participation in open source by otherwise uncounted marginalized people”:

One day a notification came to me that a repo for the open source developer survey had been created and that the survey questions were in progress. My director followed up with me to make sure that I was aware of the survey and asked me to review the questions. I worked my way through, and stopped short at one particular question: “What is your gender?” The multiple-choice options were “Male”, “Female”, and “Transgender”. I was very disappointed at this 101 mistake, and sadly opened an issue referencing the question. The body of my issue read:

“‘Transgender’ is not a gender. Transgender people may be male, female, gender queer, non-binary… If you want to know if a survey respondent is transgender, you need to explicitly ask that question.”

I left some other minor feedback on other questions, and resumed my regular work. The next day I got an urgent request for a call with my manager. She told me that the data scientist who had written the survey questions was very upset and had gone to her manager to complain about me. I asked my manager what had happened to upset her and was told that it was the feedback I provided on the gender question. . . . I was forbidden to interact any further with the author of the survey.

Hmmm. Being “forbidden to interact any further” with a co-worker? Keep in mind that, in the seven years prior to being hired at GitHub, Ehmke had worked for six different employers. Not exactly a stable work history, which suggests there is some underlying problem with Ehmke, who nevertheless claimed he/“she” was praised by his/“her” boss for “consistently shipping more code than anyone else on the team.” Then in April 2017, Ehmke got a bad annual performance review:

My overall review was a “Does Not Meet Expectations.” I was shocked and upset. A bad review out of the blue was not something that I had experienced before. I thought I had good rapport with my manager, and that if there was a problem that we would have been addressing it at our weekly meetings. In my mind this was a serious management failure, but there was apparently nothing I could do about it.

The same day that I had this review, I got some devastating personal news. I have bipolar depression and was already in a bad place mentally, so I found myself feeling crushed and hopeless. In an attempt to deal with things I ended up taking a dangerously high dose of my anti-anxiety medication. When I reached out to my therapist for help, she recommended that I go to the emergency room. This was the start of an eight day ordeal involving involuntary commitment to a mental health facility.

Being shipped to the looney bin for eight days of involuntary commitment after a bad performance review didn’t improve Ehmke’s career prospects at GitHub and he/“she” was fired in May 2017.

This high-profile failure has not stopped Ehmke from pursuing his/“her” crusade to impose speech codes on the open-source community. Recently, he/“she” published the “Post-Meritocracy Manifesto,” claiming that the idea of hiring and promoting people on the basis of merit “has consistently shown itself to mainly benefit those with privilege, to the exclusion of underrepresented people in technology”:

It is time that we as an industry abandon the notion that merit is something that can be measured, can be pursued on equal terms by every individual, and can ever be distributed fairly.

The word for this is insane.

While the speed and efficiency with which someone does their job may not be a measurement of their intrinsic value as a human being, this is the only reason they’re getting paid: Do your job, and do it well.

Quantitative measurements of performance are not always possible, but members of an engineering team know who’s pulling their weight on the team, and if somebody on the team is not getting the job done, the manager will lose respect if he doesn’t either (a) work to help improve the failing member’s performance, or (b) fire them. It’s that simple.

Imposing quotas on hiring to make “diversity” and “inclusion” more important than merit will predictably produce problems in the workplace. If one of your token hires can’t get the job done, what happens? Well, the former senior engineer Coraline Ada Ehmke couldn’t cope, and had a nervous breakdown, and got fired — then went out and publicly trashed his/“her” former employer. Which is typical, really.

Isn’t it apparent why imposing speech codes and imposing hiring quotas are related phenomena? The former is part of enforcing the latter, by protecting the beneficiaries of “inclusion” from criticism. If your company hires transgender people as part of a “diversity” initiative, and one of these quota hires isn’t productive, you’re likely to be accused of transphobia if you criticize them. Similarly, if a man doesn’t get along with a female co-worker, his complaints about her may be considered proof that he is a “sexist.” And speech codes have the effect of prohibiting any critical discussion of “diversity” policies, as such. James Damore was fired from Google and denounced as a misogynist for trying to explain the problems caused by Google’s “diversity” regime.

Remember what Elia Schito said about transgenderism? If “not accepting reality is the problem,” does it make sense to impose workplace rules designed to protect the feelings of delusional people?

It is painful to watch Coraline Ada Ehmke explain his/“her” delusion:

“I was male assigned at birth, but gender identity is not a physical thing. I knew from the outset that I was supposed to be a girl. I was socialized to conform to male gender norms, but I was really bad at it. There’s a constant tug-of-war between my body and my brain. My internal picture of who I was did not match my external appearance. . . . This is something that I would later come to know as dysphoria.”

This is a script, a rote recitation of a cult belief system.

The online transgender cult promotes “dysphoria” as the universal explanation for personal unhappiness of people like Corey/“Coraline” Ehmke, who are “really bad” at the performance of normal human social behavior. When Ehmke says he was “socialized to conform to male gender norms,” what does this even mean? It is true, of course, that the behavioral patterns called “gender” are to a great extent a matter of performance, and that some people find this more difficult than others. For example, athletic prowess is highly valued in males, and one suspects that young Corey Ehmke did not excel at baseball or basketball.

However, people who are incapable of achieving an ideal — e.g., the “Alpha male” as championship athlete — are usually able to console themselves by compensatory success in other areas of life. How much of human achievement can be attributed to the pursuit of such compensatory rewards? Ancient Greece celebrated athletic ability and military prowess, but not every man was naturally suited for such feats, and so they instead achieved fame as philosophers, poets, sculptors, etc.

Alas, despite our reliance on technology, our society does not heap praise upon the average computer geek. The nerds who have a natural aptitude for code are seldom athletic champions or beauty pageant winners. One of the most popular TV comedies of recent years, The Big Bang Theory, is premised on making fun of the stereotypical traits of scientific geniuses who are, to put it mildly, not exactly Alpha males. What gives rise to transgenderism, in many cases, is the false belief that those who, like Ehmke, are “really bad” at the performative aspects of “gender” can best achieve happiness by attempting to perform the opposite gender. And the online transgender cult encourages this delusion:

Critics of the transgender movement have described a phenomenon they call “rapid onset gender dysphoria,” in which young people develop a sudden belief that they were “born in the wrong body” and insist on seeking gender “transition” following a few weeks or months of intense immersion in the online transgender community. A remarkable increase in the number of adolescents calling themselves “non-binary” or “genderqueer” — labels unheard of a few years ago, but popularized via websites like Tumblr — further demonstrates how online communities are influencing the sexual attitudes and behaviors of young people.

Feminists and other critics accuse transgender activists of using online communities to promote a “cult” mentality among teenagers.

One of the scripts frequently heard from transgender activists is that the only alternative to “transition” is suicide, and it is therefore not surprising that Corey/“Coraline” opened his/“her” 30-minute lecture on transgenderism with an anecdote about his/“her” suicidal feelings:

“In October of 2012, I stood on a train platform . . . the wind of an oncoming train went through my trench coat. There were too things I wanted more than anything else in the world — a cigarette, and to step in front of the oncoming train. I literally had to grab hold of one of those pillars to keep myself from throwing myself down on the tracks to my death. . . . What had brought me to that place was the overwhelming sensation that something was terribly wrong with me. I was trying and failing to come to terms with being transgender.”

Ehmke delivers this startling confession in a bland monotone voice — it’s really disturbing to watch the way he/“she” says this on video — and it is not the least bit surprising to learn that, when he/“she” got a negative work review five years later, a suicidal crisis was the result. What happens when someone becomes convinced that “transition” is the solution to their unhappiness, and then discovers it doesn’t solve anything?

This is where Ehmke’s decades-long involvement in the occult is relevant. Creating a fictional online persona as the Reverend Doctor Corey Bantik, and presenting himself as an expert in “Egyptian Ritual Magick” could be seen as Ehmke’s effort to obtain social power, a high status that the college dropout did not enjoy in real life. Being “an active member of the small but tight-knit community of online occultists” in Usenet groups like alt.magick offered compensatory rewards for Ehmke’s low social status in real life. “The Reverend Doctor Corey Bantik” could presume to lecture the credulous believers in “magick,” and demand deference to his authority, exercising dominance over others in a way that was not available to him as a young computer geek working an obscure job.

And what is Ehmke’s “Contributor Covenant,” after all, except an instrument to exercise authority over others? Ehmke’s sadistic desire to punish people he/“she” doesn’t like (e.g., the popular Opal developer Elia Schito) is the essence of his/“her” SJW crusade to impose politically correct speech codes on the open-source software community.

A craving for power — to obtain authority over others — is typical of sociopathic personalities, whose frustration at their low-status condition in normal life inspires them with a desire to destroy the existing social order. SJWs denounce society as “unjust” because they are not on top of the social hierarchy. Their resentment of the success, happiness and popularity enjoyed by others is what motivates their pursuit of what they call “social justice,” but which in fact is personal revenge.

Corey Dale “Coraline Ada” Ehmke is a warped personality, afflicted with a spiritual deformity that manifests as psychiatric pathology. It would be a dangerous error to allow this sick individual to dictate policy to others. Eric Raymond has explained why hackers must oppose SJWs:

The SJWs talk ‘diversity’ but like all totalitarians they measure success only by total ideological surrender — repeating their duckspeak, denouncing others for insufficent political correctness, loving Big Brother. . . .

We must cast these would-be totalitarians out — refuse to admit them on any level except by evaluating on pure technical merit whatever code patches they submit. We must refuse to let them judge us, and learn to recognize their thought-stopping jargon and kafkatraps as a clue that there is no point in arguing with them and the only sane course is to disengage. We can’t fix what’s broken about the SJWs; we can, and must, refuse to let them break us.

Selah.







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