On LLVM leavers

I was reading the llvm-dev mailing list entries from a few months back where one contributor finally left due to disagreement with the newly chosen COC. Not an uncommon occurance in modern open-source development. A few posts later, I found a reply that had said, amongst other things, this:

The community change I cannot take is how the social injustice movement has permeated it. When I joined llvm no one asked or cared about my religion or political view. We all seemed committed to just writing a good compiler framework.

You'll see that this is not an LLVM trend, but a world wide trend and that's not a bad thing.

It is, and I wholeheartedly agree, an exaggerated and poisonous trend, but it's a response to an even more poisonous history and one that needed a change.

History is not stable, nor it's a steady progression. History happens in hiccups, step-function-like sudden increases in pressure, which are then followed by attenuated periodic function. This is one of them.

More importantly, history tramples on people *every* time. Just different events trample on different people. There's no way to avoid this."

I found the last part of this reply most illuminating as to the poster's mindset. 'History tramples on people every time [...] there's no way to avoid this'.

It seems he thinks that it's worth committing evil today in the name of undoing the evils of the past- or at least, it's worth sitting by and letting it happen. You just have to be as sophisticated as this guy is to get it.

I can't abide by it. I understand the impulse to be kind. But I can't imagine debasing myself like this for the sake of an "exaggerated and poisonous trend", just because the stated intended outcomes are, in principle, positive. I'd be less unsettled if I thought he were being disingenuous.