Jay Maynard and the perils of selection bias

Other people have done most of the legwork in attempting to refute Jay "Tron Guy" Maynard's singularly odd take on this year's Penguicon (such as Jer Lance), but I decided to go out on a limb and just looked at the list of panels and events with an eye towards seeing if it really was nearly as bent toward politics as he said it was, much less the politics he seems to abhor.

Huge surprise that it wasn't.

If you look at on Penguicon's schedule, it comes off as so screamingly bent towards the mix of hacker/Linux and SF enthusiast programming that you really, really wonder precisely what alternate reality Maynard was attending his Penguicon in. Another major problem is that even if you only look at the "Life" programming category (which is the rock you'd think that political discussions would  be found under), so much of it is oriented towards non-political subject matter that you begin to fear for Maynard's sense of reality testing. This perception isn't exactly helped by the following series of complaints he made (as quoted from File 770):

Still, I’d promised this year’s con chair that she’d get a fair chance to address my concerns, so I came back one more time. Guess what? More hard-left GoHs — the odious Coraline Ada Ehmke, she of the Contributor Covenant that prohibits project members from being politically incorrect any time, anywhere, in any venue, on pain of expulsion (who had to cancel due to an emergency); Sumana Harihareswara, who I found out the hard way was a hard-core feminist as well; and Cory Doctorow, well-known left-wing author — more politically correct panels, 15 of them on such topics as “Queering Your Fiction” and “Let’s Get the Taste of 2016 Out of Our Mouths” and “Exploring Themes in Zen Cho’s Work” (with “Intersectionality, diaspora and immigration, the culture of British education, and queer relationships also appear in Cho’s stories over and over” in the description). When I was asked to submit lists of panel topics, I was instructed not to be controversial, but it seems the Left has no such admonition.

Uh huh. The problem with all of that, however, is this:

Ehmke is an Open Source developer, and this is a con heavily devoted to that subject regardless of her political leanings. The same applies to Harihareswara. Doctorow is a...oh, c'mon. And as to those "politically correct" panels Maynard is bitching about, one of them - wait for it - is entitled in full Whiskey Tasting 2017 - Let's Get the Taste of 2016 Out of Our Mouths!, hosted by that raving Trotskyist (and former Capricon con chair) Greg "Guido" Williams.

As to the rest of those panels, no one pointed a gun at Maynard's head and demanded he attend them. Or Penguicon. Granted, he could have gone to the likes of Basic Design of 3D Printed Firearms  as a corrective instead, but...well, that would have led to severe cognitive dissonance issues - or merely the disproof of Maynard's screed.

And you can't actually have facts trespassing on the sacred fantasy-based territory of a good screed, can you?

Of course not.