I'm not a cis white male and I'm not internalizing oppression
but obviously (to almost everyone) these are unfalsifiable standards that self-proclaimed far left extremists have created to invalidate everyone's thoughts but their own
if anyone hasn't been exposed to this experience, the people that want corporations to "use their platform" for things unrelated to revenue are also believing that all aspects of life are political for people that aren't "cis white males" and if you're any combination of minority/woman/LGBT and disagree with that then you're "internalizing oppression" because to them we can't have independent thoughts. For me, these "allies" are worse than the silent apathetic people as well as the overtly prejudiced/racist people. Primarily because they're unpredictable and even more reactionary to having their world view challenged.
> I'm not a cis white male and I'm not internalizing oppression
The “internalizing oppression” thing is such a disgusting accusation. It’s just a way for the activists to trade on the moral authority of pretending to speak for their group, even when they don’t represent the views of their identity group: https://www.slowboring.com/p/yang-gang
So why don't people in those groups speak out against it?
When Reddit hired an admin with repeated links to child molestation, moderators of trans communities like r/LGBT staunchly took the position of the admin and called anyone speaking out against it transphobic. (The admin is trans).
It kinda feels like law enforcement. The good apples aren't speaking out about the bad apples. If you see activists using your group to advance an agenda you disagree with, eject them. Don't just let them do their things.
Tons of people DO speak out against it. I'm gay and I never read r/LGBT because it's such a shit-show of radical conformity. r/ainbow was started basically as a revolt against r/LGBT mods, and there are other places like r/gaybros and r/gaymers.
r/LGBT basically got taken over by shitty mods, all they really have going for them at this point is their easily searchable name.
Same here. I was in SF and was "outed" as a centrist. I was labelled a Nazi a few times on Twitter - by people I knew, in real life, within proximity to my friends circle.
I ultimately had to move out of SF as I felt incredibly out of place simply for not being far left. I'm no conservative, and I've seen plenty of hate for being gay from the right. But the last 5 or so years, much of that hate is coming from the far left now.
You see exactly the same thing in ecology/environmental circles.
If you're concerned about climate change and resource constraints but you don't see a problem with migrating or bringing seven billion people up to American consumption and carbon emission standards, I don't know what to tell you.
Neoliberalism has infected every progressive movement and it's disgusting.
Its not that easy to get rid of sticky activists. And it is also not easy to explain "You are not representing my views" without being attacked as either stupid or uninformed. I totally understand that after a few of those experiences, reasonable people just stop to voice their opinions, because the dirt fight is usually not worth it.
I am a member of a minority group (disabled), and I see it very often that activists pull "me" into other activism simply because they are also catering for a minority group. I am expected to support them all, just because I am disabled. This is so weird and patronizing, it killed my remaining sympathy for the left in the last 5 years. I used to vote for the left. Watching the fallout of political activism has made me a non-voter.
This, and the "If you're not with us, you're against us" attitude both disgust me. And I've yet to meet someone like that that didn't cherry pick some "other" group to vilify, making them hypocrites.
But I do wish you'd vote. Please look beyond the left/right politics and vote for someone who you think will do the most good. That said, I fully understand if every single candidate looks like they'll do more harm than good, and you just can't bring yourself to support any of them.
The problem is that candidates are becoming more extreme to cater to the more extreme parts of the electorate. That doesn't really moderates a real choice when deciding on whom to vote for.
I was with you until you made it political. I'm a member of a minority group and I'm fed up with wokeness.
People like John McWhorter have described wokeness as a religion. That's a characterization that I agree with, and a religion isn't countered by being a Democrat, Republican, Independent or apolitical.
I found the walk-away movement appealing when it first started. I agreed with the criticisms of the left. But the movement turned into switching uniforms ... walk across the field from the Dem side to the GOP side. It was more political than helpful.
One of McWhorter's suggestions is that more of us need to tell the people in the religion, "no."
I mean, every survey we do on these things indicates that like 80% of any given minority group doesn’t tie the progressive line on whatever issue (e.g., “abolishing the police”). I’m not sure what more needs to be done to “speak out”. It’s not like each race has a president that can speak on their behalf (although I probably shouldn’t give the woke folks any ideas).
Do they tie the progressive line on "Make the police accountable and maybe not spend mountains of money on buying them tanks tanks and maybe not let them literally get away with murder?"
Or is that not a 'progressive' line? (In which case, why the hell haven't we gotten it yet?)
I think the likely explanation for this conundrum is that people don't support <whatever strawman of the week is used to attack a caricature of a position>.
> Do they tie the progressive line on "Make the police accountable and maybe not spend mountains of money on buying them tanks tanks and maybe not let them literally get away with murder?"
If you’re asking “do black Americans want police reform”, then probably yes considering 90+% of all Americans favor police reform of some kind. So to answer your other question:
> Or is that not a 'progressive' line? (In which case, why the hell haven't we gotten it yet?)
Not uniquely, no. Why we haven’t gotten it yet: probably because our politics are broken by intense partisanship among other things. Frankly this isn’t a corporate issue (beyond some shallow virtue signaling), so it just doesn’t become a legislative priority.
> I think the likely explanation for this conundrum is that people don't support <whatever strawman of the week is used to attack a caricature of a position>.
This is a well-documented dodge. Leftists have been very clear that they want the police abolished. The media tried to make that message more palatable in advance of the recent presidential election by suggesting it was a euphemism for moderate police reform, and leftist activists clarified that they literally want to abolish the police. This is very explicitly not a caricature.
> Leftists have been very clear that they want the police abolished.
Citation _very much_ needed.
In my experience this is not a position of the left, beyond maybe some fringe <0.1% groups.
Stating that as a "position of the left" as a fact merely reinforces what the GP said: "I think the likely explanation for this conundrum is that people don't support <whatever strawman of the week is used to attack a caricature of a position>. "
This is the whole point we're arguing about up front. That activists have a oversized influence on what we discuss.
Less than half of black people support defunding or reducing the police presence but that conversation has smothered all discussions of more realistic and popular reform.
"Leftists have been very clear that they want the police abolished. "
No, most aren't crazy enough to think that abolishing the police is better than what we have.
Instead, they ask to "defund" the police, and then redefine "defund" to mean that many of their daily services should be given to others more qualified for peaceful resolutions, without carrying weapons, and police should be available for backup of those situations.
I personally remain unconvinced, and I think we'd see a lot of the people doing those services injured because they went into dangerous situations without adequate protection. But I can't deny that the police have shown a lot of poor judgement over the years, so something needs to change.
I think the best reforms are make police officers pay for their own insurance, break up the union, and pay officers more to compensate for the reduced job security.
“Instead, they ask to "defund" the police, and then redefine "defund" to mean that many of their daily services should be given to others more qualified for peaceful resolutions, without carrying weapons, and police should be available for backup of those situations.”
I’m so tired of these rhetorical games. It’s dishonest and we need to stop accepting it as a legitimate form of discourse. No respect for people and politicians who do this.
>Leftists have been very clear that they want the police abolished.
Lazy rhetoric will always let one down in a big way. At the very least, as one is making broad, sweeping generalisations, one will totally miss what the real issues are, and the real problems.
>whatever strawman of the week is used to attack a caricature of a position
Is it really a strawman when a non-negligible number of people in your political camp espouse a position without so much as a hint of irony or exaggeration? Denying the existence of the radicals won't win you any credibility with fence sitters and moderates.
Progressive activists get more air time than they have political power. It’s like how, if you watched the mainstream media before Super Tuesday, you would have thought Elizabeth Warren was a front runner for the nomination.
But, like with the democratic primaries, voting tends to collapse the bubble. Concrete example of this. Progressive Asian organizations attacked Andrew Yang for his normal Democrat take on the police: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/activists-andrew-yan.... But of course Yang is the overwhelming front runner among actual Asian voters in NYC.
> Less than a week after Heritage of Pride (HOP), or NYC Pride, announced a ban on police contingents through 2025, the organization’s members voted on May 20 to allow the Gay Officers Action League (GOAL) to march armed and in uniform — but HOP’s executive board subsequently stepped in and set their own policy.
Progressive activists really do believe the things they say. Usually they don’t get their way because it’s a democracy and actual voters don’t support those things.
As to “straw men”—I was rankled last year when my law school faculty declared themselves “gatekeepers of white supremacy” in a school townhall meeting: https://jonathanturley.org/2021/05/27/brandeis-dean-declares.... People told me, “well most liberals don’t think like that.” I suspect that’s true, your average Biden voter doesn’t. But there’s 14-15 elite law schools in the country, and the faculty of at least one of them does think like that.
This activist mindset isn’t widespread, but it’s often concentrated among people who have significant platforms. A lot of faculty, young political staffers, etc., do think like that. It’s not straw-manning to call out that behavior.
This is very true and I think people forget that they have the support of almost all mainstream media. This gives the very false impression that they (and their ideologies) represent the majority of the public - but in reality, this is far from true.
Look at ratings for national sports (MLB, NBA especially) lately. This year's Oscars had the worst rating in history.
Coca-Cola's sales plummeted after their "woke" employee training was exposed. Same for Disney. Same for Delta. Parents around the country are descending on their local school boards demanding that Critical Race Theory be abolished.
On the opposite end, when the left tried to "cancel" Goya for supporting Trump, it backfired. Sales went through the roof.
These people are a tiny minority of the population made to seem much bigger and more accepted than they really are by media, politicians and (most unfortunately) Universities - which have become Socialist re-education camps.
Your average Biden voter is either not a leftist or probably voted against Trump. I was with you until that point, because what you're pointing out is that the US is intensely conservative on a national scale, especially compared to Europe. Biden would be center right, at best, in Europe.
Biden would be solidly left on social, cultural, and immigration issues in Europe. E.g. Democrats are freaking out the Supreme Court might uphold Mississippi’s ban on abortions after 15 weeks (with exceptions for health and fetal abnormalities). But that’s a couple of weeks longer than Germany, France, Denmark, etc. Likewise, France and Germany openly reject multiculturalism, which would be a far right position here in the US. France’s center-left Macron sounds like a U.S. Republican when he complains about “woke American culture.” https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/09/world/europe/france-threa...
Biden is probably median in terms of economic issues. You have to distinguish between what Biden says he wants and where the U.S. is currently. The US is obviously significantly to the right of Europe on economic issues as a starting point. But Biden’s proposal for a 28% tax rate (closer to 35% factoring in state taxes), or his proposals for major hikes in the capital gains rate, are well to the left of where Western Europe is right now.
Thanks for clarifying this, I have often been suspicious of the claim that Democrats in America would be considered center right in Europe, and you list concrete examples of left-leaning political stances in Europe that would be far right in America.
3% of US Latino adults use the term "Latinx". 20% do not use it, and 76% have never heard of it. Anecdotally, in Latin American countries, most people either mock it or have never heard of it.
But this doesn't stop anglophone woke activists from trying to impose this word on Latinos.
Though I'm an American, I speak a little German and have friends who speak Spanish/French/Italian (either natively as they were born in a country that speaks those languages or they learned it). The thing that has always perplexed me about "Latinx" is that the those pushing that formulation are grafting what is a Germanic language construction onto a Latin-based word. It makes no sense, and it's non-pronounceable (or at least difficult to pronounce) in Romance languages.
As a native speaker of American English, I find Latinx to be either unpronounceable or lacking in an obviously correct pronunciation. Is it La-tinks? Or Latin-exks? The natural English construction of an adjective derived from “latin” that lacks gender would he just “latin”, not “latinx”, as English doesn’t have gendered adjectives in the first place.
(I don’t really understand how “Latina/Latino” came to be used for this purpose to begin with.)
I think it's just more political correctness gone wild. The vast majority of Spanish speakers in America are from Mexico but it somehow became derogatory to refer to them as "Mexican". How is that any different than calling somebody a Puerto Rican or a Brazilian? It simply denotes their place of origin.
>The thing that has always perplexed me about "Latinx" is that the those pushing that formulation are grafting what is a Germanic language construction onto a Latin-based word.
To be fair, English is extremely accustomed to etymological chimeras. A large portion of it is made of Old French, Latin and to a lesser degree Greek stems with English and Norse affixes/suffixes. Which is a perfectly valid way to import words while preserving the overarching grammar.
The problem with Latinx specifically is that it's closer to a regular expression than English.
Latinx came from LGBT Hispanic people. Probably it was influenced by spellings like folx and womxn.
Latine seems to be more popular outside North America. So Latinx is an English word mostly. And I think it became popular in writing before anyone much thought about pronunciation. A bit like Latin@.
I have a very hard time believing that this was invented by people who speak a Romance language as their first language. Do you have a source?
>Probably it was influenced by spellings like folx and womxn.
Which is ... also a Germanic construction. Those words are not pronounceable in Spanish, Italian, or French. Is the idea that you just "imagine" that the word is spelled correctly when you pronounce it and this is just a thing you do when writing it?
I would claim "womxn" is not pronounceable in many other languages as well. My native language is German and whenever I see this I can't help but wonder how anyone would voluntarily agree with such an unelegant abuse of a word.
I'm not a language elitist or anything, but it's not a secret that language evolves towards easier and quicker pronunciation. And enforcing the opposite for ideological reasons is not just a bad idea, it's also doomed to fail.
>I'm not a language elitist or anything, but it's not a secret that language evolves towards easier and quicker pronunciation.
What I find pretty funny about this whole discussion is that German is a language that seems very tuned to allow for additions of language. Meaning, if you want to "invent" a new word, the German language has a lot of tools to allow you to do that. Which probably explains the root cause here for why "Latinx" exists at all.
...which is probably a big reason why it doesn't gain traction. It doesn't make sense as a word in any language. It feels like a foreign object pushed into the language by someone who is obviously out of touch. One could easily come up with something that at least reads and sounds like a word: Latinoa, Latinem, Latines...
Another big reason is that it doesn't solve a problem that most people have. If you look at Urban Dictionary, you see that many "up-and-coming" word creations are solving actual semantic problems, gaining traction organically, from the bottom-up. This is how language changes naturally.
On the other hand, the hypothesis that "generic masculine" forms are harmful is borne out of academia. It is entirely speculative and for practical purposes, unfalsifiable. Most people have to be told that the "moral" position is to comply with such language changes "from the top", for some perceived "greater good". Appropriately, have a word for this: newspeak.
I’m still skeptical it came from Hispanic people at all and not some handful of rich white sophomores at a private university, but it doesn’t actually matter because it is used far more frequently by wealthy whites than by any of the victim groups they purport to protect.
I honestly can't tell if you're trolling. "La-tinks" is just as much of an anglo-ization as pronouncing it like "Kleenex". There aren't a lot of cases in Spanish where three consonants are mashed together. Especially not ending with an "s" sound.
In fact, Spanish syllables only end in up to two consonant sounds (nearly always "ns" or "ks"), unlike English which can end in up to four consonant sounds (e.g. "texts").
Texts might end in four consonants in some underlying representation, but does anyone actually pronounce it that way? I think I reduce it to “Tex” unless I make a conscious effort to enunciate.
> I have a very hard time believing that this was invented by people who speak a Romance language as their first language.
Children of Hispanic immigrants often feel more comfortable with English than Spanish yet many will still identify as “Hispanic”. So the word is more understandable if you see it as a product of a predominantly Anglophone Hispanic subculture
I thought about that, but the claim was that it came from that community, which is still hard to believe when it's a language construction that is really only common in elite white circles, evidenced by the polling data cited up-thread.
All of these meaningless labels were given to us by the so-called "elites" to keep us distracted... that same distraction is what allows of the continued manufacturing of consent.
But who are "US Latino adults" to begin with? This kind of statistic is based on an egregious confusion between ethnicity and citizenship, familiarity with languages, "communities" and subcultures. Labeling people (particularly other people) is problematic in itself.
"Latinx" is a sophisticated word from and for sophisticated people (such as the mentioned LGBT activists, who are often ready to adopt neutral replacements of masculine and feminine words); its usage should be considered an indicator of such sophistication (do you find it proper or silly?) and social contexts (who would you call "Latinx"? What would they think of you if you did?), all quite orthogonal to people's identity.
I'm Peruvian and married to a Colombian and have never heard of this. On the other hand, right across the Hispanic world it's very common to use @ for gender neutrality: nosotr@s, latin@s, etc.
> I'm Peruvian and married to a Colombian and have never heard of this.
That’s not surprising, since it’s purely a product of “woke” culture in the USA, and the only people who use it are either multiple generations removed from their “ancestral” country, or have degrees in social sciences from Ivy League universities (or both).
Is this in any way surprising? In Latin countries, everyone is used to gendered nouns as that’s a core feature of the language. In Anglo cultures it is not.
Most Latino people are also less "touchy feely" about these subjects. See for example the brouhaha around South American football players like Edison Cavani using words like "negrito" in affectionate terms.
South and Central America have bigger fish to fry than worrying about prudish neovictorian attitudes.
Latin America isn't North America. There were large populations of agrarian peoples used as a workforce by the Spanish. And these people weren't wiped out in most cases. They mixed with the colonizers to varying degrees and are now those you call Latinos. The reason people from the older Hispano-American colonies often look *nothing* like Spaniards and Portuguese people is simply because they're partially or fully indigenous.
North America remained available so late to colonization because the Spanish saw it as worthless as it didn't fit at all with their latifundial industry, precisely because it lacked the population and the farming that could easily be converted over to estates.
A significant part of North America is also Latin America, and vice-versa.
> There were large populations of agrarian peoples used as a workforce by the Spanish.
Therr were large populations of people virtually (and sometime precisely) enslaved by the Spabish as agrarian workforce; they weren’t always specifically agrarian (any more than any other preindustrial population, including the colonizers) before that.
And, yes, through enslavement and other mistreatment, they, and even moreso their pre-conquest identities and cultures, were often wiped out. Sure, there are some remnants and admixture with the colonizers and other imported subject populations; that’s true of the native subjects of genocide in the parts of North America colonized by the British and French, as well.
Sure, tell me: What does the Spanish/Portuguese conquest of Latin America have to do with the use of "Latinx"?
It doesn't help it, it does it. There are different native ethnicities still living and trying to maintain their culture and then US cultural imperialists go put everyone into one bucket and call it a day.
I remember when I first saw latinx, I thought it meant something about a Latin mixer or Latin cross exchange, or cross pollination. I had no idea it was a regex metacharacter for `a` or `o`, essentially latin[ao].
I was so surprised at this Latinx controversy because I learned it from a Venezuelan refugee (to the US) about 8 years ago. I didn't hear it from some "woke" white person. It's wild that it turned into a big internet controversy.
The statistics suggest your experience is atypical. It’s not that controversial IMO; it’s just a particularly egregious data point on the list of data points that suggest the woke don’t actually represent the groups they purport to speak for (which is the principal rationale behind their bid for social power), contrary to the impression we’re fed by the media. See also the statistics on black support for abolishing police.
The large number of people I know who use that term, though, are [that word you will apparently be annoyed that I use ;P] and not white allies or something. Also: I feel like maybe you are mixing up Latino and Hispanic? Someone can be Latino/a and simultaneously Anglophonic. It doesn't surprise me that people who are Hispanic don't care as much or even find the construction annoying, as it doesn't work well in their language... but why, exactly, does that matter?
Not arguing with the sentiment, but pushing back on using Reddit as an example. The likelihood of the behavior we see on Reddit being attributable to actual humans or humans acting in good faith/not purposely sowing division is rapidly approaching zero. If they aren't a bot, they're a troll, and not the edgy comment kind. Also, Reddit does have verifiable problems with moderation, specifically little/no oversight of mods and a small handful of mods overseeing the vast bulk of subreddits.
Most people, unlike the activists, aren’t that politically involved. My parents are immigrants from a Muslim country, and are annoyed that progressive activists like Ilhan Omar have become “the face of Islam in America.” They tuned in long enough to vote for Biden in the primaries when it seemed like a progressive might win the nomination instead, but they’re not going to go out there and stir things up.
The other problem is that the media narrative is controlled by white progressives who amplify the activists. Nobody invites my dad on CNN to express his view that he’s faced remarkably little racism living in America since 1989, most of that time in a red state. Nobody has my mom on TV defending Trump’s law and order stance and complaining why it took Biden so long to condemn rioting. Instead you have talking heads with degrees in cultural studies subjects that my parents wouldn’t even have allowed their kids to major in. FFS, 40% of men voted for Trump. When was the last time you ever saw one on TV?
It’s been nice to see some normies speaking out about this. Zaid Jilani, who grew up as a Pakistani kid in the south, is one example: https://mobile.twitter.com/zaidjilani. Wesley Yang is great, and Matt Yglesias has been willing to broach the subject as well. Every now and then Fareed Zakaria on CNN chimes in with a take, like during last summer when he noted “hey immigrants actually love America and think it’s pretty good.”
But center-left whites people need to defend their turf. The progressive left tries very hard to act like they’re speaking for all “people of color” and draw moral authority from that. They will amplify and retweet a handful of say Asian activists, and because there are so many more white people that really skews the perception of what Asians actually think and want. I think often times center-left white people are too scared of being labeled conservative to push back on that.
> But center-left whites people need to defend their turf.
As a center-right white person who was abandoned by the Republican party years ago, I wish the center-left good luck with that.
My wife insists that I vote, so in national elections, I vote for a moderate in the primary that has zero chance at winning, and then a third party candidate that has zero chance at winning (my state and congressional district vote over 10pts more Democratic than the national average, so no need for strategic voting).
Pretty much, this comment spawned an entire thread of replies from, most likely, angry white people, complaining about the man who's name was in the title.
Not a single one had anything to say about Britanny King or what she had to say to Bret.
Got that? The video only briefly touches on Britanys interview with Jordan Peterson, and instead of hearing the black woman's ideas on BLM these psychopaths would rather complain about Jordan Peterson, they don't even realise the interview is barely about him.
Presumably because nobody wants to watch a rambling 20 minute video where we incredibly agonizingly slowly get around to proving Jordan Peterson isn't that bad because a person of color supports him.
Here's a radical take he's an annoying talking head who is by turns educated and either uninformed or deceptive about the issues he's trying to spin out of control. What he isn't is worth attending to. The same can be said of this video. The downvotes aren't for wrongthink they are for the vastly more serious crime, on the internet at least, of being boring.
All of his "controversy" I manufactured in hit pieces that misquote and take things out of context to push a narrative that isnt based on objective reality.
We've asked you before to stop posting egregious flamewar comments to HN. Since you've ignored these requests, I've banned the account. Please don't create accounts to break HN's guidelines with—we're trying for something quite different here.
I feel like links to Jordan Peterson videos should be flagged. Watching just one will fill your You Tube recommendations with the worst sorts of hatred and idiocy.
That doesn’t mean the Jordan is wrong. But it does show what the people who like him tend to be in to.
That feels like the least charitable way to interpret what I said. I only want them flagged so that I can open them in Private Browsing. The real problems are that his videos are associated with much hatred and that the platform I need to access his videos on will then associate that hatred with me.
>You are asking why minority groups don't speak against dominantly rich, white and male majority?
No. You've lost the train of conversation being developed in the replies.
To paraphrase gp, he was saying : "So why don't people in those [minority] groups speak out against [others in their minority group with extreme views]?"
Generally these activists are 'second tier' who want to usurp the perceived dominant rich white male. So they're usually rich white but female, rich male but Jewish, white male but unsuccessful, etc, who feel they deserve the easy success the rich white male has. They project those feelings of failure onto the marginalized groups they mean to represent.
The minority groups often have totally different values then the activists ( who share the dominant value system and consider themselves and the minorities they represent the losers of that system ).
I believe this is one Yglesias' best writing. Simply because he has captured so vividly the wide gap between activists and the group that they speak for.
The woke left of today remind me so much of the ultra right-wing religious nut jobs of the ‘80s and ‘90s. Morality extremism always leads to a lack of tolerance, suppression of independent thought, and manners of totalitarian BS being imposed on those who don’t want it. It’s always bad.
People on the side of The People always ended up disappointed, in any case. They found that The People tended not to be grateful or appreciative or forward-thinking or obedient. The People tended to be small-minded and conservative and not very clever and were even distrustful of cleverness. And so the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn’t that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people.
Sounds like a modern version of "false consciousness" which some left wingers were using to explain why some people they thought to be natural allies didn't agree with them.
Heh. I misread that as "false conscientiousness". I've been calling presumptuously speaking for another "white knighting". Your take isn't so generous.
FWIW, I'm optimistic that it's a generational cohort thing. Plenty of boomer activists know what's best for other people and will selflessly nail themselves up on a cross for your benefit. Why aren't you grateful? Sure, others do it too, but it's somehow different. Feels more like oversteer than preaching.
The article says the primary reason people exited is that the memo was seen as shutting down unionization activity.
> these are unfalsifiable standards that self-proclaimed far left extremists have created to invalidate everyone's thoughts but their own
How do statements like this fit HN's guidelines?
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.
Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
EDIT: Perhaps the thing to do is to write to the mods at hn@ycombinator.com.
> However, several current and former employees told TechCrunch that they believe Medium’s mass exodus is tied more to Williams’ manifesto, dubbed “the culture memo,”
A perspective.
You chose one of several from the article.
These are related controversies. The opposite of unrelated.
>> However, several current and former employees told TechCrunch that they believe Medium’s mass exodus is tied more to Williams’ manifesto, dubbed “the culture memo,”
I don't understand what that quote represents to you. Do you think the word "culture" necessarily refers to the 'culture war' kind? The word describes many other things, and corporate culture is a long-standing, well-known management concern.
> A perspective.
> You chose one of several from the article.
The effect on union activity seems to me to be by far the predominant reason presented.
I don’t have an opinion on the word culture, the word they chose
I find it congruent that some former/current employees find that memo to be the catalyst, as their perspective matches other catalysts in other companies
I am a cis straight white male, but I do have colleagues who are gay, lesbian, trans, and/or non-white, and all of those who I've spoken to on this topic do not agree with your take here.
It just goes to show you that everyone is different, and there's no such unified thing as "what gay people believe" or "what black people believe". Some like that their employers make business decisions based on the personal ethics of those in leadership positions, and some don't like that. That's just life, I guess.
That's like using the term "Black Crow" to describe the vast majority of crows, simply because a "Blue Crow" [1] exists, yet consists of a very tiny fraction of all crows.
Let's say 99% of crows are black. Then there's no need to call them "Black Crows" as there's a very low probability you'll need to point out the color of the crow.
Just say "Crow". Or "male" / "female". No need to throw in "cis" unless you're simply trying to demonstrate your conformity to the new fad of wokeism.
In which case, ya lost me as someone who will take you seriously.
Somehow I went all of the aughts and half of the 2010s without noticing
That makes me feel a lot better about the viability of any of this
Can I ignore it if I stop noticing and caring about politics and modern inclusitivity pushes?
I have my doubts but I’m willing to try! Its just other people shoving it in my face that I don't get to inherit American dreams because I’m not a cis white male and keep reminding me, not that I would want to be. Any accomplishment I have must be broadcast! Any setback must be broadcast as well! Doesn't feel like privilege. I dont want to be a role model I just want to blend in and make money and enjoy the same vices as everyone else.
It started even before, I remember most of these discussion being around in the mid nineties.
They're not at all ineffective, they took hold in school and accademia and produced a generation of person deeply sensible to the topic of equity and social issues, which outrage quite easily and can be brought to bear to a wide range of causes from truly important battles to cancelling people for a shirt a friend gifted them.
The delay you see is not because of the technique not being viable, it is because in culture wars you need quite literally to grow your army, as people get entrenched in their ways after a while.
I have to point out that your second source is a conservative think tank, and if you're conservative it generally means that the status quo is in your favor ("you like/are happy with the status quo") and any challenge to it looks like the start of a revolution.
Hoover Institute is about as high quality intellectual conservatism as it gets. They're part of Stanford University. The institute has been around for more than 100 years.
Not my concern really, but if you need to comment that someone else used a conservative website as a source for something and that’s “an issue”... you might need more conservative sources in your own reading.
> Not my concern really, but if you need to comment that someone else used a conservative website as a source for something and that’s “an issue”... you might need more conservative sources in your own reading.
The reason I would raise an issue with most conservative “think tanks” as sources for fact claims is that I read, and have for years read, their output extensively. The same is true with center-right (liberal) and progressive think tanks in general (there arr a very few exceptions in each category.)
If you are using them as fact sources, you might need more outlets that aren’t ideological propaganda mills in your own reading.
Your assertion isn't true, as was explained to me on HN recently. Conservatism in the US has nothing to do with conservation, it's more synonymous with economic liberalism in Europe: small government, low regulation, wealth makes right.
On a personal note, this war on words has turned me off from most debates because hollow sophistry is deemed a virtue by the loudest voices. Excluded middle, and all that.
> small government, low regulation, wealth makes right
How does this explain their stance on issues like gay marriage, trans rights, abortion, and criminal justice? We really have to stop saying that American conservatives are primarily motivated by small government.
>Conservatism in the US has nothing to do with conservation, it's more synonymous with economic liberalism in Europe
This is a very popular cliché, and while the conclusion might hold, the logic doesn't, in my opinion.
If the US did have true conservatives, then they would be conserving what is in the US, not Europe.
And I think it's widely considered that the existing order in the US has more elements of economic liberalism.
On the other hand, the Republicans who like that sort of thing seem increasingly marginalized anyway, so as I said, the conclusion may still be correct.
"Entryism (also spelled entrism or enterism or called infiltration) is a political strategy in which an organisation or state encourages its members or supporters to join another, usually larger, organization in an attempt to expand influence and expand their ideas and program."
This is for every framework (left, right, economical, ecological, etc.)
If the framework gives you direct power over other people, you want the framework applied everywhere: work, private life, politics, etc. The people at the forefront of these frameworks use the rest of the group as a stepping stone to their personal power and the framework to enhance their importance (any other positive and negative effects of the framework aside, those I don't want to judge).
> these "allies" are worse than ... overtly prejudiced/racist people.
I disagree. By my reckoning, there just isn't a comparison, by almost any metric of societal damage. Of course, it doesn't have to be a contest. That's not the important thing.
I concur with the parent comment. A lot of these groups show such a deep religious fervour to their "ideology", that any slight disagreement to them on any topic is not allowed. They will hound you out, suppress your opinion if you don't subscribe to the groupthink.
Twitter is a pain to use because of this behaviour, I wouldn't want the culture in my workplace to be like it.
Not to make a statement on the rest of the thread, but you're using Twitter wrong.
I've never had to deal with shitty people or shitty behaviour on Twitter. How do I do it? The unfollow button. I also don't look at replies to famous or controversial people's tweets.
The problem as I see with Twitter is, if I am following an expert in some field I am interested in, say cryptography. I love their tweets about the subject, papers they share etc. I love their expertise in cryptography but I am not the least bit interested in their political inclinations or social view. When I follow them, I am exposed to all of it though; the only way to escape is to unfollow them but at that point the platform loses value to me.
Also, with the algorithmic field based on likes, even if I am not following someone, someone I follow might like tweets from a new crusade happening and they enter my feed. It seems like there are one or more groups out with their pitchforks on some issue. While I support activism for causes, when the activism is such that it hounds out any divergent viewpoint, it becomes toxic and I would rather not see it.
I agree with GP. The antagonistic "allies" push away neutral people, turning more people against the groups they're supposedly trying to help. Overtly prejudiced people do the opposite, with neutrals seeing them as obviously wrong.
These ostensibly "neutral" people are in fact biased by their lifetime of experience and the way they skew in light of this confrontation is very revealing about exactly how. No one is introduced to the idea of, say, microaggressions, institutionalised racism/misogyny etc. as a neutral bystander. They have a stake in it whether they've acknowledged it already or not. No one is "pushed" away; they choose, informed by their experiences. And if someone is "pushed" towards maintaining a status quo that some of the most marginalised people in the world think is unfair, maybe they should think about why.
> No one is introduced to the idea of, say, microaggressions, institutionalised racism/misogyny etc. as a neutral bystander. They have a stake in it whether they've acknowledged it already or not.
This is part of what I'm talking about, the inability to understand neutral people. It presupposes they already agree with the concept, same as original sin from religion: You need to have already bought in to these concepts before the preaching means anything other than "you're stupid/evil", and the preachers don't understand why the nonbelievers don't like being called stupid/evil.
Overt racists are dangerous like bears. The danger they present is obvious to anybody with sense and they're not pretending to be anything other than dangerous.
The aforementioned "allies" are dangerous like bear-traps. Ostensibly they exist to deal with the bears. But they lay hidden in the brush ready to take off the foot of anybody who missteps, bear or otherwise. And you probably won't notice one is around until somebody steps on it.
>The aforementioned "allies" are dangerous like bear-traps. Ostensibly they exist to deal with the bears. But they lay hidden in the brush ready to take off the foot of anybody who missteps, bear or otherwise. And you probably won't notice one is around until somebody steps on it.
One of the principles of medicine is that the cure should not be worse than the disease.
At some level of activism, the remaining non-overt racists will be less harmful than the obsession to root them out.
Companies already pay a ton of money for sensitivity and diversity trainings that either do not work or even worsen the atmosphere of the workplace. This money could have been used for a better purpose than lining already fat pockets of Robin diAngelo and her peers.
> Funny how you neglected to mention the harm non-overt racist [...]
Funny how you're taking this gripe up with me, not the commenters above mine to whom I am responding. I did not set the scope of this branch of conversation, yet you insinuate I am responsible for it. Buzz off.
HN should be a place of justice and sharpening of ideas. Thank you for participating in that.
Allies and racists both exist on a continuum, do they not? A single individual will take actions that are both helpful and harmful in different measures to other people and groups in society.
Some racists are going to be net benefits to society. Their racist views may be limited, unintentional, unexpressed, or any combination of the above. While their works may be helping minority groups directly.
That's just one example of the presented framework breaking, but there are many more permutations. Hopefully this is enough for us to agree that a blanket statement like
> these "allies" are worse than ... overtly prejudiced/racist people.
is, if not inaccurate, so imprecise as to be meaningless.
The thing is, when the social justice left do things that are actively prejudiced against and intentionally hurt the minority groups they claim to be helping, you just don't hear about it because one of their core beliefs is that they're always helping by definition and they have enough power over the mainstream discussion that it's impossible to challenge.
For example, one of the last things the Labour party, who're the more left-wing of our two main parties, did when they had power here in the UK was write a special exemption in anti-discrimination law to deny trans women access to rape and domestic violence services at the request of a feminist lobbying group. (As in this was literally the stated purpose according to the official guidance accompanying the law when it was proposed.) Any discussion of how this happened or the lobbying group behind it was explicitly forbidden in the left-wing and feminist publications and communities with any reach. The press only turned on the Labour-linked lobbying group in late 2019, over a decade after the original law, when they started lobbying the Conservatives over the same anti-trans cause. The discussion of this has been so warped that the established social justice left view on the whole thing is that it shows transphobia is a right-wing thing and proves any attempt to equate the left with them (not just over transphobia, but any attempt to claim they're comparably bad in general) is a dangerous false equivalence.
Maybe, but you’d have to back that up with at least an anecdote. I agree with OP and the fact that most racists are extremely poor and rural with no power makes them a downward punch for most people.
>most racists are extremely poor and rural with no power
[[Citation Needed]]
The rural poor have plenty of power on both a federal level (each California House representative is responsible for 65 times as many people as each North Dakota representative; numbers are similar for Wyoming, Montana, and plenty of other rural areas) and state levels (thanks to the magic of gerrymandering.
There are all sorts of racist rich people. I grew up in a well off suburb in Michigan that was significantly more than 90% white (though adjacent to a more diverse larger city) and full of overt racism, to say nothing of the more subtle forms.
You gotta come visit rural Appalachia and see if you still think they have any power.
We have turned our poorest, most vulnerable populations into the enemy. We did it in the 80s/90s with young black men, then in the 2000s with Muslims and we’re doing it again but this time it’s “racists”. Because we have to have an enemy.
This is not a defense of racism, but it is a defense of the people being made into the target.
Targeting groups based on what they innately are is wrong. Targeting them on what they choose to be is reasonable. Racists are not a demographic.
I've spent plenty of time in Appalachia. You can only help people who want to be helped. The Obama administration wanted to retrain coal miners to new.jobs to help them and they (and.the politicians they elect) rejected it out of hand. They've had decades to change and have actively opposed it. This is fundamentally on them at this point, just like a good chunk of the rust belt suffering is because states and people had decades to try to diversify into something other than automobiles and decided not to.
> The rural poor have plenty of power on both a federal level (each California House representative is responsible for 65 times as many people as each North Dakota representative; numbers are similar for Wyoming, Montana, and plenty of other rural areas)
So what? This is the result of a compromise established in 1776 to keep states with lower populations from unilaterally deciding to leave the Union when they lack representation. Do you propose ammending the constitution?
This is an incorrect understanding of the 1776 compromise.
The original "compromise" is that each State gets at least 1 seat in the House, and equal representation in the Senate (2 seats). That is separate to the 3/5ths "compromise" related to the voting franchise.
The house of representatives was always supposed to grow with the population. This changed in 1929 due to an Act of Congress to limit the total to 435. Unsurprisingly, it was done because a Republican Congress would lose representatives otherwise. [1]
What has happened is that by artificially limiting the size of the House to 435 representatives, areas of greater population density are now under-represented.
In a rough approximation:
1. The House is supposed to represent the people
2. The Senate is supposed to represent the States
3. The POTUS is supposed to represent the nation to other nations.
Due to the now unrepresentative nature of the House, the people are under-represented in that balance.
The fix would be to expand the House membership, effectively by using the minimum size of a seat (eg the smallest State is guaranteed at least 1 seat in the House and seats cannot cross state lines).
That size could be used to determine the number of seats in total.
Based on that, the number of seats would be somewhere around (US population / Wyoming) = (328m/578k) = 567 seats.
I don't think its possible to amend the constitution in such a way as to remove the disproportionate representation of low population states.
Personally I would be happy with making house seats exactly proportionate to actual population and adding one senator for every 5 million residents.
So North Dakota with fewer than 800k people gets 2, Washington State with 7.6M gets 3, California with 39M gets 9. This still gives ND 1 senator per 400k while CA has to settle for one per 4M but this is better than one per 20M.
That is incorrect.
The source of it may vary but the results are the same.
Educated and well off people might have a superiority complex and they can be both racists and classists. And poor people can be ignorant, even more so when isolated, which is a catalyst for racism.
Its the unpredictability to having their world view challenged that I called out and already clarified. Those are completely related thoughts separated by punctuated. There's no point in trying to find other metrics I didn't specify at all.
There's significant funding and political force at the local, state and federal levels that, if allowed, would "ban" LGBT existence and put Christianity as the U.S. official religion. Along with every other crazy idea you can think of. Luckily, there's funding and work in opposition.
People can be very comfortable sitting on an unbalanced rock, until it tips.
The US is in a bad state today because people have forgotten how to speak to each other respectfully, they don't agree to disagree, they violently disagree. Fear mongering and labeling will only make things worse.
Both sides need to stop explaining, justifying and funding their bad apples by pointing to the other.
In medical terms, stop tying to cure an infection with another infection of your own.
I assume you mean to ask this rhetorically, as if the notion is absurd. But this is pretty much the gist of the paradox of tolerance. What would you suggest doing about intolerant people when reason fails?
Tolerance vs intolerance is a false dichotomy. Our actions can be viewed as points on a 2-dimensional axis between the two. Is showing discomfort with another's overly racist ideas tolerant or intolerant? What about asking questions about why someone made a casual offhand comment? Refusing to participate in a group blackface costume for Halloween? Are these tolerant or intolerant actions?
No one is claiming that it’s not a continuum. Even the Wikipedia summary of the paradox of intolerance refers to societies that are tolerant without limit.
The PoI could equally apply to any conspiracy: Shadowy Jewish bank cartels, the gay agenda, prism and the deep state.
The issue at hand is that the evidence is picked at contextual extremes, and then extrapolated.
You need way more verification that the intolerant have the power you think they have; there is v often a silent majority that would step in if things escalated.
Note: the Paradox of Tolerance only applies in a "naive" (first-order) consequentialist framework. In a virtue ethics framework, the answer to "what should be done about intolerant people" is "tolerance" because tolerance is an inherent good regardless of outcomes.
However, I also think to a first approximation, virtue ethics has better consequentialist outcomes than naive consequentialist ethics does.
So I don't have an answer to the PoT; I just don't think it's a slam-dunk argument against tolerance at all. I espouse tolerance first and foremost for the sake of its ideal, and I hold that ideal because I prefer its generalized outcomes.
In other words, I can't help but notice that the Paradox of Tolerance is largely used as a tool to justify plain intolerance.
Eh, I actually think Germany banning Nazis was a good idea in hindsight, but there's some special context there. :P Specifically, looking at Germany, I don't think it's a Paradox of Tolerance situation because we've seen over decades of experience that the Nazi ban is not being broadened or overapplied. And there's no need for it, because the actual Nazis remarkably seem to be unable to help themselves, even given the very specific and limited ban we're running. So I'm going to explicitly carve out an exception for the Nazi ban in my otherwise liberal ideology - on consequentialist grounds, since as far as free speech restrictions go this one seems to be operating productively even within its sharply curtailed limits. In other words, it selects Nazis and approximately nobody else. If more limitations of free speech had the character of §86, I'd be a lot more on board with the concept.
In other words, the Nazi ban is one case where the dialog went like this:
"Come on, this is pointless, they can just use other symbols and dogwhistles. You'll fall into an escalating spiral of swatting down new Nazi symbols, negatively affecting pretty much everyone but Nazis."
"Yeah but look, we won't fall into an escalating spiral of free speech restrictions. Because they won't change their symbols, ever."
And they were right. I don't entirely understand why, but clearly they were right. My standing theory is that Nazis are either really dumb or in some sort of symbiotic relation with the constitutional protection office where going to jail is actually their goal. Works for me.
Tl;dr: my rule-consequentialist ethics don't have a problem with "liberalism, except where Nazi paraphernalia and holocaust denial", since those modifications have clearly demonstrated their worth and limited character.
You are seriously suggesting that "nobody else" is ever going to attempt what the Nazis did, ever? We've got billions of years until the sun makes Earth uninhabitable.
History clearly shows us these things are cyclical. Also, your point about symbols is wrong, they are constantly looking for new dogwhistles and using them.
It seems like you're either lost in the weeds or have some obtuse agenda. This 'intellectual' sophistry is meaningless to 99% of your fellow humans. I don't see how anything you've said negates the paradox of tolerance-- there is a line to be drawn or fascists win, it's that simple to me and I cannot imagine an argument that would convince me otherwise.
I'm sorry the current state of the US has nothing whatsoever to do with a breakdown of dialog. Nobody looks at a Lion closing its jaws around an antelope and thinks gee what a failure to communicate there. If only they had talked it out.
40 years ago the right wing decided to build its platform on a combination of white people, Christianity, and conservative social and sexual mores.
This went swimmingly for a while but none is the fastest growing religion, white people are headed to be the largest minority instead of a majority by 2040s, and more liberal perspective on sex is becoming increasingly common.
To be specific we have gone from half of people believing homosexuality should be accepted to 72% in the last 20 years. White people are slated to become merely the largest minority by 2044, and Christians went from 77% to 65% in 14 years.
If your bread and butter is white people, who have strong feelings about sexual mores and jesus by 2044 you are going to be looking at 10% of the population down from closer to 50% in 1980. Hell leave out the sexual mores and white Christians are sliding from 64% heading towards 25%. The republican party hasn't had anything like an acceptable game with any other group in decades.
They are losing the country because they built their house on sand and they are freaking out about it instead of making a coherent plan half their party is already off the deep end and wont be dragged back.
Agree with everything there. For now Republicans play the demographic hand that they're dealt with today. So do the Democrats in other ways (with all the respect due to African-American voters from Georgia, I think their opinion matters a lot more than that of many other democratic supporters). It's important for both parties' survival to shuffle where the puck actually is on election day, not where it'll be in 2044.
> It's important for both parties' survival to shuffle where the puck actually is on election day, not where it'll be in 2044.
Also consider that many politicians in power (especially at the national level) won't be alive in 2044. It's worth it to the conservative ones to slow the rate of change a bit, even if they know that some changes are inevitable.
"The republican party hasn't had anything like an acceptable game with any other group in decades."
Trump's record with Hispanic voters was actually fairly good, though not great. Many Hispanics do not even consider themselves people of color and Democrats cannot take this fairly huge group for automatically granted.
Trumps record with Hispanics is only average even grading on a curve and life isn't graded on a curve. Objectively 32% is garbage. Trump got only an average of 25% of nonwhite voters and 58% of white voters in 2020.
Once you have as many nonwhite voters as white you need 43% of the non white vote plus 58% of the white vote to win the popular vote.
"The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC) is an agreement among a group of U.S. states and the District of Columbia to award all their electoral votes to whichever presidential candidate wins the overall popular vote in the 50 states and the District of Columbia."
Am I the only person who sees these two lines as a tremendously stinging rebuke to the Democratic Party and the progressives in particular given what an utterly deplorable individual the incumbent and those who surrounded him were? Sounds like a growth opportunity for the Republicans more than a crisis, which speaks volumes about how the progressive message is being perceived among minorities they are claiming to be helping.
While you are hopefully grasping at 2 data points as if they were a trend their portion of the black vote has been almost exclusively exploring the territory between 8 and 14% for 40 while Hispanic vote has been mostly exploring the 25-35 territory with the exception of one glorious trip north of 40 in GW Bush's second term.
This isn't a stinging rebuke of the progressive agenda its just an example of a certain percentage either buying what Trump or Republicans are selling or prioritizing conservative values like sexual or reproductive issues over other concerns. It was and is inevitable.
The thought process that if an odious man like Trump can garner 32%/12% then a more reasonable person could do better isn't I think correct.
Half of the grand old party has gone off the deep end. A more reasonable person will never make it through the primary in the first place because the crazies wont let it happen and if they did then for every thinking mans vote they obtained they would lose 2 crazy. Take a look at Donald Trump you are looking at peak Republican. If you wanted to make a monument to Republican presidents you could start the tour with Lincoln and end with Trump because he is either the last Republican president or the father of the first dictatorship.
"Reasonable" doesn't have anything to do with it. The thought process is that a smarter but equally deplorable candidate would be able to able to tailor and segregate their messaging so that each subgroup hears what they want to hear, uniting both the center and the far right to secure the presidency. Trump was only good at telling the crazies what they wanted to hear because he wasn't that smart; a skilled politician is good at telling everybody what they want to hear.
Much as I would be happy about the end of the Republican party, thinking that they're finished or don't know what they need to do to win again is fantasy. The Democrats need to distance themselves from antagonistic progressiveism that is driving voters into the arms of the Republicans immediately or they stand a pretty good chance of losing future elections. That is what the minority voting numbers of 2020 show.
You cannot reason with people who are taught since birth to be unreasonable and simply believe. Go to any sort of forum with people of these crazy positions, try to reason with them, it is impossible. You can't dispel it, it doesn't matter if you are the most patient and we'll explained person in the world - you cannot overcome belief. These groups are intentionally malicious, they fabricate information, group together to spread that disinformation, and use the democratic system against itself to advocate for the times of lord's and surfs.
Just this week the local school cancelled a vaccination clinic because people believe covid isn't real and that the vaccine is there to put chips in you. That "the lord Jesus" is their immune system. These people will change the law from underneath you if you let them. They don't care about the truth.
Outside of the covid chip comment, which is a specific example, everything you wrote applies to yourself and others who agree with you as well. When you're trying to convince someone to take the vaccine who says they don't want to because covid isn't a threat, they don't see you as an enlightened mind backed by science who wants to save lives like you see yourself, they see you as an arrogant sheep brainwashed by the media who doesn't understand statistics and relative risks. Since you clearly don't understand their perspective, it is no wonder that you can't convince them to listen to yours.
Try listening to people you want to convince before trying to convince them. This approach doesn't have a 100% success rate, but it has a higher chance of success than your current approach has. The catch is you have to be open for them to convince you that your closely held beliefs are wrong. If you're not, and you dismiss everything they say out-of-hand, how can you expect them to be open to your ideas?
If they were interested in the truth it's not hard to find. They don't want that, and believe "facts" are false because they believe it so. Not because they have any actual knowledge.
They cannot be convinced despite a plethora of opportunities given, not due to a lack of them. That's how I know quite well that they don't care about the truth. If you were to argue with these people you'd be eaten alive, as would anyone else.
This isn't chess, they make up the rules and knock over the pieces as they go. Again, no care for the truth. You cannot change that. The only thing we can do is outnumber them.
This is hyperbole. There is a First Amendment standing in the way of making Christianity an official religion. I am conservative and follow political forums. Conservatives may oppose gay marriage but do not seek to re-criminalize homosexual relations.
Repeated - and, sadly, successful - attempts to deny the right to abortion shows the religious wackos are at least a state-level force that can’t be ignored.
Abortion is not an LGBT issue and anti-abortion types are not exclusively religious. The split between anti-abortion and pro-abortion is almost 50/50 in the US and 50% of America are not fundamentalist Christians.
There are no arguments against early abortion that wouldn’t be either religiously motivated, or based on non- religious logical fallacy. From what I’ve seen on American media, almost all of it is religiously motivated. It doesn’t matter that fundamentalists don’t identify themselves as fundamentalist.
I think the fundamental argument against early abortion is itself not religiously based. That argument goes like:
1. There is a secondary organism (life) within the womb upon conception.
2. That life will become a human being. Therefore:
3. That life must be given the same rights to not be killed that other (fully grown) human beings have.
Where is the religion or logical fallacy in that line of thought?
We even see aspects of this logic applied within common law, in that a pregnant woman (regardless of the length of pregnancy) that is murdered is considered a double-homicide.
I think it's unhelpful to approach a highly-contentious subject with the thought that the people on one side have absolutely no logical reason for believing what they do. I say logical, because the implication that something is religious is a way in modern rhetoric to defuse the opposing view by implying that the person holding it is not approaching from any sort of empirical worldview, but instead only deriving their argument from some ancient document of (whichever) religion.
This is all based on assumption you can force someone to “donate”, or partially sacrifice, their body for whatever reason. And this assumption comes from a fundamentally misogynistic interpretation of religion.
> There are no arguments against early abortion that wouldn’t be either religiously motivated, or based on non- religious logical fallacy.
This is only true if you expand “religious” to mean “based on moral axioms regardless of source”, but then, any argument for or against doing (or allowing, or prohibiting) anything would be religious.
> From what I’ve seen on American media, almost all of it is religiously motivated.
OTOH, yes, the American anti-abortion movement is almost entirely a product of politically weaponized Christian conservatism.
> It doesn’t matter that fundamentalists don’t identify themselves as fundamentalist.
While the religious groups involve overlap with Fundamentalism (which is a particular subset of Protestantism), they aren’t all Fundamentalist.
Based on the moral axioms you’ve chosen. Axioms are, by definition, unsupported and unsupportable.
> Unless your moral axioms are fundamentally flawed, which is what I’ve described above.
No, what you described above was belief that was “religiously motivated, or based on non- religious logical fallacy.” Axioms are the roots from which logic works, they aren't based on logic, fallacious or otherwise. And there's no reason moral axioms that conflict with abortion need to be religiously motivated, either.
Sure, you might view any moral axioms thst disagree with yours as “fundamentally flawed”, but that doesn’t salvage your earlier description.
Just because you don’t see it doesn’t mean it’s a logical fallacy or religiously motivated. Get out of your bubble and talk to people and you’ll learn things!
As someone who is far-left (and not cis-white), virtually none of us proclaim ourselves extremists. Progressives, yes, perhaps even militant around organizing around a cause, but I fail to see how this part of your comment can be read as anything other than political straw-man flamebait.
> but obviously (to almost everyone) these are unfalsifiable standards that self-proclaimed far left extremists have created to invalidate everyone's thoughts but their own
In this narrative, the CEO is playing the role of far-left extremist? I'm confused, please clarify.
no, the people that left the company over not being able to talk politics typically would be more sympathetic to far left extremist ideas, because politics at work is one.
- obviously (to almost everyone) these are unfalsifiable standards that self-proclaimed far left extremists have created to invalidate everyone's thoughts but their own
The current state of social discourse is essentially landmines in the form of Kafkatraps[1]. Once there's any form of discussion on an unfalsifiable topic, it provides the leftist with a false sense of justification, simply because it was discussed...even if the leftist's reasoning made no sense and they lost the debate. Then they use the false justification to trick low-intelligence people into believing it's actually justified.
This has led us into a race towards the bottom within society, catering to the loudest complainer in the room. Crabs in a bucket.
Seems like the only real way to counter these unfalsifiable arguments is to call the person a fucking clown and tell them what a kafkatrap is.
Thank you! I now know what this phenomenon is called. I went through "diversity training" when I worked at a university, and was appalled at the presentation. The Kafkatrap was _exactly_ the trick used throughout the entire "Q&A". It was so insidious, bit I didn't have a name for it -- now I do.
It kind of blew my mind when I first heard of the term last year. The comment thread of my source article is really interesting as well.
It's one of those concepts that everyone understands, but there wasn't really a word for. It still kind of hurts by brain how no one can come up with a solid rebuttal to the situation (this is what the article's comment thread touches on). Which leads me to believe this is somewhat of a forefront in human understanding/psychology.
I've been calling people who spread these kafkatrap things out for exactly what they are. People completely out of touch with how logic or reason works. Of course, they aren't interested in that, since logic is "the Master's Tools" of oppression.
Well, you know what no self respecting sjw should be interested in programming digital technology. /s Since it's all ones and zeros it's all binary, but they live in a non binary world, there are no men and women, a world of subtleties, everything is done in a shade of oppression and power. Only the level is different, you can be violent with words, express microaggressions or even nanoagression. You are the most privileged with the least amounts of pigmentation, albinos are at the height of it so it seems. Someone give these people a Nobel price ASAP.
It's no different than the far-right unfalsifiable standards that were enforced for centuries, more often than not with religious overtones. Let's not pretend this is a left/right thing, so much as it's just an extremist thing. Only now, the leftist is using the outrage tactic just as effectively as the right, which has lost a lot of its moral high ground on most social issues.
> It's no different than the far-right unfalsifiable standards that were enforced for centuries
Not sure what you mean. Examples?
I wouldn't say it's an extremist thing, considering the Kafkatrap setup tactic is being actively used by people with different degrees of leftness. It applies to any topic where one person/group claims/claimed to be a victim in any way/shape/form. My source article explains in detail.
Not probably your point, but I’ve always found comparisons between the present moral panic and the Red Scare to be interesting. Notably, the extreme measures and intense paranoia of the Red Scare took place against the backdrop of a credible existential threat—global thermonuclear war. We now have the benefit of hindsight, but it wasn’t clear to people at the time that the situation would stabilize, which is to say their extreme measures make some amount of sense (I can sympathize with abandoning lofty liberal ideals in such a moment). On the other hand, the current moral panic has no similar justification—it’s a naked power grab by a group of ideological authoritarians who can’t even be bothered to pretend to act in accordance with their own stated beliefs. Neither the RS nor the present panic are rightful, but one is at least sorta understandable.
That really all depends on your definition of what constitutes a credible threat. I'm sure any activist would say that continued police brutality against minorities, widespread and increasing hate crimes, etc. represent a credible threat to affected populations.
We can argue about how genuine / common these threats really are, but at the end of the day I think it's fair to say at the absolute minimum that activists genuinely believe they are threats.
Quick question, without checking the numbers, about how many black people do you think were killed by police last year and how many of them were unarmed? I'm interested in knowing what you think the numbers are in reference to them possibly being a credible threat.
While those things are bad, I think we can agree that there is a difference between global thermonuclear warfare and police brutality and hate crimes. At the very least, GTNW is a literal existential threat for every person, while brutality and hate have been pretty normal in human history and liberalism is the antidote (indeed, the rich American liberal tradition is what makes hate and brutality seem so shocking)—giving up liberalism in the name of combatting hate is inappropriate, and IMO very likely the thing which drives up hate crimes in the first place (left wing behavior pushes many people to the right and sets up illiberal precedents for them to follow).
The Red Scare began in the 1920s, long before nuclear weapons were invented, so the threat of nuclear war was not the primary determinant factor characterizing that situation
>there was never a real danger of a global thermonuclear war
This seems like an odd thing to say. Is it meant as sarcasm?
Everyone has heard of the Cuban Missile Crisis, so I won't say anything about that.
But have you heard of the Sino-Soviet crisis of 1969?
Allegedly (I'm neither a historian nor any other kind of authority on it) the USSR was going to launch nuclear missiles at China during a border dispute, and asked the Nixon administration to remain neutral.
Instead, Kissinger replied that the US would nuke hundreds of Russian cities in response.
This story appears to be reflective of the official Chinese Communist Party historical account.
What I’ve really meant is: there was never a real danger of a global thermonuclear war, unless started by US. The example above demonstrates this nicely.
Eric Raymond and Wendy McElroy are not thought leaders I'd turn to, and naming something doesn't make it true or turn it into an effective rhetorical device.
There's a wide spectrum of human behavior and responses to these issues, and this takes a tiny sliver of that and tries to pain the rest with the same broad stroke.
> Examples?
In just the last few decades? We have immigration, women's propriety and reproductive rights, civil rights, and the LGBT movement to name a few. The outrage comes mostly from one side, which has their own arsenal of rhetorical devices to paint opposition as morally bankrupt reprobates. Support same-sex marriage? Closeted gay or un-Christian heathen, destroyer of families. Won't pledge allegiance to the flag? Must be a commie. Women deserve equal pay? What a beta simp.
Both sides do and say stupid shit in their own stupid ways.
> Both sides do and say stupid shit in their own stupid ways.
The sad and hilarious thing is that both sides are often wrong in what they advocate, but often right in their criticism of the other side. It's probably easier to recognise bullshit in others (than in oneself and) than to get stuff right oneself.
Since the "Kafka trap" thing isn't something he advocates but something he criticizes his opponents for using, I'd start from the assumption that it's among the (increasingly rare) things ESR is right on.
People are great at giving advice to others, while failing to do the same for themselves.
> things ESR is right on
Except he's not. The entire existence of "kafkatrap" is to paint an enemy and argument that doesn't exist, taking some random train of thought to it's logical extreme. Considering his bigoted comments on women, Islam, and African American's, I have very little confidence that he's coming from a good place.
Exactly... wanted to say this... I don't subscribe to the left vs right dichotomy to begin with, but "kafkatrapping" is a tactic used by both sides. When I was reading the link, I was reminded of a ex-colleague, who thought my transition was wrong because it is pandering to the inherent evil in me. Ah...
Agreed and I dislike how these conversations just embolden people to invite us into their right wing filter bubble after they see our dissatisfaction with left wing filter bubbles
For now I’m satisfied with the reversion to the mean of not talking politics at work
I kind of agree with this—one of my main criticisms of left-wing ideology is that it so closely resembles right-wing ideology, and it certainly seems to push a lot of people toward the right wing. In particular the intense left-wing pressure to suppress any frank, unscripted conversations about race leaves a lot of “ideologically vulnerable” people with nowhere to turn with respect to their questions than the welcoming embrace of right wing folks, which unsurprisingly swells their ranks. All of this intense left-wing bad behavior similarly gives right wing folks a sense of moral license to behave badly as well (for just one example, think of how the media and other prominent voices profusely excused and justified BLM riots all summer long and the precedent that probably set for the 1/6 riot).
“Reversion to the mean” is probably a good thing insofar as it means “moderating ourselves”.
Exactly. I identify as strict antifascist and leftist, but cannot understand why the extremist social justice warriors are identified as leftist.
Eg there was this citation by them
> creates a “not safe work environment.”
On the contrary, calling for censorship and heated nonscientific, political discussion on the workplace, esp. against conservatives, creates a non safe work environment. It also cripples science.
Formerly they were called out as religious zealots, not leftists.
> Then they use the false justification to trick low-intelligence people into believing it's actually justified.
I don't agree with this. Anyone who has been following politics has noticed the growth in the left's base, mainly from the college educated. A lot of these activists seem to be motivated by the (ironically) paternalistic notion that they know better than the groups they advocate for.
I see quite a few unsubstantiated claims like this being thrown around in this thread. Can you help by clarifying 1) which activists? 2) which groups to which they do not belong are they speaking on behalf of? 3) in what way do they think they know better? 4) who among these groups has spoken out against what activists say? and 5) what gives you the impression that the activists have not consulted with the groups they represent (if they are not themselves members of the group)?
What triggered my comment was episode 225 of Rationally Speaking[1]. In it, there was an interview with Veena Dubal[2] where she (according to the podcast) is a prominent advocate for AB5 [3]. In it, she concedes that taxi drivers themselves have been polled[4] and _do not_ want be classified as employees and want to maintain their independent contractor status.
So in answer to your bullet points:
1) Veena Dubal
2) Uber drivers (I mean, I could be mistaken. Perhaps this professor of law moonlights as an Uber driver. If so, I would continue to argue that this is not her main vocation.)
3) She wants Uber drivers to be classified as employees
4) The majority of Uber drivers
5) Nothing and I never said they hadn't consulted. In this case, quite clearly they have consulted with the groups but have not listened.
Now, in the podcast, Dubal goes on to dispute the polling methodology of the various polls. Well okay, re-poll with your questions and present the data. The point I'm trying to make is that you don't ram through legislation before convincing the people you're going to affect the most that it's good for them. Educate and convince them first.
1) the woke ones.
2) see the comment up thread about the disabled person expected to to fall in line because they’re part of a minority group.
3) see kafkatrap.
4) unsure what you’re asking.
5) see latinx conversation up thread.
Is this evidence you speak of your own personal and subjective experience or is it peer-reviewed studies? If it is of the latter kind, could you provide some citations for me to peruse?
Are you certain that you are qualified to judge the quality of peer-reviewed studies? In either case, that isn't what I was asking about and you know it.
College education, including a fair amount of STEM, is an admission fee to be considered middle-class (or higher, depending on which school you went to). Nothing more. What you actually learn in college is 100% secondary to being able to say that you went to school X (and have the connections from that school).
why do people always link the worst possible site to cite the kafkatrap? it's literally a conspiracy theory site encouraging a prosecution of Fauci on the front page.
This may be would be effective, but this is also the same as "deplatforming" tactic that they use. If you're the kind of person who wants to defend the spirit of rational, open debate, isn't refusing to engage someone a tactic that on itself contradicts those views?
Do you engage all the BS at work, or do you let it burn itself? Whatever arguments you have need time to become more constructive, neutral and obvious. Arguments back and forth is fruitless and depleting.
Basically no one is "cis", because people are just born the sex they are and don't "identify" with it, or agree with all the outdated stereotypes placed on their sex. Men and women aren't a subset of their sex.
I don't "identify" as "cis". I think of myself as normal, pretty much like everyone else. But when I need a word to describe myself as "not trans"... There isn't one, until "cis" came along.
So yes, I'm "cis". I don't like the word, and I probably would not have managed to come up with it on my own. But "straight" doesn't describe the situation and "not trans" is inherently negative, where no negativity is desired.
I'll fully agree that I don't follow a lot of the stereotypes for my gender, but there are a lot I do follow, too. Nobody is 100% stereotypical. And Cis- and trans-gender isn't even about that. It's about how you feel and who you feel you are, not about following stereotypes.
so the reason I use that adjective is because it only has upside. It is effortless, harmless, actually briefly conveys a much longer abstract message which is the purpose of language, and helps otherwise marginalized people feel included and stay productive.
it doesn’t matter to me that 99% of people already match that adjective which wasn't previously known or necessary
This is framed as a bad thing but it seems like the purpose of these “no politics at work” “culture memos” is specifically to encourage people to the door who require or desire a more modern/activist/diverse/BLM work environment. I suppose we see an experiment playing out between the companies that want to preserve the “old” ways of companies with their politically incorrect employees who would be considered “toxic” and “bros” and “problematic” (and to adapt to modern standards, to adopt a don’t ask don’t tell policy with respect to their personalities) whose animating principle is “coffee is for closers” and the newer diverse, “intersectional,” “antiracist” culture that claims “diversity is our strength.”
I don't want actual politics at work. I don't want to be debating politically contentious events at work. E.g. (to pick a contentious topic that was in the news recently) a long winded debate on the palestine/israel conflict is not something i want to have at work. That doesn't mean i don't have opinions on the subject or that in a different context i wouldn't want to debate it, work is just not the time to get into it.
However that doesn't mean i think racism/bigotry/etc is acceptable at work.
The immediate response will be: "bawolff, through their silence, is promoting not-my-agenda (obviously!) therefore I feel unsafe and want bawolff fired!"
You haven’t heard the term “silence is violence”? It’s not ironic. Anytime you see on a list of “demands” (which is a term that people feel very comfortable using) that includes “forcefully condemn X,” they are basically rejecting your choice to remain silent on the issue.
You may have never seen this in the workplace but it is increasingly common in some of the most coveted (or formerly so) employers like Google, Basecamp, Medium, etc.
As usual, there's context to everything and these discussions often skip over it. In some extreme cases, silence is violence is correct, for many people that threshold will be in different places. In other context people may be abusing "silence is violence" as "you should support my pet issue I care about". There will be cases where people will have strong opinions about, like providing services to ICE - literally helping a violent organisation to be more efficient.
Ideas are not the same thing to people - some ignore it, some don't, some abuse it, some change it for different purposes.
>There will be cases where people will have strong opinions about, like providing services to ICE - literally helping a violent organisation to be more efficient.
This is just "support my pet cause" with some added rationalization. The line of what constitutes as "being complicit" always conveniently ends where the majority of activists lie. You're bad if .1% of your company's revenue comes from a contract with a government organization, part of which enforces illegal immigration. However, if you sign this petition, your sins will be forgiven.
I think you're generalising a bit and end up building an imaginary persona you believe in. Maybe some people think like that. But for example, in my case: I agree with it and I'm not an activist. "You're bad..." is wrong way to look at it. I'm against helping them rather than against taking their money. There are no sins to forgive but if there were, signing a petition is not a way to achieve it.
You presented your idea of the supporter of the quoted opinion and it turns out to be almost the opposite of the supporter you responded to.
My characterization was intentionally facetious for my own amusement, but the core argument remains sound. If working for a company with an ICE contract counts as helping a violent organization, then you should also apply the "silence is violence" doctrine to activists who sign a petition but refuse to quit, yet nobody ever does.
Some people believe they can push for change from inside. I'm not sure what do you mean by "nobody ever does" - we're commenting on an article about people quitting - and they will if they can't achieve the change they want. Others may not join in the first place due to political reasons. (I've refused 2 jobs at companies doing things I don't agree with)
In this case, they are being paid to leave, so it's a commercial transaction rather than an act of holding themselves to a moral standard. Not taking a job or resigning from a job for political reasons would be such an act, but I don't see how that would be relevant to "silence is violence" if you aren't pressuring others to do the same.
You say “literally helping a violent organisation to be more efficient.” Someone else might say “Helping our nation protect its borders.” Neither person would be axiomatically correct because you’re arguing over opinions, not facts.
I've worked at some places that i think would consider themselves woke. I have never been asked to personally condemn anything. I'm doubtful that places like google are really like that, i suspect this is mostly a strawman that doesn't really exist.
Sure, if i went around saying that hitler was just misunderstood, i would probably get in trouble. And i'm totally ok with that.
And offshoring manufacturing to dictatorships that also "reeducate" and forcibly manage the reproductive rights of religious minorities in the country and threaten neighboring countries with invasions and harvest organs when the like.
Oh, wait... that's right these activists don't care too much about THAT violence.
The one which by proxy is totally nonplussed by what human rights violations go on in China as long as the cash register keeps dinging its bell but on the other hand gets utterly flustered at the lesser problems at home so it ends up looking hypocritical?
Isn't that pretty much what these stories are about? Big tech company implements policy that says no more political activism at work (big tech company already has policy to fire anyone who expresses racist/sexist or other taboo views). People mass quit in protest because they equate neutrality with supporting the status quo, which is to them evil.
It exists at every one of the small sized tech businesses I am familiar with. Some of these situations blow up at the larger well known tech business, but the small ones don't want the fight, agree to the DEI committee, put up the occasional BLM/trans/etc social media support messages, and generally avoid the conflict. The employees of these companies pushing the changes feel their employers are bigoted for not pushing harder for change, but the minimum attempts to placate them are enough to keep the peace. However, these people talk to eachother, occasionally make the scary slack general chat message about doing better, and make a really eggshell feeling work environment.
When I worked at a defense contractor (years ago, before any of this stuff was even on the horizon) I'm pretty sure HR would have been had a "I am living the movie idiocracy" moment if that happened.
Silence is violence rings pretty hollow when your company deals in the loud explody kind of violence.
I wonder how this works in, say, the Marines, or the Navy, which I believe are much more diverse than tech. Are people discussing politics endlessly at work? Is there a code of ethics/conduct that explicitly bars such behaviors?
Tech is extremely un-diverse, but it somehow seems to attract much more vocal and activist types compared to the above. For example, I have never read about such incidents in the Navy or the Marines... Is it simply my ignorance, or does the military have an established way of dealing with such things?
FWIW, I'm sick of the politicization and invasion by SJWs of the discourse in our little bubble in the Bay Area. I'd heartily appreciate the day when I can spend a whole day at work with absolutely no discussion of politics and religion at work. Even private home life is not impervious to this nonsense (even talk at the dinner table often comes down to this, much to my dismay). Do others share a similar sentiment? Just like there are 'no-cellphone' train compartments, perhaps we can have 'politics/religion-free' zones at home and the office!
The difference is tech has a lot more people who went to expensive fancy colleges and private high schools, and have comfortable middle class backgrounds, the military that is the extreme minority. People can talk about diversity, but its not truly diversity they are looking for, as they do not look for political or class diversity. The marines, has a lot of working class background people, and black, white, hispanic, working class people seem to get along just fine with different races without long diatribes about politics.
Tech has these "intelligentsia" activists that want to show they have the right ideas and opinions. Go to a welding shop or mechanic or marines or whatever, and everyone can have different opinions about something and nothing bad happens. People might laugh it off and call someone an idiot, that's about it.
> Go to a welding shop or mechanic or marines or whatever, and everyone can have different opinions about something and nothing bad happens
That depends on the "something". Everyone has views they consider unacceptable. Try telling a marine about how 9/11 was actually justified. I highly doubt he would just laugh it off.
I mentioned above how shared challenges is a way to remove biases among diverse people. In my comment I used small companies trying to the keep the lights on.
While there are exceptions, the military is one giant shared challenge. When people go through hell together and their lives depend on each other, they figure it out.
In the Marines you have to prove your mettle. So people actually earn the respect of their peers. And I think that their process is quite competent in weeding out the really toxic people that are the majority of activists. Today those types are SJW, 20 years ago they would have been fundamental Christians wanting to help Jack Thompson ban violent games.
And of course Marines are the one that invented the term fragging.
The problem with activism in the west is lack of feedback for being obnoxious. So they can get away with it.
A very popular meme is how in june all corporations turn their profile pictures rainbow in all social media accounts except in the legit homophobic and conservative countries.
So it is activism entangled with safetysm. We protest where we know people will pay the dane geld.
Many people would call your refusal to hear their opinion on Israel/Palestine or any other issue “problematic,” or contributing to an “unsafe” environment. You can say you’re against racism at work but do you think you can push back against the next BLM workshop with “this isn’t appropriate for work?” Doubtful.
It doesn't address the issue. It's just ducking your head down to not participate one way or the other. It's fine for keeping your head down, it doesn't address workplace culture.
I have a coworker who does almost no work, but is on four different organizational diversity committees so is basically bulletproof. They've caused major rifts in the team. My only solution is to find a new job, which is what I'm working on now.
When your workplace empowers those sorts of behaviours in the name of progressive benevolence, just ducking your head down only works for so long.
If you think about it, this kind of culture actually hurts minorities because an employer will think twice about hiring them in the first place.
Why hire a black, hispanic, or LGBT person, if you have no ability to fire them without being labeled, canceled, or sued. Safer to just hire the white straight guy.
I mean, I think it’s stupid, the corporation’s purpose is to deliver product to customers. But I think you’d be in a lot of hot water if you actually suggested cancelling a race workshop for a live site.
I live in Eastern-European, one ocean away from the States, I'm curious about these workshops, do they really happen as often as people say they happen? (let's say once a month or so, which I would consider "often" for this type of meetings).
I'm asking because they do look to me like pretty much resembling the communist party indoctrinations work-place meetings my dad had to attend in the 1980s (my dad's workplace was in the business of building stuff inside a steel mill factory, so nothing intrinsically political about it), those communist party meetings seemed to be taken seriously by absolutely no-one and were seen just as a huge loss of one's time.
They're happening in the UK too, however at least for my employer, it's a one-off multi-hour 'training session'. Amusingy, our trainers were 3 white people, led by a male.
The book 'White Fragility' was used as a reference. You just sit through it and at the end say you found it enlighening or whatever. Box ticked.
I would NEVER allow myself to be forced into a room to listen to some racist “anti racist” nonsense and then consent to agreement on any of it even implicitly.
I’d consider that only a small step above willingly kneeling before my executioner.
I've not grown up in eastern Europe, but yeah probably right. Everyone thinks it's bullshit waste of time, but will anyone speak up? No, you sit through because it's easier than dealing with the consequences of denouncing the indoctrination.
They call themselves Marxists, but Marx didn't care about diversity, or think white people are evil, or that there's toxic masculinity, and would deride these ideas. They are not marxists.
if the yardstick is Marx and his manifesto + Das Kapital series, then practically nobody was a Marxist - not even Marx himself later in life and certainly not Lenin, Stalin or Mao
since Gramsci the mainstream of Marxism replaces material determinism with a hybrid of cultural hegemony and social gatekeeping, with things like religion, race, feminism being much more central than they were for Marx - and this has been the mainstream of Marxism for 100+ years, so hardly a new development in this particular respect
Not really. HN skews pretty right wing on things like this. It isn't nearly as commonplace or ridiculous as it would have you believe. I say this as a member of a "woke MegaCorp."
> Many people would call your refusal to hear their opinion on Israel/Palestine or any other issue “problematic,” or contributing to an “unsafe” environment.
To be clear, the new generation of political activist is the one creating the dichotomy. The kind of workplace you’re describing in the first paragraph would be, according to Kendi, racist.
Turns out human beings are complicated. Individual differences are greater than the statistical differences between groups. It's odd that many of the loudest voices that vilify discrimination will often wield it to great effect, counterproductively against a project of shared humanity
> However that doesn't mean i think racism/bigotry/etc is acceptable at work.
A big issue is different people have different definitions of these terms.
For example, say a very religous conservative doesn't want to use a trans persons preferred pronouns as they consider said pronouns to be untrue and sinful. They are otherwise polite and nondiscriminatory (e.g. they will listen to and implement ideas from the trans person and don't bring up their opinions of trans issues). Is this bigotry?
Or say some people in the company want to run a BLM donation drive and a conversation then ensues where someone states that they don't think racism has anything to do with USA police killings of blacks and it's actualy down to problems in the main african american culture. Is this racism?
Prioritizing made-up, vague and abstract ideas of "sins" and refusing to respect the identity of a fellow human? Yes, that is bigotry.
> Is this racism?
Yes, because there's plenty of research that's been done that says racism within police departments is responsible for the killing of black people in the USA. Not to mention countless videos of innocent black people being shot down by cops.
Believing something stupid doesn't excuse your bigotry or racism.
Consider also that there are towns such as Jackson, Mississippi which have police departments that are >90% black [1] but still have all the same problems as police forces in America generally:
Not posting this to change your mind, I don't think that's possible through a single comment, but if you seriously think that there can be no other good-faith, legitimate opinion than your own, then consider that you might not be thinking about this rationally.
"“He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that." John Stuart Mill
The recent high profile police shootings were not during arrests for violent crimes, and in many of them the victims had committed no crime at all. You aren't going to change very many people's minds by citing statistics unrelated to their concerns, and some may even take offense at seemingly trying to steer the conversation from talking about killing clearly innocent people to violent fugitives.
You do realize that these very statistics show that the “high profile” cases you mention do not reflect the racial reality of police killings? The media decides what becomes “high profile” and cases like Daniel Shaver and Tony Timpa do not get the coverage of Eric Garner or George Floyd.
"racism within police departments is responsible for the killing of black people in the USA"
Firstly, if they are mistaken about facts, that doesn't necessarily make them racist. That just makes them mistaken, and possibly racist depending on the reasons they are mistaken.
Secondly, what is the evidence for this? I've read evidence of racism in US police departments against Blacks, but not specifically in the context of police killings.
> I don't want actual politics at work. I don't want to be debating politically contentious events at work.
Frank and Kate is sitting at the lunch table. They are discussing "Israel's ongoing massacre in Gaza" and how awful it is. Your opinion is contrary to theirs. Do you feel that you have the right to make them not talk about this topic because you don't want "actual politics" at work? I'm curious to know where you think the line should be drawn. Suppose you are an atheist and you just got a warning from your manager because a Christian employee overheard you saying to a colleague that "all religions are such bunk." Should you not have been allowed to express that "controversial" opinion?
To me, "no politics at work" means "the company does not get involved in political activities or discussions". Individuals are free to discuss what they want, with who they want.
This means: water cooler discussion about Middle East conflict? Perfectly fine. "Bomb Israel Activism Day (with free cake in staff room)" organised by the company? Not okay.
I am sick of receiving corporate emails inviting me to "x pride/awareness/celebration" activities that have nothing to do with work, and that are not neutral topics. I am happy for people to have different opinions with me, and talk about them, and even debate with me about them, but I don't want "mandatory fun" events where the "fun" is eating a cake with icing colored in whatever way symbolizes the current woke topic, and being forced to stand around and pretend I care.
> To me, "no politics at work" means "the company does not get involved in political activities or discussions". Individuals are free to discuss what they want, with who they want.
Wouldn't that mean that certain tech companies' bans on politics is a form of involvement in political activities and discussions?
> I am sick of receiving corporate emails inviting me to "x pride/awareness/celebration" activities that have nothing to do with work, and that are not neutral topics.
Interesting, can you give some examples of any such activities that you have been invited to?
Note that the agent compelling you to attend these events is the company you work for - not the "woke crowd". Since if pays you for your time it most certainly has the right to order you to attend to these mildly political events (gay pride, that you have as an example, isn't very controversial).
No it wouldn't been involvement. The company is remaining neutral and allowing employees to do as they wish.
The company pays me to perform the duties in my contract and job description. It includes nothing about attending any events unrelated to those duties.
>I don't want actual politics at work. I don't want to be debating politically contentious events at work
to take the example from the article:
"In July 2019, for example, Medium chose to publish a series that included a profile of Trump supporter Joy Villa with the headline “I have never been as prosecuted for being Black or Latina as I have been for supporting Trump.”"
When you're in the business of news publishing, on an incendiary and relevant political event at that, and your decisions have a real chance to influence public discourse, even engineering decisions, how is it realistic to think you're not involved in politics, or even can get away from it?
Tech, in particular media and communication platforms directly sit at the intersection of politics, news and technology. Those copmanies build the platforms where moderation and editorial decisions are made that have huge impact.
what happens when your "work" does business with politicians then? Why shouldn't you be allowed? Directly or indirectly all "works" do business with the politicians and they favour politicians for their interests, not YOUR interest.
Sounds some kind of perverted game. The big ones are allowed to do whatever they want, the small ones should obey the rules of the big ones.
So should perverted games be allowed to the workplace? Another interesting question.
Empirically, companies do not make equally sized political donations to all candidates and most certainly do not spend equal amounts lobbying for and against each bill. Post citizen's united, the political desires of corporations have a big impact on the direction of government.
Politicians are not another business. and doing business with them is not legal in all Constitutions.
But this is the attitude of business to be the next king or emperor without any legal binding. Chaos and anarchy, oppression and boasting. The evolution clock goes back 10^{5} years.
I feel that employers can no longer silently ignore call-out culture, as it moved from Twitter to corporate Slack and real meatspaces where petitions to punish X and Y are now circulated.
Either they hop on the wagon fully or do something against it, but looking the other way means that real power within the community of employees will snowball to the most effective organizers of new call-out campaigns. Who may or may not have the best intentions, but their incentives do not really align with that of the corporation.
This is really a case of "everything can be overdone". Most people want to have the ability to protest against big outrages such as a KKK-themed party in the workplace. But calling out everything that someone on Slack finds offensive is an overkill that polarizes the community and diverts attention from the actual job tasks that need to be done.
Constant culture wars are, among others, a giant waste of energy and time. Most private sector institutions cannot afford to join them full time.
To be replaced with "merit doesn't matter, only group identity"?
> “diversity is our strength.”
That's rich coming from an ideology that actively depersonalises and reduces people to a group identity. Merit, intelligence, accomplishments, effort, passion - these things don't matter. Personal choice when it contradicts the narrative - seen as misguided, not respected!
What diversity is that, when they ignore exactly what makes one different from another in the same group? How is it fair when it proposes group guilt and punishment, to ignore all personal circumstances except race, gender and a few more attributes? It's diversity meant for group identities, not for people.
The ugly thing is that identity politics emphasises differences while being silent about cooperation. We all benefit from the work and advancement of the other groups, we cooperate more than we fight each other. There's more value in being together, but that's uncool to praise for them.
For reference take a look at how guilting and punishing for ideological motives and based on group identities went in the French Revolution. They started with an absolute monarchy and ended with an absolute dictator, in the meantime any wrong think could send you to the guillotine.
You have made a false dichotomy of it I feel. I don't think there are two models, just various points on a spectrum of tolerance.
I don't entirely disagree that politics is not needed in the workplace, but people spend almost all their time at work now and so it has become their defacto social space. If you spend 8 hours a day there it is important to make sure it's comfortable.
That increase in diversity is a direct result of talking about the issue of intolerance in the workplace, making it more comfortable for different people to work there.
You can be a hard working closer and tolerant of others all the same.
From the employer's perspective, there is one type of employee that can pretty much work in any environment given that they are paid - and there is another type that needs ALL the other coworkers doing things and acting in a particular way for them to feel safe and productive. I'm not even against their need to feel safe, included, heard, or their claimed victim status, ptsd, lack of representation, whatever they are concerned with at any point in time - but it is very hard and expensive to build and maintain an environment where they will prosper - very expensive too.
A new drama every week, dealing with bad press from a resigned "activist" employee every other month. Even with sympathy towards those people, I probably wouldn't want to touch them with a ten foot pole when money and livelihood of all my employees are at stake. I'd probably just try to help their cause by other means but would not try to torture them in an environment where they'll inevitably suffer and be unproductive. Their utopia does not exist in planet earth (yet), is it reasonable to expect that to exist in a company working environment?
From a certain perspective, more is wrong with the world than right, and it is impossible to provide an environment that is "right" when most of the world is wrong. When you are the employer, you take the implicit role of building miniature model of that world in their working environment and I reckon that is impossible, at the very least very very expensive.
> From the employer's perspective, there is one type of employee that can pretty much work in any environment given that they are paid - and there is another type that needs ALL the other coworkers doing things and acting in a particular way for them to feel safe and productive. I'm not even against their need to feel safe, included, heard, or their claimed victim status, ptsd, lack of representation, whatever they are concerned with at any point in time - but it is very hard and expensive to build and maintain an environment where they will prosper - very expensive too.
This is why any smart employer should start aggressively filtering such candidates out of their hiring pipeline.
Even though this isn’t official guidance at my FAANG, I’ve started weeding out anyone who (as best as I can infer) cares about political activism. They are damaging to an organization. Even if they don’t start political interest groups at work, they will bring up political topics in casual conversation which will exclude certain people’s viewpoints.
My stance is, we pay you to be an engineer, so I hire people devoted solely to engineering.
I think you are leaving out the pretty expansive middle ground where everyone lives. The options are not "pretty much any environment where they get paid" and "woketopia". Do you expect female employees to put up with harassment because it's too expensive to improve the working environment? Should employees "just deal with" being yelled at by managers? I'll pass thanks, but I don't think that qualifies me as an activist.
Diversity of culture between workplaces is collateral damage of diversity and inclusion efforts.
All cultures are not compatible. Not everyone will not be comfortable in a particular culture. Not everyone will not be wanted in a particular culture. [0]
The left call this immoral, believing that any exclusion or disparity is the result of circumstances that enslave humanity, from which humanity should be liberated [1]. The result of this thinking is the limiting and constricting of various liberties, and a push towards the formation of a soulless, foundationless, conglomerated monoculture.
Instead of fighting to produce this horrible monoculture, we should accept that people don't get along, and then find a way to allow all cultures to thrive.
What I don't understand about this ideology is what the end goal is. Will the fight be over once every facet of society is equally distributed among everyone, effectively abolishing majorities? And which human attributes will we choose to make diverse? Today it's gender, race and ethnicity. Yet there are countless other attributes we can choose to select on where not every group will be represented equally, so why stop with these?
This argument also ignores inherent imbalances in society, like the fact that professions are largely chosen by interest. The same male-female inequality that exists in tech also exists in nursing, construction, hairdressing, etc.[1] I hope that we can one day accept that this is OK and not the result of some huge conspiracy and systemic discrimination (not that this doesn't exist, but that it's not the main cause for the imbalance).
I see this claim made a lot every time the "politics in the workplace" conversation happens, but really? "Almost all their time"? Isn't a normal person supposed to work 8 hours a day, sleep 8/10hours at night and spent 8/6 hours doing something else? If my math is correct that's not "almost all their time".
If some people are incapable of having a life outside of work, well balanced people shouldn't have to pay the price of their obsessions.
I do not have an unbalanced life outside of work, not because of obsession (I only work 40 hours a week, roughly), but because I mainly spend my personal time recovering from the mental fatigue of work. I just don't have a desire to do much of anything until I've had a few days off and my creativity can be directed towards my own interests.
> Williams wrote that while counterperspectives and unpopular opinions are “always encouraged” to help make decisions, “repeated interactions that are nonconstructive, cast doubt, assume bad intent, make unsubstantiated accusations, or otherwise do not contribute to a positive environment have a massive negative impact on the team and working environment.”
>He added: “These behaviors are not tolerated.”
That doesn't sound like an unbiased removal of politics from the workplace to me. I think I would be out of the door, too.
It’s not an unbiased removal — the text of the memo specifically targets the screechiest voices. If you want to put BlackLivesMatter in your Slack status I think you’ll find few complaints but if you present a list of demands starting with “The Company must take a public position in support of reparations” then they’re saying you will be shown the door.
It depends how you interpret it. Someone gets to decide what a "positive workplace" is, and exactly what "casting doubt" and "nonconstructive" mean, and then they are free to be intolerant of those who go against them.
That doesn't sound like an unbiased removal of politics from the workplace to me. I think I would be out of the door, too.
Why, do you "assume bad intent" and "make unsubstantiated accusations"? Do you want to, or do you want to work with people that do? I don't think anyone who quits because those "behaviours are not tolerated" will be missed by their former colleagues.
I think a few of the things from the quote are troubling because they were phrased so ambiguously the management could interpret them in disingenuous ways that mean you could theoretically push anyone you wanted out of a company. But at this point isn't it just a memo from the CEO and not a formalized SOP? I would hope the SOP would clarify more.
However, I think lots of people wondered why in the quote you included a few things that don't seem to be anything aside from objectively bad, such as "assuming bad intent" and "making unsubstantiated accusations."
How did someone simply asking you about it "crush" you into silence?
That person used my very questioning of it as an example of something that "assumed bad intent", etc etc, as the memo said, "will not be tolerated". Scale that up to a workplace, and I can see how that could go sideways.
NASA hired literal Nazis to start its space program.
The Soviet space program was somewhat kneecapped by having its management shift with the political winds as people fell into or out of favor and having good people stuck in marginalized roles because of their political history.
I'd bet good money on the winner being the the model that doesn't care what people believe on topics not related to work.
... and the Soviets beat NASA to space, both in getting a satellite in orbit and in getting a human in orbit.
(There's a bit of inherent Great Man Fallacy in figuring out the contributions of the Nazis, because while on the one hand von Braun did lead the design for the rocket that got NASA on the moon and the Soviets failed miserably at their equivalent, on the other hand, the Soviet rocketry lead who was behind their two previous successes died in 1966. There's an argument that they would have pulled it off if he had survived, but more generally, there's an argument that people other than von Braun were perfectly capable of competently building rockets, and in particular that they could do better work than the Americans while under Soviet-style politics.)
I'm fine with both models existing. I'm happy the "old" model is seemingly gaining popularity. It seemed like every organization I have been a part of has been going the "woke" route, and it worried me.
This new trend sounds great for companies as a way to purge extremists from their workforce. From my anecdotal experience the people trying to bring politics at work were not very effective.
It would be interesting to compare productivity before and after the exits.
My first thought whenever I hear how much effort and time is spent on all this drama, especially in large companies, is "how do these people have any time to do actual work?"
Part of me honestly considered getting a job at some Woke Megacorp because I figured I'd have at least a couple extra hours to myself everyday where other folks were involved in internal forum wars.
While I do think there are bigger societal and systemic issues, I agree with you. My first thought is that they don't have enough work to do. I've worked with gay, trans, transitioning, liberal/conservative, whatever and it's never been an issue (or even anything we thought about). We were too busy trying to make enough money to keep from going out of business.
The shared challenge with people different from yourself is a great way to remove biases. Unfortunately, there are fewer avenues for that type of challenge today, and fewer still as people retreat into their homogenous bubbles.
They have a clear story for other wokists then: fired for just existing. If they spend all day saying the company is Xist, then when they get fired they'll make it look Xist, just like they said.
You’re saying that the “wokists” cannot be fired for being unproductive because that would yield too much bad PR about the company being “Xist,” but they can be fired because of a policy against being “wokist?” Never mind the absurd terminology there, even the basic reasoning is nonsensical.
Whenever there's a high-profile activist worker firing, I'm suspicious of motives on both sides because the company really could be trying to suppress something, but someone spending this much time as an activist could be seriously underperforming in their job.
Something that pushed me to resign from a job at a 2nd tier technology company (gaming) was receiving in invitation (company-wide or locality-wide) from an HR person, via company communication channels, to an after-work-hours drag queen conference call event.
It just made me question the value of the HR department-- Here I am with a ton of pressure on me to build a product.
And the HR department is organizing a very non-work related politicized event, using company resources?
I was disgusted-- not about people attending an online, non-work related drag queen event-- Fine, people can do whatever they want in their off hours-- it's none of my business.
But I was disgusted simply that company resources were used to organize peoples' attendance to an event that promotes drag queens. It was the last straw, decided to quit soon after.
HR departments are often charged with helping overstressed workers release some of the stress and tension. That often means crappy pizza parties at the end of a quarter. Sometimes it means off-site parties with BBQ and beer. Sometimes it means renting out a movie theater. Sometimes it means giving funds to 'clubs' at the company to buy some craft alcohol, host a drag event, go play tennis, or anything else.
I don't understand what is political about a drag event. It's a form of performance a la theater, comedy, dance, etc. Can you explain what would bother you about drag queens being promoted? Perhaps drag performances disturb you for some personal reason but to another person a workplace craft whiskey club with a bit of funding from the company to buy a bottle once a month would be disturbing because of the life experience of having an alcoholic as a father or loved one. But I wouldn't expect every event a workplace to put on to appeal to every employee. If that is the goal that is how you end up with the pizza party and that's about it.
As a person who thinks for themselves, I find all these woke people very bigoted, close-minded and discriminatory. My opinions are attacked and unwelcome.
I’m inclined to agree with you, despite your downvotes. Woke ideology is steeped in fundamentalism and it seems to have filled the void where religion used to be. Some people can’t help but be religious; it’s an emergent quality of humans in large societies.
I got downvoted into sweet oblivion for making this exact point in another post. This whole thing is religious. In fact, it’s so religious that it’s caused me to question my own religious beliefs now that I’ve seen an actual religion assembled in front of my eyes. It’s so much like what I see in my own religion that all religion is starting to frighten me.
> In fact, it’s so religious that it’s caused me to question my own religious beliefs now that I’ve seen an actual religion assembled in front of my eyes. It’s so much like what I see in my own religion that all religion is starting to frighten me.
Don't worry about it if some members of a group you self-identify with are assholes. It's a problem when most of them do, and then you have to disassociate yourself with a different label.
Hell, I'm atheist, and I still call out other "atheists" who tell others "your god doesn't exist", or who refuse to wish others "Merry Christmas", etc.
If too many atheists are militant about others' belief system, I'm going to stop calling myself atheist and identify as something else ("Member of the religion of 'We don't care who is up there or if they exist'", although that's quite a mouthful).
I side with the Atheist in this regard. I used to do the agnostic thing, then I realized, agnosticism seems to exist almost exclusively for religion. We don't bother with that in any other context.
Everything regarding the real world is 'almost surely'. I 'almost surely' have a job, a house, a brother and two cats. Any of those might be falsified at any time, but it's a pointless waste of time to faff about it and pedantically make it explicit how I'm pretty sure I'm still employed, but I can't exclude the possibility that maybe I'm not anymore.
If half the country believes I don't have a job, and were offended when I said I did, I'd probably accommodate them with an "almost surely" to get through my morning commute a little more peacefully.
I hear that. But your examples fail because (e.g.) your house is not an unfalsifiable assertion about the cosmos.
I get why you would make an unqualified rejection of the concept of a Sky Daddy. In practice I do, too. We human beings have so much ahead of us, and arbitrary lifestyle demands and fevered imaginings of desert nomads dead over 2000 years don't have a place in our present, much less our future.
Of the infinite set of all possible assertions about the nature of the cosmos, Sky Daddy is almost surely wrong. But then, I believe all assertions about the nature of the cosmos are all almost surely wrong.
You should place an "Only a Sith deal in absolutes" in there...
I'm a Christian and have no problem with Atheist's or what have you. There's a strong chance that there isn't a heaven/hell/72 virgins/what have you waiting "on the other side". I can still be confident in the tactile important parts (IE: Do unto others, love they neighbor, etc) without having my worldview destroyed by a "might" or a "maybe".
It amazes me when someone can say with 100% confidence that it does or doesn't exist.
I would primarily contend that you don't need religion for those parts you find redeeming
All societies function on the 10 commandments without them being explicitly written. Convergent evolution of the concept of society leans towards that. Lying, coveting, and laying all result in the same outcomes.
"Religion" is fine... the "groups" that practices, can be not so much. I can be a Christian and follow Christian tenants without following the Dogma of the Catholic/Lutheran/Baptist/etc. (I consider myself Lutheran even if I don't agree with stuff like baptism of babies - a carry over from the Catholic Church.)
I also tend to follow JBPetersons line of thinking in that "religion" is a result of hundreds of thousands of years of "evolution". "religions" codify, as you've said, the important parts of life (Don't steal, kill, that's not your wife, etc).
There is physical truth - an apple weighs this much, an atom has these parts, etc.
And then there is Truth - don't lie. Don't steal. Don't screw your neighbor or your neighbors wife. Those aren't "true" like the weight of an atom is true... but it is true as in life is better if you live with those "rules".
Religions give a basis of reference - and yes, that comes with some of the baggage (IE: Catholic priests, holy rollers in churches getting caught in bath houses, etc). It is hard - and at times impossible - to separate the Church from the Truth at the core.
Like you said, all religions have similar cores... but there ARE differences - Jesus was a carpenter... Muhamad was a warlord. Buddha was a scholar. Their cores are very similar but there are differences in and out of the religions.
Bit of a ramble as it's hard to pack a complicated conversation in a few paragraphs.
Religion does provide a convenient framework and community around those values, you could also call it enforcement, depending on how strict a given religion is.
As with any ideology, there are of course those who wish to exploit it to their own ends, which is where we get the atrocities that have happened through human history.
Yes, I would say it's human capacity for atrocity that's the danger, and the justification for it attaches itself to anything. In the past, that has been religion, nationality, race, even abstract concepts like justice. I believe it's naive to blame religion, even wishful thinking: if it were religion that is solely responsible for human atrocity, the answer then is simple: get rid of religion by any means necessary.
Absolutely. Justification for why My Tribe can kill Your Tribe doesn't need any rational basis. All you have to do is look at the religious fervor and protests/violence/intolerance from The Woke to see that at a level more clear than it's ever been - and NONE of that is because of "religion" per-se, even if the level of energy is the same as the devoutly religious.
I hope we can survive as a species long enough to figure a solution.
"The Woke" as you call them, the extremely active, extremely online and extremist faction are an absolutely miniscule number of people, who are neither violent, nor particularly intolerant. The fearmongering about them is completely overblown, this is simply another case of the American penchant for the extreme, rearing its head again. Stirring up a storm by shouting loudly and getting attention in the media is nothing new, and is necessary for bringing attention to problems that the comfortable majority have been able to ignore.
"Police are infallible!" is now "police are infallible?", thanks to activists and media attention on the very real problems faced by minorities in the US. The people who were previously sitting very comfortably and safe on top of the pile are feeling their position threatened, so of course they're afraid of the world becoming more equitable. That's just too bad for them.
The extremists will move to another cause or mellow out, but that spark of activism is needed to effect real social change.
You didn't notice hundreds of millions in damage in multiple states? I think the number may be in the billions... Court houses destroyed... people killed... ran over.. 4 years of violence. Flash mobs against people who go against the Woke tenants and Woke Crusaders to burn the heathens at the stake.
Overblown? Violence and destruction continues by "peaceful activists" as they spread Love and Tolerance by destroying those who disagree.
"Police are infallible" thanks to people willing to lie and destroy to get their ways. And while the violence escalates and police get more "infallible?"... people around the country are more unsafe than ever... the cities that are defunding police are seeing spikes in violence, murder, robberies, etc.
Because idiots focus on a couple bad apples and ignore the millions of good interactions and positive things police provide.
"too bad for them" I like how your basic premise is "they aren't violent or intolerant" yet it's fear and violence that are making "them" scared.
Too bad for them? Too bad for the hypocrites that use hate to fight hate and racism to fight racism and violence to support lies.
> "The Woke" as you call them, the extremely active, extremely online and extremist faction are an absolutely miniscule number of people, who are neither violent, nor particularly intolerant. The fearmongering about them is completely overblown
Do you think it might be possible, at all, that those who fear the woke might know some things about which you are unaware? Incidents, details or facts that, if you yourself knew them, would change your mind? Yes, no...?
Yep. My almost surely is philosophical. Socially, it also keeps me humble. Rather than blurting out "That's ridiculous!" when someone tells me about their ridiculous beliefs, I shrug and think . o O ("there is a non-zero chance that {insert absurdity} is true")
Probably a better term here would be "approaches", as in limits. 0 and 1 are not valid probabilities - absolute certainty shuts down probability math.
(This is cleanly visible if you try to transform probabilities to log-odds representation - of the extremes, one becomes undefined, and the other infinite.)
The infinite set is the set of all cosmologies. An axiom of my personal metaphysics is that any assertion about the cosmos is almost surely wrong, including those informed by science. That's not a formal statement of the principle, but gets at it.
My belief is that human understanding of the cosmos is much more limited than we generally understand it to be. Relative to what (I believe) the cosmos contains, human beings have no more, and no less, capacity to understand it than any arbitrary animal. We can explain only that which is important and relevant to ourselves, and vast arenas are foreclosed even to our perception.
probabalistic agnostics like me assign a pseudocount of 1 to every possible religion (with some smoothing). Any god hypothesis is considered, but extremely unlikely.
I think most people just have a tendency to to repeat dogma they are exposed to, based on the groups they belong in. If you join any group anywhere, be it people who practice yoga, the burning man crowd, or an online forum about programming, you'll find that there's a hierarchy, with some individuals who are highly regarded by the group, you might call them thought leaders. The individuals at the top have certain beliefs, and most people in the group will echo those beliefs as dogma everyone should believe in, and try to suppress dissenting views.
More than that, the thought leaders set the emotional tone of interaction with outsiders.
The problem is that the US is an aggressively authoritarian country, and the default tone is violent narcissistic bullying.
Unlike other authoritarian countries this isn't explicitly state sanctioned.
It's more of a continually dramatised and modelled mode of relationship which is so ingrained in so many public interactions - from school to work to "self help" to corporate culture to mainstream media to social media to large parts of elected government - that it sinks into the background as a kind of unavoidable noise.
It would be deafening if you'd never experienced it before. Because it's so common it's tuned out consciously, but still dominant unconsciously.
The "woke" part isn't the problem. It's the copying of the dominant emotional ideology that leads to both left and right extremism, and also justifies excess corporate power and other horrors.
It's all part of the same issue, but both left and right are only looking at small parts of it - and getting angry about those while missing the underlying issue.
> I think most people just have a tendency to to repeat dogma they are exposed to, based on the groups they belong in.
This realization is basically how the "NPC" meme was born. It predated the "no inner voice" study, that's just how most people seem to have come across the idea because the study half-jokingly caused a "wait a minute, we were right?" moment.
The thing with belief is that you are 100% sure about something you cannot be sure about.
If you ask a religious person "what do you think is the chance that god exists?". A rational person will never say 100%, because objectively you cannot be 100% sure.
But a religious person is wired in a way were they are unable to admit this fact. It is a lie people tell themselves because somehow they think it benefits them.
Now whether it really benefits them or not, I'm not sure. But I would think nothing can beat the objective truth, and that truth might include probabilities.
This is an egregious over simplification of religious belief. I think most religious people are absolutely not 100% sure. That's why faith is such a big topic, and why philosophers and theologians have written about faith, the existence of god, whether it can be proven, etc. for centuries.
Besides, aren't all your actions based on beliefs that are are less than 100% certain? I don't know that the line of code I'm writing is going to compile, or that the company I'm working for isn't going to go under tomorrow, or that the relationships I'm investing time into are going to last forever, but I'm certain enough that I proceed with them. Believing in God isn't so different.
This is true and one of the reasons I remain religious. Faith in an ultimate resolution allows you to persevere the suffering you will invariably go through. The loss you will certainly experience. It seems to me that without faith in something, Nihilism creeps in and that’s a dark place to live your short days.
> But a religious person is wired in a way were they are unable to admit this fact.
This religious person can. I am not 100% on anything via reason, I just don’t think reason is the only way of knowing. I can’t be certain that my dad loves me via reason but I know he loves me via human faith because I know my father, I don’t simply know about him. Authentic Christian faith in God is similar to that.
Thankfully not all non-religious people are wired to make such sophomoric sweeping generalizations as you.
It's not at all unusual for people to start off comfortable with their level of faith in others, and then discover their faith was misplaced.
I gave up on Christians specifically when I discovered that Christians all believe different things. I would literally ask in chat rooms for a group to define one thing they all agreed on, and then watch as fights broke out - because when pushed they all disagreed violently on core ethics and dogma, and yet they also believed they were right and other people with different views "Weren't real Christians."
It turns out there is no real content to that kind of religion. It's all meta-justification for a person's existing moral leanings, and meta-interpretation of a "sacred text" which is broad enough to rationalise pretty much anything, including some appalling and terrible things. (History has plenty to say about that.)
The only true common belief is that religious self-justification is a valid and respectable process. That was the one thing they had in common.
Specifics and details were wildly variable window dressing, and heavily customised to personal taste.
> I would literally ask in chat rooms for a group to define one thing they all agreed on, and then watch as fights broke out
> It's all meta-justification for a person's existing moral leanings
There is a vibrant and ancient school of Christian moral teaching that still permeates to the core of western law and governance. Talking to strangers in chatrooms is not a serious confrontation of this reality nor any basis for dismissing it all.
> interpretation of a "sacred text" which is broad enough to rationalise pretty much anything, including some appalling and terrible things. (History has plenty to say about that.)
Interestingly, those Christians who did appalling things used the same cherry picking strategy with Scripture that you use with history.
So I'm guessing you are Christian because you were raised in an environment like that.
If you were raised in Pakistan, you would have been a Muslim.
So how much chance would you give each religion to be the correct one? Because they all contradict each other, and believing in one basically states that the other can't be true.
Not all religions are centered around a 100% belief in God. That assumption seems to be a very common mistake among atheists and agnostics who are most familiar with Christianity.
I used to be like this. I regret it. I made a distinction that didn't exist-- that there were non-religious people and religious people.
Naturally, I was one of the non-religious people and therefore better. Instead of defining what I believed in, I could just attack the things I didn't believe in. It was easy. I never had to play defense. I might not win every time but I could never lose. I could rattle cages but had no cage of my own.
The way you're describing yourself is how everyone thinks. Faith and doubt are two sides of the same coin. I consider faith worthless without doubt.
So if I say 0%, is that irrational? I mean I’m not 0% sure, but I am to many many decimal places. So what if somebody is religious in the same way? They’re not 100% sure, but they understand significant digits, and just round up.
George Steiner discussed this in «The Secular Messiahs» (part of «Nostalgia for the Absolute»):
> [They]...are not only attempts to fill the emptiness left by the decay of Christian theology and Christian dogma. They are themselves a kind of substitute theology. They are systems of belief and argument which may be savagely antireligious (...) but whose structure, whose aspirations, whose claims on the believer, are profoundly religious in strategy and in effect.
> (...) Those great gestures of imagination, which have tried to replace religion in the West, and Christianity in particular, are very much like the churches, like the theology, they want to replace.
> The convinced Marxist, the practising psychoanalyst, the structural anthropologist, will be outraged at the thought that his beliefs, that his analyses of the human situation, are mythologies and allegoric constructs directly derivative from the religious world-image which he has sought to replace. He will be furious at that idea. And his rage has its justification.
Professor John McWhorter has called wokeness a religion
> Something must be understood: I do not mean that these people’s ideology is “like” a religion. I seek no rhetorical snap in the comparison. I mean that it actually is a religion. A naïve anthropologist would see no difference in type between Mormonism and this new form of antiracism.
As a Mormon[1], this is interesting. Not because I disagree, necessarily, I certainly see the similarity between Wokeness and religion. But I think an anthropologist would see a difference. At the heart of the experience of being a Mormon (and presumably other religions, though I'm most familiar with this one) is belief in a Prophet (capital P) and a collection of scripture. If you ask any Mormon who the Prophet is, they'll tell you, and they'll all give the same answer. So, who is the prophet of Woke, and what are the scriptures?
1 Culturally, at least, if not really religiously. I'm about as much of a Mormon as Larry David is a Jew.
EDIT: the article linked does partially answer my question:
> There is what we could think of as a triple-Testament tome, consisting of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me, Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility, and Ibram Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist. A box set of the three would take its place on coffeetables and mantlepieces nationwide.
> But I think an anthropologist would see a difference. At the heart of the experience of being a Mormon (and presumably other religions, though I'm most familiar with this one) is belief in a Prophet (capital P) and a collection of scripture. If you ask any Mormon who the Prophet is, they'll tell you, and they'll all give the same answer. So, who is the prophet of Woke, and what are the scriptures?
I don't think the heart of a religion is a belief in a Prophet. Hindiusm is a religion, no one will dispute that, but that Hindus don't have the concept of a Prophet (big 'P'). Same goes for many other commonly accepted religions.
The only thing that all religions have in common is "A core set of beliefs, agreed upon among their followers".
One of the interesting things about wokeism is that the core beliefs - the things that you must uphold and recognise as absolute truth in order to be recognised as one of the tribe - are not actually codified anywhere. Not only that, they keep changing (though at every step, you must have complete faith that the current beliefs are absolutely true and correct). There's not some kind of formal process to be inducted into the truths either - you have to learn them through being continuously immersed in the community of believers. Oh, and it's vitally important that you also believe that these truths are obvious to every decent person, and that the only reason someone would claim to have trouble understanding them is because they're evil.
That you were born with and possess privilege and that acknowledging that privelege is morally necessary. That's the original sin parallel.
You can just read McWhorter, he draws a lot of parallels between Woke as a religion and Christian religion. It is somewhat amusing as an allegory. He's actually a fairly level headed critic.
People seem to be fine with religion for the most part. If you want to root out dogmatic thinking, then shun religious thinking from both the Woke religion and the socially expected Christian religion.
Of course, if conservatives were more welcoming to atheism this wouldn't be an issue to begin with.
> What is the core set of beliefs agreed upon by Woke adherents?
From the outside of the asylum, it looks like:
"Discrimination against $GROUP_THAT_IS_NOT_MALE_AND_NOT_WHITE is active and alive and is the most important fight we have".
Maybe there's others, but I'm not part of the religion so it's difficult for me to tell why the followers hold the beliefs they do, because I don't share their beliefs.
Neither a prophet nor scripture is a necessary component of religion. The classic religions of the Greeks, Romans, Germanic tribes, Africa, and the New World, had neither of these things, and the list is not exhaustive by any means.
Granted, but it's an anthropologist making the comparison, not a Mormon. I read "difference in kind" as religion vs. not-religion, where Mormon could just as easily be Ishmaeli or Shinto.
Then again, those religions where not absolutist as for example the Abrahamic religions are. I think especially the distinction between polytheism and monotheism explains a lot of that.
Religion is too broad a term, so there are subclassifications. You mentioned "absolutist" for one.
If one were to talk about religion in general, the definition would probably be close to encompassing nation states and corporations too: an intersubjective idea, that exists as long as people believe in it, and that evolves independently of any individual or group of believers.
This is too specific. Look for the Trinity and you'll see it plainly. What lives in everyone's heart, created the world we live in and gives society its structure, according to them? That's what they worship.
Many feel so. Beliefs are limited. But the feeling that make you get out of bed every morning, surrender and trust in life itself if you want to call it that, is on par with consciousness.
It's a cult, not a religion. The difference is that a religion forms around some highly complex and abstract wisdom that even the inner circle barely understands, and by the time it gets to the outer circles, the wisdom gets dumbed down to a religious pamphlet. A cult, on the other hand, is a much smaller formation around a fairly trivial secret that holds all the cult members attracted to the dim glow of that secret. For this reason I'd compare the radical woke crowd with a weak variation scientology. And woke is weak because their secret is a lie.
Thanks for your balanced comment. I should clarify that while I do believe I think for myself, that's not to suggest that all woke folks don't. Although I'm sure some don't.
As a POC, I appreciate these woke people, even though some of their actions may be heavy handed. I wish there were more of them when I was growing up and being bullied by real bigots.
> As a POC, I appreciate these woke people, even though some of their actions may be heavy handed. I wish there were more of them when I was growing up and being bullied by real bigots.
Counterpoint: As a non-white, oppressed person who grew up in Apartheid South Africa, these 'Woke' people resemble the Apartheid rulers way too much for my liking[1].
As bad as the situation is, as presented by BLM for blacks in America now and in the recent past, it's nowhere near as bad as having laws on the books, that courts had to enforce, that made you less of a human than white people.
[1] The animals looked from Pig to Man, and Man to Pig, and they could not tell the difference, roughly paraphrased from Orwell.
I live in South Africa. DeGroot and his ilk were nothing like "woke". They were monsters that dehumanized citizens and murdered with impunity. You should know that, which makes your comment suspect.
> I live in South Africa. DeGroot and his ilk were nothing like "woke". They were monsters that dehumanized citizens and murdered with impunity. You should know that, which makes your comment suspect.
But I do know that they dehumanised citizens, because I specifically said:
> it's nowhere near as bad as having laws on the books, that courts had to enforce, that made you less of a human than white people.
Why did you ignore that? Is there something about that comment that makes it hard to read, or hard to understand?
I never claimed that the Woke followers were murdering others with impunity, I said that I see a resemblance between them and the apartheid rulers. I never specified what the resemblance was, but since you appear to assume that "murder" was the resemblance, let me clarify that I did not intend to claim that the Woke followers were murdering people.
The resemblance I see is the dehumanisation of non-Woke followers (not dehumanisation of just the Woke-opposed, but of anyone who may even be neutral).
If you compare people to apartheid murderers and _don't_ specify how you mean, you can't exactly claim he's jumping down _your_ throat taking that the wrong way.
"Oh, these leftists seem like Adolf Hitler"
"Fuck you"
"Hey, hey, I didn't specify _how_ they're like Hitler, I just meant how he dehumanises people, not _any_ of the things almost everyone in the world knows him for"
This is why I hate the anti-woke, just incredible levels of smug, trolling styles of communication, constantly saying inflammatory bullshit and then pulling back and acting "attacked" and calling people "close-minded" for not asking you to elaborate on obvious "veiled" insults and bile.
these 'Woke' people resemble the Apartheid rulers way too much for my liking[1].
How much do they resemble the Apartheid rulers? They look quite different to me. When I think of the Apartheid rulers, the key defining features I think of are people operating a state that actively dehumanises large groups of people and sentences them to life as second-class citizens lacking rights and opportunities, and who are made to fear violence of the state, and so on.
These woke people seem quite different to that. So when you say they're too similar for your liking, how similar is that? In what ways, that you don't like, are they similar?
I am genuinely sorry to hear you went through that, and I’m glad to hear — if I’ve interpreted you correctly — that some woke people provided you their support. However, I don’t believe disciples of the woke ideology have a monopoly on opposition to bullying, and I think they are often bullies themselves. Furthermore, it appears that woke ideologues are not internally consistent with their opposition to racism. Case in point: the recent demotion of Google diversity head for anti-semitism.
I am arguing that Bobb is the woke party in this case, but that doesn't preclude Google from also being under the influence of woke ideologues. The woke are not beyond eating their own. It's somewhat tautological — the company would need some woke sympathy for Bobb to be installed in that particular position of power in the first place. Bobb forced Google into an untenable position which is why they had to make the move. It is perhaps also telling that he was not fired. Would a white, non-woke person have enjoyed the same leniency? Difficult to say without seeing more data, but I remain sceptic for now.
I was bullied and beaten for being "the jewish kid" when I was growing up. I'm completely sure that those "woke people" would have joined the bullies then. They're exactly the kind of people who enjoy ganging up on someone and feel their superiority.
The problem isn't "woke college kids"... it's intolerance way PAST the point of intolerance. Racism in the name of fighting racism. Hate in the name of love.
It's the religious fervor by the Woke Crusaders who are willing to burn, pillage, destroy, kill in the name of "Diversity, Equity, Inclusion" - and destroying justice, REAL equality and our collective future.
People are falling over themselves in this thread to blame "Woke" people, but there are barely any concrete examples here at all. It should be easy to provide if this is so blatantly fundamentalist?
That's how debate works! Opinions are SUPPOSED to be attacked! Your opinions are being attacked because people think they are trash. If you can't stand it then don't share your opinions.
I work in Google with many people strongly holding strong beliefs. Not sure where the line for "extremist" actually is, but I can easily imagine these people getting called by that. I can't say I've noticed a significant correlation between that and productivity.
But: coffee breaks with a group involving people of two opposite views are always a sight to behold.
You are attacking a strawman. The commenter said extremists, not diversive opinions.
It's one thing to have diversive opinions and comely discussing them... And another to be emotionally overinvested and dumping you issues onto your coworkers.
Agreed, but the definition of extremist seems to be moving; seems you cannot voice opinions anymore and it seems especially a US thing. Bill gates and Steve Jobs would be marked as extremists in the way they led the business now. Not political but angry and aggressive to the max. I think we need 'extremists' to not have a flat society where nothing happens.
I think you weren't paying attention? Both were always known as extremists.
Steve Jobs was a raging asshole, until it caught up with him. Turns out you can't bully cancer into submission.
Gates was involved in some seriously shady stuff and under his rule, Microsoft ruined a whole lot of companies, some of which thought they had a profitable agreement. And not by some sort of honest competition, but some very underhanded tactics.
Gates seems to have a much better reputation as of late, but he used to have a Borg style icon on slashdot for a reason. Lots of people didn't like him at all back when he was running the show.
>Steve Jobs was a raging asshole, until it caught up with him. Turns out you can't bully cancer into submission
You really think that though both Bill and Steve were assholes at the beginning of their careers, but the fact that Bill gentrified himself is why he hasn't died of cancer and Steve did?
From what I've read, Steve Jobs was just too full of himself. He had a curable form of pancreatic cancer, and access to any health care conceivable. Instead of that he went with a fruit diet, acupuncture and a psychic. Apparently his diet was so nuts that when Ashton Kutcher tried replicating it, he ended up in the hospital.
Gates while an asshole in the business sense, from accounts that I've heard is a genuinely extremely intelligent person and has great technical understanding. While medicine is not his field from what I heard he seems to take well considered positions in that regard, and I think it's doubtful he'd sabotage his own chances of recovery in such a way.
Jobs was extremely intelligent as well (I'm not sure how you could be disingenuously extremely intelligent, btw :P ), but his decision to cure his cancer with this route was always mysterious.
You're voicing an opinion right now. Unfortunately there's a common misconception that everyone is entitled to voice their opinion without criticism. If you go around all day saying stuff that people think is hurtful or obnoxious, the freedom that allows you to do so is the same freedom those people have to tell you to get lost.
Why is it difficult to keep the political leanings, opinions, activism away from the workplace and act like professionals? If you disagree with something your colleagues or the company you work for, just quit and find another job.
In my humble opinion, there is a place for expressing/speaking up about the things you care about, but workplace is not one of it. You have no locus standi.
I think a lot of these people don't bring much to the table professionally, so they use woke call out culture to implicitly threaten those around them to treat them with kid gloves and give them a wide birth. I doubt these companies feel that sad when people like that leave.
This is a broad generalisation without supporting evidence - not sure if this helps improve the quality of the discussion. Can you substantiate your statement further?
The study you pointed to indicates that these psychopathic/narcissistic traits apply to virtuous victimhood signalers on both the woke ("Recognize your privilege") and the anti-woke ("The real racists are all on the left") side of thing.
As opposed to the people who spend their time just meandering on Reddit/HN in various non-technical posts...?
I think it’s a bad argument to say that those who aren’t activists are also those are who better at their jobs because those who don’t do activism must be spending their time honing their craft. Just because you’re doing one not doing one activity doesn’t mean you’re doing one other. The set of activities that exist is not (activism, honing craft) - it is a much bigger set of possibilities.
America atleast created a society where life revolves around corporations. Your job is a big part of your identify. Corporations are part of your identity in general. Your a McDonald's or a burger king person, coke or Pepsi. private corporations run America. I think it's only natural for people to express them selves through their work
I think younger workers bought the lifestyle pitch of their employer hook, line, and sinker. They see the office (virtual or otherwise) as a part of their identity.
It’s hard to get employees to work 60+ hour work weeks if they aren’t bought into the company mission. It is very effective to blur work and life lines to get workers to put in the extra hours.
> If you disagree with something your colleagues or the company you work for, just quit and find another job.
On the flip side, why should you? Companies and cultures are made of people and they change as people change. Why should you just quit before trying to institute change?
When I hire people, I generally look for people who don’t accept the status quo as inherently right and try to solve problems.
> When I hire people, I generally look for people who don’t accept the status quo as inherently right and try to solve problems.
There are limits to this aren’t there? I too am a fan of contrarianism, but at some point — depending entirely on the context and the role of the employee — self-indulgent contrarianism becomes counterproductive.
I blame the long hours and dying of outside of work social groups. Churches and "bowling league"-style activities probably kept it out of work fairly efficiently.
>Why is it difficult to keep the political leanings, opinions, activism away from the workplace and act like professionals?
It's not a question of how difficult it is. Their goal is literally the opposite. Everything is a platform for political discussion, identity, etc. Work, culture, art, etc.
It's totally possible to have a workplace you describe, but when people view everything as a platform for activism they don't want that. They want the platform.
It's difficult when the company itself decides to be political. Acting like professionals and having official channels talk about ethnicity ratios is not very compatible:
> Medium said that 52% of departures were white, and that one third of the company is non-white and non-Asian.
The workplace is inherently political; it consumes the vast majority of workers' waking hours for years, and decades. Corporations have vast, measurable influence in peoples lives, both good and bad. Why are the workers, to you, not permitted the agency to bring politics to work?
Because you’re being paid to come to work and work. That’s why they call it “work”, not “debate club”. The idea that young, affluent tech workers like those at Google expect to come to work and argue over the plight of black lives in between writing code for serving ads all while making $300k a year and complaining about other peoples’ privilege is just gross (and a little funny).
> The workplace is inherently political; it consumes the vast majority of workers' waking hours for years, and decades.
Where are people working where the vast majority of their waking hours, for decades, are spent at work? At least be honest, these articles about bringing politics to work are talking about people in comfy tech jobs working 8 hours a day, not wage slaves in coal mines and factories working 12 hour days.
"Vast majority" might be an overstatement, but if you work an 8-hour day, commute for an hour each way, and take an hour for lunch (which, let's face it, is often with co-workers and involves work talk), that's 11 hours doing things that you probably wouldn't be doing if you didn't have to work. If we assume 8 hours of sleep, that's only 5 waking, non-work-related hours.
It's... pretty lame, honestly. All these modern conveniences and we're working more than ever these days (in the US, at least).
Also not really sure where all these "comfy tech jobs" are; every tech job I've worked in the past 15+ years often has people working ~10 hour days. I'm not aware of many people in tech who work 9-5 and that's it.
To be fair, these jobs do exist in a sizable amount. I’ve almost never worked more than 40hrs/week and have short commute times. (Lunch is included in my working hours) I’ve seen many places where people work potentially less hours than I do during certain seasons.
I’m a pretty productive employee (when I want to be and feel incentivized) and am paid well enough to be in the 1%.
I still agree with what you said. Just want to say that these jobs exist. It’s up to the employee to fight for it though more than anything. Many employees in tech are a bit of pushovers though. (Or are afraid of losing their visa)
I very strongly disagree. No one is asking their companies to stand up for trade policy or any wonky stuff outside their business. It's almost entirely about representation and discrimination. Things are part of everyone's everyday lives and things very much in every company's power to resolve.
I think the notion that companies should only care about their bottom line is the thing that needs to end. Returning profits for shareholders isn't enough. Employees have started to think that who they work for should reflect their values. And why not?
It's false equivalence to say that just because someone wants identity politics out of work, they also are against representation and discrimination.
Someone may support active efforts to address inequality in the workplace (eg better interviewing procedures, bias training, inclusive language in products), but be against anything that's political, such as supporting black lives matter or taking a position on middle east conflicts at work.
It doesn't mean they disagree with the latter. They just want it out of work, they might even support it.
I don't think identity politics is really the problem. That's not synonymous with wanting representation. And BLM isn't political. It's just acknowledging that black lives matter. It becomes political when a political party makes a point of not refusing to say it.
They don't have a platform besides what's in the name. Any website with a formal agenda isn't "official" in any sense nor have 99% of people marching for justice read whatever you read. It's just black lives matter. And people engineering reasons to avoid saying it without explicitly saying black lives don't matter.
You have it exactly backwards - I believe black live matter, but I don't believe in the organization BLM and they do have an an organization and an agenda.
It's a kafka trap to name your organization with political goals some obviously positive name, and then declare anyone who does not support your organizations methods or particulars of its agenda as a hater of that positive name.
It's so transparent we're just in an age where being honest is rare, and people will convince themselves obviously untrue things - 'they don't have a platform' but they removed their 'what we believe page' including being against the nuclear family https://nypost.com/2020/09/24/blm-removes-website-language-b... .
It's a weird sort of denial of reality to just insist things don't exist, like an organization (which BLM is) with a formal agenda (which BLM has, even if they tried to obfuscate after being criticized for it's more radical and harmful ideas).
Maybe because it's not allowed to be discussed openly. My company has absolutely let rip on political discussions and it's been pretty healthy. Nobody doesn't want diversity. It's purely a question of what we do about it.
How do you know? Do you think everyone is being honest with you when they appear to state their opinions, knowing that saying the wrong thing could get them canceled? Are you naive enough to believe all humans are truthful?
Doesn't really matter does it? You can liken it to a Turing Test. If you can convince a naïve observer your not racist or even that you are anti-racist, then you are. Maybe you're faking. Maybe you're a lifelike android. The world still ends up a better place.
> Employees have started to think that who they work for should reflect their values. And why not?
Then this is perfect, they can leave and find a job that does reflect their values. They should've quitted right when they realized their values weren't aligned but I guess they valued a severance package more. Still, win-win.
I think this article is off-topic to the memo itself - it seems to be going to a lot of random culture war issues that don't seem to be dealt with or related to the part of the memo quoted. The journalist is probably looking to gin up controversy by attaching issues to Medium that aren't really the driver of the situation.
The story here seems to be Medium is struggling to turn a profit, and there are a lot of people reading which direction the wind is blowing and getting out. Mass resignations are a sign of poor job security and general management problems, not people seeing red over vague and not-much-quoted-here memos.
> “[Medium wants] to enforce good vibes and shut down anything that is questioning ‘the mission,’” they said.
Medium are right to “enforce good vibes”. Nobody wants to come to work to constantly defend themselves from ideological harassment.
It is openly conceded in the piece that the critics know that Medium leadership didn’t write anything unacceptable, and that those critics are leaving owing to their understanding/interpretation of leadership’s implicit message that while philosophical diversity is acceptable, harassment of colleagues is not.
Definitely left a bad taste in my mouth. They might have been more honest than they planned when they indirectly admitted they're proud to have an above-average ratio of a specific skin color in their company.
As a European who doesn’t think Europe has an ongoing skin color / racism problem, you’re signaling that you’ve never really thought about the proceeds of slavery and colonialism to finance, well, almost everything we associate with modern Europe. Especially ignorant if you’re French, British, Dutch, Belgian, Italian, and probably a few other extreme oppressors left off that list.
America has a lot of problems, but we TALK about them. Europe is at least 20 years behind the curve. You guys would be happy with pedophile priests if we hadn’t exposed them.
That’s a pop star you ran out of town. The BBC or Der Spiegel weren’t falling all over themselves to be first to let everyone know that the Catholic Church had a giant problem. There’s a reason Spotlight was an important movie.
An Irish pop-star... Ireland has known about paedo-priests long before Hollywood. And the pop-star above performed that piece on SNL. It ended her in the US. I'm not American, by the way.
I didn't want to start a comment war of Europe against USA. I'm saying that from my outsider point of view, with an European education that taught me about slavery, colonialism, and a little of finance, USA has an obvious ingoing problem with skin colours and racism. I don't really think us European are behind the curve, we are just on another line. We are not perfect too, and we haven't been in the past. You mention slavery and colonialism I will add the too many genocides. We can take, and we do take lessons from USA, sometimes a bit late yes. USA could also take lessons from Europe, we have some experience about what not to do.
I've heard, that people from the USA understand the term 'race' differently than Germans. A direct translation into German would be 'Rasse', a term reserved for dog breeds and history lessons.
From how I see the word 'race' being used in the USA, I can't see the difference to the German word 'Rasse'. For me, the racism in the USA begins with the insistence of separating people according to their 'race' and this race based thinking has permeated their entire culture. Doesn't matter where you look, old school liberals vs woke, republicans or democrats, they all divide people according to their race. It's even on their ID card.
And yet some claim 'race' is a totally different concept compared to 'Rasse'. I don't buy it, not one bit. The USA will never overcome racism, until they stop thinking in races.
> The USA will never overcome racism, until they stop thinking in races.
That is a necessary but not sufficient condition. You also have to (a) somehow stop the people who like discriminating based on race ("racists"), and (b) do something about the systems that were intentionally setup to discriminate based on race ("systematic racism").
Since you say you're not from the USA, I'll give you some context which is that your talking point is frequently used by people here to argue against addressing (a) and (b). And often it is particularly brought up by people accused of discriminating based on people's race, as though pointing out that someone is being racist is worse than actually being racist.
> That is a necessary but not sufficient condition. You also have to (a) somehow stop the people who like discriminating based on race ("racists"), and (b) do something about the systems that were intentionally setup to discriminate based on race ("systematic racism").
Agreed. I don't believe you can achieve that continuing to use race as concept. The important divide is between socioeconomic classes. Identify people in need of support, help them. People in poor neighborhoods will receive the same help, no matter their skin color. With that, you'll have widespread support for the measures, at least as far as that is possible for such measure in the USA. Bring race into the mix and you introduce another point of division, as neighbors with the same socioeconomic class would be treated differently for racist reasons.
Abandon race as concept, identify people in need of help by socioeconomic metrics and provide support to them.
I worked at Amazon when what we called the "Crying at desk" article[1] was published in the New York Times. The memorable moment from that article was an Amazon employee who said he had, at one point or another, witnessed every one of his teammates crying at their desk. For what it's worth, in my ~10 years at Amazon I saw only one person crying at their desk.
After the article came out, it actually had a big effect on our group. Our leaders talked to us about the article and about morale. We instituted a "happy hour" which basically ended the workday early (earlier than usual) on Fridays. We opened a little snack pit in our area with free food and drinks. We started doing irregular team building exercises.
This moment, with the NYT article, was actually the only time I recall seeing noticeable changes to our day to day work. Leaders came and went. Teams changed. But everything was more or less the same. Then, one day, this article comes out of nowhere. I didn't identify with it at all, our group was much more mild than anything the article talked about, and suddenly we were making all of these changes - almost instantly.
I liked and appreciated the changes but it always perplexed me why it took a story in the NYT to get them to come about. Either the NYT knows our internal morale better than our leaders did, and our leaders didn't react until they saw it in the NYT - or, the NYT didn't know our morale and our leaders overreacted based on third hand reporting about it.
It's very odd to me. I've seen people directly telling leadership that we are overworked, that schedules are impossible, that we need to work on group morale, etc - and it very obviously meant nothing to the leaders. You could almost see the words washing over them and leaving nothing behind and indeed, nothing ever came from complaints or feedback like that (so far as I could tell). And yet, if a NYT reporter writes a single article, instant and dramatic reaction.
All this is to say that whenever I see articles like this one, I have to wonder first, if the average Medium employee is going "That's weird, I didn't know there was a culture war going on here." And second, what the reaction to something like this article would be. Are the leaders at Medium going to start suddenly doing different stuff because of the "Techcrunch article"? Would it need to be from a media company with more cachet to make a difference?
You were in a good bubble/team. I worked at Amazon around that time (I had left amazon right before that article) and noticed a lot of morale problems at work, and yes, people crying.
In one of my most stressful projects, was me taking over the work of an engineer, who had a breakdown at work (crying and all), as she requested some time off and was denied. She obviously ended up quitting (or fired, can't tell).
I was done with my project, and it was a super tight deadline, and had to finish her part and worked weekends for a couple of months. At the end, I barely got a thank you from my manager.
The red flag would have been when I joined the company, as my team had a good-bye party for a lead engineer, who had been there for barely a year. During that lunch I learned that he left as he was burnt out, after just a year. And, yes, that was a very successful project and product at Amazon. That was a sign, that even if you product/project succeeds and does really well, amazon doesn't reward you but still treats you like being expendable.
Anyway, your experience might not reflect many others in the company
Yeah, I have no doubt there are groups who have it bad there. The strange thing for me is that my group wasn't really described by that article but still reacted like they were. It's like, they only know/believe what the news tells them rather than the much better evidence they could get with their own eyes.
Playing the devil's advocate for your manager: maybe your particular group didn't have morale problems, but others did.
If management wants to raise the average morale, they need everyone to do morale-raising efforts, even managers who don't think their particular groups needs it. Hence why your team got the changes even though it was previously fine.
Company leaders really live in a bubble compared to the working stiff cranking out code. They often have no understanding of working conditions, and are instead focused on products and customers. A common inclination when facing internal criticism (if that's encouraged at all) is to dismiss or minimize the importance. Yet when a supposedly neutral 3rd party reveals a different perspective, the leaders are given permission to make changes.
>It's very odd to me. I've seen people directly telling leadership that we are overworked, that schedules are impossible, that we need to work on group morale, etc - and it very obviously meant nothing to the leaders. You could almost see the words washing over them and leaving nothing behind and indeed, nothing ever came from complaints or feedback like that (so far as I could tell). And yet, if a NYT reporter writes a single article, instant and dramatic reaction.
This shouldn't really surprise you. Mass media are essentially the arbiters of morality. Whether what they publish is factually true or not, the perception will change accordingly. Your "leaders" and co-workers don't have that kind of power.
When I worked at Amazon I never saw anybody cry at their desk either. I did however see a few people cry in the bathrooms, and towards the end I felt like doing the same.
These "activist first" employees should understand that if their primary purpose is activism, then they should indeed switch to a company that hires activists instead of people who are there to get the work done.
Activism is not a job. I see many people who think it is. "Pay me to change your values and judge you". Thanks, but I can get that for free.
I don't do activism at work, but I certainly do sell myself to employers and potential employers.
The greatest value that I provide in my work is that I am me: I am a person, with human needs and concerns and thoughts and inspiration and creativity. I leave some of myself in my work.
It surprises me when people have the attitude that you have expressed, that you are just there to get the work done. Is your job in high tech really to robotically do the task?
It makes it seem, to me, like you are greatly underselling yourself.
No, I said "activist first". Or for many "activist only".
I see people who think the actual work is incidental.
You say you don't even do activism at work, and even less activism first. So how do you imagine you disagree with me?
Unless you have a super low qualification job where you're hired to be a warm body, you're actually hired for the traits you mention, so that is the job. That is actually the "get the work done".
Ignoring all the social aspects of the article, regarding this quote from the memo;
> “repeated interactions that are nonconstructive, cast doubt, assume bad intent, make unsubstantiated accusations, or otherwise do not contribute to a positive environment have a massive negative impact on the team and working environment.”
I've had experiences where different levels of management within the company (macro level) or project (micro level) have been making what appear to be less than ideal choices. Often this is because they aren't listening to all or the right workers, which could mean they might not understand all of the issue, or possibly that they don't know all of the options/solutions.
Of course, the workers might not understand all the aspects that management does either (which might relate to the quote in the article: "even tough feedback can and should be delivered with empathy"). However, this won't stop the workers that feel wronged or otherwise justified from voicing their discontent to their peers, and so the problem of negativity quickly snowballs. And so a naive solution is to send out a memo with a sentence like my first quote.
But it's a bit of a chicken or egg scenario, because if the management were achieving better results, the workers wouldn't feel negative in the first place.
Man these “woke people (for lack of a better descriptor) we love you but you’re making the workplace unbearable so it’s time for you to stop making everyone angry or take a pile of cash and leave” memos are increasingly abstracted away from the real issues - do the people writing these really think they can come up with a formula that doesn’t peg them as anti-woke but still gets the desired result? Because they can’t.
I basically agree -- the woke interpret anything other than absolute unconditional support as opposition. But there may be something to this strategy of making the announcement so insipid that the woke don't have anything in particular to get upset about, or perhaps aren't even sure they're being opposed.
Lefty tech geeks are going to become poisonous as time goes on. You’re at work to work, not to wheedle and your job is not a platform for whatever social causes the local DSA chapter’s into this week.
The good news is, if their workplace policies are anything like their editorial policies, if you don't like it just wait 3 months, they'll have a new one.
Just like all the cookie banners starting with "we value your privacy". Always written by websites who don't value privacy, otherwise they wouldn't need to write this message.
This is a broken management style, carried out by people who have no training in managing company culture or people in general.
It's the same broken idea that Basecamp implemented.
There's nothing wrong with wanting a certain culture within your company. It's healthy to have a shared vision, and shared idea of how you should behave and present yourself. It gives people a sense of belonging and a community around their work. That culture needs to be implemented with actions, and by the leadership behaving according to that culture, not by sending out a memo.
If the problem is that some people are aggressively pushing a certain politic or behaviour not tolerated by the company, then you deal with those individuals directly.
Trying to manage by memo is like being back in school when your teacher would complain endlessly about those students who doesn't show up. You just end up sitting there an wonder: "Is he complaining about my behaviour? Am I suppose to do something?" and then you get angry, because you have to listen to someone going of about something you have no control over.
Sadly a tendency to avoid interaction with "assholes" and just blasting out a message and expecting the assholes to understand that they are the target of the message. It's not working and it provoking the rest of us, pushing us to a point where we stop careering.
> That culture needs to be implemented with actions, and by the leadership behaving according to that culture, not by sending out a memo.
I think the memo saves a lot of people a lot of time and frustration. By actions you mean "not tolerated" in the sense that someone is fired or reprimanded for a set of behaviours then that would raise a lot of questions about what else doesn't fly when working there. It is better that they published a memo.
Who are these "woke" people? We don't see them in comments here on HN to defend themselves. Are they strawmen, loud groups and living in their own bubble?
Not only that, but there is a tendency to group too many phenomena under the heading of "woke", both by people describing themselves with that label, and describing others.
For instance, I've seen people deride someone for "being too woke" when the issue at hand was sexual harassment. This is clearly absurd, since we have laws about sexual harassment, and it can't be simply "woke" people who respect laws.
On the flip side, things like "let's not name our principal branch 'master'" are, to me at least, clear examples of excessive wokeness.
This word, "woke", has become a smokescreen. People who use the same word may not be remotely talking about the same things. They only seem to be agreeing, but neither one actually knows what the other is saying.
"Woke" is a pointer, whose pointed at memory location has wildly varying values for different people.
As the cultural pendulum swings people are more or less vocal. Four years ago the woke were in ascendence on HN (being vocal on their opinions) and now the anti-woke are. I don't fully understand what drives these trends.
"The middle" is no position though. The middle in the US is and has been wildly different over the last 50 years. Both in the US itself and certainly compared to Western-European countries.
An example would be that an old school democratic socialist since the 80ths or whatever shouldn't be seen as an extremist now just because the window has shifted so far to the right with Trump etc.
"In July 2019, for example, Medium chose to publish a series that included a profile of Trump supporter Joy Villa with the headline “I have never been as prosecuted for being Black or Latina as I have been for supporting Trump.”
When the Latinx community at Medium spoke to leadership about discomfort in the headline, they claimed that executives from editorial didn’t do anything about the headline until it was mentioned in a public Slack channel. One editor asked anyone who had gone through the immigration process or was a part of the Latinx community to get in a room and explain their side, a moment that felt diminishing to this employee. The headline only changed when employees posted in a public Slack channel about their qualms."
I'm not empathetic with the employees.
I despise Trump, it's unconditionally within bounds to publish something like this.
If you want to work for a political organization, or a 'far-X' organization please do that.
Medium already tilts very strongly in one direction and their political orientation is well known.
If people are being actually mistreated, there should be a discussion but this is getting out of hand.
This worries me because I "just don't get it". If I worked at medium I would expect to have zero input on editorial decisions (unless I was hired as an editor). The CEO publishing some fluff about not reopening old wounds is something to ignore (like most CEO messages), not something to interpret as a personal attack. It's doubly ironic that a message about assuming good intent is immediately assumed to have bad intent. What is up with people today? What am I missing?!
Such stories always strike me as quite incredible and conducive to mental instability. Why would anyone get so invested in a company aside from major shareholders ? These places don't need a culture, they're not nations, you don't share a common destiny or anything of the likes.
1. A company is a place of business and every company exists to create a product or a service and make enough money in order to produce more products or a better service.
2. I am a professional and I offer my skills, experience and expertise in exchange for money. I might really like the job or not at all, makes no difference because work is to be done.
3. I am not interested in playing a social justice hero or promoting politics of current world affairs at my workplace, nor am I interested in a culture, mentality or values. If I wanted to join a cult I'd join one where they have drugs and naked ladies, not your company.
I am getting sick of people pretending to try and change the world through their jobs when they only speak up as long as their jobs are secure. I see this often in my company that is trying really hard to be as liberal as possible while burning investor money where people keep raising political questions such as doing business with China not understanding that their roles will likely be cut if the company loses those Chinese contracts. Goes without saying topics regarding sex and sexual orientation are always hot, but others such as the Palestinian genocide are frown upon. You can't be selectively X, that just makes you a hypocrite.
I am currently looking for a new job because I refuse to work in an environment where people are more preoccupied with non-work related problems than they are with the actual work itself. We all have interest in moral issues as individuals, but there is a time and place to discuss those issues. A workplace is not it. For the same reason I am removing myself from LinkedIn.
Everybody on the earth wants to make the world a better place. Returning maximum profits isn't part of that (unless you're a shareholder). Companies exist to make money because that's all that we've expected of them. Now people expect more. Talented people are no longer permitted to be assholes because they're too valuable. And it's about time.
> Talented people are no longer permitted to be assholes because they're too valuable.
How is this connected to politics at the workplace? You don't have to choose between a Steve Jobs-style CEO or a company openly declaring most people quitting have a certain skin color. Those are both not desirable imho, and neither need to be a part of the job.
although I don't see how their memo has anything to do with the much clearer Coinbase memo, if employees left because the company isn't political enough or doesn't have enough secondary agendas, then this was a good move
Latinx employee group outraged / changes made employee who wrote article fired?
Engineer complaining about the article says they were attracted to medium because of free speech which is gone so now leaving - referring to free speech to complain about the article
I’m still trying to figure out what Medium provides that a wordpress site or html webpage doesn’t provide. Oh that’s right, a boatload of bloat and a paywall. I tend to avoid Medium articles. The actual content tends to be as fluffy as the platform, these days. I’m not surprised that such a fluff engine produces leadership like this. Sinking ship, IMO. I have no basis for this beyond sentiment and observations.
> But Medium specifically recruited people who care about the world, and justice, and believe in the freedom of speech and transparency.”
I fit this bill to a t, medium sounds like a great place to work.
The progressive left is slowly finding out that the general left doesn't give a shit about them and is finally starting to wake up to the fact they don't have to put up with be called a racist trump supporter for simply disagreeing with the woke left on any of its insane ideas.
While the woke ones were "triggered" (as they are by most things these days), I'm sure a good portion of employees are relieved to just have a normal workplace again.
I knew of a person who quit their company over a scandal, only to have their new company have a similar one a few months later.
Employees should not be playing musical chairs with employers as a form of protest. If you’re willing to quit, better to stay until you get fired striving for real change instead of hoping that quitting will make management realize they were in the wrong. It rarely works.
