And then my views drifted ever so slightly from the tried and true party lines. One day I said I thought it was wrong that Brandon Eich was forced out of Mozilla, I said I thought it was wrong the way he was treated. Immediately the decade spent arguing for gay rights and marriage equality disappeared and I became a bigot, the enemy.

One day I said it seemed clear that there is in fact a biological aspect to gender. The decade spent arguing for feminist politics disappeared, and I became a sexist. Just like that.

I've lost friends, old friends over these things. My politics are still left of center but I've learned not to open my mouth around the social justice set because to them I'm a sexist/bigot/racist/etc. It's amazing just how small a step out of line you have to take before the group tries to collectively shame you into seeing the light. It's amazing that shame has become a central tool for trying to create positive social change.

“Why did you execute Bogrov?”

“Why? Because of the submarine question,” said Ivanov. “It concerned the problem of tonnage – an old quarrel, the beginnings of which must be familiar to you.

“Bogrov advocated the construction of submarines of large tonnage and a long range of action. The Party is in favour of small submarines with a short range. You can build three times as many small submarines for your money as big ones. Both parties had valid technical arguments. The experts made a big display of technical sketches and algebraic formulae; but the actual problem lay in quite a different sphere. Big submarines mean: a policy of aggression, to further world revolution. Small submarines mean: coastal defense – that is, self-defense and postponement of world revolution. The latter is the point of view of No. 1, and the Party.

“Bogrov had a strong following in the Admiralty and amongst the officers of the old guard. It would not have been enough to put him out of the way; he also had to be discredited. A trial was projected to unmask the partisans of big tonnage as saboteurs and traitors. We had already brought several little engineers to the point of being willing to confess publicly to whatever we liked. But Bogrov wouldn’t play the game. He declaimed up to the very end of big tonnage and world revolution. He was two decades behind the times. He would not understand that the times are against us, that Europe is passing a wave and must wait until we are lifted by the next. In a public trial he would only have created confusion amongst the people. There was no other way possible than to liquidate him administratively.

I tried arguing that allowing people to get fired for their political activity, even if that activity is misguided, is far more dangerous to democracy and society than Prop 8 ever was. I was slammed and downvoted waaaaay into the negatives.

That event really changed my outlook on social liberalism.

I really think HN needs a lesson on down-arrow usage.

HN has that well-understood problem where intelligent people think they're immune to faulty judgement, so they end up being easy to manipulate with simplistic but pleasant-sounding arguments. I happen to agree that progressive (i.e: self-described as intelligent and open-minded) people tend to be hypocritical and easy to manipulate, but I'm obviously coming away from that with different ideas than the people upthread.

I honestly don't get what people disagreed with, I was just attempting to correct some of the factual errors that people had been making all over this comment section.

Edit: Ah, I see that the person I responded to edited their post from "Brandon" to the correct, "Brendan".

I guess I used the term "opposing view" as a catch all for something that people seem to disagree with. It appeared that people disagreed with you since you got down-voted. I didn't mean to incorrectly represent your post but I guess I did accidentally.

Yet it doesn't. It creates fear and reduces communication. The motive for shaming people, for trying to make people feel guilty, is to increase the power of the one who does the shaming. To cement their position in the in-group. Because deep inside they feel weak and powerless.

Whereas truly good people make you feel stronger and they inspire you by their example of virtue.

I consider it an important goal to be as patient and open to communication as possible with others, and politely decline communication (or friendship) only when it's clear that there is nothing to be done, and that our views are too far apart.

Often I've failed at that. I've had my moments where someone's views were so offensive to me that I could not stay calm and continue conversing, but I consider that my failing, and something to work on. And to some extent I accept that I have my limits.

One of the reasons I take this approach, is that I've been utterly wrong in my beliefs in the past (conservative Christian, bible-belt style). Or rather, I think I was utterly wrong. And yet I was the same 'rational' person I am now.

Another reason is that I've spent most of my life being around wildly different people and cultures and belief systems. And the one thing it made me realize is that most people are not 'evil' in their beliefs, but that they either 1) never really thought about them much, or 2) made a fundamental error at some point of the process.

For example, it was only when I started reading 'republican' blogs that I started to understand and to a degree even appreciate their point of view on many things. Understanding the religious elements in this dynamic made this a bit easier too.

Perhaps the problem the author describes is a result of people living in very 'homogenous' surroundings, and as a result perhaps they never learned how to disagree in a civil way, or respect someone's views even though they disagree with them.

I have mixed feelings over the way he was treated, but your argument actually seems the opposite of nuanced: the blanket claim that someone should never be fired for their political views (particularly, from a public position where their politics could have an effect on the company they represent both on internal culture and on externalities like boycotts), no matter how repugnant their politics are, seems pretty reductive.

My favourite example was OkCupid, who detected you were using firefox and redirected you to a page telling you to use a different browser. Despite several gay developers saying that their experience at Mozilla wasn't oppressed by Eich.

But the kicker was that after OkCupid got what they wanted (and got a ton of good press), they didn't revert the damage they did to the Mozilla brand. They won, but I visited their site with firefox and chrome, and there was no redirect to a page saying "hey, mozilla is cool, you should use them [again|still]".

They weren't actually interested in reform, just in shouting and winning, and damn who they damage in the process.

It was so bizarre I didn't even engage on the topic, she didn't even realize they had won. She was on the clock at work representing her company, she even was training another employee. It was so unexpected that I didn't realize what had happened until it was over.

Yep. Although that would be a much higher "this won't affect his job performance" bar than Eich's anti-gay marriage stance, which passed that bar because his was a purely religious stance and pretty clearly didn't imply personal or professional animosity toward homosexuals (amidst all the flak I never read a single anecdote about him mistreating a gay person, and you'd be damn sure that would have surfaced).

The KKK is a hate group, and so he'd have to demonstrate somehow that he was no longer personally or professionally hateful. That would only be possible if someone was truly reformed, a la Edward Norton in American History X.

...seems the opposite of nuanced...

The nuance is that humans are not built to defend the rights of their enemies, but that is precisely what consistency demands, what I did, and am doing now.

This is the nuance you talk up? Silly. You're flattering yourself. I believe the above and yet don't think Eich was wronged. Maybe that's too nuanced a position for you.

If instead you asked about something like a US neo-nazi group I would be much more tolerant of people giving money to a terrible group like that in a way completely unrelated to their job.

The reason the situation is tricky, I think, is because jobs with a spokesperson aspect blend work and personal life. Even though I can't think of any reason they should. I can't think of any major downsides from letting people have work and personal life be separate.

It removes the ability to enforce arbitrary social conformity.

You know, for whatever local definitions of "good person" and "good thing" crop up today.

    > because jobs with a spokesperson aspect blend work and personal life.

The thing that didn't bother me about the Clinton/Lewinski thing is that, in my opinion, having an extramarital affair doesn't necessarily affect your job. But then again, if being viewed as an adulterer means that you can't get your job done properly as President, then that is a problem.

In the case of Eich, I was a bit more torn: being the CEO of an organization that prides itself on its openness and general "social good" means that your social views should match that of the organization. Or at least there shouldn't be any glaring mismatches.

So let's hear you're incredibly nuanced position. I'm waiting to have my mind blown!

Bless your heart.

That's not quite it. They're also perceived to be for the expansion of government, more spying, less local and state autonomy, fewer guns, more regulation of businesses, more taxes, more diversity, more equal redistribution of wealth, and less prosecution of criminals.

(Now, we'll ignore that on at least the last three points, that's patently false, because their supporters and backers have no interest in such things.)

The thing that is probably biggest difference, though, is the way the two sides' members treat each other. I'd say that the right-wing folks view the other side with fear, because they're worried that they'll ruin everything. Their talking heads tend to treat the left with outright hostility and use very nationalistic notes and basically try to show that while they are the enemy, they are a legitimate enemy.

The left seems to view the opposition as backwards and deserving of contempt, as a group of bumpkins and idiots and sometimes subhuman. Their talking heads tend to appeal to how smart the reader/viewer is for following the party line, and espouse philosophies that require a strict adherence to lest one be considered ignorant and hence non-left.

It's hard to side with the left, for me anyways, because they seem to encourage a sort of arbitrary and baseless smugness I've never seen in the right. And that's unfortunate, because change is needed and some of their positions are unquestionably correct.

    > The left seems to view the opposition as backwards and deserving of contempt,
    > as a group of bumpkins and idiots and sometimes subhuman.

John Oliver, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert each have an amazing ability to use humor/satire as a way to make a point. But I can't hardly watch This Week Tonight without feeling like he's portraying "the other side" in exactly this light. And it's a gimmick. A cheap way to put your viewpoint on display without actually lending any credence to anything your opponent would say (would it be fair to call this tactic an Ad Hominem?).

The sad part is, I get the impression that the generation who are now in their 20's and 30's have grown up knowing only this kind of "political discourse". They don't recognize that by sheltering their ideas from opposition in this way their viewpoints remain intellectually weak and stunted.

Put it this way - given a choice, which would you prefer? Allow no new laws to be passed for 8 years, or give Republicans an 8 year supermajority and a mandate to make any changes they liked? If you are right that they merely want to keep things static, you should be indifferent.

That's not generally true. Right wing politics usually claims its for the first two things, and one form of the last, but generally opposes substantial reforms of immigration policy in favor of more stringent enforcement of existing laws.

> In contrast, left wing politicians just want to throw more money at the same things.

Incorrect. "Liberal" politicians in the US favor substantial reforms to immigration policy, healthcare policy (though perhaps less so at the moment, given that they recently achieved a fairly major restructuring in that domain, though there are plenty that would drive further), and, in many cases, reforms to the structure of SS, welfare state systems, and taxation structure. In a very different direction than right-wing politicians seek to change them.

"My side favors [nuanced, detailed presentation of my faction's views], while the other side favors [simplistic nonsense presented as the other side's view]."

I'm a left winger who takes the stated basic principles of the old left (individual rights, equal treatment), and I eschew the cognitive dissonance necessary to support every left leaning special interest group. I.e., I'm a heretic, not an infidel.

But what right wing politics are about is maintaining the social order. Ensuring that wealth stays with the wealthy, power remains with the powerful, and making people content with both their own place in society and the places of others (particularly their 'betters'). Dismantling SS, keeping illegal immigrants illegal, cheap, and vulnerable as well as avoiding a flood of legal immigrants who will take 'native' jobs, and controlling education policy all achieve these goals. As does advocating for less progressive taxes to avoid distribution of wealth away from top earners.

Making right wing politics all about shrinking government is putting the cart before the horse. Shrinking government is not in itself a useful goal, it's the outcomes of that shrinkage, and what you shrink, that are the goal. Starving the beast is just how you get there.

Right wing politics wants to reduce the position of those groups and elevate the position of workers, business leaders and those who embody traditional christian values. That's a real change in the status quo.

I'd also be really curious to hear why you think they're in support of 'workers', to which I assume you mean something different from a normal definition of 'working class'. I'm not really aware of any right wing political policy that works in their favour.

But all of that aside, you again conflate changing the status quo with changing the social order. Obviously the right wing seeks some kind of change in the status quo (else why organize at all), but that change is to reinforce the social order or establish one that is in line with their views. The fact that you're talking about elevating a particular class of people is in itself a right wing, social-order oriented, concept.

Left wing politics are generally about dismantling social order altogether -- not just the current one, but the very existence of one. You can easily argue about how successful they've been, especially in the more radical efforts, but that remains their pie-in-the-sky goal. You may also argue with the idea that such a thing is even possible. That is itself a right wing axiom.

Those are some of the least paid and least powerful professions in society. Academics just have loud voices that no one listens to.

> Right wing politics wants to reduce the position of those groups and elevate the position of workers

That's why the right wing supports increasing the minimum wage, unions, and regulating industry exploitation of employees. /sarcasm. The left wing has pretty much been pro-workers since the left wing was invented in 1789 France.

Interesting --maybe I'm misunderstanding your claim. Can you clarify what you mean by "occupy a strong position in the social order", and outline your evidence for such a belief?

On the cultural front, note how difficult it is even to criticize teachers or government dependents. Consider the media reaction when Romney correctly pointed out that about half the population is at least partly dependent on the government, or how right wing politicians are described as "attacking" teachers when they propose anything the educational establishment dislikes.

Or think for a moment about any policy which might reduce the status of either group - for example, partially replacing teachers with machines, or shaming people on welfare. How do you think such a policy would be received?

I've yet to see any policy sold under that banner that had any reason to believe it would achieve that end: all have either been proposals to increase the degree of arbitrary latitude granted elected politicians and appointed administrators and/or policies imposing measures as standards that have no demonstrated validity as measuring teacher performance as distinct from other factors that might affect the students in that teacher's classroom, including (particularly) the degree of administrative support for that teacher. Usually, most proposals have included both of those features.

I haven't opposed them because teachers oppose them -- though no doubt they do -- I oppose them because I am opposed to wasting public money on measures that have no rational expectation of success and I am opposed to decreasing accountability for school administrators.

> Or think for a moment about any policy which might reduce the status of either group - for example, partially replacing teachers with machines, or shaming people on welfare. How do you think such a policy would be received?

The latter with well-deserved derision from much of the public (and plenty of support from most of the right, probably), the former would depend on the specifics -- plenty of functions teachers have done have been partially replaced by machines over the years with broad support.

I'm sure many people of a certain ideological stripe feel as though they're somehow self-reliant and do not rely on anything any level of government provides, but that does not mesh with reality.

As for shaming people on welfare, I'm again unsure which country you're describing. First, "welfare" (i.e. as a cash grant) hasn't existed in the U.S. in close to 20 years. Second, people who do receive some sort of subsidized food or housing are very nearly universally looked down upon. They're not held in any esteem whatsoever now. Do you think it would be reasonable, or make any kind of policy sense, to shame them further? If so, why?

He means net payments to/from the government, not using the roads.

My only quibble with treating "welfare recipients" as a group is it conflates two quite heterogeneous groups of people: seniors/retirees in one hand, and disabled people plus medicaid/food aid/SCHIP recipients on the other. The former do account for the majority of welfare spending and quite justifiably fit (my understanding of) your definition of "strong position in the social order" in the sense of strong enfranchisement; but the latter hardly do.

But right wing types elsewhere in the world (e.g., Modi) are not exactly looking to preserve the status quo either. Hindutva (probably spelled wrong) is hardly about preserving the status quo, nor is economic liberalization, getting closer to the west or "toilets before temples".

What parts of the world are you talking about?

"It's worth remembering that one disadvantage left-side politics have is that they are defending the status quo, and mounting such a defense is trench warfare, not a campaign that captures the hearts and minds of the next generation. By comparison, right-side politics are passionate for change. And it's when people are passionate that they get into disagreement. But because the right is so far away from achieving its goals, the passions inside the movement aren't as heated. Also, the right tends to be suspicious of political correctness and ideological litmus tests."

I suspect if you hung around Americans for Tax Reform, Heritage, Family Research Council, Eagle Forum, etc. for a while, you'd find that they want to overturn the status quo on taxes (perhaps a flat tax), government spending (reduce significantly), third-tier government agencies not mentioned in the Constitution (abolish), abortion (overturn Roe v. Wade), obscenity and indecency (remember the horror called the Communications Decency Act?), religion (erode church/state barrier), United Nations (get U.S. out, or reduce dues), federal regulations (dramatically roll back), Obamacare (repeal), Second Amendment (enforce RTKBA post-Heller), voter ID, marriage, home schooling (defend), public schools (vouchers), and so on.

Look at the 1968 Democratic Party platform. It talked about Head Start, Upward Bound, more federal spending on education, Medicare expansion, creating the Department of Housing and Urban Development, more regulation of industry, increasing Social Security spending, etc. [http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=29604]. It's been nearly half a century since then, and all those policies have been enshrined into law; the question today is not whether to eliminate them, but how much budgets will increase year-over-year.

Liberalism has won the culture war as well, as both conservatives and liberals have acknowledged for quite some time: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/04/14/1291965/-Liberalism... http://theweek.com/articles/469079/culture-war-over-conserva...

Right-wing politics in the US say they want this, but actual right-wing behaviour has been to increase government spending significantly.

In any case, most of items in that paragraph are about rolling back progressive changes, rather than introducing new items. When I say 'status quo', I don't mean 'preserve a snapshot of modern society in January 2015', but returning society to an earlier version, and preventing social flux in order to keep it that way.

This is something that even casual observation of the real world as opposed to rhetoric will show you that it's not true.

I'm not suggesting they all adhere to the same ideology. I'm saying that they have better party discipline.

I'm leftist, but I'm also pro-gun (how else to overthrow the ruling class, after all), and I think there are probably some innate gender differences in humans, much like there are in e.g. Sumatran orangutans. I wouldn't last two minutes in deBoer's class, and while I'm leftist, I could never be an ally of The Left.

Are these comments on your blog, or real life friends, or both?

>politics are still left of centre

The whole left-right thing is really a false dichotomy. It sounds to me like you associated/associate with extremists of political correctness.

I hold some very progressive ideologies, but I have never faced ridicule if I don't "tow the line" as you are experiencing. But then again I don't blog or share my views that publicly.

You'd be surprised. I left the Bay for a handful of years, and when I came back half of my friends had become political radicals. There is no lack of people who will react badly if you don't share their views in detail.

I once wrote a comment on a thread here on HN but after considering past reactions of HN of similar comments, I didn't bother submitting the comment and closed the tab instead.

I don't necessarily care about karma but I use it as a way to figure out what kind of stuff the community wants to hears from me. When I get downvoted I make a mental note to keep such opinions to myself next time. I rather have some of my comments be visible than have them greyed out or dead.

I grew up in the South. Many of my peers never heard racist comments until they were adults, even though many adults in our community were deeply racist. That made my generation far less racist than older ones.

So why were the racists so quiet? Because it stopped being socially acceptable to be racist. Those people were ashamed of publicly stating their views. Racism become something you might believe, but didn't say to a child.

It's not a pleasant tool, and it's often abused, but there are definitely shades of gray there.

And if so, why is that a problem?

If you never knew, why would it bother you?

If you haven't observed their harmful actions or those supposed actions' effects, you're acting irrationally and going on witchhunts.

Not if they are specifically hiding those actions from people that would recognize them as harmful.

>If you haven't observed their harmful actions or those supposed actions' effects, you're acting irrationally and going on witchhunts.

I don't know why you're making a narrative about witch hunts. The original statement was that it's bad when people keep biases but don't discuss them anywhere they might be corrected. Denouncing hiding is pretty much the opposite of going on a witch hunt.

Racism in and of itself is a quirk, and if you can't prove that others are actually harming people with it, you shouldn't begrudge other people their opinions--even if you don't like them.

Definitely a lot of idealists who could stand to mature some.

No more than any other leaning.

Simple example:

I've got two good friends, one of them on one side of the GamerGate nonsense, and one on the other. I have to be very careful chatting with them, because while they each separately are very articulate and reasoned in their arguments, I cannot even pretend to identify with any of the other side without risking very strongly being labeled and shut out of further discussion.

You'd think you could get these people to agree to sit down and calmly hear each other out, maybe critique each other's positions, and perhaps agree to disagree--but no.

No, instead one side will immediately feel like they are being judged and condescended to and set up for mocking, and the other will feel that they are probably tempting a campaign of harassment and stalking and abuse. Neither can talk openly and freely because they assume that the other person, once flagged as the opposition, will be doing everything disingenuously. One cannot have reasoned discussions in such an environment.

And if you do agree with the people who are either side of GamerGate? You're either siding with people who use threats and really sloppy language ("SJW" as a catchall for any goddamn thing that even is remotely related, good or bad), or siding with people who bully and pander and conduct successful mass-media campaigns belittling their opponents. Like, nobody deserves to win this.

~

The thing that's most annoying to me, though, is that one side you can kind of reason with, because you slowly wittle away the crazy into an admission that "Well, yeah, we should treat them with some class, I guess. Death threats aren't actually okay."

The other side, though, has made central to its position a sort of victimhood, and that is a position very hard to navigate somebody out of. And so, even if you try and work on things, they'll acknowledge a small portion of why the other side has its issues, and then immediately revert to "But, think of the fear and the suffering and blah blah blah".

And it's annoying, because if you try to stand on that side and argue back with the jerks making deaththreats and doxxing and doing nasty shit, you look over your shoulder to see your allies and they're automartyring and being downright mean and just clearly not acting in any sort of productive way.

And if you're on the other side and trying to support the nerds who are getting picked on and made fun of and made out to be manchildren and whatnot? Your allies are busy calling in bomb threats and making the most puerile gestures and getting so damned emotional in their trolling they losing sight of the big picture--and playing right into the hands of their opponents.

It's just so goddamn frustrating.

The exact same thing plays out in politics: one side will make fun of and harass the other side, and that side will continually play the abused and purge anybody who doesn't fall in with them.

And between the two of them, there's simply no place for anybody who doesn't want to look like a buffoon or an opportunistic victim.

Second and more importantly, it's now in some third or later phase where frankly things have extended quite beyond just games. Both friends spend a lot of time online reading blogs, reading essays, and basically being literate on digital culture. That being the case, avoiding the ripples and crazy of that whole fiasco is hard.

There's a fascinating de facto trial of the limits of free speech in the age of mass point-to-point communication, and if you just stick your head in the sand because of GG you're going to be missing a lot.

I was once labeled an "MRA" for suggesting sexual assault (or worse) and IPV statistics might be more balanced between different genders if the data collection efforts weren't skewed so far toward a single gender.

I used to be a lot more idealistic, but ideologues broke me of that faulty thinking.

When people are powerless for a long period of time, all they learn is the "language" of power, and every issue is cast as a life-or-death struggle where you are either with them or against them. When such people are close to attaining power, actually achieving it is the only thing that matters to them. They often become just as dogmatic oppressors as the people they fought against. It takes time to learn higher-level "languages" like empathy, or justice, or reasoned argument, and typically these skills can only be learned in a situation where you have a certain baseline of personal power. And so you get see-saw effects where the groups on top change but nothing is ever more just about the society.

I can see this dynamic with certain Hacker News personalities who've been in powerless positions in the past and hence frame every comment as an us vs. them struggle, and it also explains the political history of numerous countries (eg. Russia, Rwanda, Israel/Palestine) in the modern era. It's a very common theme in arts & literature as well, eg. 1984, The Hunger Games, The Who ("Won't get fooled again"), South Park.

I've experienced this as conservative christian, and I only realized how black and white my world-view had become once I 'got out'.

I could be wrong though. I generally avoid these 'communities' for the reason the author describes.

On this point we disagree, and my post is about what happens when we disagree, that it's not OK for me to disagree. That it's wrong, fundamentally wrong, so wrong it can only be due to stupidity or bigotry on my part.

Really I just have different views of what it means to be inclusive.

In the past 25 years I've seen an absolutely huge amount of compromise coming from mainstream America and the Christians especially when it comes to the LGBT community. I don't think it's too much to ask that when Eich was sitting there waiting at the negotiating table that the LGBT community would at least show up and try to find a compromise.

This wasn't a Bible-thumper screaming "you're all going to hell!!!" It was the CEO of a very important Open Source project saying "Let's sit down and talk, I'm willing to put in the time and energy to work this out." But the torches had been lit, the pitchforks sharpened, and the rest is history.

> That he didn't even try to correct the issue made it more likely that progressive coders would turn away.

Just because he didn't prostrate himself before you doesn't mean he didn't put any effort in. https://brendaneich.com/2014/03/inclusiveness-at-mozilla/

And it would take a lot of "progressive coders" to make up for Mozilla losing its CEO/co-founder who had been working on Firefox since it was called Netscape Navigator and who just happened to be the creator of JavaScript.

No one was compelled by any force of law here, either--he had beliefs that no longer meshed with contemporary views on equality and rights, and his peers, subordinates, and the world at large made it clear they didn't deem this appropriate.

> A: No. Mozilla employees expressed a wide range of views on Brendan’s appointment as CEO: the majority of them positive and in support of his leadership, or expressing disappointment in Brendan’s support of Proposition 8 but that they nonetheless felt he would be a good leader for Mozilla. A small number (fewer than 10) called for his resignation, none of whom reported to Brendan directly. However media coverage focused disproportionately on the small number of negative comments — largely ignoring the wide range of reactions across the Mozilla community.

https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/04/05/faq-on-ceo-resignat...

I think it's a little hard to make this comparison. Eich's position was in favor of taking away the rights of others. I'm fine with people having views I don't agree with, until those views affect others negatively.

Eich contributed to the creation of the equal rights policy in Mozilla and worked to enforce that inclusive policy. He made a commitment to uphold those policies. No GLBT person at Mozila had examples of him being discriminatory.

https://brendaneich.com/2014/03/inclusiveness-at-mozilla/

We used to fire people from their jobs (and worse) because they were gay. What happened to Brendan isn't too different, and the result is the same: removing someone from their job because of something that has little to do with their ability to do it...

Edit: they're not exactly the same, of course. I just find their too close for comfort. Whatever happened to "I disagree with what you're saying, but will defend to death your right to say it"? When did the side of the political spectrum I agree with become okay with thoughtcrime and censorship? Brendan's case is slightly less sympathetic for me than others, but it's an issue I've seen time and time again, and it's what the OP is talking about.

The person who considers Eich's political donation to Prop 8 as a conclusive indicator he couldn't do that?

Or the person who considers his long history there as a more relevant, legible, and likely conclusive signal about how he would have run the Mozilla he helped build?

(Also, when people are constructing these ostensibly parallel hypotheticals, why does some equivalent of the latter always seem to get left out?)

At another point, you confuse inclusiveness towards employees vs. making employees actually want to work there. The latter is the issue. You can have an organization head work towards setting up Sharia law but treat women fairly in his workplace. That won't mean that people who support women's rights will work for him when they have plenty of other options to choose from.

Imagine that you own a bus company in the South in the 1950s. You personally believe that blacks should have every right that whites have, including the ability to sit up front. However, if you passed that policy on your busses, all your white ridership would refuse to buy tickets. Your bus drivers would quit. Your shareholders would fire you. And it's all for naught anyway, because your customers would go to competing bus lines with bigoted owners who hire all your employees away. So you make blacks go to the back of the bus, just like everyone else.

Does this mean Rosa Parks was incredibly naive?

On a pragmatic level, you're right - companies are under constraints imposed by their stakeholders. But if you're talking moral philosophy or what is right, it's not enough to make arguments based on what everybody else believes. You need to be able to come up with some distinction that holds even if you swap white to black to gay. Are people entitled to their jobs, regardless of their race? Are they entitled to their views? Are they entitled to make political contributions? What are the basic rights that we choose to protect for our citizenry, regardless of the specific form that their expression takes?

Part of what made the Brendan Eich issue so problematic for a lot of people is that upholding his right to hold his own personal and political views is not inherently contradictory with upholding the rights of gay Mozilla employees & community members to have a safe working environment. He had publicly promised to uphold Mozilla's existing non-discriminatory and LGBT-friendly policies, and to prevent his personal views from interfering with his duties at Mozilla.

In your scenario, Rosa Parks is not naïve. She would be naïve if she assumed she were entitled to run the bus company. By fixing all bus companies from the outside, she was shrewd (or in her telling, simply too tired to comply).

(Which isn't to say it never happens, I'm sure it does, just that it's not the epidemic it would appear to be if you look solely at politics as she is practiced on campus.)

There's an old saying to the effect that campus politics are so vicious because the stakes are so low. When you get out in the real world and realize politics requires more than making statements -- that it requires building movements, and you need lots of people in order to build movements that make a difference -- you learn fast to either live with people who are mostly on your side, even if they disagree with you here and there, or you content yourself with writing blog manifestos.

The real trouble with the political correctness thing about sex is that it's a distraction from the real political issues - money, and who gets how much. Most of what government does and can do is about money. The US right has its own problems with sex, but it's a distraction there, too: "God, guns, and gays". None of which the U.S. Government can do much about.

Occupy ran into this. Occupy leaves behind one lasting achievement - the identification of "the 1%" as a problem. They never had a coherent agenda. Basic truth about dealing with political leaders - don't ask them to solve your problem. The most that will get you is a study. You must have all the homework done up to the "sign here" point. Ask any lobbyist.

Thought for today: should people be paid more than they are worth as purely economic units? If not, should incomes go down as automation gets better?

As long as the 1% doesn't include Steve Jobs.

Small correction: From what I understand Occupy didn't have a coherent agenda by design. The initiators of the movement had other goals, and were relatively successful by their own measures (and I agree, to an extent).

To me, this explains at least partially why the college age is one where you see this sort of strong rejection of anyone who disagrees. Many college students will have only recently laid any real claim to their own fully formed world view, and they don't have very much personal experience to back it up. Their world view also tends to be very wrapped up in self identity.

All in all, I think this leads to a more vigorous rejection of differing opinions in some cases.

The overwhelming message I hear (not that anyone ever says it explicitly) is: "you either believe everything we say, or you're against us". It's gotten to the point that I (as a white male) have a lot of fear of speaking out when it comes to these matters, to the point where often I just keep my mouth shut. Not saying there aren't times when I should be keeping my mouth shut. But I do feel like I have some useful things to say, but I'm afraid to say them.

Are some bigoted people evil? Sure. But I think that a lot of people hold various opinions because they just haven't thought about it too hard. They've just gone along with whatever they've been taught from childhood, and they're just kind of parroting their indoctrination. That doesn't make them bad.

Unfortunately, the SJW crowd (to be distinguished from the mostly rational leftist crowd) seems to have decided to elevate themselves based on their enlightenment. "I've devoted the time to make myself more informed, and that makes me a good person." With that black-and-white thinking comes the inverse - you're a bad person because you haven't devoted this time to make yourself more informed.

Such thinking immediately makes people bristle and walk off. Why would they volunteer for abuse? I don't talk to SJWs because it's ridiculous to be treated like subhuman filth for disagreeing with something that the other person treats as Gospel, especially when a huge amount of this material is hugely complicated and up for debate.

The guiding principle should be stop being an asshole. Instead, the SJW crowd resorts to yelling about "tone policing" and drives away people who would normally be allies.

Here's some food for thought. The black civil rights movement in the 60s and the gay rights movement today have enjoyed a lot of success because they emphasized their status as normal people. As soon as you get the kooks who excoriate people for any slight deviation from the One True Faith, you end up failing miserably.

> Here's some food for thought. The black civil rights movement in the 60s and the gay rights movement today have enjoyed a lot of success because they emphasized their status as normal people. As soon as you get the kooks who excoriate people for any slight deviation from the One True Faith, you end up failing miserably.

I've started to sympathize with Dr. Kaczynski's view of leftism being some ego-driven movement meant to satisfy one group's desire for power. He puts it bluntly:

> Helping black people is not their real goal. Instead, race problems serve as an excuse for them to express their own hostility and frustrated need for power. In doing so they actually harm black people, because the activists hostile attitude toward the white majority tends to intensify race hatred.

As it is with SJW's trying to "help" groups they believe to be marginalized.

It's funny you say this because I was discussing the exact same thing with a friend today. There's some views I have where previously I have been incredulous that anyone could support the opposite view -- "How can anyone possibly support something so horrible and wrong?" But then I think, is 50% of the population really be evil? No, of course not. That's ridiculous. I think most people have good intentions with what they believe, and if they have the opposite viewpoint on something that is important to you, it's not the case that they're evil people who just don't care about morality; it's far more likely that they truly think their viewpoint is moral and just.

Often, this results from taking the bad intentions of certain people who believe such things and applying them to the whole.

"You're for / against X program. There are people who are for / against X program because they have an immoral ulterior motive. Therefore, you have that ulterior motive too!"

This naturally leads to fingerpointing and yelling.

One could argue that such an opinion is in fact short-sighted and bigoted...

> people pushed out and marginalized in left-wing circles because

> they didn’t use the proper set of social and class signals to

> satisfy the world of intersectional politics.

This definitely happens, but not as some sort of organized strategy by "the left". It happens because "the left" on college campuses is made up of young people who are angry about the racist/sexist/classist/etc culture in which they have grown up, but have not yet learned to be diplomatic with and empathetic to people who are less informed.

The goal isn't for people to avoid certain terms, the goal is for people to not be assholes.

[1] http://www.vox.com/2015/1/28/7930845/political-correctness-d...

That's not true. It absolutely is an organized strategy by the left.

Anti-oppression activism is founded on social constructionist theories. These claim that bigotry and prejudice are subtly reproduced in society through language. So activists are scrupulous in cleansing their speech of any hint of prejudiced beliefs, no matter how minor, because they believe that if they can accomplish that, prejudice itself will disappear.

But people who aren't activists are also reproducing prejudice through their speech, so the problem becomes how can you get all of them to stop doing that too. The answer is to make it morally unacceptable. Minor phrases like "man up" turn into huge ethical lapses that are worthy of censure and shaming.

Not using those phrases become matters of empathy and not being an asshole towards unknown persons who are offended. But really, no one is offended, it's just a tactic for redefining linguistic norms.

Political correctness is responding to politically unpopular viewpoints with punishment and vitriol.

Her point seems to be that labeling things political correctness which are actually reasoned arguments is harmful to discourse. But even if some idiots are doing that, that still doesn't mean that "actual" political correctness (i.e. responding to politically unpopular viewpoints with punishment and vitriol instead of reasoned arguments) doesn't happen or isn't harmful to discourse.

The flak I cop for that is nothing compared to the very real, quantified consequences for women trying to enter tech, or who are already in it. I think we should upvote more articles about that and less articles about this.

The author wasn't saying that intersectionalism produces worse injustices than other parts of society.

The author was saying that intersectionalism marginalises itself and drives away allies by focussing on orthodoxy and using shame as a tool to change habits of speech.

This ties into the larger issues of gender reform in tech. A left wing that didn't actively repel those who speak slightly differently would be in a stronger position to change society.

I find the internet social justice movement intensely annoying. They are, to be blunt, assholes.

But unfortunately, they're also right more often than not.

And dwelling on how disgustingly annoying the online social justice movement is instead of solving its problems is one facet of geek culture that is just somewhat pathetic.

I think the difference here is that many geeks are of the mindset that it should be "easy" for them to help, both in action and emotionally. Constantly being berated for "not helping exactly the right way" puts people in a foul mood. The bottom line is that there aren't many easy-to-see benefits for non-oppressed allies. Basically many geeks see it as the less-privileged asking them for help, with nothing really in it for them except constantly being taken to task for not being immediately perfectly sensitive to all the issues women and people of color face.

It's a little disingenuous to both vehemently assume, expect, and require that sensitivity while at the same time saying "there's no way you can possibly understand the struggles we face". Can't have it both ways.

What? That comment doesn't say anything even resembling that.

>dwelling on how disgustingly annoying the online social justice movement is instead of solving its problems is one facet of geek culture

It's not clear whether the author means "its" to refer to SJW or geek culture's problems. I believe the author meant geek culture should fix its own problems, but it's a reasonable misinterpretation to have read that sentence as referring to SJW's problems.

That's where the parent comment was coming from.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8943256

It's uncharitable to assume that the parent's experience stems from his or her own shortcomings.

Basically, if what you agree with is decided by who expresses their ideas in a quieter way, you'd probably agree with nothing.

I'm not suggesting that bullies make ideas poisonous. I'm saying that bullies poison discourse and shut off conversations. They don't so much drive people to other ideas as they do drive people away from engaging entirely.

Especially when they do things like staking out the position that there is no reasonable room for disagreeing with them.

"But what can I do as a white man/white women/generally privileged person?" - Amplify. Your voice unjustly carries more weight than that of other people. If you can be the "Retweeters" of Social Justice, you'll be doing a lot of good. Just be sure to retweet the people with firsthand knowledge.

As one example, my father, an anthropologist/historian in his 60s who spent his whole career and life befriending, interviewing, translating, and writing about indigenous rural peasants in southern Mexico, and probably knows as much or more about their history and circumstances as anyone alive (in an intellectual sense, if not precisely as lived personal experience, since he was never himself a destitute peasant) was told by a 30-year-old recent Ph.D from a well-off family (who had literally never worked a job outside academia, and spent her entire life living in rich US suburbs) that he had no right to comment on the circumstances of indigenous rural peasants, “the subaltern” to use her term, because he he was a privileged member of the hegemonic class, whereas she could, as a Latina.

I was specifically speaking about people that pontificate about things they have no legitimate claim to have experienced. Being a Latin@ in the United States doesn't legitimize your claim to speak about rural peasants of Mexico (though, if your family has roots there you may have lingering first hand accounts that can color the discussion more than those without).

In fact, historians are one of the people I would consider a source, especially if their words are born from the interactions and studies done from interacting with real people. They make it their life's work to understanding the situation in which people live.

Also, everyone makes mistakes and/or embellishments. I make mistakes. People in their own experiences get caught up in those experiences instead of the truth. Historians get caught up in their own narrative of truthiness instead of truth. Skepticism and an open mind are great tools toward enlightenment.

So, yeah, sometimes white men can be more legitimate than others in their viewpoints. But far too often the voices of the privileged and uninformed drown out the voices of experience and truth. That's the tragedy.

Anyway, this exact thing you suggest was something that they explicitly had articles against. "PoC are tired of being asked about their experiences. Go read a book first, don't ask them". I was scolded by the host for suggesting that "asking people as a first resort over picking up a book" was a human thing, not a white thing born of privilege, and I was scolded for it. Several of the PoC in the forum were quite clear on how they felt (poorly) about being asked of their experience by people not familiar with it.

Until I hit that site, I thought 'white apologism' was a myth. But boy, if you self-identified as white and didn't meekly talk cap-in-hand about how you sucked, you were berated. My favourite post was where the moderator asked what could be done to improve the site, and myself (white male) and an asian female said the same thing (both dispassionately): that we felt we held different opinions to the mainstream of the site, and it was difficult to be heard. She had a number of users encouraging her to post more and feel welcome. I got read the riot act and was nearly banned from the site.

It's very much worth noting I did learn a lot from some of the users that site, and I certainly wouldn't tar others in the field from my experiences there, but boy, arseholes can come from all directions. Some of the users were actually interested in discussion and I did learn a lot from those (one of whom was the woman above), but the moderator was an utter moron. I felt sad because these are important issues, and that moderator and his ilk were more interested in shriving guilt and hand-wringing than finding equitable solutions.

Anyway, long waffle short: not all people of colour appreciate being asked about their experiences by well-meaning naifs.

I think a possible difference is that asking someone to share their experience directly invokes some kind of entitlement on the part of the asker.

But, I don't think that there is anything wrong with amplifying the messages of those underrepresented [1]. Many people with true experience are talking, but have trouble getting that message heard.

[1] With their permission. Don't shuttle around someone's personal story without permission. It can be damaging in ways that you're not aware.

This is something I really don't get. This attitude seems so dysfunctional and counterproductive. If I ask a question about someone's experiences, it's because I'm interested in learning more about that person. If they're not comfortable talking about it with me, for whatever reason, they need only say so, and I'll understand and not pursue it.

I believe in general I'm entitled to ask questions (with a gut-check as to how personal the question might be vs. how well I know the person, which might cause me to decide not to ask), and the other person is entitled to decline to answer. That's just how polite social interaction works.

[The URL's a good examples of "perils of permalinks": the post is now titled "A reply to Freddie deBoer" and he mentions in an update that "The original title of this piece was more obnoxious than was necessary. I’ve changed it" ... but not the link.]

deBoer's post speaks to a culture of not knowing the right language, of general intemperance and how poor and working class actually wind-up more likely to be victims of it because they are less likely to know the game even if the game itself is intended to protect them.

I have had calm, rational debates with people who have viewpoints that are completely opposite to mine. Both of us come away from the conversation feeling enlightened, and occasionally one of us changes our mind on an issue because of a persuasive argument. This is what a good debate should be like. But unfortunately, people who can debate like this are few and far between.

Far more often I just end up frustrated and leave the "debate" part way through. So many people get angry and emotional if you criticize their viewpoint, and I don't have the time or energy to deal with it. Although sometimes if I'm in a good mood, I will stir things up for entertainment: if I am listening to a debate between two people I know, and one of them is using shaming tactics and logical fallacies, I will join in on the conversation (if permitted) and automatically take the side against theirs, even if I have the exact same viewpoint that they do. Then I will tear their argument down the best way I know how (it's fun to argue against your own belief). And at the end I will reveal that my viewpoint was actually the same as theirs.

Blanket statements all around, personal attacks, strawmen galore, just-so anecdotes as moral fables, and for what? The kind of petty political polemics inevitably attracted by the topic do nothing to make HN a more interesting or pleasant forum.

To quote the submission guidelines:

  Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're 
  evidence of some interesting new phenomenon.

> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting.

No matter the topic, anyone can bring up that line and effectively ends any question that the topic is fit for HN by claiming that they find it interesting.

The criteria may not be algorithmic but they're not arbitrary either.

http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2013/09/technol...

If anybody can make any actual sense of the point of the article, please say so?

Other than the fact that deBoer has scrupulously chosen to only call out white authors, this article seems to "scold" its subjects for their tactics just the same as Chait's did. What's the basis for the great distinction between the two that's the basis for the first and last paragraphs? That Chait is a "centrist Democrat" instead of "more left wing"?

If deBoer could be honest, he'd probably say "WTF is wrong with you? Chait was correct, and excommunicating him for saying correct-but-uncomfortable things is fundamentally unhelpful and illiberal". But he can't say that, because the same process will excommunicate him too, so we get this instead. Not that it'll help; for some of the more extreme types, it's probably enough that Chait quoted deBoer approvingly in his article.

(You'll notice that while he mouths the pro forma denunciations of Chait, he never really specifies where he thinks Chait got it wrong.)

Chait thinks that traditional liberal values of free speech and free thought are threatened by political correctness. DeBoer thinks that anti-oppression movements are undermining themselves by alienating their own members.

They both see political correctness as harmful, but are very different in every other way.

I don't know why I'm supposed to care. A demographic with a tiny tiny minority is getting represented? A few years back, being indistinguishable was the highest compliment you could pay a trans person. Now, it seems anything they do is 'brave' and you have to constantly praise how 'proud' you are of their transition, even if they become an utterly unlikable person with it. In my world, you try to build the best world you can by lifting everyone up, not by stacking praise where least praise is warranted out of some form of 'equality'.

Maybe if WOTC had made us like the character first I'd care. Maybe if it had been a bombshell, or something quietly unacknowledged, but it took two paragraphs before it was clear where this one was going. Maybe it was just spoilers; The subset of people who had posted it and their praise told me exactly what the moral was. Maybe if it were treated as just another trait; a birthmark, a minor disability, a past struggle worked through. Maybe then I'd care.

A lot of activists are trying to effect some actual social change. That requires not staying on the basics forever, just as if you're writing papers on operating system design, you won't be spending much time explaining what pointers are. Even in a classroom, a graduate-level class on operating systems isn't a place where you'll be taken seriously if you complain that pointers are needlessly confusing. But it would be a mistake to conclude that coherently explaining pointers isn't important, just because nobody working on OS design seems to do it, or that the student wasn't earnest in finding pointers needlessly confusing. In fact it is absolutely fundamental that pointers are taught well and students be taken seriously when they express confusion -- but it is precisely because it is fundamental that it needs to be in a separate place.

I have seen two good forms of "101 spaces", though. One is quietly listening in upperclassman spaces, the Internet's venerable rule to "lurk moar". You won't understand everything at once; you certainly won't pick up the lingo, and you probably won't understand several of the conclusions. But in an era with internet search, you can slowly work on figuring out what people have found out, just as it's possible to catch up to the state of research by just reading papers and trying to figure out what they mean.

The other is friends, people who have been through the 101 class but also personally know you're acting in good faith. If you say something that's innocently wrong to them, they'll know it's innocently wrong, and not malicious, badgering a tired point, concern trolling, etc. In turn, of course, listen to what they have to say.

But besides those, there's certainly a lack, and for various reasons, a lot of people may not find internet-lurking their style of learning, or may not have sufficiently knowledgeable friends to go bother. It would be a good thing for the world to see more. But unfortunately, the responsibility to create them cannot be on the shoulders of the activists. If you think teaching at a research university is ever half-hearted, imagine what it would be like if the researchers weren't paid to teach, weren't expected to teach at all, and were, often, trying to fit in research in their spare time after another full-time job.

Even better, should pointers be nullable?

EDIT: addendum. I guess one could imagine a situation where you only needed to have knowledge of feminism 101, but not be required to agree with the arguments. This does not seem to be the case though.

Maybe a better example is monolithic kernels and microkernels. You can believe either opinion, but if you're wading into Linux kernel development now and keep complaining about the lack of microkernel sensibilities, you're going to neither turn Linux into a microkernel nor get people to keep listening to you. If you really, truly believe that Linux's monolithic design is bad for the world, start your own kernel. (Andy Tanenbaum, for instance, had this argument right when Linus Torvalds announced Linux, and since then has been working on MINIX, not showing up on LKML.)

It reminds me of a time when a friend of mine got fired from his job at a private school in the eastern US for simply patting a female student on the back during class. You might wonder what the nature of this "patting" was, but I don't. He's just not the kind of person who would have done that in a creepy way. He was devastated, of course, having just been labeled in a somewhat official capacity as a sexual predator. It's too bad that this kind of thing happens.

In fact, yesterday I just had a debate with my Czech coworkers (we work for an American company). In Europe, the ideology of "political correctness" is not so followed (and in fact many from minorities would find it plainly annoying), and in Czech Republic specifically is mostly ignored. Yet in many respects Europe could be considered more "leftist" (take employment law, for instance).

As it turns out, "PC" is a term developed to dismiss appeals to sensitivity and inclusion. And it's quite good at doing so!

So, if you care about sensitivity and inclusion, but focus on "PC", you're forced, like this author, to throw your hands up in defeat.

It's actually quite simple: if you realize that policing other's language is more often itself a form of exclusion/aggression, then you can clearly describe the scenarios the author relates as part of the problem, not as some failure of the only proposed solution to an unfathomable problem.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4ZKIeNnTBe2Q2ExQkJRcVNNYkl...

Search for "Responding to Micro-Aggression" for a step by step guide.

They left one of the bullshits camp and hopefully they will be more careful next time before they will try to associate with another.

People learn on mistakes.

For example, while women are disadvantaged in our society in many ways, the ways in which this disadvantage works is remarkably different for black women and white women - or women from higher-class backgrounds vs. lower-class backgrounds.

Ditto, while "white men" are commonly perceived to be privileged, this privilege works differently (and to varying degrees) depending on if you're wealthy or poor, urban or suburban, jock or nerd, etc.

And the effect in totality is not the simple sum of all the properties of the individual. Therefore, attempts to separate the discussion of privilege and disadvantage into discrete "women/men" "rich/poor" "white/black" "straight/gay" variables is doomed to failure - the way an individual is treated in society is the complex intersection of many attributes of who they are.

A straight black woman faces different discrimination than a gay white woman, who faces different discrimination than a straight white poor woman - and the dynamics of the privileges they hold and lack cannot be simply isolated like an algebra equation.

So a specific person in a specific place is privileged/oppressed as the sum of the advantages/disadvantages provided by each of the identifiable systems. As an example, being a man is usually a net positive in terms of societal privileges, but being black at the same time? Being female is a disadvantage, but if you're also rich, you're still coming out ahead.

Unfortunately for them, moral superiority is by definition a positional good, a good whose value rapidly diminishes as PC concepts become increasingly mainstream. Thus they seek increasingly extreme levels of political correctness to signal their status as being above the common rabble.

Something I noticed as a student who spent time around activists (I wouldn't say I am one--I fundamentally agree with many pretty far-left social and economic ideas but I didn't participate in marches/action and was only occasionally involved in their official groups) was that there were sometimes people who used left wing politics and the language of intersectional feminism as a bludgeon to silence any critics and generally prove their superiority. Some groups were kind of dominated by this type of person, and others weren't--it certainly wasn't universal.

The thing is, I saw similar things during my short time in a pretty right leaning debate club, just over different issues. Instead of not speaking the language of intersectional feminism, it was not speaking the language of right leaning economics, but the mechanisms seemed to be the same--an in-group who knew the language and biwords used it to enforce the group's shared values on those outside of that in-group who were interested in joining.

The realization that I had was really that there are people at every point of the political spectrum and in every philosophical movement who police orthodoxy and use it as an excuse to be disrespectful. It happens in the center as well: the people who see the far left and right as crazy demagogues and ignore/berate anyone who uses their language, regardless of their point.

The solution (for the left and the right groups) is probably to demand a certain basic amount of respect from and for other people in your movement. That doesn't mean "let them trample all over you," but instead "When someone seems genuinely interested in your movement, direct them to educational materials." In the cases given, the appropriate thing to do would probably have been to interrupt and explain either why something might be offensive or 'wrong', but defend the person being attacked not on the basis of what they said but on their personhood. And, of course, to not tolerate rabid orthodoxy at the expense of basic compassion for others.

As a side note I wouldn't conclude from this post or the occurrences that I saw that "political correctness" (of either the left or right variety) is totally out of hand or wrongheaded or invalid. As other commentators on the internet have pointed out, a lot of what gets labeled as "abusive leftist social-justice-warrior political correctness" is actually "treating people who are different from you with respect." If someone regularly says things like "Gays are terrible aberrations in the eyes of God" or "All Muslims aren't civilized", then it's fair to conclude that they probably do not respect Gays or Muslims as groups of people, no matter how much they claim otherwise.

At one of the political blogs I read that have discussed Chait's piece, the commenters made the astute observation that Chait and now DeBoer are complaining about the wrong thing. The problem isn't "political correctness", it's tribalism.

http://www.hoover.org/research/why-there-culture-war

But it has worked so well so far!