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Comment by jordigh | Hacker News Reader

I was fully expecting someone in HN to get very upset about Black Lives Matter. I don't know much about them, but judging from their Wikipedia entry, as a whole the movement seems to be doing much more good than harm.

It's also a pretty diverse group, and some have used the BLM monicker while being denounced by other members of BLM. So don't paint them all with the same brush. It's like saying that you're against John Stuart Mill or Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz because you dislike feminism[1]. It will be interesting to see which part of BLM the EFA considers to be representative.

[1] Or absolutely all of these people:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_feminists

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After having read the talk pages and controversies surrounding a number of politically charged wiki articles, I could not in good faith use them as a source to determine which political groups have a positive or negative influence.

I'm starting to think disjoint, disorganized movements like BLM are a bad idea just from an organizational standpoint. It means your message can't be controlled, it means its up to each individual member what the groups means, and worst of all, It takes just one idiot doing something wrong before the whole movement is permanently tainted - mostly because the majority of people will not exercise the same benefit of the doubt you just did.

These disjoint, disorganised movements exist to try and avoid another issue; that of a single person or group of people who can be 'discredited' or attacked by their enemies.

If you have a proper structure, you provide targets to discredit in order to bring down a movement or group. Groups like Occupy and Black Lives Matter and whatever else don't want a 'pope' like figure that the media can focus all their efforts on attacking, nor an organisational structure that can get infiltrated or corrupted.

Unfortunately, that causes the trade off you mention; you have no way to control the message your movement sends. This is what's caused so many problems with GamerGate as well, the fact it's entirely based on a hashtag and a loosely associated bunch of forums and blogs means that their enemies accuse them of absolutely everything they don't like that day.

But it's a trade off. Either have it decentralised and avoid the issue of a single leader/organisation being a media target (but lose the ability to control the message and who's involved) or have it centralised with a clear leader and structure at the cost of these people getting attacked non stop by their enemies and people trying their best to decredit/arrest/potentially kill them.

It reminds me of how Occupy was discredited: "They're just thugs and lazy people who don't want to work...and they're occupying our parks, for crying out loud!"

Because why would anyone other than thugs and lazy people who don't want to work ever protest Wall Street?

For sure, thoigh some of them advocate violence and separatism, and at some points people with such views had a lot of followers, kind of like the Trump followers who are filled with fear of Muslims.

Note that the BLM logo is the black panther logo, and they were largely viewed as separatists. I'm all for the movement when it is peaceful and respectful of American values, but when people who advocate having their own space start having a louder voice, then I lose interest.

The Wikipedia is the absolute last place you should ever visit to read up on political movements. It’s a biased source.

If you say you support a particular movement, you’re taking on the whole baggage it brings. If you don’t want the whole baggage then don’t name names.

> It’s a biased source.

Every source is biased. Wikipedia tries harder to be less biased. And hey, you can frequently change the bias if you just go and edit the article yourself.

I suppose I should read Wikipedia and Conservapedia and take the average of the two to get closer to the truth? :-)

>It's like saying that you're against John Stuart Mill or Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz because you dislike feminism[1].

I don't see why you'd have to be against a person just because they support a different point of view on some specific issue.

Really? A person can be the flagship of a movement that is so opposed to your point of view as to be dangerous. A radically religious up and coming politician for example. Or, I suppose, Hitler.

Of course, but he was quoting a "list of feminists", which I haven't clicked but I guess contains dozens or even hundreds of individuals, whose lives most likely don't revolve around feminism.

And there are plenty of people whose lives didn't revolve around the KKK either. You would find that most KKK members believed in different treatment based on a person's skin colour, but disagreed with lynching or physical violence.

I argue that any group who focusses on itself is similar. You get some vocal intolerance (see the attack on Matt Taylor for a list of tens of thousands of intolerant feminists). However, what you get from the collective group is a misguided sense of entitlement. Eg. The founder of she++ dislikes gender based groups, so she established one herself! In fact, I'd argue she++ is one of the few gender based groups I know of.

As far as I'm concerned, prejudice is prejudice. BLM focus on black lives only. Feminism focuses on special treatment based on gender. how are either of these things fair or reasonable? Such movements can't help but encourage intolerance (eg. the attack on Matt Taylor). Hence, they should be denounced in the same way we denounce the KKK.

Any movement that focuses on one section of society (KKK, feminism) inevitably drives intolerance. Just ask Matt Taylor who was crucified by feminists for wearing a shirt designed by a woman. It is one of many examples that highlights why BLM and feminism are flawed in the same way.

EFA should only promote groups who represent everyone equally. You wouldn't accept the KKK, why accept others who encourage equivalent prejudices.

> Any movement that focuses on one section of society (KKK, feminism) inevitably drives intolerance.

If a section of society is marginalized and persecuted in the society as a whole, a movement to equalize things is bound to crop up. By your argument, you would prefer the African-American civil rights movement never to have existed, is that correct?

As a sidenote, I would like to remark that many feminists would like to define feminism as the struggle to end sexism for everybody. Consider this quote by bell hooks:

"In Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, I suggest that defining feminism broadly as “a movement to end sexism and sexist oppression” would enable us to have a common political goal…Sharing a common goal does not imply that women and men will not have radically divergent perspectives on how that goal might be reached."

(devil's advocate) Arguably feminism has already succeeded in achieving equality by the end of the second wave. Although some feminists may indeed fight to end sexism for everybody, feminism still bears the implicit assumption that women are currently disadvantaged.

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