Hacker News Reader

Comment by masondixon | Hacker News Reader

> I don’t a-priori assume that the incident was rooted in sexism

So who is sexist in this scenario?

Turns out its the feminist in the audience assuming that a woman needs someone to cause a public disturbance because she could not help herself be heard.

Why is it every time some social justice event gains public attention, it turns out to not be sexism/racist/etc. at all.

View on HN

To say "every time some social justice event gains public attention, it turns out to not be sexism/racist/etc. at all" seems like a wild overgeneralization. You would probably be more accurate in saying that while "sexism/racism/etc" are often over-attributed as a cause, they are in fact pervasive, but to varying degrees of influence. The first mistake is to assume there's a singular cause of any behavior.

He was plainly speaking figuratively...

I'd be charitable to their claim if they left it at 'every time', but to say the incidents are not due to sexism 'at all' is not a good argument, even interpreted figuratively.

That seems like an arbitrary place to draw a line; it still seems completely, unambiguously figurative to me, but I'm not going to argue the point.

> 'every time'

...is clearly figuratively as the commenter mentioned.

So who is sexist in this scenario?

Maybe it's no one.

A simple test is to ask yourself if you believe it'd have been sexist for a man to have done the same thing. I think we'd all just assume it was someone interested in what the woman on the panel had to say. It's not automatically 'sexist', or even feminist, for a woman to speak up for another woman.

Because our society has advanced a lot in the last fifty years, but some people want to profit from the appearance of "fighting injustice" or perhaps they feel they need some sort of moral consolation?

I really want to understand the internal monologue of these people. There is some culmination of factors that must result in this need to fight injustice. It just feels like they have some chip on their shoulder from adolescents. Being bullied at school. Having gone through a bad breakup. Something like that.

I agree. I think social justice became an identity or a tribe, and each w̵a̵r̵r̵i̵o̵r̵ person in the tribe joined for their own particular mix of reasons (some were probably legitimately the victims of a prejudice and were overcome with hate for their aggressor and his/her racial/gender/etc group, others may have simply made friends with SJ-types in their formative years and taken on the identity, etc). Once an ideology becomes tribal, it's more or less impervious to rational thought. I think this is probably the case and not just wanton psycho-analysis because it mirrors social psychological work done about politics generally.

That's exactly my interpretation of the situation. The moderator is exceedingly polite towards everyone; there's not a trace of sexism.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com