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Comment by throwaway34689 | Hacker News Reader

Of the places I've lived (not necessarily in order):

- Deep South (18 years - born + raised) - Boston MA (5 years @ college then job) - NYC (6+ years) - Los Angeles (1yr @ startup) - San Diego (1yr @ startup) - Bay Area (6 years, including 4+ at household name tech company)

I found the Bay Area (and SF in particular) to be the most intolerant, rigid and inflexible culture I've ever lived and worked in. I've never encountered such a self-righteous, smug and viscerally hostile attitude to other parts of the country, especially the South and Midwest (where I grew up). Someone literally told me once that "people from the South eat their children" in a half joking tone.

I don't think you can call it "racism" per se, but definitely the most oppressive form of prejudice I've ever encountered, by far, was found among people I worked and came in contact with in the SF Bay Area.

EDIT: Of course, I met (and stayed friends) with really amazing people in SF Bay Area. People with different viewpoints than mine that really expanded my horizons along a lot of different axes. And the raw intelligence of most people I interacted with - technical and otherwise - is off the charts. But the attitudes I mentioned above were expressed frequently enough to leave an impression on me.

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Okay. I grew up in small town Louisiana, across the street from a swamp, where a baby alligator once crawled up into our ditch. Coming to California, and then to San Francisco, felt like shrugging off a weight I'd never realized I'd been carrying. I think what you're experiencing is value mismatch. When the culture won't bend the way you're used to, it can seem as though it's resistant to bending at all. But you yourself admit that the Bay Area accommodates "people different viewpoints than mine that really expanded my horizons along a lot of different axes". Not that I wouldn't say the same about my birthplace: it's just biased at a different point in the multidimensional space of personality.

> I think what you're experiencing is value mismatch. When the culture won't bend the way you're used to, it can seem as though it's resistant to bending at all.

If I need to match a culture's values in order to have an open discussion, that culture is intolerant.

No one is absolutely tolerant of every other position. The question is to what degree one is willing to tolerate (or more important: accept) other points of view.

While this is a good point, it’s exactly the statement Altman is making. The complaint is that the degree to tolerate is too low and that is harmful to society.

No one is calling for absolute tolerance where Nazi pedophiles and sexually harass people. But perhaps firing the CTO of Mozilla because be donated to Prop 8 is too strict a level of intolerance.

To add to that as someone who grew up in Dallas, Texas, has lived in what many consider the most "liberal" parts of the U.S., and now back in Dallas (Texas forever); The thing I hear the most from people who have moved to Dallas recently or visiting is "Everyone here is so nice". I hear it all the time. Even work colleges who are in town for business. I heard one say a few weeks ago how nice people are here after somebody waited a little longer holding a door open than what is considered normal.

I guess I've lived here most of my life and it's normal to me. You can literally strike up a conversation without almost anyone random and you won't get a disdained look back.

I think, in Texas at least, don't know about other areas of the south, many people will be surprised from how open people are in the cities. Now, in rural areas... yeah, no promise there. Rural people will love you at first site, but if you mention anything anything that contradicts their bible or the right to have a gun, most likely not. The cities surprise people who visit here though. They were not expecting the acceptance of things they thought everyone in the south was against.

Is the contradiction here intentional self parody?

No, I'm saying there is a difference between Dallas, Austin, Houston, San Antonio and the rest of Texas, like rural east and west Texas.

I think you have to compare apples to apples here. San Fran to Dallas/Houston/etc. You can't compare rural west Texas to San Fran or the rural wine country around SF to Dallas.

I understood what you meant, I was wondering if you noticed that you, as a self-proclaimed open-minded Houstonite, made a broad brush stereotype about "Rural people".

Well, I didn't say it definitively. But I suppose you can say that. But this whole thread is one giant stereotype to begin with, so yeah. From my observation is what I should have said.

And I'm in Dallas, way better than Houston ;)

Dallaganian?

I think we mostly also use -ite.. Dallasite

We call ourselves Houstonians in Houston.

Have you considered that the culture of hospitality in Texas might be related to the values found in the Bible you are so quick to dismiss?

Values are like the vitamins of culture: You don't notice how helpful they are until you get scurvy.

I think this is absolutely true, but you'd think the Quakers would have left some wholesomeness in the Northeast as well, right? I would hope that we don't need to depend on religion, hundreds of years later, to instill good values in our children.

Culture of hospitality exists is many other places that has nothing to do with Bible. Example Afghanistan

Also due to ancient tradition. My general experience is traditional cultures are nicer. Hospitality is usually a sacred value, e.g. Bible's story of Abraham unwittingly being a host to God.

Your point of course stands, but this example may not be ideal. It is a country where the predominant religion follows ideas very closely related to those in the Bible.

> The thing I hear the most from people who have moved to Dallas recently or visiting is "Everyone here is so nice"

I lived in Dallas, it was the only place I've lived where people would yell "faggot" at me on the street. People there aren't that friendly if you look different.

All these people saying SF is less tolerant than the Deep South are almost certainly not gay.

I came out in college in a big city in TX and it was fucking brutal.

Someone who thinks SF is intolerant has no fucking clue what real intolerance looks like.

Or perhaps they have had different experiences from you?

Intolerance based on thoughts you have a choice to verbalize is markedly different than intolerance based on physical/physiological attributes you can't control. Someone having a bad experience because they expressed an unpopular opinion in SF seems bad if you've never been the target of disdain for just existing.

Why are they markedly different?

Ive found it's much easier to shrug off discrimination based on my skin color than it is to shrug off discrimination based on my core beliefs.

I'd love to see some research on this - do people who can be discriminated against based upon sexual orientation (which can be hidden) have it a lot easier than people who can be discriminated against based on skin color (which they obviously can't hide)?

> Ive found it's much easier to shrug off discrimination based on my skin color than it is to shrug off discrimination based on my core beliefs.

Are you white?

I am not white, and indeed, discrimination based on skin color is much easier to shrug off for me, than discrimination based on thoughts or beliefs. I think it's because I equate my identity to my thoughts and beliefs, and not my skin color. This perhaps also comes from stoic philosophy, i.e. I don't bother to think about things I can't control such as my skin color.

> Deep South (18 years - born + raised)

If I may ask, where, more specifically?

I grew up in southern California, and my wife grew up in Columbus, Georgia. We met in the midwest and lived there 15 or so years, and so visited Columbus frequently. For the last 4 months of her dad's life, we lived in Columbus.

We've lived in the SF Bay Area for the past 8 years.

> [SF Bay Area ...] most intolerant, rigid and inflexible culture

I think I know what you're getting at, and I don't necessarily disagree out of hand.

I will say that there is an enormous difference in day to day racial tension in west Georgia compared to the SF Bay Area. In Columbus, from McDonalds to hospitals, there was barely submerged but obvious tension between blacks and whites.

I don't mean this to be a counter to what you're saying, I think it's a different thing.

>I will say that there is an enormous difference in day to day racial tension in west Georgia compared to the SF Bay Area. In Columbus, from McDonalds to hospitals, there was barely submerged but obvious tension between blacks and whites.

Probably because Columbus GA is 45% black and San Francisco is only 6.4% black. Hard to have black/white tension when one of those groups comprises such a small percent of total population.

But San Francisco is also 33.3% Asian and over 15% Hispanic. The white to non-white percentages are very close between both locations. And while the story of Asian Americans in SF is not the same as Black Americans in the South, it was hardly a picnic for them (for one example, Angel island).

That's an interesting point.

As someone who grew up in a poverty-stricken neighborhood of Boston, I'm also familiar with tension, and I remember it being far more racially-defined within the poor communities than elsewhere. Upon moving to nicer areas, however, the tension felt more like rich vs poor, with race (very sadly) often signaling to someone's level of wealth. They also seemed less tension-prone overall, in comparison to the poorer communities.

What I mean to say is that:

1. Tension between races seemed to primarily exist at the poorer levels, and that at the wealthier levels, the tension between classes very much overrode any tension between races.

2. Wealthy communities just seem to be more educated and accepting, as they see the better [1] individuals of all races of people.

I haven't spent too much time in the Bay Area, but would you possibly say that:

1. The wealth inequality in the Bay Area creates enough of a class divide to where the racial divide isn't noticeable?

2. Alternatively, does the racial diversity in the wealthy of the Bay Area remove stigmas that result in racism altogether?

I'd be interested in your thoughts! I'm not aiming to counter either, but just curious.

[1] By 'better,' I don't mean to pass judgment on any people; just that people in worse conditions in life will often be forced or incentivized into worse actions. For example, a child's friend is far less likely to steal their toy or game in a wealthier community than poorer. It's not evil, it's just worse conditions resulting in worse actions.

Outrage culture in the Bay is strong, and it makes many conversations here impossible or uninteresting.

However, I think Sam occupies a rare position that he may be blind to: He is famous and the media is paying attention to what he says. That makes saying interesting things, which require taking risks, more dangerous, because more strangers are listening to him, his comments are more likely to be removed from their context, and reporters seeking clicks will deliberately misconstrue him.

So while I don't think he's wrong, I think his perception of this environment of outrage and right-thinking is exaggerated by his own celebrity. Famous people are forced to be more careful in what they say. That is less true for the rest of us.

as a counterpoint, i have a similar geographical history and felt and saw more raciscm in the south than elsewhere (although to be fair, it wasn't vastly more so).

what you're feeling in that smugness is an exercise of social power on you. my guess is that you're white, which is why you didn't feel racism in the south but did feel the smugness of the "coastal elite" (and why you tie those two things together in your mind).

Yeah, I also want to bet that they're straight.

I want to respond with a bender quote, "this is the worst kind of oppression, the kind against me"

But honestly your comment is so vague I'm unsure exactly what you want to be heard from your words

Can you clarify what kinds of oppression you noticed in SF and the kinds you noticed in other places

When you speak so indistinctly everyone is forced to fill the holes themselves

Those that agree that SF is oppressive will fill those holes with their own aggravating experiences and those that see SF as progressive will read your comment as "I just want to tell my coworkers that their lifestyle is offensive to god but SF is too intolerant of me and my wants"

> self-righteous, smug and viscerally hostile attitude to other parts of the country

I'm not sure what this has to do with "political correctness." People being jerks isn't the same as demarcating hate speech and saying that it has no place in public discourse.

I think what happens is that someone will propose something that another constituency worries will have violent outcomes for them, and they push back saying "that's unacceptable." Then the first party gets defensive and says that they're being tone policed instead of engaging with the substance of the complaint. For people like me (white men) this can sometimes be the first time when our presuppositions are challenged, or that we're told that we might not be totally objective, rational observers in a chaotic universe and its very very easy to get defensive.

Further, it's important to understand that people who worry about "PC" as a threat to the free exchange of ideas are actively having their rhetoric coopted by others on the far right who are actively trying to move the overton window into a place where they are able to espouse things like racism in public without backlash.

Considering that 50% of the people in the Bay Area are foreign born, and have no experience of the South, I find your comment "a self-righteous, smug and viscerally hostile attitude to other parts of the country" to be hyperbolic. May be you are projecting based upon a few interactions ?

Have you seen this clip?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFYRkzznsc0

The man is an elected official in Alabama. Also an idiot and a bigot who think only Christians can be elected to Congress. It's okay to look down on him for being ignorant, but a lot of the comments attack his regional accent. That's not okay.

Exactly right

People don't need to have experienced something firsthand in order to have a "self-righteous, smug and viscerally hostile attitude" towards it. In fact, they are more likely to be hostile to things they haven't experienced. This seems to be genetically programmed, as it transcends cultures and history.

I think the use of the word "tolerance" here muddies things.

To the extent that tolerance is a virtue, it refers to tolerating other people for what they are, not what they do. There are gray areas here of course, but there are plenty of places where that distinction is clear.

I don't think political tolerance is inherently virtuous. If a coworker tells me they don't think women are suited for technical work then I don't feel any moral obligation to be "tolerant" of that viewpoint.

I am reminded of an old quote from George Washington:

"It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support." [1]

"Tolerance" has a clear power dynamic. One group allows another group to exist. It is therefore shouldn't be looked at as the ultimate goal of a just society. Instead we should simply ask that people are "good citizens."

Whether your coworker believes women don't make good tech workers should be irrelevant to you. What should matter is whether they are a good employee and whether their views manifest themselves in anyway that hurts anyone else (e.g. they should not be in a position to supervise other employees if they can't prevent their beliefs from harming those employees)

[1] - https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/05-06-02-...

> To the extent that tolerance is a virtue, it refers to tolerating other people for what they are, not what they do. There are gray areas here of course

The gray areas are miles wide in many cases. Tolerance of what people are is fairly easy for most people to agree on, but in some cases what people do and what people are is disagreed upon. That is, to some degree, the crux of the debate about homosexuality still. People disagree on whether it's something people do, or are. At the same time, an older debate under similar grounds (but, ironically with less evidence for it being towards the are end of the spectrum) is religion. Are you a Christian, Jew or Muslim, or do you just practice those religions?

I don't think boiling it down to are and do particularly helps for a lot of the really controversial topics we are currently dealing with.

Except you're conflating a person thinks with what they do. It is still entirely possible for your hypothetical coworker to give a more honest evaluation of a female colleague's tech work than for one who was a women's rights firebrand and perhaps prone to overlook poor female performance because of his or her own biases. You are right to demand impartiality where judgment affects another person's equality. It's unfair however to assume without evidence that someone is incapable of impartiality because of what they think.

Have you heard this? I have not. I have heard people make the case that there are very minor biological differences between men and women, and seen them get tainted with the brush of holding a far different view.

As if southerners aren't constantly cursing or making fun of "San Francisco values".

Honestly - in my experience, they are not. I didn't know anything about SF before I moved there. No one around me in the South ever talked about it. Now that I go back home and I mention I lived in SF I may hear people say something along the lines of "wow they are really liberal out there aren't they?". Nothing along the lines of the vitriol I hear in the Bay Area.

We're really not.

Oh please. Y'all campaign against San Francisco values. Pelosi is basically a code word for it even though she's from a Baltimore political dynasty.

https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=644311...

San Francisco values gets repeated by Newt Gingrich, Bill O'Reilly, Hannity, Rush, ... at every opportunity. Sorry to link to Breitbart, but here's Roy Moore ranting on about San Francisco.

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/12/03/hes-said-...

Who exactly is he ranting to?

Why are you associating those douchebags with the south? Newt I get, but aren't the rest of them in NYC?

The real divide in this country is rural vs. urban. Cities in the south are plenty progressive, and rural areas in the rest of the country are plenty conservative.

I've lived in Boston and Atlanta, and Atlanta is a much more tolerant, friendly place.

Roy Moore and Newt Gingrich are about as South as South gets and they definitely campaigned against San Francisco values. Newt Gingrich essentially defined the modern Republican Party's approach to campaigning and governing.

First, Roy Moore lost. It wasn't a resounding loss, but he did lose.

Second, acting like an entire region as a monoculture is stupid and unproductive. We're all very, very different, and while there are some trends that are more prevalent in a region, that doesn't mean that the people who believe those things are backwards. Perhaps it means that you just haven't tried to see things from their perspective.

The lack of empathy and the unwillingness to consider that other people have different backgrounds and codes of ethics and a dogmatic insistence that "this way is the right way" is what's killing our cohesion as a country. And, as a whole, I've seen more of the "live and let live" philosophy in Atlanta than in a whole lot of supposedly liberal places.

Yes, you are all very, very different. So are we.

But it remains that really starting with Gingrich that conservatives have mounted a long media campaign against liberals which has been personified as Pelosi and codewritten as San Francisco values.

The reverse is not the case. This was one sided but it was also Gingrich and Republicans only path to power. It worked as an election strategy but not as a governing philosophy. So if you are complaining about the cohesion of the country, you really should start there.

I lived in the South. I have family in the South.

But I feel like you're blaming the victims. It was actually people like Rupert Murdoch who set up the whole "our culture is being destroyed by PC run amok" thing, and they did it to gin up ratings for Fox News and to gain power.

We're all vulnerable to cultural brainwashing. I think that's part of what the article is complaining about. It's hard to be an iconoclast, especially when you're treated as an immoral person if you dare to think for yourself.

Again, the way to save the country is to call out all demonization of "the other". Of course I call it out when I see it, to the point where my liberal friends think I'm conservative and my conservative friends think I'm liberal.

Fox News dates to 1996. Newt Gingrich (Atlanta suburbs) was already Speaker by then and had been recruiting and training candidates on his methods for close to a decade. He started as a pro-environment wonk Republican back bencher but saw this perfection of Nixon's Southern Strategy as his only path to power.

It worked.

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

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

To be a real iconoclast, and I don't see Altman as any sort of iconoclast, you have to take your lumps. You have to be indifferent to your lumps.

Even Newt’s been in the DC machine for decades, he probably doesn’t even watch college football.

>I've lived in Boston and Atlanta, and Atlanta is a much more tolerant, friendly place.

Care to say what you experienced in Boston?

It's been 35 years since I lived in the Boston area, so this may have changed some -- I certainly hope it has! -- but the ethnic animosities there shocked me, as someone who moved there from the DC area and had the idea that Northern cities would be more tolerant. I moved into an apartment in East Cambridge in 1982, in what was, unbeknownst to me before I got there, a Polish neighborhood, only to learn that a few weeks earlier, a Black residence on the same street had been firebombed.

> Oh please. Y'all

Please don't personalize or (so to speak) group-ize this here. I know the feelings are strong, but this temptation needs to be resisted because it leads to battle, which is incompatible with thoughtful exchange. You did it again downthread ("you" vs. "we") and it strikes me as no coincidence that this subthread is by far the worst of the ones I've scrolled through so far. Which I'm sure is not your intent and is definitely not all your responsibility—it's just that things predictably happen this way, given such initial conditions.

I lived in the South and I know what y’all means. Given what Altman was writing about I’ll put this down as unintentional irony.

I'm sure you know more about the American South than I do. But the point is that you're damaging HN by taking this thread in a significantly worse direction. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15926503 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15927904 are not helping. Please stop this now.

Dude, you are not making any sense. I cited a CIA report on Russian meddling in the 2016 election. Explain yourself.

Irrelevant to his original point. That Southerners do the same does not justify San Franciscans doing it as well.

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

What do you consider southerners?

As recently as two nights ago I helped entertain some startup founders from SF who were genuinely suprised that Houston (the 4th largest, soon 3rd largest city in the US) wasn't just a few strip malls.

Houston is always surprising to people who've never been there (and was surprising to me when I first moved there as a 19-year-old kid). It's among the friendliest places I've ever lived. And, for all its horrible traffic, the drivers are among the most polite I've seen, as well (though they drive terrifyingly fast on average). It's one of the biggest/best cities that nobody's ever heard of or thought about. Great music, arts, and food, on par with the best cities in the US, as well.

As an aside, there was a study many years ago about the friendliest cities, and New York and Houston were at the top of the list; both were considered surprising by the authors, I guess based on reputation. While the deep south was way down the list well into the "unfriendly" category, which also seemed surprising to the authors given the reputation for "southern hospitality", but I'm from the deep south and I wasn't surprised, at all. The deep south is, by and large, insular and mistrustful of outsiders, except in a few larger cities. Poverty makes for higher crime, as well (one of the tests of "friendliness" included leaving a wallet in public places and seeing whether it made it back to its owner with cash intact...in NYC and Houston it almost always did, in some other places, not so much), and the south is pretty poor on average.

But, Houston is not a "southern" city. It is an international city with a huge amount of people who've moved there from other states and countries. It doesn't feel southern, though it does feel like other big Texas cities to some degree. I don't really consider Texas the south, though small-town Texas kinda looks like small-town Georgia or whatever. But, also, small-town California is kinda like small-town Texas...lots of cow towns, oil towns, and farm towns, just like Texas. And, tends to be Republican-leaning, just like small-town Texas.

One follow-on to your final paragraph: the thing is that small-town Texas (depending on the area) does look a lot different from Georgia.

It's probably got a good deal more Latinos (Angleton, or any town as you head west), it's probably got more Vietnamese and folks of Vietnamese descent (coastal towns, Port Arthur), it's probably got a more functioning economy (notable exceptions like Rockport).

In some ways (if you look up the statistics above) rural Texas most resembles rural California.

I agree with you; rural Texas is more like western rural cities than the deep south, including California. I pretty much always argue that Texas is not part of "the south", and often get ranted at because Texas is so far south...it's as southern as you can get in the US, but I think its character is just so different from SC, NC, GA, AL, etc. that it doesn't make sense to group them in most conversations.

I would expect you to get ranted at because of its alignment with the Confederacy in the Civil War, which otherwise pretty much defines "the South" as a geographic term in common usage. South = Confederate states, North = Union states, West = a few physically separate states and various non-state territories at the time. At least with the North and the South, less so with the West, these groupings lasted long after the end of the civil war due to the effects of reconstruction and cultural identity related to the outcome of the war.

Honestly, as a native of (urban) NC, I felt like TX was very similar when I visited. And the few Texans I went to school with didn't seem to feel too out of place in NC either. We've both got nice people, growing and diverse cities, a solid college education system, and super religious people everywhere just to keep you on your toes... Really the biggest differences I could tell was that TX got hotter and you have crazy long stretches of road with nothing at all on them (which is indeed a uniquely western thing).

But I think the whole concept of "deep south" vs the "new south" is where you see the differences come into play. Charlotte, Raleigh, Durham, Asheville, and many other NC areas, are great, diverse places that have far more in common with Dallas/Austin/Houston than with whatever the stereotypical image of "the south" is that most folks have in their heads. So in other words, I think TX is just as southern as NC is, and that isn't necessarily anything to be ashamed of.

People in the south don't think about San Francisco at all. Only the Fox News anchors based in New York but charged with representing the politics of the south care about San Francisco.

Couldn't agree more. They are too busy having a great life down there. I definitely miss a lot of aspects of that culture.

Precisely.

People in SF don't think about the south either besides in political discussions.

Or when it's time for BBQ.

This is not true. I live in the South (Nashville) and I've heard (and overheard) multiple disparaging comments about people from the coasts. It's not like they're obsessed, but they talk about NY and CA as much as NY and CA talked about the South when I lived in both places.

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