Hacker News Reader

Comment by beaker52 | Hacker News Reader

I noticed that someone criticised the blood droplet as "Ambiguous and multi functional". I've noticed a lot of this kind of attitude around discussions of race, LGBT and women's issues - activists pushing for "exclusive rights" to things like emojis, words, activities, places for specific groups. That isn't very inclusive. I feel like the most outspoken "social activists" have good intentions but don't really know what equality or inclusivity really mean.

View on HN

They want to be perceived to have good intentions. There's a huge effort by these people to silence any discourse contrary to their increasing thinly defined criteria of acceptable behavioural norms. The far left is once again joining the far right as both anti-liberal and devoid of empathy.

This and the thread that follows are conspicuous for the fact that the group being discussed is never defined. 'Social activists'. 'These people'. It's a good discipline to argue against actual people and their beliefs, not a vague phantasm of them. Your argument - to associate the words of one unnamed person with an large and multifarious politics - is equally unhelpful.

Bit of an odd response because I did define them as "Social activists" (for want of a better term, but it does the trick), which is a far cry from "these people". If you don't understand what I mean, that doesn't mean it's necessarily inadequate, just that we haven't communicated very well.

And the unnamed person - you can easily find in the article as a tweet. But it wasn't important to name the person because my intention was to draw attention to the attitude behind the words, which I feel is more important than the particular person behind that tweet. No point in muddying the waters.

Yes, we live in the age of Inclusion by Exclusion. It's maddeningly cognitively dissonant and the Overton Window appears to have split in half, with extremists on either end ripping logical, neutral people to shreds over not picking a side and thus "working with the enemy" or "being indecisive"

I agree. That's when I disconnect from the discussion.

I think everyone deserves an equal stab at life. Nobody should be discriminated against for their beliefs or what's in their trousers... But the methods used by some to reach that end are appalling.

Equality isn't accomplished by publicly shaming everyone for every little social infraction. It deliberately excludes the people you need to improve to achieve equality. That turns your cause into a circlejerk and ultimately hurts those who you're trying to represent.

But that's what politics is these days.

Red Vs Blue. Us Vs Them.

Edit: I've witnessed the score of most of these comments fluctuate wildly. It's a shame that inclusivity has to be so divisive.

> That's when I disconnect from the discussion.

That might be good for you, but each rational being we lose in the fight against extremism weakens our overall chances of escaping this madness within our lifetimes.

If someone tells me I shouldn't be participating in a discussion about womens' or transgender rights because I'm a cis white male, walking away from the discussion doesn't do anything. It's like quitting your job after you've already been fired. I feel compelled to impress upon people that I will not be silenced based on the color of my skin or my sexuality, that "reverse racism" really doesn't exist because it's still just called racism.

It's incredibly frustrating and fills me with anxiety, and was a huge component of why I left Facebook and other social media...

One of the final straws was in a thread about domestic abuse. Someone asked a question of how false rape charges could possibly ruin a man's life, because it seemed impossible to them that there could be lasting consequences for false rape accusations.

I shared a story about my own childhood abuse as well as the time I was physically assaulted by a sexual partner, which led to a large portion of my friends turning against me in the belief that I had hurt someone. My life was majorly affected in a negative way by this person's assault and subsequent defamation of my character. It could have been even worse as multiple people encouraged her to go to the police, but I made it clear to her I would fight tooth and nail to expose her and get her jail time for a false accusation.

I was then bombarded with hundreds of people tagging in from various "support groups" calling me a liar, saying I probably deserved it, that it probably wasn't as bad as I said, that I probably assaulted her first, declaring that I am likely to be a future rapist solely on the fact that I'm a cis white male (really wish I was making that up) etc etc. Literally all of the victim-blaming behavior that people complain is the bane of inclusion and understanding... came out in waves. Eventually I was banned from the thread. I felt ashamed for absolutely no reason at all. These people had successfully shamed and invalidated me for being a victim, based on the color of my skin, gender and orientation. I lost several real-life friends over that incident as well, and it wasn't long after that my Facebook was gone for good.

I don't disagree that moderates are required, but —as you highlight— these causes can only police themselves. Anything else is seen as an attack on the cause itself.

It'd be great if our humanity allowed us to accept criticism and contradiction at face value, but that is demonstrably not the case.

I don't know a way around this.

Inclusivity is about wanting to better include minorities or disabled people in spaces where they may have been discriminated against and affecting their livelihoods, e.g. the workplace.

Using a definition of inclusivity here without a consideration for power dynamics between the parties involved is totally uncharitable: as you've observed in your comment, there is no barrier to actually denying "exclusive rights" to activists, so it's more a matter of respect to the people who want to use the symbol (e.g. the pride flag, which few people have issues with it being used to exclusively represent LGBT groups) to make their cause more visible, rather than a lack of "inclusivity".

Inclusivity is a word with a broad meaning, and that's not it. Has it also been recently redefined in terms of "... + power (and we'll tell you who has how much power!)" in the social studies dictionary, same as racism?

1. https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/inclusivity

> The practice or policy of including people who might otherwise be excluded or marginalized, such as those who have physical or mental disabilities and members of minority groups.

2. Without an understanding of power, is there a useful definition of "inclusivity"?

Or is it just a whitewashed feelgood platitude that can't mean anything in the end, because if you include everyone, including people who are decidedly discriminating against you, that it constitutes some ideal of "inclusiveness"?

You just gave a useful definition of inclusivity, which doesn't rely on power in the sense that it is employed in this context. Or, alternatively, excluding others is a power in and of itself - a very common power to have, and people do that all the time to those who have other powers over them (sometimes for that very reason!).

But no, it doesn't mean that you have to include people who are decidedly discriminating against you. Which, again, has nothing to do with their power to actually do so, systemic or otherwise. For example, an NBP black supremacist can be rightly rejected because they're known for their anti-Semitic rants with threats of genocide, despite the fact that they have no ability to actually carry them out.

Lets follow that dictionary and looking up minority groups.

> A small group of people within a community or country, differing from the main population in race, religion, language, or political persuasion.

With women being slightly more than 50% and men being slightly less than 50% of the main population in the country, that will makes men the minority group.

Women is not a minority group according to any dictionary.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com