Saying “All Lives Matter” to Siri Now Redirects You to Blacklivesmatter.com
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However when Tim Cook defended the decision to side with China and to censor and suppress the pro-democracy protestors in Hong Kong [1] and then support this one, it is quite extraordinary for this double standards from Apple to pick and choose their causes when both are exercising their right to protest against an injustice.
A very hypocritical one-sided stance from Apple.
[0] https://www.macrumors.com/2019/10/03/apple-bans-app-used-by-...
[1] https://www.macrumors.com/2019/10/11/tim-cook-defends-remova...
Apple hasn't acted hypocritically at all. Every decision they have made was calculated to fulfull their primary goal: generating profit for shareholders.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Cook#Early_life_and_educat...
If you’re a “bad” person, logically your technology should help you be bad.
And if you’re good, the same.
But never would I want my technology to inform me what is good or bad, or permit me one path over the other. That is my decision as the human in the relationship.
Search for abortion resources, search for 3D printing a firearm, search for pirated movies, search for being anonymous in a protest... all get redirected to the right way to think of things.
The FBI should just go ahead and ask them for the good of the people to redirect all terms they categorize as terroristic in nature to their anti radicalization resources...
Also: you can very easily find hate groups and where they hang out on the internet through Google. You'll also, correctly, find adequate warning that these groups are probably not places you want to be.
The key word here is not "bad" but "your". Whose technology is Siri?
With apologies to Godwin, but IBM and the Holocaust [1] will always be relevant in these discussions.
There's a world of difference between exploring the world of information and genocide.
When entities like Apple start doing things like this is it pouring gasoline on conspiracy theory fires, and one can argue makes things worse.
It's also a classic case of the Streisand Effect.
What thugs are the social, political and business elites supporting today?
What if google were making these editorial decisions during WWII? Would you be redirected away from things supportive Japanese Americans that were place in internment camps?
How about during the red scare? Would you be directed to Hollywood blacklists?
How about during the civil rights era? Would you be directed to content arguing in favor of segregation?
Contrary to popular liberal belief, the Black community in America is not a borg with one hive mind. There's a lot of diversity of thought within that community and people that dissent from the very narrow viewpoint that many gatekeepers who lean left are promoting. There's a lot more thoughtfulness and nuance in discussion than promoting one-sided activism would suggest. In fact, this active filtering robs that community (and other communities that are filtered) of their agency.
Here's a list of people from the black community with dissenting opinions that I can name quickly off the top of my head and I'm sure there are many many more:
Shelby Steele, John McWhorter, Glenn Loury, Thomas Sowell, Coleman Hughes, Kmele Foster, Roland G. Fryer Jr. Anthony Mackey, Morgan Freeman, Denzel Washington, Larry Sharpe, Pastor Corey Brooks, Eric July
It’s almost like they can’t imagine a scenario where they are the minority, and might wish to pursue their own beliefs in peace...
Especially shameful here on HN, which claims to be an especially intellectually open-minded community!
For shame, that you present an accurate, supported analysis of risks that doesn’t support the current dogma! ;)
The last few years definitely have had a feeling of eternal september and of all the eternal septembers I've experienced in my 26 years on the Internet, this is by far the worst and most toxic to open, thoughtful and nuanced discussion.
My general observation is that those that best recognize the importance of such liberties also possess the greatest faculties in abstraction (a fundamental skill for success in engineering, especially software engineering). For it is only through abstraction that someone is able to back out from the concrete issue at hand and see generalizable principles and how they might apply to other issues under other circumstances.
My suspicion is that as HN and tech in general has caught the attention of a broader audience, that the median capacity to abstract has dropped and a plurality lacks the comparable capacity to reason abstractly as once existed on HN.
http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/S/September-that-never-...
This would aggregate people for whom downvote means “I don’t agree”, and separately those whose downvote means “that’s an inflammatory/ unsupported/ insane position”.
Soon, those open to reasoned debate would see comments by others known for reasoned debate — regardless of their political/ideological stripe.
The trolls would be relegated each to their own echo-chamber.
Everybody wins!
Neutrality is a myth. Actively promoting values and challenging biases is preferable. You don't have to agree with the values promoted, and you're welcome to choose not to use the technology.
It is that simple.
Technology is built in service to mankind.
> For subjects to believe in an ideology, it must have been presented to them, and been accepted, as non-ideological indeed, as True and Right, and what anyone sensible would believe. As we shall see in 2e, Žižek is alert to the realist insight that there is no more effective political gesture than to declare some contestable matter above political contestation. Just as the third way is said to be post-ideological or national security is claimed to be extra-political, so Žižek argues that ideologies are always presented by their proponents as being discourses about Things too sacred to profane by politics. Hence, Žižek’s bold opening in The Sublime Object of Ideology is to claim that today ideology has not so much disappeared from the political landscape as come into its own. It is exactly because of this success, Žižek argues, that ideology has also been able to be dismissed in accepted political and theoretical opinion.
https://www.iep.utm.edu/zizek/#Ha
I think it's actually fairly concerning that the fault lines between ideologies seems to be deepening - people seemed more and more convinced that their positions are absolutely not even contestable. I'm not sure where there is room for civil political discourse and positive change in this kind of scenario.
That thought process is absolutely poisonous for technology - it’s like a viral brain-lock.
I mean tech is never neutral right?
> And if you’re good, the same.
That is almost tautologically the case of how technology works, but Siri isn’t your technology (where you = the end user), it is Apple’s.
I think this oversteps the Silicon Valley idea that technology is always inherently beneficial.
It's really not unfair that I can buy gardening gloves and radish seeds on Amazon, while a domestic terrorist has to sneak around and lie to buy a barrel of nitromethane. We should not be using our technology to enable both equally, and then leave it to the individual to decide whether to plant a garden or a bomb.
But Racism 2.0 has been pushed out and – in some ways – it's a forced upgrade.
Racism 1.0 was widely understood: racists were bad people who made monkey chants on football terraces. It was "the nice people" vs "the mean people". If we "raised awareness", maybe one day it would be "stamped out".
Racism 2.0 is more complex.
It's structural and systemic, so for the first time a lot of of white progressives are discovering that we're part of the problem. Saying "I don't see colour" is suddenly the wrong thing to say. For a long time it was the correct thing to say and think.
People are having to re-learn stuff they thought they already knew and not everybody is thrilled.
Worse, Racism 2.0 is closed source. The code isn't really published anywhere, at least not in simple language. You have to kind of piece it together yourself from lists of "resources" thrown together by activists, some of whom have opaque agendas.
It's not as simple as it used to be, and it's not surprising that some people are confused.
Also, you're summing up the topic of racism as referring to the progression of criticizing racism. Actual "Racism 1.0" would be more like "it is good and just to subjugate different tribes". Racism 2.0 would be "they're less capable, it's for their own good".
You start out in 1954 by saying, “Ni\\er, ni\\er, ni\\er.” By 1968 you can’t say “ni\\er”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Ni\\er, ni\\er.”
This quote is terrible and one of the most racist things I've ever read. It tries to interject race into forms of political theory that have nothing to do with race. Just absolutely toxic for society.
I suppose it's pretty much like most management edicts that come down over time. Just nod your head, keep your mouth shut, and with any luck it will all blow over in a month or two.
While that phenomenon does not have its origin in racism, I do think it reinforces it. I've moved to allow-list and block-list on my company's recommendation. I only remember to do it about 50% of the time, so I'm glad that it's not being policed, but rather a constructive suggestion.
I think it’s going too far. If you want to do something for people go out and help them. Devote time to kids, provide mentorship, etc. This other superficial stuff only satisfies misguided activists and does nothing for affected kids.
Here’s the thing. It’s easy to find someone or something to pillory. It’s time consuming and hard to get on the ground and help. People love “showing” how good they are, but rarely act on it in real life with hard effort —that’s too much work.
As Zizek says, what happens the day after (the revolution)? Everyone is enamored with the effervescence or revolution being the good guys... but no one wants to do the hard work. Everyone’s life has to go on when you get back to reality.
There are definitely instances of taking it too far, and they tend to be the ones that get disproportionate attention because they generate easy outrage. But in all honesty, if what we're seeing happen right now is progress towards a fairer society, I'd rather not stand in the way of it just because I'm used to having 'master' as my main branch on git, and I'd prefer to have the people most directly affected make their voice heard on this kind of thing.
Am I not my dogs master? I mean, of course it should not be used to show relationships between people, but relationships between things or people and animals, I don’t see an issue.
Do we change the name for “Slavic” people too because it harkens back to their history where Slavs were the default slave people in Western Europe and the origin of the word’s English meaning?
If anything, Slavs would have a point as it unfairly defaults them as being slaves etymologically.
I don't really know what to make of it except that these discussions about not using 'master', 'cop', etc. seem _heavily_ biased to the US perspective and current affairs in the US. I can understand it taking place due to the sheer cultural upheaval that has (quite frankly) been a long time coming, but my mild frustration about `US === the whole wide world` can take a step aside while we focus on the injustices fellow humans face.
There is nothing new under the sun. We're just inventing new ways to hate each other.
I remember in the mid-2000’s we had to stop using master/slave in reference to LDAP and database servers, and (I forget now whether it was IDE or SCSI) the switches on hard drives. The replacement was primary/secondary, which I felt somewhat obfuscated the intended meaning.
primary / replica
Orchestrator / Executor
Even master / minion would be better imo, the I prefer the others already mentioned
But taking a step back, we have decades of lore giving us a sense of what "master/slave", in the technology sense, means. Ditching that for a few seconds of PC glory is madness.
I suppose I'll just start using definitions instead: e.g., "the list of allowed IPs". Good luck googling that...
EDIT nope I’m confused, but leaving comment for completeness
EDIT2 what about andlist and nandlist?
That's pretty verbose. How about acceptlist and denylist (or blocklist)?
For "master/slave" maybe "boss/worker" would be a good substitute?
Lots of words have synonyms, so that's not a real problem. Sooner or later the search results will catch up, and in the mean time it's always an option for a junior developer to ask a question or figure things out themselves by looking at the implementation.
Guarding access? You have an allow list or a deny list. Rolling out an experiment? You have an enable list or disable list. Restricting an input? You have a filter.
You are so fired.
I'm not sure it ever was? It's been criticized for a long time that pretending not to see colour is just a way of pretending the problems don't exist. Generally the best approach is to find nonwhite voices on the subject - part of the problem is that even within antiracism activism it's easier for white people to get on TV or get an audience for lectures and books.
And part of the reason that there's all the problems right now is that ""racism 1.0"" never went away.
I had always assumed that that was MLK's central point in his most famous speech. Maybe I misunderstood what he was saying.
I'm inclined to agree. Black authors and scholars have been critiquing the 'color-blind' school of thinking since the 60s; notably, James Baldwin did it live on TV. [0]
K-12 schools, even in "red" America, very successfully taught me that sex and color aren't how you judge people, and gave me the impression we were past that.
The dissonance of seeing that not everyone was on-board with that program the way I thought they (we) just about all were, and of backlash against that attitude itself(!) has taken me from legitimately, no-BS, about as close to being not-racist and not-sexist as possible, as a kid, to feeling like I'm more racist and sexist than I was. And I don't just mean that my eyes have been opened to ways I was without realizing it, but actually transforming my thinking to consider those factors way more and (inevitably) incorporate biases from them. It's weird and fairly unpleasant (and, as a symptom of precisely this issue, I must hasten to add that I don't intend this as crying about getting the short end of the stick or setting myself up as victim-in-chief, obviously).
I don't think that's true, really; "I don't see colour" was always a cop-out to avoid thinking about anything.
It's been widely held up as the standard privileged response that helps secure an unjust status quo through erasure for longer than, really, any of the rest of the phrasing in this sentence was current in how one would express the problem of that statement. As an example (comparatively recent in the history of that expression being widely derided as problematic), when Steven Colbert adopted the faux-right-wing personality for the Colbert Report 15 years ago, “I don’t see race” was one of the standard refrains he used, which wouldn't work if it weren't not only problematic but widely and stereotypically so.
So, no, it didn't just suddenly become the wrong thing to say.
The truth is that racism has always been more complicated than "the nice people" vs "the mean people". Blackness and Whiteness were invented by slave traders to justify the subjugation of the people they intended to enslave. The definitions of Whiteness were carved out around those in power, in the colonies especially, to make sure they retained their wealth and power.
The problem we face as White people now is that we are far enough into the advancement of this system that we unwittingly participate in and benefit from it. This makes me extremely angry. What we have is a system that is so advanced that most of us White people do not see it, a system so geared toward our comfort and privilege that when the system is questioned, it makes us feel uncomfortable and impinged.
I'm reminded of the story about Facebook's AI that created a language that humans couldn't understand. The racist system we were born into, have swum in for our whole lives, and are now confronted with is not something that can be refactored, papered over with code coverage, or pivoted in the same way that we often think of resolving software problems. The system itself is corrupt. We need to rm -rf this repo and init a new one with a fresh perspective and a bold, courageous vision for the kind of society that we want to live in based on our values and lessons learned with. As a White person, that can be scary because it means that the world might not continue to cater and defer to us. But we have to be committed to true justice, true equality for all people.
Yes I'm aware of the Atlantic slave trade - it was despicable and shameful.
Ever heard of Arab slave trade?
Yet, everyone seems to agree that ALM is now a racist move? I am racist if I believe that all people should be treated equally? Those that utter the phrase are accused of subtly trying to transport a message which is anti-black? The longer I read about it, the more I hate identity politics. If I honestly believe that BLM is to restricted a phrase, I am now being accused of being racist because I dont explicitly support BLM? This is madness. Why do activists persue radical and extremist paths which eventually reduces the support they get from the political middle?
Also, these thoughts aren’t mine (though they were obvious to me from the start), they’re fully Googleable.
But I still done get the word wrestling. From my POV, ALM is not exclusive. But if someone accuses me of being racist just because I am using a phrase that has somehow been declared unwanted by a select few, all they are achieving is that they reduce my willingness to support their rallies.
Language police is horrible. I know it from first hand. I am blind. And since about 10 years or so, I notice that more and more people feel like they are not allowed to use the word blind while I am around. It is pretty clear why they do that. They are afraid of stepping on someones toes and being shunted for that. Now, all that has been achieved by this is that people feel more awkward around me, because they no longer know how to talk about my condition. They find all sorts of phrases to make sure they never mention the supposedly bad word. However, fuck it, I AM BLIND. Policing the language does not improve my situation at all. In fact, it worsens it.