Comment by spaniard89277 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by spaniard89277 | Hacker News Reader

That will change a lot of stuff.

I really have an inside battle when I read this sort of stuff here on HN, because I don't want to post derailed political comments, I want this place to be like it is, keep it cool and avoid kulturwars, but man it's hard.

Look, I'm not in the US, so maybe I can't even think how it is with racism there, but I just can't help to think this is kind of stupid-naive virtue signaling. It feels like some bunch of uber-priviledged SV guys who think too high of themselves want to feel good about something and they come up with this BS that everyone will forget a week later.

Man, it's so surreal. Don't you have poor people in your city? What about helping your local NGOs? What about working for them for free? One week you help feed the people, another in the kitchen and another one in accounting.

Dunno, it feels sooooo far away from my reality. I don't know what is to be earning +100k year and thinking this is a great idea! It was even difficult to write this comment because I find it funny and just feel the impulse to mock this.

> I just can't help to think this is kind of stupid-naive virtue signaling. It feels like some bunch of uber-priviledged SV guys who think too high of themselves want to feel good about something

Except that’s not what happened. This was spearheaded by Black developers who don’t want to have to read about “slaves” being “rekicked” at their jobs. Is that not a reasonable request?

I think many words are polysemic (that's how it's called in english right?) and you shouldn't be offended by them, but who I am to judge, I'm not a black developer at Twitter.

I don’t think they’re offended, per se — I just think they don’t want intermittent reminders of the atrocities committed against their ancestors at their workplace.

Everyone has ancestors and grievances. Hell, my country has been invaded pretty much by everyone near us at least once, and we have vocabulary from a variety of surrounding languages. Let's speak esperanto everyone.

I'm sorry, but this fixes nothing. It's just to feel good about themselves, pure virtue signaling.

Basically every single thing someone does is “virtue signaling”. Even your use of that term is meant to indicate a certain set of conservative values.

I’m glad you were able to reclaim whatever historic signifiers of oppression you’re talking about. For Black people in the US, that oppression is still ongoing, and the developers at Twitter would rather avoid using terms with that baggage in the context of their work.

> Basically every single thing someone does is “virtue signaling”. Even your use of that term is meant to indicate a certain set of conservative values.

¿? Mmm, no? You can help feed poor people or lobby for better housing regulations and you don't need to be signaling anything.

And I don't know what "conservative values" I hold, since I'm a social democrat.

> I’m glad you were able to reclaim whatever historic signifiers of oppression you’re talking about.

We didn't reclaim any historic signifiers. We have architecture, statues and museums about such invaders, everything is fine. In fact this "cancel culture" came from the anglophone world, thankfully without that much success, but enough to distract people from real issues we have here.

> For Black people in the US, that oppression is still ongoing, and the developers at Twitter would rather avoid using terms with that baggage in the context of their work.

I'm having a hard time believing that black developers at twitter are not in the top of the food chain. Also, the previous point I made about polysemic words. Knowing that words have multiple meanings seems useful for communication.

> you shouldn't be offended by them,

Why not?

I’m left handed. Should I get offended at “sinister” or “gauche”?

Isn’t this like a simple lesson from children’s Harry Potter books? Why give words like “Voldemort” so much power. Words are just pointers for communication. the contextual intent isn’t what matters not what you read into it.

Let me know when the police target you for being left handed

And therein lies the distance between this effort and what we care about.

There’s real profiling and brutality going on and having word police ain’t gonna change that.

Dispute English’s effort to demonize me, no one has even noticed.

There’s real concrete nuts and bolts problems with policing, the laws, the justice system. Swapping out a few words is less than spitting on a fire.

Ah yes, I've heard this before.

Let's not worry about this because there are much bigger problems to worry about. Never mind that those bigger problems are much harder to solve and these are quite simply and within reach.

Lol.

Please don't capitalise the term 'black' here, leave that to political pamphlets like the New York Times (who seem to be the ones who started this). The more people start identifying themselves with their inalienable characteristics like skin colour, hair colour or eye colour , the further we'll get away from the ideal of a colour-blind society.

Yes, that is the ideal, that the colour of your skin does not matter. If you don't want to take my word on it, maybe Martin Luther King can convince you:

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

I have a dream today!

[1] https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkihaveadream.htm

  Please don't capitalise the term 'black' here

The San Jose Mercury has just changed their style guide to do exactly this (capitalize Black when used in a racial identity context)[0]. When using "white" in the same context, it remains uncapitalized.

[0] example: https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/07/03/protesters-march-to-s...

I don’t see that quote as advocating for color–blindness. There is a difference between seeing the color of someone’s skin and judging them for it.

But if you adopt MLK’s views like this, can I take it that you then support reparations and civil unrest in response to racial oppression? That you think the biggest obstacle to racial justice are white moderates? That you oppose capitalism and support socialism?

> But if you adopt MLK’s views like this, can I take it that you then support reparations and civil unrest in response to racial oppression

Why would you think that? MLK was his own agent and so am I. Just like he agreed with some of the things e.g. Fredrick Douglas said but disagreed with others, I agree with some things he said and disagree with others. On the subject of the response to racial oppression I can, in some cases, support civil unrest as that is often the only way of breaking a status-quo. I do not support direct reparations because a) this does not solve the problem and b) neither those who would pay nor those who get paid are either guilty of enslaving people or having been enslaved. Targeted investments in areas which still suffer from the effects of earlier redlining and similar Jim Crow laws are something I can stand behind, as long as they are just that: targeted and effective. I do not support "Socialism" since I interpret that as being the precursor to Communism which has cost enough lives by now that it should be clear to even the most stubborn observer that it is a dead-end street - literally. I do not oppose Capitalism as it is implemented in e.g. north-western Europe, i.e. an economically liberal social democracy. Is it perfect? No, certainly not. Can it be improved? Absolutely. Given all that it still seems to be a reasonable compromise between individual liberty and social responsibility, both terms which when taken to the extreme lead to (extreme liberty) chaos and (extreme social responsibility) oppression.

I genuinely believe people who don't see the colourblind society as the ideal are so deeply racist that they would froth at the mouth at any MLK quote that they didn't know came from him.

Even though the etymology of the phrase does not support the conclusion, I am less troubled by replacing slave with other terms

However Grandfather? Dummy Value? Sanity Check? Enforced speech codes for Pronouns?

That is straight up infantile. Plenty of people have horrible ancestral histories. If you choose to obsess over it at every moment, that's not really anybody else's issue. As another comment said earlier, it is very similar to no longer using the word 'cotton', because it might remind you of black slavery in America.

It's a childish waste of time that has nothing to do with solving real world problems. Changing terms used in technology contexts doesn't do anything for racial injustice in any capacity whatsoever.

SV has one of the highest homeless populations in the US, I do not see any of them giving up larges parts of the salary to fix that problem, or even demanding the cities stop preventing building of new housing.

You "think this is kind of stupid-naive virtue signaling" because that is exactly what it is.

The real problems we face as a society can not be fixed with a Twitter post and a image outlining the Newspeak we must all follow in the totalitarian superstate that SV wishes upon us

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