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Comment by hintymad | Hacker News Reader

This is hardly surprising. We used to have lots of civil social discourse. Media, elites, and intellectuals would engage in such discourse and would present sometimes opposing thoughts. Only with such discourse will there be no room for radicals. And look what's been happening, moderates of a few years ago would be considered far-right today. Anyone with different opinions, now matter what reasons they offer, will be labeled with the usual: bigot, racist, fascist, and xenophobia. Media like WaPo and NYT and CNN published all kinds of articles that argue XXX is racism, like milk, like maths, like interior design.

It's a matter of time we got into this hysteria.

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I think you're making your own counterargument: if you prioritize civil discourse, you necessarily exclude radicals - you've limited the space of discourse by insisting that the only acceptable propositions are those that people can reliably be civil about. Fewer people were making extreme claims, but many of those extreme claims could have been debated rationally, were people interested in doing so. It is a Potemkin discourse: it looks very peaceful and respectable, but it looks that way because it's artificially removed from actually discussing the state of our society.

So, I am happy to engage you in debate, and I'll even do your job for you by trying to precisely name the propositions that you think are so obviously incorrect.

Most of the hits I see for "milk is racist" is about the alt-right using milk drinking as essentially an aesthetic symbol, which seems like a) a factual observation b) not a claim about milk itself being racist, but about its adoption as a racist symbol.

I see a 2016 CNN article called "math is racist," which, if you read it, is clearly arguing that mathematical models are being used in ways that reinforce racism, not that the brute facts of mathematics are themselves racist, either. This argument is generally widely accepted, so I'm curious if you disagree with it.

I can't find any articles about interior design being racist, but I do see articles about the interior design industry confronting race problems. This doesn't sound surprising or extreme either - I'd expect that most industries have race problems of some sort.

You'll note that I have not called you bigot, racist, fascist, nor xenophobia [sic], and I'd appreciate if you returned the favor and engaged my arguments on the merits.

There's also the moving goalposts of what's considered "extremist", especially where it's reduced around extremely small confines of acceptability, and invoking long-tail assumptions as direct accusations of intent against people.

Radical ideas can be presented just as civilly as conservative ideas. Noam Chomsky does a perfectly fine job of being civil.

Sure, and I think they are being presented civilly - the "math is racist" CNN article is quite mild in tone https://money.cnn.com/2016/09/06/technology/weapons-of-math-... - but that doesn't help much when your interlocutors think that certain ideas are inherently uncivil.

(The problem in some sense is the opposite of what the interlocutors say - "racist" is a well-defined term, and one can debate whether a thing is racist or not, but they're not willing to engage with any argument that something is racist, and they respond to it by shutting down debate and saying their opponents are unreasonable.)

> Sure, and I think they are being presented civilly - the "math is racist" CNN article is quite mild in tone https://money.cnn.com/2016/09/06/technology/weapons-of-math-.... - but that doesn't help much when your interlocutors think that certain ideas are inherently uncivil.

I don't think anyone thinks the "math is racist" article is uncivil. I think they think it's stupid. And the title "math is racist" is pretty undeniably laughable.

The content of the article "Sometimes mathematical tools are used to reinforce aspects of racial inequality" is much more reasonable. But people dislike this because it's a motte and bailey argument - the headline "math is racist" is a ridiculous proposition that is totally unsupported by the content of the article.

> (The problem in some sense is the opposite of what the interlocutors say - "racist" is a well-defined term, and one can debate whether a thing is racist or not, but they're not willing to engage with any argument that something is racist, and they respond to it by shutting down debate and saying their opponents are unreasonable.)

There is no serious argument that 'math' is racist. There are serious arguments that mathematical tools have been and are used to reinforce racial inequality. That is nowhere near the same thing as "math is racist".

It's a completely clickbait headline (like most things you'll find on sensationalist outlets like CNN). If you read the full article, there's not anything like a claim that "math is racist".

My only takeaway from this is just another point to deduct from CNN's credibility, rather than that this author is saying "math is racist".

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