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Comment by ponker | Hacker News Reader

There's something that makes me very uneasy about companies and individuals having to go on the record saying "Black Lives Matter" or being ostracized. It feels like a shibboleth, like kids reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, like the Parsley Massacre, like a kid twisting another kid's arm saying "Say uncle! Say uncle!"

That said, I don't think Armstrong's blog post made a strong argument against these kinds of mantras.

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Well, the reason that's happening is that a lot of people benefit a lot from a widespread culture of white supremacy, and the systems, to use the popular terms, need to be actively dismantled, because they were actively designed and have been (and continue to be) actively maintained.

Disambiguating those who haven't thought much about it simply because it doesn't affect them from people who actively don't give a shit about human rights and would prefer things stay as they are is a critically important thing to happen in our society.

Additionally, in the cryptocurrency space, there are a lot of cryptoracists (i.e. from kryptos: "hidden") who are just sort of skating by, assumed to be decent. An analogous situation was when the POTUS was asked recently to commit to a peaceful transition of power following the election. Not saying anything, posed that question, is saying something quite loudly.

The very plain statement that sums up this situation nicely is:

> If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.

I think that's plainly true, and anyone who doesn't see a massive problem with the status quo is, at the very least, a little bit of a contributor to that problem.

Pretending that the way our world works is someone else's problem is not tenable whilst hiring and building things in that very world. You're moving in a direction, and the effects of that direction cannot be ignored as they exist within a moral and ethical framework.

You've prescribed here numerous viewpoints that are each fiercely debated and you expect everyone to take it as a package or be on the "status quo".

This is a very low effort comment. Can you go through the effort of describing the viewpoints you find fiercely debated and why you think that, please?

The core assertion that there is an epidemic of police killings of Black men is contradicted by a study from a Black Harvard professor who claims that white and black men are killed at the same frequency by police, and that the real problems are 1) a disproportionate number of police engagements with black men and 2) an epidemic of police killings in general.

Can you link to the study if you're going to use it in your explanation please? What about other studies? Shouldn't we be using the scientific method for these things??

https://scholar.harvard.edu/fryer/publications/empirical-ana...

I have read the abstract but my point was not really about the paper itself. Imagine a group that made you say “the Earth is round!” or they’d throw a rock through your window. Frankly, I’d just say the earth is round. But I would still have a problem with this.

Yeah reality is a little more complicated than that, isn't it? Imagine a large group of people yelling that the earth is flat, and that's causing people to die on one side of the globe because so many people think that the earth is flat that they've decided to stop sailing to that side of the globe and can't get supplies there fast enough. We've got to get people to say that the earth is round because believing otherwise is dismissing the fact that their false information is literally killing people, and those people dying from this false information is their own fault and they should just pick themselves up by their bootstraps.

Just curious, have you read the abstract? It seems like you're cherry picking from it.

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