Comment by HashingtheCode | Hacker News Reader

Comment by HashingtheCode | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

This article is the biggest, smelliest, chunky pile of lefty-woke-snowflake trash I have read in a long time.

Stories.....are stories. Stories can be anything only limited to your imagination.....but oh no, here comes the woke brigade to curtail your freedom of thought and creativity to write in a manner deemed appropriate by them for fear of offending ..... who?

These people need to get a life, or better still do, put all of these lefty-woke zombies on a starship and send them off into space, just like in Hitchikers Guide and Golgafrinchan Ark Fleet Ship B.

"The Golgafrinchan Ark Fleet Ship B was a way of removing the basically useless citizens from the planet of Golgafrincham. A variety of stories were formed about the doom of the planet, such as blowing up, crashing into the sun or being eaten by a mutant star goat. The ship was filled with all the middlemen of Golgafrincham, such as the telephone sanitisers, account executives, hairdressers, tired TV producers, insurance salesmen, personnel officers, security guards, public relations executives, and management consultants.

....because the Ark Ship B Golgafrinchans were a 'bunch of useless idiots'."

Add to the list lefty-woke-zombies-idiots

url: https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Golgafrinchan_Ark_Fleet_...

> Stories can be anything only limited to your imagination

That’s completely true. And yet, so many of our stories end up in the same rut of tired, unrealistic tropes. Maybe a look at the reality behind such depictions will encourage authors to exercise some of that vaunted imagination and break out into new directions. After all, an appeal to imagination doesn’t make much sense when you’re just using it to defend doing the same things that everybody else does.

> unrealistic tropes

mmmmm...some tropes are rooted firmly in reality, maybe a little exaggerated sometimes, but there is truth to them nonetheless, just like there is some truth stereotypes.

I think there is nothing inherently wrong with using tropes. Freedom to choose is what is important. If the author wants to use tropes, they should be able to.

> If the author wants to use tropes, they should be able to.

Nobody is questioning that. However, you’re pretending that doing the same thing as everybody else has always done is ‘using your imagination’, which is laughable.

i didn't say nor imply that

Is this meant to be some sort of parody comment?

Deadly serious.

If writers actually follow these guidelines, god help us. Imagination will be curtailed and suffer, and we the readers will suffer as a result.

This misguided attempt to "wokify" storytelling is reminiscent of the attempts by INGSOC in 1984 to eliminate the expression of the shades of meaning inherent in ambiguity and nuance from Oldspeak (Standard English). In order to reduce the language's function of communication, Newspeak uses concepts of simple construction: pleasure vs. pain, happiness vs. sadness. Goodthink vs. crimethink linguistically reinforces the State's totalitarian dominance of the people of Oceania.

I hope nobody follows those guidelines. I pitty the fool who does.

Seems to me it's the opposite, writers will have to be more imaginative if they decide to avoid using some of lazy tropes described in the article.

Sure, if they want, if they choose to. And that's the point for me at least; freedom of choice.

Writers should be able to write how they want, employing whatever literary devices they want, about whatever topic they want. There should be no restriction imposed.

On another note; writers can't ignore reality, if they are writing about reality that is. Homeless people exist. They are smelly and unclean and in many cases can be violent. Ask anyone living in San Francisco, Los Angeles etc. Sure, not every homeless person is white, but the majority are. Trying to pressure writers into adding forced "diversity" due to wokeness is ridiculous. Reality is not woke, it is what it is.

If they want to use tropes, no problem. If they want to find different ways of representing real life situations without the use of tropes, no problem. Whatever. Choice.

What i disagree with is the imposition of language that the OP (Chris Winkle) is trying to impose; that tropes are somehow bad and to be avoided or "cleaned up" because they are somehow demeaning or offensive.

> Sure, not every homeless person is white, but the majority are. Trying to pressure writers into adding forced "diversity" due to wokeness is ridiculous.

I agree.

In order to get writers to include black homeless people, they would have to write stories about black neighborhoods which is already a stretch.

Just including a smattering of black homeless people in a show about predominantly middle-class whites show would look like simple racisms.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com