Hacker News Reader

Comment by refurb | Hacker News Reader

Yup. The adults in the room should have nipped this crap in the bud but instead they entertained it. Now it’s a much bigger problem to solve.

Check out SFUSD renaming racists schools like “Lincoln High”. Eventually parents had start a recall effort to end it.

View on HN

It’s dangerous to complain about this stuff. Was at one place that routinely trashed white males, of which I happened to be. Caught hell when I tried to push back. Sadly this seems like it’s becoming the norm.

"It’s dangerous to complain about this stuff." Yep, I'm Latino but when NYC's law was going to make it a crime to call someone an "illegal immigrant" with a $250K fine I didn't even feel safe speaking out against this bad idea. Because I am in tech and high-income so "what do I know". Despite being slurred this way many years ago by a cop and despite assisting some cousins enter the country illegally and being held by a border agent.

All this "privilege checking" makes it difficult to speak out. The least privileged people have existential concerns more significant than our culture war so they don't speak out either. The Woke movement has been hijacked by narcissists. There is no resistance so this will only accelerate in the near term.

In these situations, malicious and over the top affirmation is the safest and most effective form of critique. See Laibach and NSK on how it’s done. Woke hyperliberalism With all it’s terrible contradiction should be an easier target than The authoritarian Socialism of the 80s.

What's Laibach and NSK?

If you read German, https://www.amazon.com/Fundamentalisten-diskutiert-ohne-Vers... is interesting. The title translates to "How to discuss with fundamentalists without going insane".

(The author cleverly and deliberately picks up examples from obsolete Christian schisms to avoid derailing the core of the book with any present-day inflammatory topics.)

> over the top affirmation

What does this entail, do you mind giving an example?

We are on a serious tangent but I'll make a go at it. At the time a friend of mine felt that it should be a crime for anyone to use the hateful words "illegal alien" but the fine should be small "like $100". His comment which ended the conversation:

"I value language and am thoughtful with my communication. If I can do that why can't others?"

Maybe how I should have responded?: "So you always ask someone's pronouns prior to initiating conversation. You agree to those and should be obliged by law to not error ever?"

Or doing that may have backfired ? Now I am a self-hating Latino and transphobic ? Not a reputation I want and I have no power to change things. So why bother is the natural conclusion.

It’s 100% narcissism. When will the vast majority gain courage and marginalize this pandemic of misinformed thought?

As someone wiser than me likes to point out, this sort of crap is how Trump gets re-elected.

Ban second hand sales of out-of-print, arguably sort of racist children’s books, or keep that man out of the white house.

Pick one.

It's not the only reason people voted for him, but it certainly strengthens his position and chances for 2024....not to mention, the first thing the authoritarian left did after CPAC was to ban his speech from Youtube.

My 70 year old Democrat immigrant Muslim mom is forwarding me Bill Maher segments and complaining about cancel culture of Facebook. She texted me approvingly when Trump banned critical race theory in the federal government.

Yes, this is how Trump, or someone similar, gets elected.

This is not true, but im sure the headline you read sounded good

Related From 2019: You can now be fined up to $250,000 if you call someone an ‘illegal alien’ in New York City[1]

[1]https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/01/us/nyc-illegal-alien-discrimi...

Perhaps the stories at the time conflated discrimination with mere use of the phrase if that is what you meant by good/not true.

The first sentence of that story says:

> New York City has banned the term "illegal alien" when used "with intent to demean, humiliate or harass a person," the city said.

That sounds like an important qualification, but I suspect in praxis intent is hard to (dis)prove so it would probably depend on the judge and precedents?

this only applies in workplaces, to landlords, or providers of public accommodations, and this only applies to harassment, its like saying hate crime legislation makes it illegal to be bigoted

whenever something sounds this absurd, read past the headline and you usually find whats actually going on is a lot more reasonable

It's authoritarianism and cultural revolution: there is not a contest of ideas, but a demand for obedience.

Sue. That’s creating a hostile work environment. Civil rights laws are still based on actual equality and not critical theory, and racism against white people is a cognizable violation.

You might have considered leaving instead of pushing back? Vote with your feet?

All progress we’ve made so far was by talking and understanding one another. Leaving would amount to silencing since the people who left are afraid to make their thoughts public for fear of backlash.

What kind of progress are you talking about?

As far as I can tell, historically leaving oppressive places has a better track record of success for individuals than fighting or trying to talk and understand.

(Eg think of the people fleeing North Korea, the Soviet Union, East Germany, Nazi Germany, etc.

Similar, you are better of quitting a bad company, than trying to reform.

Or just quitting twitter instead of 'talking' to people there.)

On a personal level I agree but it's not a moving forward solution to withdraw and stay quiet. I'm talking about the general sense of progress, the one where people are more in balance with other people and that involves understanding eachother and eventually it comes down to talking or some form of communication. Yes, clearly what we're doing at the moment (social media and it's ills) is not only not right but very divisive but that does not meat it's going to be like that forever.

If people move from places that have bad social norms (or bad norms of discussion), like say Twitter, to place that have good norms, like say the Slatestarcodex comments section, the experience of the average person will improve.

The bad places can just quietly whither away when no one goes there anymore.

In case anyone is interested in that recall effort: https://www.recallsfschoolboard.org/

Pretty sure they tabled it for now but it definitely did not end.

They voted a month ago to move forward. I haven’t seen anything about it tabled - do you have a link?

https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/sf-school-board-tables...

Do you mean shelved? Tabled means it's been put forth for discussion and action.

Depends where you live

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_(parliamentary_procedure...

Tabled means shelved in American English.

From an English background, I imagine we are sitting at a meeting. Something that is tabled is between us and under discussion. Something shelved has been removed from the table. What things are Americans visualising here when they say table?

It comes from picking something up to discuss and setting it down when discussion is over. I don't know how many people visualize anything when they say it.

As long as you are all happy with this. I'm still a little bit worried that the issue is Right There On the Table:)

I’m probably confusing people with my name and they expected me not to be using American English.

> Now it’s a much bigger problem to solve.

What is the problem that needs to be solved?

Counterpoint: I graduated from a university still named after the confederacy that held "slave auction" fundraisers all the way into the 80s. I think it's easy to downplay how pervasive racism still is in America, and to imagine that hypersensitivity is the result of "fragility" instead of "constant exposure".

There’s a difference between schools named after the Confederacy and schools named after Abraham Lincoln.

The fact that this bears mentioning points to the general historical ignorance affecting many of these misguided activists, such as those who tore down the statue of Hans Christian Heg in Madison, WI. Heg was a Union soldier and abolitionist who led an anti-slavecatcher militia. He was also a white man, which is presumably why his statue got dragged through the street and beheaded during the height of last summer’s protest violence:

https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/2020/06/24/madison-prote...

Even the Lincoln statues got pulled down. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/portland-protesters-tea...

> There’s a difference between schools named after the Confederacy and schools named after Abraham Lincoln.

Given the number of people who make precisely the same complaints that appear in this thread when high schools change their name from "Lee", that difference seems to be lost to many "free speech absolutists".

This is a great argument for why we shouldn’t work in generalities. “Systematic racism” isn’t practically actionable, so it results in Lincoln High getting the same treatment as yours, which apparently held “slave auction” fundraisers relatively recently, and another school which may teach the “Happy Slave” narrative.

1 of those is a high school named after a president that freed slaves, 1 is a high school with a seriously questionable recent past, and 1 is a high school actively perpetuating racist dogma. We shouldn’t be treating them all like what their doing is equally bad

Was your university doing something kind of like Halloween, where people dress as demons to show the demons have no power over them, or was it more enamored with the past?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com