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Comment by blackearl | Hacker News Reader

The saddest part is boring but popular ideas like universal healthcare continually get thrown to the wayside by loud idiots who want to demand nonsense like "latinx"

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Good observation, I've felt the same since I encountered this new generation of humans who demand changing speech, and use esoteric terminology and demand other people say and not say things. I don't care if someone believes in social constructivism, that we're born blank slates, that words influence perception more than biology, so on and so forth, but I care very much when people who believe these things believe that anyone who questions - who dares question - them is a villain and an enemy who must be stopped.

A focus on symbolisms like statues and children books and language on Twitter or git repos is being embraced by the powerful corporate interests. Something that actually does an enormous positive for racial justice, universal healthcare, takes a back seat.

Can we agree this is a feature, not a bug?

Identity politics type news stories shot up right at the end of the Great Recession, around the occupy wall Street time, when people were the most infuriated that moneyed interests bailed themselves out at the taxpayers expense. Really makes you think...

Here's absolute proof. n-gram frequencies in the NYTimes: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/06/th...

Occupy, as derision-worthy as it was, saw a broad coalition of Americans--blacks, whites, latino, straight, gay, trans--all get together to push back against Team Elite.

Then the entirely tiny group of people who control the media (and hate us, apparently) got together and pushed endless identity bullshit on us.

It was around the same time that far right identity politics ramped up massively as well.

That's a figment of the media. The "far right" and the huge collection of "white supremacists" that have been drummed up as some huge evil plot in America has, as far as I can tell, zero basis in reality.

Note that basically everything done by white people is a "far right" "white supremacist" plot. E.g., AOC refers to the (hilarious) "insurrection" (the unarmed, leaderless one that waltzed into some of the most protected space on earth with nary a problem) as a "white supremacist" plot.

If you buy that, you're an instrument, played like a fiddle.

I see some people say they'd like to be called Latinx. I see no one demand it. I see many more people complain it's used at all.

100% of people who say Latinx support universal health care in my experience. But they have more control over what they say than what their government does.

Only 30% of Latinos have even heard the term Latinx. Using the term is a problem because it’s alienating for someone to use a term for you that you’ve never heard before. Out of the 30% who have heard it, 2/3 think it shouldn’t be used to describe Latinos. Be respectful of people and don’t call them some weird thing some professor made up that the vast majority of affected people either don’t recognize or actively don’t want used to refer to them.

https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2020/08/11/about-one-in...

Let’s not forget that trying to de-gender a gendered language is its own special form of ethnocentrism.

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