Hacker News Reader

Comment by vmception | Hacker News Reader

I’m a black American and agree with everything that this person in London wrote.

It is also a common criticism of the American “left”, and is entirely accurate.

For everyone perplexed about black Americans and other people of color walking away from the left, its because you/they don't see us as equals that can be bothered by the exact same things that other Americans can be bothered by: being told what to think, watching people be vicariously offended without asking if context in question is offensive, and the obsession with signaling instead of meaningful action.

View on HN

Aren't you worried that by applying political labels like 'left' (or equally often seen in the US context: 'liberal') for something that does not really represent that political ideology, you are at risk of further polarizing such debates?

This specific instance seems like an overreaction of some in both corporate and social media culture. One poster already pointed out that this is likely more about corporate fear of getting targetted by a vocal but ultimately small 'woke' crowd (there, another label, but at least a bit more specific than just generally someone who wishes to achieve basic goals like welfare, equality, and regulation of private industry). It does have all the looks of virtue signalling without any real justification.

In debates like this sometimes a small number of loud, well-meaning but naive people get much more influence than they should for fear of the other being painted the bad guy, while a significant number of people who are actually affected by the underlying issues don't get heard at all.

Who on the right is pushing this stuff?

I believe the main point of the person you're replying to is that it's a relatively small, vocal minority of people on Twitter who care about this stuff, and the media snowballs it into a big ugly controversy for clicks. As far as I know, this is true also of the following examples of "the right" "cancelling" stuff:

* Colin Kaepernick and kneelgate

* calls to boycott Starbucks for celebrating an inclusive holiday season, rather than Christmas in particular

* republican voters "cancelling" Mitt Romney and other republicans for being vocally anti-Trump, even though their political principles have not changed

I can think of at least one more serious example that goes beyond just a vocal minority: The long, ongoing fight to teach children about LGBTQ issues in public schools. Teachers can be fired for simply revealing to their students that they have a same-sex partner.

Not long ago, too, was it career-ending for a Hollywood actor to come out publicly as LGBTQ. Ellen comes to mind as an example.

You're misinformed if you think this is a minority.

Am I? I personally haven't met a single left-leaning adult who doesn't think Twitter's "cancel culture" has gotten out of hand. However, I've never lived in the bay area, where I understand things may be different.

Can you say anything to demonstrate to me that it really is more than just a vocal minority of people?

Perhaps we have different definitions of "cancel culture"? I don't consider the fall of e.g. Louis C.K. to be an example of cancel culture, but rather a clear-cut case of someone in a position of authority abusing their power, and rightfully losing public support for it. I do think the master vs main issue is silly, though. I'm not sure where you draw draw the line between "cancel culture" and "social consequences for toxic / abusive behavior in public".

People on the right participate in cancel culture all the time. It is truly deafening to hear them complain about things they do from their pulpits at FOX, Congress, and Senate.

Anyone who watched TV in the late 90s and early 2000s should be very familiar with how right-wing[0] cancel culture works thanks to organizations like the AFA.

[0] Religious-right, anyway

The religious right barely exists anymore.

It wasn't such a partisan thing in the 90s. Democrats let their right-leaning members get away with it all the time. Remember Tipper Gore?

edit: I've re-read your comment, and I'm no longer sure which "side" of this you fall on, I think my point stands alone anyway, so I'll leave it:

You've not met me, but I'm a left-leaning individual who thinks the drama about "cancel culture" is mostly invented.

There's lots of people doing crappy thing on the internet generally and on twitter in particular.

In a world where you can get anonymous death threats for pretty much any reason, I've not seen any evidence that "the left" or "cancel culture" is an actual problem in this regard beyond the baseline of people being nasty when anonymous.

I have seen people, often on both sides of the same issue, point to unpleasant people on the other side and make some kind of argument that "those people" are all crazy. Some of the individual stories are horrifying but I've never found any of them convincing at the level of settling the argument (whichever argument it is invoke in). It's just used as a way to circle the wagons against the other side.

> You've not met me, but I'm a left-leaning individual who thinks the drama about "cancel culture" is mostly invented.

Your position is the same as the ones he's met. That was his point.

Indeed. My point is that "cancel culture" is a problem on Twitter, since Twitter intentionally amplifies the voices of the people who participate. So, "cancel culture" on Twitter is not representative of how real people on "the left" (or "the right") feel about current events.

For instance the vast majority of working professionals I know don't get themselves regularly involved in political arguments on Twitter, since they see it as unproductive.

So it is simultaneously true that:

* cancel culture is "a thing" on Twitter, in the sense that it's easy to find examples

* cancel culture "doesn't exist", in the sense that no one you are likely to encounter in real life is ok with cancelling people for tweets they made as a teenager

“cancel culture” isn't an actual thing, it's just the new term the Right has come up with for replace “political correctness” to make, almost word for word, the exact same complaints they've been making since the 1980s about the left doing...exactly the same thing the right has always done as much as it can get away with to everyone who publicly disagrees with them.

How many people since the 1980s have lost their jobs because a mob decided that they weren't politically correct enough?

How many?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhetorical_question

Yes, large portions of the company I work for fall into this category. 4 out of 7 in our team fit the description.

> I don't consider the fall of e.g. Louis C.K. to be an example of cancel culture, but rather a clear-cut case of someone in a position of authority abusing their power, and rightfully losing public support for it.

That is cancel culture.. its just not an example of cancel culture run amuck which is what the problem has always been, not cancel culture itself which is widely accepted by most people for the most egregious behaviors.

Voters don't cancel their representative, they select the one they think will represent their wishes. Even removing someone from the office when the voters believe they no longer represent their interests is not cancellation, it is how democracy works. You don't cancel your lawyer if he misrepresent you, you fire him.

To clarify, I think you're right, and that all the disagreement about cancel culture really boils down to semantic arguments about what the word "cancel" means and whether it is subjectively fair or unfair in a given situation. I would argue that voting someone out of office is a democratic way of literally cancelling them.

I think that the most widely accepted definition of "cancelling culture" is suppressing someone that has opinions different than yours. For example you can cancel a comic that has different political views. Opposing to that, when you have someone representing you, either a voted politician or hired attorney, it is not cancel culture if you disagree and want to be represented by someone else.

What if a comedian loses his audience because views of his come to light that his audience doesn't support? It's no longer profitable for him to go on tour, or for studios to offer him roles on tv, etc.. Is that cancel culture or not? I'd argue that it's cancelling, but not the "bad" kind.

If you say it's not cancel culture when a majority of people change their mind about someone, then you're saying that almost by definition cancelling is when a small minority of people have the power to deplatform someone who missteps. So, it's not accurate to say that "the left is ok with cancel culture" (for instance) since only a small group of people are going it who are not representative of the larger population.

Ask the same question: what if people don't like the local restaurant food (new chef puts too much salt) and they lost the patrons? Is that cancel culture? No. Cancel culture is when you want to close the restaurant for everyone when the owner's daughter refused to date you versus not eating there because you don't like the food, but you don't interfere with others eating there because they like the food. It's "I don't buy" vs "close them down".

The exact same thing can be said about what people refer to as "cancelling". It's not whether they're banned from Twitter, losing their contract or are voted out of office that constitutes the cancelling, but why they were.

Mitt Romney was not attacked for not representing conservative/republican values, but for going against a mob/cult (of personality). That is as "cancelling" as it gets, regardless if it leads to him being voted out in Utah or not.

Criticizing a politician for not representing the values people believe he holds is not canceling. If that is the case 3/4 of congress has been canceled.

Romney is persona non grata in the national GOP now, which is exactly what being cancelled is: to be ostracized. His values haven't moved anywhere from eight years ago when he was good enough to be president, so something else must have changed.

>to be ostracized

He is not ostracized in the way I would consider it. As far as I know Republicans still work with him, are willing to let him sponsor bills, etc. My understanding is he is still invited to Republican lunches as well.

I think we are working with two different understandings of cancellation. He will almost certainly lose his next election though.

>he was good enough to be president

Well not good enough since he lost to Obama. Just because you win a primary doesn't mean the majority actually supports you.

>so something else must have changed.

I think people forgot what his views were. People have nostalgia and remembered they thought he was better than Obama which turned him into a more mainstream conservative in their mind. I think there are other things at play like Romney being a Morman and also having name recognition.

> Criticizing a politician for not representing the values people believe he holds is not canceling.

My point was specifically that this wasn't the case here. Maybe you misread a negative in my comment.

People on the right don't have the power to really cancel anything anymore. Some on the right may attempt to cancel stuff, but it is mostly not effective.

>Colin Kaepernick and kneelgate

Kaepernick wasn't canceled by the right. He just wasn't the best player out there and didn't get onto another team. He now is making millions from Nike and other deals all without playing the game. If this is what be canceled is like I would gladly sign up.

>calls to boycott Starbucks for celebrating an inclusive holiday season, rather than Christmas in particular

There was an attempt but nothing happened. As far as I know Starbucks' revenue didn't even drop (but I haven't really looked into it). Again a complete failure of a cancellation.

>republican voters "cancelling" Mitt Romney and other republicans for being vocally anti-Trump, even though their political principles have not changed

Romney still has his senate seat and is still on all of the committees he was original on. There is no cancelling here, unless you mean voting out a politician is canceling.

>The long, ongoing fight to teach children about LGBTQ issues in public schools.

This is a bit more complicated. Some people believe it is more than just an objective teaching that LGBTQ people exist and you should treat them as any other person but more of encouraging people to engaging in such behavior. Some people also accuse the schools of focusing on random LGBTQ people or assuming people's sexuality when they weren't married in history class instead of focusing on more important people or just the facts. I don't think I was in school when this was going on so I can't really comment on what it is like.

> Teachers can be fired for simply revealing to their students that they have a same-sex partner.

I have only seen this in private religious schools. In theses cases the teacher agreed to publicly follow the church's teachings and they failed to follow their employment contract. You shouldn't work for a church if you disagree with the church's teachings.

>Ellen comes to mind as an example.

Are you saying Ellen was canceled for being LGBTQ? I am pretty sure she is being attack for being abusive to people who work / worked for her.

They successfully got the NFL to ban kneeling, you might remember someone saying "Get that son of a bitch off the field".

Liz Cheney, Murkowski, Richard Burr, Bill Cassidy have successfully been censured by the GOP, and motions are in progress against the rest that defected from the Trump cult.

>They successfully got the NFL to ban kneeling

The NFL would have almost certainly done it themself since the NFL was losing viewers massively. Just not watching a show is not canceling in my view. If that is the case then almost everybody is canceling almost everything else.

>you might remember someone saying "Get that son of a bitch off the field".

Last I checked Trump can't cancel any NFL player.

>Liz Cheney, Murkowski, Richard Burr, Bill Cassidy have successfully been censured by the GOP

I agree these are [partial] cancellations, but members of the GOP being censured by the GOP is not really the same as organization you did not choose to be a part of cancelling you.

Right makes such bad performative takes louder in order to raise outrage and discredit political enemies.

There's also the part where conservatives are Masters of Canceling since forever, including things like Hays code.

It's easy to make people who are angry at outgroup not notice they are fleeced.

The woke movement is extremely anti cultural-right and extremely pro economic-right.

Which right are you talking about?

Assuming the US:

Do you know a lot of "woke" people who aren't otherwise on the left? I don't.

Do you know a lot of "left" people who actively speak against the "woke" crowd? I know very few. Almost all of them who speak on the topic, speak in unequivocal support of "woke" ideas and talking points.

If "the left" doesn't want to be equated with the woke culture, they should publicly and consistently disown it. You know, in the same manner as they demand that conservatives disown Trump and his crowd to not be counted as racists.

It's in everyone's power to start extinguishing the extremes. Until then, I'll take silence on your nearest extreme as your tacit approval of it.

> Do you know a lot of "left" people who actively speak against the "woke" crowd?

Certainly. The majority really. That's in the Netherlands, but compared to the vocal internet crowd most people I know who vote on parties left of the political compass worry about climate, animal and human welfare, and inequality. Rarely will someone go all 'woke' and demand changes like this.

That's in the Netherlands

Haha, GP specifically assumed US in the first line of his comment and then got responses from the Netherlands and twice from UK. Yeah, it's largely an American phenomenon so far but I wouldn't be too happy about it because American culture exports these things all over the world and Hollywood is among the most woke.

While you're protesting this notion on HN, plenty of your countrymen are learning English from some of the wokest trash on Netflix.

Perhaps they chipped in because GPs phrase "Assuming the US" is not a very clear way of saying they want to talk specifically and exclusively about the US, or they thought it fair to broaden the discussion?

I don't see how your sweeping generalisation in the last paragraph adds to the considered discussion here either.

Ha I saw that too. But there’s nothing European HN users love more than commenting with their super well-informed takes about the US, so it should have been expected.

Yeah, the US is such an exceptional country that you can only have opinions about it when you're actually American - I hope you do see that this view is rather short sighted? Especially given that the US itself has no qualms with interfering in foreign politics all over the world.

The 800 pound gorilla at the edge of the world, you can have opinions.. but we are the motherfucking show!

Shit show you mean

Doesn't matter as long as you are watching. The opposite of love is not hate, its indifference. Hate is just misconfigured love.

The reason we chafe at this is because those opinions usually distill and treat us as a singular group. Like one of us saying “the British believe,” for example, prefaced behind something the Welsh and English disagree on.

Not your fault, though. Our internal borders are meaningful. We lie to ourselves that they aren’t, and the rest of the world goes with that. Minnesota, Michigan, and Mississippi may as well be different countries for all they have in common.

those opinions usually distill and treat us as a singular group

Whereas US' opinions on foreigners are always balanced, well-nuanced and fair?

It’s ironic that you did exactly what I mentioned is the problem while responding to a comment where I pointed out I’m aware of, and sensitive to, subtle cultural differences within Britain. I’m at least n=1 for giving a nuanced shit about people outside our borders, but that didn’t fit your reductionist narrative. I get it, but I don’t respect it.

I think you just proved the GP's sarcastic point.

So I guess I don't even have to start with Germany, solving all issues changing the gender of all words to something more neutral, right? https://www.dw.com/en/gender-neutral-wording-is-making-germa...

> Do you know a lot of "woke" people who aren't otherwise on the left? I don't.

I'm in the UK so maybe it is different, but lately "woke" is anyone that is seen as an enemy of the far right. Including those who are on the right of the spectrum, but just not as far as those throwing the "woke" label around.

Totally agree. Everyone who's not far right is woke and everyone who isn't far left is racist, if you listen to Twitter etc. That's intentional, gotta make moderates afraid to speak up, leaving the discussion to extremists, bot farms and professional opinion havers.

But I was talking about a more agreeable definition of "woke". Many people on the left are very comfortable with this subculture, just like many people on the right are very comfortable with Trump. I very rarely hear people on the left saying anything against the woke culture, so in my mind it's very reasonable to equate or at least strongly affiliate the two.

Many people are not ok with either. We just left social media a decade ago but still somehow have to put up with its bullshit leaking out all over the internet.

I'm in the UK so maybe it is different, but lately "woke" is anyone that is seen as an enemy of the far right.

I am also in the UK and there is lots of hand-wringing about "the extreme far right" but if you gently probe what people mean by "extreme far right" they mean "Brexit" or "not electing Jeremy Corbyn".

I expect in a few months the term "ultra extreme far right" will enter the lexicon, and we'll keep adding superlatives as the term "right-wing" becomes more and more diluted and gradually encloses the entire population except for a few Momentum die-hards.

> if you gently probe what people mean by "extreme far right" they mean "Brexit" or "not electing Jeremy Corbyn"

Bollocks. For starters, Brexit had support on the far-end of the left, who see the EU too liberal, e.g. https://www.ft.com/content/692f2578-fcbd-11e5-b5f5-070dca6d0... (RMT comes to mind since I work in that sector)

I've certainly seen many outside the Momentum bubble being labelled 'Tory' (e.g. Lib Dems as 'yellow Tories', Blair/Starmer as 'red Tories', etc.), but you're speaking pure hyperbole.

"Extreme far right" is reserved for the likes of NationalFront/BNP/UKIP/BritainFirst/BrexitParty/Reform/whatever they're calling themselves these days (plus their goons like EDL, DFLA, People's Front of Judea, Judean People's Front, etc.)

It saddens me to see this sort of word-muddying (especially on HN), since it makes it easier to deflect this sort of crap:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism_in_the_UK_Conservative_...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamophobia_in_the_UK_Conserv...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism_in_the_UK_Conserv...

(Not forgetting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism_in_the_UK_Labour_... to avoid the knee-jerks; although that's probably not dismissed as 'people call everything "extreme far right" these days')

the likes of NationalFront/BNP/UKIP

By putting BNP and UKIP in the same list you have just proved my point.

Is Rustie Lee "ultra extreme far right" in your opinion? https://www.radiotimes.com/tv/documentaries/who-is-rustie-le...

The distance between UKIP and Far Right is not a wide gap:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/03/new-ukip-membe...

Brexit party? Extreme far right?

Yes, for a few years the Brexit Party was the I'mNotRacistBut Party. It looks like they've now been rumbled (hence becoming unelectable), so they're rebranding as Reform, which might last for another few years.

The previous I'mNotRacistBut Party was UKIP (featuring Stephen Yaxley-Lennon as advisor for racially-charged issues, and denounced as racist 24 years ago by its own founder)

Before that the BNP was scoring a few percent in general elections.

And around and around it goes, all the way back to Mosley's blackshirts.

Nigel Farage left UKIP for that very reason. The Brexit party is fairly moderate and would be described as center-right, just shy of the conservatives.

The Brexit Party was just a face-saving rebrand for UKIP. It didn't take long for the mask to start slipping, with the party's founder resigning after retweeting racist posts from far-right figures.

Of course, Farage himself may denounce such things:

> I set the party up, she was the administrator that got it set up.

( https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/apr/12/former-ukip... )

Which is an interesting contrast to his remarks when the party was being formed:

> This was Catherine's idea entirely - but she has done this with my full knowledge and my full support.

( https://www.independent.ie/business/brexit/the-new-ukip-nige... )

Friendly reminder that it's very easy, and very common, for racists to disavow their racism when it's expedient to do so (e.g. an extreme example https://youtu.be/zcoYKuoiUrY?t=1568 )

>I am also in the UK and there is lots of hand-wringing about "the extreme far right" but if you gently probe what people mean by "extreme far right" they mean "Brexit" or "not electing Jeremy Corbyn".

Yeah, the funny thing about the UK is hearing from a country where the center-left party bombed an election precisely because it couldn't throw away its woke wing on two big "woke" issues (Brexit and antisemitism), and hearing that "anyone who's not far-right is woke". Well no. Keir Starmer won his place as head of Labour precisely by his willingness to reject further coalition with the "wokes", when Corbyn had been unwilling to really oppose them at all.

It feels odd to portray the 2019 election as lost on "wokeism", or that Corbyn let that policy take over. By the end, Corbyn was the target of that crowd, being branded as an anti-semite for what amounts to "being too critical of Israel", and "being leader while being seen as too soft on others accused of anti-semitism".

Aside from that, the 2019 election was really a Brexit election. Labour failed to pick a side, and the Conservatives were promising to get Brexit done and were early enough in the negotiations that they could promise it would be a soft brexit or maximum brexit depending on which crowd they thought would hear their comments.

What is "far right"? Is there "near right"? "middle-reach right"? 'Far right' is just a BS title used to 'adjust' the perception of people that anyone not left wing is crazy extremist nutjob.

>Do you know a lot of "woke" people who aren't otherwise on the left?

Yes. The majority of them are performative liberals.

>Do you know a lot of "left" people who actively speak against the "woke" crowd?

Yes. There is infighting to an extent but it's really not hard to find leftist critiques of what you call woke culture.

>If "the left" doesn't want to be equated with the woke culture, they should publicly and consistently disown it.

I highly doubt bad faith actors would care about what people on the left are doing. Sure hasn't stopped you from mischaracterizing them all this while.

>You know, in the same manner as they demand that conservatives disown Trump and his crowd.

You seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding as to who "the left" are. The majority of actual (not what passes for American left) leftists will agree that disowning "Trump and his crowd" is the same kind of performative wokeness that you accuse liberals of. Disowning and denouncing for appearances does nothing because it doesn't tackle the root cause that allowed a movement like Trump's or the larger right to come to power.

I didn't mean "disowning" as performative act but as an honest expression of preferences, including in-person and online discussions and voting choices.

The general population publicly expressing their honest moderate views and opposing the extremes is not "for appearances". It's the core of what's missing in today's public debate, dominated by far left/right activists, bot farms, and personalities/celebs.

My point is, the (American) left is justly associated with wokeness because they are its primary visible supporters. Maybe it's because those on the left who don't support it just don't speak up, in which case, my message is: please do. I'm not just going to assume your existence.

>as an honest expression of preferences, including in-person and online discussions and voting choices.

As I mentioned, I've seen plenty of this, but with filter bubbles being what they are, it's hard to fault someone for not coming across them enough.

What I'm saying is that it's not that they (we?) don't exist, more like you don't come across us because of xyz reasons that are getting harder and harder to pinpoint as discourse is manipulated each passing day.

I also broadly agree that nuance is missing in the "modern debate", which causes bad faith interpretations like everyone on the left being either "woke police out to cancel everything you love" or "stalinists looking to establish USSRv2" and everyone in the right being "uneducated white people who don't know what's best for them" or outright Nazis. I wanted to push back against this kind of monolithic interpretation, hence my previous comment.

> ... but as an honest expression of preferences, including in-person and online discussions and voting choices.

Isn't that really dangerous though?

eg if you're unlucky enough to become targeted by some of the more "out there" people, they can do career-and-effectively-life ending things by blowing it out of proportion, getting it in the media, etc.

Associating the Democrat with "wokeness" is the same as assiociating Republicans with trump supporters and "Storm the Capitol" crowd.

It's an easy way to discredit your political opponent.

Also, i am sightly offended when people call the Democrats "left". I've talked to a real "leftist" (and by that i mean, sightly left on european political board), he felt forced to join the democrat to have a shot at a representative position, and some support for his flyers, but he agreed with my broth: the democrat would be barely center in europe.

And honestly, the far right and the conventionnal right have only themselves to blame for the right of the woke/cancel culture. They are the one who started to open up the overton window, they can't start crying when their politicals opponent do the same.

What is the difference between Democrats the "left" in the US? To me they seem synonymous.

Also, what does "left" in Europe look like? Because I'm surprised to see you say that Democrats in the US "would be barely center in Europe".

There are "left" parties in the US too, like Gloria La Riva's PSL.

The Democrats push for what can at best be termed social democracy, even though real social democracies in Europe would still be to their left after they fulfilled most of their campaign promises. Left right and centre are kind of reductive categorizations but social democracy is left of centre.

> Do you know a lot of "left" people who actively speak against the "woke" crowd?

I know of quite a few prominient anti-woke left-leaning people in the UK: Helen Pluckrose, Andrew Doyle, Nick Cohen, Kathleen Stock, and so on.

>Do you know a lot of "woke" people who aren't otherwise on the left?

The best I've seen is sentiments along the lines of "yeah that's overkill" which is about equivalent to what fiscal conservatives and libertarians were saying about the moralizing christian right back when those clowns ran the show.

People don't generally speak out against people who make their positions look like a reasonable middle ground. Woke crap makes basically every mainstream left position look reasonable by comparison so of course they don't want it to die. It makes them look good.

Well everything in the US currently is extremely polarized. Very few people on either side are going to criticize groups on their side, as they are spending all their energy fighting the other side.

and even pointing out even that overlapping similarity will get you ostracized from ..... both sides

(but neither side seems to know the other has even that little bit in common)

Hmmm. You typed a whole comment without disavowing the extremists on the right. Should we take your silence as tacit approval?

Of course we shouldn’t. That’s not how any of us should think about other people.

stress is known to make systems less fragile.

The way to improve things is to speak "truth to power", and the moral way to do it is to always "punch upwards".

I've been riling against Trump, Bannon & Co for the past 4 years. Before that I've been vocal about Obama's reign of terror, his broken promises of closing gitmo, and his drone wars. No doubt in my next 4 years I'll be hurling insults against Biden.

There is no need to add disclaimers or enumerating all things that a comment doesn't stand for. Doing so not only makes for "boring reading" but also looks like the person feels very insecure.

EDIT:

>" Do you know a lot of "left" people who actively speak against the "woke" crowd?"

Bill Maher is a fairly prominent liberal who has been vehemently anti-woke. This is regular fodder on his Friday night HBO show Real Time with Bill Maher as well in his regular standup comedy.

The question wasn't "Do you know any people on the left who aren't woke?" The question was "Do you know of anyone NOT on the left who is woke?" I.e., wokeness is a problem of the left.

I pasted the wrong quote from the OP, fixed.

Bill Maher would often be considered on the left based on the US paradigm.

> Do you know a lot of "left" people who actively speak against the "woke" crowd?

There's a lot of them. But do you really expect them to do it all the time? Disavow every single misinformed but loud person? (Why don't you actively speak against Ted Bundy - are you supporting serial killers?)

For example I can argue with my mom who says she's a feminist because women are better than men. Or I can spend that time preparing a lesson for the local programming club for kids. Why would I choose the first option? Who would benefit?

Disavowing Trump is massively different - a single, elected person with power. Taking that position and bringing it to their local representatives would be worth the effort.

What is this "the left"? Bernie Sanders, by far the most left leaning of the democratic presidential candidates was hugely against the narrative that Trump voters were racists. Noam Chomsky has an extremely long track record of being extremely consistent in his support of free speech and open debate in a way that the most obsessive first amendment types would rarely stick to.

Amongst the more left leaning people I know there was a hugely negative attitude towards the CNN/MSNBC style coverage of the past 4 years that fixated on Trump and conspiracy theories and gotcha stories.

Every side is gonna be smeared, it's much more important to look at what they're actually trying to offer people. And offering nothing but vague platitudes tends to be worse than offering lies, as Hillary's pretty vapid 2016 campaign showed. This move by github seemed to bring more attention to them working with ICE and the like than anything else that I could see.

$15 min wage was super popular in Florida, Trump won Florida by a significant margin. Had the dems actually offered this obviously popular thing and stood by it that state could've turned out very differently as it'd force Trump to take a side on something that mattered to people.

Even this article that we are commenting on seems to me to be a _leftist_ critique of liberal/moderate virtual signalling, and is calling for them to actually do things that matter for anti-racism.

And the majority of the comments implicitly conflate left and liberal (and thus seem to assume that Joe Biden and Bill Gates are leftists).

> Do you know a lot of "left" people who actively speak against the "woke" crowd?

Yes. The "healthcare pls" meme springs to mind as a trivial, but very widespread, example https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=healthcare%20pls%20...

> Do you know a lot of "left" people who actively speak against the "woke" crowd? I know very few. Almost all of them who speak on the topic, speak in unequivocal support of "woke" ideas and talking points.

This article we are commenting on is an example of this.

Do you know a lot of "left" people who actively speak against the "woke" crowd?

Yes, some big names here: https://harpers.org/a-letter-on-justice-and-open-debate/

(cue the no-true-scotsman argument how e.g. Noam Chomsky, Steven Pinker or Margaret Atwood aren't really "left").

Many of them have gotten flak for signing it, too.

There is this letter that criticizes cancel culture:

https://harpers.org/a-letter-on-justice-and-open-debate/

Of course, the woke left views somehow views this as infighting, and somehow trying to primary away more conservative Democrats somehow is not.

> Aren't you worried that by applying political labels like 'left' (or equally often seen in the US context: 'liberal') for something that does not really represent that political ideology

I don't have the experience of any other group doing this. I agree that it is not inherently a political ideology.

The people involved proudly proclaim to be left and liberal. I think it is important to say that because I know people in other parts of the country that see these as insults and would be surprised to know that people commonly self-identify as these terms.

I find that this group thinks their behavior is better and more helpful than apathy, "silence", and the idea of rampant exclusionary hate from the right. When its really not better, its different, but its not more helpful. There is absolutely a constant threat from people afraid of bird watchers in a park, people that blend into their ranks and are willing to weaponize their understanding of race, two seconds after donating to the Democratic Party.

The problem lies not in that you are wrong in concluding that these people are adherents of leftists ideologies (most are), but that you are falling for the pars pro toto fallacy: people who think that 'master' is an offensive word to use in a source code repository are 'left/liberal', thus all or most of 'the left/liberals' are such people.

You are saying 'this group thinks' as if all people who would identify as adhering to leftist ideologies (from the extremes to common social democracy) act like this. You are trying to stuff people into boxes: you are either team A or team B. That is polarization; something we can sorely do without.

The problem lies that there is not enough (any?) push back from this kind of garbage (and specifically in this case) from the 'left/liberals'.

There needs to be push-back if they [those left/liberals not in this camp] want to disassociate. But where is it? I don't think there is appetite for this argument.

I know many of left/liberal-types (in the Bay Area) all who either believe, or accept this as silly but somehow think it is meaningful to some people and so should be gone along with...

The podcast Blocked and Reported is founded by liberals who are tired of this. Highly recommend.

Again, availability bias. The people screaming the loudest about this are also screaming the loudest about other Left/Liberal issues. The normal left-leaning folks don't get heard. It's pretty natural to conclude that this group represents the whole.

I'm also convinced that the screamers aren't really interested in stopping black people from being offended (let alone actually harassed/murdered). I think they're much more interested in getting recognition for fighting the fight.

I think you're right. I'm an independent and I'm guilty of doing this to right and left leaning folk, but I've done it because I believe that the people screaming will only listen to people within their ideological interests. It was my way of making them accountable for their compatriots that are loud enough for me to notice. I've also stopped doing this because it's not really effective. People don't feel like they should be responsible for outliers and I somewhat agree, but don't know how to solve the problem of vocal trouble makers.

You are correct and I understand the logical flaw.

Its just the 99% correlation with my life experience, observations of real impactful polarization, which leave me without another way to describe it.

Be my guest in rewriting it more accurately.

I guess some of us quiet liberals should be less quiet then. Hi, I'm in your 1%.

>The people involved proudly proclaim to be left and liberal.

I don't think Microsoft do claim that, nor is that really why they did this.

Microsoft is a profit seeking entity that is trying to maximize its profit and goodwill (an intangible asset) at the same time.

Thus for them the best moves are those which:

* Have minimal cost.

* Distract people away from profitable dirty laundry which doesn't attract goodwill (e.g. concentration camp contracts).

* Buy them some goodwill among some people - especially through the mechanism of "outrage marketing" (people who by dint of attacking "the right" when they attack this will naturally defend Microsoft - a bit like how Nike used colin Kaepernick).

They did this because "change master to main" appeared in a local maxima that maximized these three conditions.

This is being reflected all around the corporate sphere because what applies to Microsoft applies to a lot of other companies.

Just trying to avoid getting Twitter dogpiled

Yeah, that definitely seems to be a big part of it. And I don’t understand. Okay so your company is the target of some activists on Twitter for a few days. End of the world? Maybe I just can’t understand what it’s like to lead a big company.

Just abut the only company to handle one of these situations in a way that seems rational to me is Trader Joe’s. Some people on Twitter decided that having a burrito labeled “Trader Jose” was a horrendous form of cultural appropriation and demanded the company change all products with this kind of word play in branding. TJ’s considered it and just basically said “no, move along” and the whole woke twitterverse moved on to some other target.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2020/...

Exactly like any bully. Which is what these people are.

Agree completely. But you have to understand the mindset of everyone involved.

The marketing/PR people in any organisation care passionately about what other people think of the organisation - naturally, because it's their job to care about this.

Journalists are insanely influenced by what other people are saying and love nothing better than a nice piece of juicy controversy to get those ads clicked.

Stock markets are notoriously twitchy about rumours and "public perception".

Most corporate CEO's got to that position by climbing a greasy pole where what other people think of you is literally the most important factor in your climb.

So almost everybody involved in making these kinds of decision are exactly the people most vulnerable to being bullied like this.

But if you can resist - there's only a few thousand Twitterati who will bother even trying to enforce any kind of boycott, and they're probably not your customers in the first place. It's completely ineffectual if you can just ignore it.

Yes great points. Another factor that I hadn't considered until recently (can't remember who pointed this out) is that most C-suite employees / executive editors at media co's / deans at universities are probably in their 50's and are in what is arguably the most financially critical parts of their life ... as in, they have a big mortgage (or two), need to be contributing significantly to their retirement, are likely staring at at least a few VERY expensive college tuitions, etc. They're levered up both literally and figuratively. The cost of losing a job in this situation is a serious threat that likely has many taking what they feel is the safest path to keeping their job, and many times that is whatever that really loud crowd is demanding.

True. Also, office politics means that senior management at large organisations tend to be very risk-averse (the old "try not to be in the room when a decision is made" trope).

Telling the geeks in the IT basement to change the name of the "master branch" on that "git" thing that the organisation apparently uses, so that thousands of angry people (some of them journalists at large media organisations) aren't shouting at you on Twitter seems like such an easy choice to make ;)

I think it's a combination of both:

a) modern corporate culture trying to make employees take on the company they work for as part of their personal identity

b) young, liberal people working in PR departments who would be horrified if anyone personally called them racist / sexist / homophobic etc

These people go to work, see some random account on twitter saying "<your company> is racist" and a) and b) combined makes this feel like a personal attack on them that they have to defend and social signal against.

This is the most likely explanation I have come up with, because as you said, none of this really makes sense from a logical business perspective.

I think when individuals or even companies roll over, it's because the mob's attack can be quite scary. It's easy to point at the people who stay their ground and say, "see, they didn't cave and did just fine."

But that's an obervation we make in hindsight, and without knowing it was like for the targets. At the time, their phone is probably ringing off the hook, media are calling, etc., and they have no idea when the attack will end or if people are getting fired, advertisers withdrawing or any of that.

I'll applaud anyone, left, right or other-vectored, who stands up to mobs, though. I'm not a fan of the phrase "cancel culture," but it gets one thing right: it is a cultural development, both the culture of outrage and the culture of appeasing the mob. The injustice of a, outraged mob declaring itself judge, jury and executioner only works if targets try to appease them. So while the culture of outrage is a hard problem because it's diffuse, anyone who refuses to accept that injustice is has an outsized effect in pushing back against the appeasement side of it.

I've been on the sharp end of a minor version of this, and you're right, it's scary. I only coped by not paying attention to it all and buckling down to deal with the things that matter. And alcohol, which helped, though it cost me in other ways.

> Aren't you worried that by applying political labels like 'left' (or equally often seen in the US context: 'liberal') for something that does not really represent that political ideology, you are at risk of further polarizing such debates?

> It does have all the looks of virtue signalling without any real justification.

If you combine both the statements, you are committing a no true Scotsman fallacy.

I don’t think so. It’s not that no true Scotsmen are idiots, it’s just that the idiots are not representative. Maybe 10% of Scotsmen are idiots. The other 90% are fine.

The idiots are just very loud on social media.

This is a soft form of the same argument. Whatever may be the proportion of those people, the community still has to own up to it if this portion exists.

the community still has to own up to it

Why? For what purpose are you burdening 90% of True Scotsmen with an obligation of your choosing?

Because it's a part of their community and each community needs to take care of its own problems.

When it comes to political ideology invoking a no true Scotsman is not always invalid.

As an example, as a leftist I can say: “A socialist revolution without social justice is not socialist”. Yes, this is a no true Scotsman fallacy, but here I am merely disavowing a subgroup of people that might share my economic believes that workers ought to take over the means of production, but fail to see that the racial injustice in our economic system is part of the problem. In my view, if you don’t see that, you are not a real leftist.

Calling welfare or regulation "basic goals" is misleading: the first is not basic as there is no right to welfare, but forcing others to support welfare while regulation is not a purpose by itself, it is a means to achieve specific goals.

Seeding wrong ideas in what seems to be a neutral context is not nice™.

Marxism isn't a political ideology?

What has renaming the master branch got to do with Marxism?

Slavery as class struggle seems a popular method of argumentation, but it's hard to pin down that logic when any discussion of it generates anger instead of explanation.

Cultural left, ie, "woke" and economic left are two very, very different things. Americans have this wonderful way of completely slaughtering their political terms.

That's missing polsci 101, left/right exist, that's why they have names, not the opposite.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_spectrum

This goes way beyond just trying to get ahead of a potential PR disaster. I can think of nobody out there in non-nerd world that would've raised a stink about the word "master" being used in some programming context, just like they haven't raised a stink about the term MC. This is ultra-woke privileged white tech lefties who truly do feel like their fighting for social justice by doing this kind of thing.

>you/they don't see us as equals that can be bothered by the exact same things that other Americans can be bothered by: being told what to think

To switch things around for perspective:

"There's nothing wrong with being white and you should be proud of your race."

Yep, if a black person told me this it would be patronizing, and if a white person told me this I'd assume they're racist. Swap white for black in my quote, and it's what the white community in the US is effectively telling the black community, if not in such obvious terms.

It's precisely because of systematic racism that we white people get to share our "sage advice" on how to combat racism, while being almost totally ignorant on the subject. It's proof of privilege and hideously condescending.

Perhaps, in the spirit of sharing useful insight within these kinds of discussions, as a black American you could educate me about something?

For context, I am neither black nor American, I have little time for woke virtue-signalling and fake outrage, but I do want to be properly respectful of others whose background and sensitivities aren't necessarily like my own. With that in mind, I often find socially acceptable terminology around race confusing.

For example, take the word "color". I can understand why an umbrella term such as "colored people" could be problematic. However, if that is the case, I don't understand why "people of color" should be any more socially acceptable, nor why one of the most prominent advocacy groups still uses the former term in its name. There is so much unconstructive commentary about this particular example that it's hard to figure out what the relevant history and genuine sensitivities are here. Can you enlighten me?

It's just symbolic, and still part of a consensus forming continuum based on advances in communication across large landmasses.

Black people in America are from many different cultures and are simply people that noticed that they had a shared experience of being excluded from institutions and even entire states.

The terminology simply comes from individuals taking initiative in the moment and saying "they treat everyone that looks like us all the same and we need umbrella terms to acknowledge our shared circumstance so that its easy to refer to ourselves". Other non-black people already had terms for us and these terms were typically also used in the pejorative. Many people consider "black" to be an affliction even today. So what you have is that some black people reject those older terms, some people try to repurpose and "take back" those older terms, some people create new terms, most terms are still in use.

These aren't scientific terms, but they do permeate into academia to convey a shared concept. So there isn't much to read into it except learning what the consensus is, and the history of why it is. But trying to merge it into the lexicon based on pattern recognition with other words will only confuse you.

Thank you, that's an interesting reply. Again perhaps this is my own lack of informed perspective, but I had always imagined that grouping all "non-white" people together under a single term was part of the problem. It seems like an act that diminishes the distinct cultures all being lumped in together, as well as the obvious racism if the whole group was then treated as somehow inferior or less worthy. But from what you wrote, it seems like at least some people in the affected communities do find these kinds of umbrella terms useful, as a form of solidarity and recognition of shared problems? But then even within those communities not everyone agrees on which terms are useful for positive reasons and which have too much negative baggage or pejorative history, and that's how we get the apparent contradictions like "colored people" being socially unacceptable, but not in the context of the NAACP, and at the same time "people of color" being socially acceptable?

yeah mostly accurate, but a lot of people would not agree with me for saying so :)

but lets look at your example source of cognitive dissonance, NAACP:

The NAACP has done historically monumental things on behalf of a group of very different people that were being excluded as if they were the same. It comes from a different era and different motivated individuals taking initiative. It predates a different individual pushing “African American” much later on. That predates such rampant subsequent immigration and population growth in the US where enough people find African American to be so ambiguous to the point of ridiculous, while there are many slave descendants that take pride in the term and make it their whole identity (or have it forced on them like many black people in other English speaking countries with no American parents, this is particularly comical to me), whereas others who may also be slave descendants adopt black American or other adjectives and identifiers. With the NAACP there is no utility in changing that acronym and no need to or drive to, like a landmark. It wouldn’t surprise me if they arbitrarily did change the name on their own, but there is no talk or consensus amongst its beneficiaries to do so (unlike other landmarks).

Thanks again. I learned something today. :-)

> the obvious racism if the whole group was then treated as somehow inferior or less worthy

Well, yes, this is how the group forms in the first place. It's made up of people who don't have an identity in common other than the one that's forced upon them of "non-white" by the white people discriminating against them.

Note that in countries which aren't white-majority you don't generally get a group of people holistically identifying as "people of colour", even if the same ethnicities would do so in the US. Instead you get different forms of racial discrimination.

Similarly LGBT+ merges a group of people with very different identities and practices, the primary thing they have in common is receiving the same kind of abuse from the same people.

> I can understand why an umbrella term such as "colored people" could be problematic. However, if that is the case, I don't understand why "people of color" should be any more socially acceptable

Scott Alexander explains this as a way for upper-class people to maintain their privileges: "The whole point is to make sure the working-class white guy whose best friends are black and who marries a black woman and has beautiful black children feels immeasurably inferior to the college-educated white guy who knows that saying "colored people" is horrendously offensive but saying "people of color" is the only way to dismantle white supremacy."[0]

[0] https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/a-modest-proposal-for-...

You might consider this alternative perspective:

“Indeed, what is acceptable for white people to call African Americans and for black people to call themselves has evolved over the last century. The standard term has shifted from “colored” to “Negro” to “black” to “African American” as people sought to redefine themselves and their place in America.

Now, in 2020, “people of color” often is used to refer to the collective group of non-white Americans. It is offensive to single blacks out as “colored.” That, in part, is because of the painful segregationist history associated with the term prior to the mid-1960s. “Colored-only” restrooms and water fountains are examples of harmful relics of the Jim Crow South that black people had to fight, and die, to remove from American culture.”

https://www.chicagotribune.com/columns/dahleen-glanton/ct-da...

The question is why “people of color” isn’t an equally harmful relic, which the article doesn’t really seem to explain.

It also doesn't explain why "black" was preferred for a time, then it was verboten, and now it's preferred but you have to capitalize it. Nor does it explain why "African-American" was required for a time even though many Black people don't identify as African, and it's obviously completely inappropriate to apply to a Black person who has never left the UK, but that's what was required nonetheless.

Scott Alexander's hypothesis explains all of that. Constant change is what makes fashion fashion, and fashion is a very effective way to discriminate between the in-group and the out-group.

Jesse Jackson took initiative in the absence of other civil rights leaders and chose a term, African American. It’s really not that complicated. Just like people can acknowledge that BLM would be shitty branding and exists in the absence of other civil rights leaders, there is no committee and now its just about correcting people.

Do you have any thoughts on the cause of "the absence of other civil rights leaders"?

Scott Alexander is condemning woke culture in the essay you quote but the specific reason woke culture cycles through words is the euphemism treadmill.

This is an example of the "Euphemism Treadmill." Words that refer to things that some portion of society hold negative views about acquire negative connotations over time. These words are then discarded by polite society for clean new words without the baggage. E.g. latrine to water closet to toilet to bathroom to restroom, or retarded to mentally handicapped to developmentally disabled. See: https://aeon.co/essays/euphemisms-are-like-underwear-best-ch...

NPR looked into this 7 years ago.

https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/03/30/295931070...

> signaling instead of meaningful action.

Oh this is a good short summary of the era

yes! let me tweet this and post it on FB...

but really the web amplified the tendency to look and speak in shallow settings

it's like morals on the map versus the territory

Reminds me of the Netflix film, White Tiger. A liberal Indian-American woman comes to India, pretends to care about how the lower castes of India are treated as slaves, but in the end, is just going through the motions and leaves a servant with pocket change. In the end, not treating them as people, but as objects to funnel their morality and values.

Malcom X said it the best. The White leftist liberal is the biggest oppressor in the room. By declaring they speak for the oppressed they've essentially silenced them.

Take a minute to reflect back on what happened.

I think speaking for the oppressed is better than actively oppressing people though. While there is always more that could be done, hanging out a BLM banner is better than...supporting suppression of black voter rights. Though I understand some people use signaling -in place- of action, which is neutral at best, it's better than active oppression.

I don't think a corporate entity like Black Futures Lab can be expected to champion for societal problems.

In reality the current approach just alienates the people in power with the ability to do something meaningful.

People that werent going to do anything meaningful, but still wont. Except now they wear black and blue versions of the American flag in a specific counter protest.

While the actual person of color has to listen to your ilk proclaim rewriting the language is so progressive and for that person no matter what their life experience has been, and also wonder about how much the “silent” people resent them because they think it’s we’re going to cancel them.

Hope that people can further refine how the energy and sentiment is directed. I feel like we’re close, but people are still so out of touch.

the thing is the CCP has been indoctrinating your youngest from the 80s. pikachu surprise face when they start touting the propaganda they were taught in their younger years.

Don't put words in his mouth. He referred to the "White Liberal". You added "leftist" to push your political agenda.

Malcolm X was a communist---pretty sure that's about as far leftist as you can get.

I actually mentioned the movie `White` Tiger, and a `liberal` Indian-American woman, but you're right, I don't agree with that response.

not sure what your complaint is. white liberalism is almost exclusively from those who preach far left

I didn't mention white liberals is all

explain

Meh, I just like 'main' because it's two letters shorter than 'master'. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Usually I only type `ma<tab>` so in either case, for me it is just three keystrokes.

The entire point of this is what the default branch should be called. You don't even have to type it 99 times out of 100.

And lets be honest. Changing one word that annoyed a few dozen of people because they think of slavery, well, thats a lot of change just because a shit excuse, that will not matter in the end.

In all fairness, this sort of silly business is more representative of the "Twitter left", comprised of cogs in a perpetual rage-inducing machine, than it is of "leftists" whose main objective is to address the limitations of capitalism, at varying degrees of willingness to work within the system vs burn it down.

Of course, our media is run by billionaires so they capitalize on the identity politics to divide everyone and avoid having any real debate about economic policy, which is the only thing that really matters.

I would so much rather be debating about the best way to roll out UBI than whether to call something "main" or "master".

This is some technocrat fiction that has failed time and time again. There are towns in the US right now which actively reject help if it's not coming in the form of "more coal jobs" (which aren't coming back regardless of how much coal mining is actually on).

Economic incentives don't change people's minds, they motivate them to double-down on their biases.

Correct me if I am wrong, but my understanding is that such people have been duped by channels like Fox News into doubling-down on a way of life that is simply not possible anymore.

What I'm saying is that if Fox and CNN (for instance) devoted the same air time to good-faith debate about the causes for, impact of, and solutions to wealth inequality and our changing socioeconomic landscape as they do reading Twitter comments live on air, we might be in a better position than we are today.

I'm not a leftist at all, but I'd also love to be rolling out UBI.

Billionaires capitalize on identity politics and political division because it gets them advertising dollars. That's it. While I agree that economic policy certainly merits more discussion, an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory about "the elite" isn't any more productive than an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory about white people.

The capitalize on it because it keeps everyone focused on white vs black instead of rich vs poor.

They want you constantly thinking about race instead of thinking about wealth inequality.

They want you constantly fighting with your fellow workers instead of forming unions.

The rich aren't a single monolithic entity and it doesn't make sense to treat them as such. George Soros is an obvious example. Unless if you have concrete evidence, a blanket anti-rich narrative only serves as a vector for another rich person to inject their ideology. Plenty of people think that Donald Trump's feud with Bezos was proof that he was on the side of the working class.

The rich aren't, but the companies they run practically are, from a political standpoint.

Basically all large, multinational corporations now make their company logo rainbow for pride month, and all release the same sounding official statements about racial inequality on a regular basis, etc. etc.

It's almost impossible to find a large corporation that doesn't do this now. And their statements are so bland and generic that they are almost all identical, and completely interchangeable.

That's the symptom and not the cause. When people treat virtue signaling the same as positive change, it's natural for corporations to exploit that. It's a cheap way of building goodwill.

Billionaires aren't all colluding, but their incentives are aligned, and they do individually use their money to advance a political agenda that regular people who don't own TV networks are powerless to push back against.

See: Rodger Ailes, Rupert Murdoch, Bill and David Koch

I think more appropriate classification is something like the political compass.

> the American “left”

I like that you quote it there.

I don't understand why aren't there more real left (no quotes) organizations or parties gaining traction in the US. It seems as if it should have happened "naturally" one or two generations ago.

I don't understand why aren't there more real left (no quotes) organizations or parties gaining traction in the US.

There are. The Democratic Socialists of America has grown a lot over the past few years. They even managed to get four member elected Congress this last election cycle.

It seems as if it should have happened "naturally" one or two generations ago.

I have no evidence, but I suspect McCarthyism and the following hard crackdown on leftists that followed during the cold war greatly slowed down this "natural" growth. It took a generation removed from the cold war for this growth to start up again.

DSA isn't no-quotes-left. It has gone full steam into identity politics if you ask me (I'm not American, but this is just based on what I've been seeing from them, correct me if I'm wrong). I don't mean that in a negative way and I'm not making any judgements of morality or anything, but no-quotes-left has a class conscience, today's left has an identity conscience (gender, ethnicity, etc). Both fight for equality (new left also for equity) but the ideology has shifted from a class struggle to a new kind of struggle that has replaced the nobility and bourgeoisie for the white cis male, and the proletariat for BIPOC, women, gender non conforming, etc.

Edit: equality+equity.

The DSA is a mix. It has grown in leaps and bounds, but before it did that it was this kind of small social democratic organization with a kind of unique politics that came from Michael Harrington, and was more interested in being a bit of a left wing lobby inside the Democrats.

With the rise of Bernie Sanders and a new generation of people getting into socialist and left wing politics, it became quite a bit broader and larger and vibrant. And my impression is it became of a centre of gravity for other left tendencies in the US to coalesce.

There's quite a few different groupings in there these days. I don't think you can make a broad generalization like you did here.

Apologies for the broad generalization (as I said, correct me if I'm wrong, and I stand corrected here). That being said, if what you say is true, it's a pity that either the main stream media's reporting doesn't reflect that diversity or that the louder voices don't leave space for the rest of viewpoints.

Agreed. I'm a far-left (libertarian) communist in America, and from what I've seen/read, the DSA is effectively the slightly-left wokish arm of the Democratic party. Think "public healthcare" with a big dose of "what are everyone's pronouns?!"

They're more concerned about trigger words and identity politics than dismantling capitalism.

IIRC up-thread I wrote complaining about "woke" leftists who are "three times as strict on culture-war issues as on economics", and I was referring precisely to today's DSA. As a supporter of the Harringtonite social-democratic class-struggle approach, what the org has become kind of disgusts me.

It's worth pointing out tho that the DSA members elected to congress were elected as Democrats.

Not necessarily - Bernie Sanders runs as an independent and just caucuses with the Democrats (same for Angus King, the other independent in the Senate, although he's not of the DSA). However, it doesn't look like anyone in the House is an independent, so maybe Bernie's the only one that does that.

Bernie Sanders isn't DSA, though generally the DSA likes him.

Propaganda and the dominant ideology, I think.

Although there’s still the CPUSA, PSL and even the DSA.

Maybe because the country is blocked in a two-party systems? In other democratic countries, you do not have "the left" represented by one single entity. You instead have a multitude of political parties that can negotiate with each others to push for their political goals. That makes the political landscape dynamic, new parties are created, reorganized, disbanded all the time.

In the US, if you are generally more aligned with the democratic party but see some changes you disagree fundamentally with, you either suck it up or give up your ideals and switch to the complete opposite (republican party).

I don't understand it either. Looking from across the pond at what they do, the Democrat party would be considered highly conservative in Europe.

They executed Joe Hill and Fred Hampton, and imprisoned Eugene Debs for years.

Just look at COINTELPRO for example, that's what happens.

It's because of the 2 party system we are stuck with.

Democratic Socialists, Social Liberals, NeoLibs, and NeoCons(because of the Republican party's shift to the right) are all stuck under one party, so the biggest group controls the entire thing.

They are. For example Seattle has a council member from the Socialist Alternative party. There are a few Democratic congress representatives that are socialists (both in state and national level). Some socialist policies have successfully been pushed by socialist party members (e.g. the current medicare for all bill has around 100 democratic house members backing it up).

However the confinement of the current democratic system in the USA today simply doesn’t allow for third parties to gain national traction. There are mathematical models that proves this fact. For the real left to get socialist parties to the national assembly some democratic reforms needs to happen first.

I really appreciate this post. Somehow I think the media and its funders are trying to drive the wedge between similarly thinking people as hard as they can.

> I’m a black American ...

Do you think that there's a difference with using "master" for the main branch vs using "blacklist" for stuff you don't want in your system? Or are they equally non-offensive to you?

Please let "blacklist" and "whitelist" die. I'm not sure whether the terms carry racial baggage or not, but I don't need to be. I have to repeat the logic of which means which in my head every time. It's as bad as "false negative" and "false positive" -- which means what, again?

"allowlist", "blocklist", "denylist", whatever. They all mean something. I know that "blacklist" is used in a number of areas (blacklisted authors etc.), and I don't have much trouble understanding it there, but those uses also come with a whole set of connotations that don't necessarily apply to lists of URLs or whatever. It's a stretch too far for my brain to be able to hop over without thinking it through.

(For the record, I'm also all in for "false alarm" in place of false positive, and "missed bug"/"undetected flaw" for false negative in the context of static analysis where it makes sense.)

it will take more than a piecemeal approach of rewriting the English language to address prejudice

it is part of an effort of acknowledging that things white are seen as good or less bad, and things black are seen as bad and worse, and this is consistent across the language

this particular approach of extrapolating that towards skin color and ethnicity is just as misguided

but I could have seen it coming: when I’ve used the words in context before, it becomes clear people have had race on their mind the entire conversation that they try to make a poor joke about the irony of me using those words. Seemingly for their own comfort.

Not exactly what I would call privilege, in America.

I think important to distinguish between the radicals and the reasonable people. I would consider myself left but find this change ridiculous. Similar to e.g. how the American concern around blackface is pushed around the world and has madethe dutch Zwarte Piet or German equivalents 'offensive' (even as they probably relate to charcoal burners ('Köhler') [1]).

You equate the few radicals that see some issue there with all 'on the left' which is presumably 50% of any population.

Similar to veganism: the joke is that vegans are all very vocal about being vegan. But reality is that you simply don't notice all the ones that aren't vocal about it and silently love their lives or focus on other issues. Its just an issue of availability bias [2].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charcoal_burner

2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic

No, I equate it as an accurate criticism of the left.

As in, it isn’t an inaccurate criticism. It would be nice if the various camps just acknowledged their criticisms based on accuracy.

Yes, a few predictably present radicals does make it an accurate criticism. It would be more difficult to predict this kind of behavior from people identifying as “the right”. They do other things and a core part of that is rejecting virtue signaling even if that results in apathy that perpetuates adversity.

People are willing to choose the latter, in absence of other choices, partially because it more honestly matches the last 250 years of apathy by all administrations. Where its clear there is a kind of vapid reckoning occurring in the former that simply assumes their minority constituents are all struggling victims that cant possibly be interested in any nuanced platform.

From Wikipedia:

> Traditionally, Zwarte Piet is black because he is a Moor from Spain. However, since the late twentieth century the common explanation of Zwarte Piet's blackness has been that it is due to the soot on his body acquired during his many trips down the chimneys of the homes he visits. Those portraying Zwarte Piet usually put on blackface and colourful Renaissance attire in addition to curly wigs and bright red lipstick. In recent years, the character has become the subject of controversy.

The article seems to be demanding a much more radical change than GitHub is making so I don't think the author's issue is he wants more moderation.

As an outsider, watching Americans complain about political fatigue is fascinating, and informative. Very clearly there is a pervasive feeling that the political apparatus of America is ineffectual. But instead of seeking to become engaged, many are sucked in by media rhetoric that assigns blame to a menacing adversarial out-group.

> It's not pervasive corruption that's to blame, it's the evil culture of people not like you and their corrupt representatives!

We have this where I live, but thankfully we also enjoy a fair amount of mobility; it's less common to be entirely surrounded by those who vote the same as you, and most ridings have flipped between two or three parties over the coarse of most constituent's lifetimes. While the ethnic diversity of the ridings has generally increased over the same time.

Americans could use more political diversity; you're choosing between neocons and neoliberals, and fighting visciously against each other to do so.

A good distillation of what you're saying is here: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anythin...

Yeah the whole thing is really becoming a meta-commentary on the entire US political system. If it weren't so bizarre and dangerous, it would be really fascinating to watch (speaking as an American). On some level, many are subconsciously realizing the majority of both parties represent essentially the same geopolitical worldview that neither left nor right really agree with anymore (for different reasons). If this were a different country I'd predict a major political realignment on the horizon, but given how ingrained the respective neo-con/liberal ideologies are in the political infrastructure here ... I just don't see it as likely without something catastrophic happening to force the issue.

Mixing the politics of the day with business is bound to result in a bunch of low-effort “equal justic initiative” black and white styles block divs.

The best thing a company can do the way I see it is to _dedicate_ a cut of regular profit to a black charity. Like, on a regular basis.

Money can affect serious change in the right “hands”.

JUST MOVE MONEY TO BLACK CHARITIES OR ASSOCIATIONS. ITS CALLED DIVISION OF LABOR. Then, do your best to be inclusive intentionally. That’s the answer IMO.

What about the American right is attractive to black Americans? Which GOP policies really sold the story that black progress was in the air?

Its actually not a statement about what I personally do, it gives context to why black Americans and other people of color would and have, at the surprising surprise to seemingly everyone.

The “right” simply does other things and a core part of that is rejecting virtue signaling even if that results in apathy that perpetuates adversity.

People are willing to choose the right, in absence of other choices, partially because it more honestly matches the last 250 years of apathy by all administrations. Where its clear there is a kind of vapid reckoning occurring in the left that simply assumes their minority constituents are all struggling victims that cant possibly be interested in any nuanced platform. And there’s just other things that Americans can be interested in like certain trade deals or certain people confirmed into government positions or something completely irrelevant. Your comment really suggests only some people have the privilege of playing the game of America. Within America, people on the left have trouble believing minorities could have any interest in that, as in the Democratic Party doesn’t factor it in at all, while their ranks are filled with posers who are willing to weaponize their understanding of race at a moment’s notice, no different than a self-proclaimed supremacist.

As one who leans towards the left, I can reassure you that I've never told anybody what to think, nor have I been vicariously offended, and I barely communicate anything to anybody, which renders my "signaling footprint" pretty darn small. I'm doubtful that those are fair generalizations, and skeptical of critical signaling theory.

I read about the GitHub name change, then completely forgot about it until I saw this HN thread. At the time I think I asked our internal Git guru if this was going to change anything, and he said don't worry about it.

My concern is that a few gaffes from here and there are combined into some unifying characteristic of my "wing," when most people simply take little or no notice of them.

I think you're right about that. Coupled with the fact that extremes from both "wings" are, despite being quite small, very loud and have the megaphone of the news media and social media to make them seem larger than they really are.

Agreed. So many things about this view point are patronizing and condescending. I don't get why people aren't offended by this.

to be heard you do need to speak. Write your representatives in Congress your views on things they are or aren’t doing. Write a blog or vlog.

Oftentimes simply being talking in public gains otherwise obscure or even unhelpful views traction simply by being available.

What do you think about the claim that LBJ’s great society effectively incentivized breaking up black families, with tragic consequences?

Seems another good reason to “walk away from the left” if even their apparently sincere projects keep backfiring like that.

I think the War on Drugs was far more responsible for that than LBJ.

87% of voting African Americans voted for Biden

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/11/03/us/elections/...

With Trump as the alternative, that was hardly surprising - Biden could have been just about anyone and the result would likely have been the same.

*with anti-Trump propaganda it's hardly surprising. He was slandered as 'racist' pretty much non-stop for the entire duration of his term.

> black Americans and other people of color

White guy here, just wanted to chime in and say HELL YES, you nailed it bro. There's more of an emphasis in "tech" toward appearing "woke" than ACTUALLY SOLVING THE FUCKING PROBLEM. You nailed it with "you/they don't see us as equals [...]".

The most important word in the term "African Americans", to me, is, "AMERICANS". You're in this with us. You're our friends, our neighbors, our brothers and sisters. We're in this TOGETHER. And this woke-ism bullshit is just that: bullshit.

Changing a primary branch name from "master" to "main" isn't solving the damn problem. Execs want to do this to earn PR points and wash their hands of the issue of a lack of representation and equality in the industry as a result. It's cheaper than actually giving a shit. But the reality is that socioeconomic barriers to entry into high paying STEM roles amongst our African AMERICAN friends/colleagues is a very real problem that needs to be addressed on both a cultural and economic level.

Ya'll are every damn bit as capable as the rest of us and I'm fucking tired of seeing you thrown under the bus in this industry, especially under the guise of "woke"-ism. It's time we start tearing down these PR stunts as the falsehoods that they are and insist on real, monetary, quantifiable and results-driven investments in black communities that are damn well deserved.

And to my colleagues in the industry that are non-black (especially white): it's time we stand up and "get their back" for our black friends, colleagues and family members. We're in this together, and it's well past time we stand up for our fellow Americans. This bullshit charade needs to stop and WE have the power to move things forward into an era of REAL representation and fairness, and as such we have a RESPONSIBILITY to do it. Enough talk - it's time to act.

In Europe the notion of someone being a African Frenchmen or a African English is absurd. You are your nationality.

Unfortunately this export from America is starting to take root in Europe.

It's not an American import, or absurd to have an identity composed of both a nationality and ethnicity. Really, it's up to the individual - there are many 1st, 2nd and 3rd generation immigrants to the UK or Europe that value their cultural origins and ethnicities. Absolutely those people are British, but many, if not most will not wish to erase their heritage for the sake of 100% assimilation into the host culture.

I should have expected such a reply. Your comment is exactly what I expect from white collar professional that works an office job.

It is an American import and it is absurd. It also causes division. e.g Many labourers (both skilled and unskilled) see it as a slight for someone who is brought up here and have lived here their entire life to display a flag other than the Union Flag of the St. Georges Cross. I've seen a lot of guys in working man's pubs get quite angry and this sort of resentment is always hand waived away as "racism" when that isn't the problem at all.

Many developers don't spend time with the lower classes / those that aren't university educated which have to deal with the worse parts of immigration. They only see the positive aspects of it.

BTW the same happens with the British in the South of Spain btw. The British reputation in Spain is complete dirt because of the disrespectful party goers and expats. It is due to them not assimilating or even bothering to respect the local culture and language.

This is rich. Britain colonized half the world, imposing it's culture on dozens of societies around the world while exploiting their labor and natural resources, but god forbid modern day migrants to the UK dare display the flag of their homeland and cherish the traditions of their parents. Meanwhile chicken tikka masala is hailed as Britain's national dish. I suspect your xenophobia is a personal foible, not a British sensibility.

> This is rich. Britain colonized half the world, imposing it's culture on dozens of societies around the world while exploiting their labor and natural resources, but god forbid modern day migrants to the UK dare display the flag of their homeland and cherish the traditions of their parents.

This old nonsense. This is the problem people like you will constantly bring up the past and won't let anyone forget about it. None of the people that were involved with that are alive today. Also BTW every country and people have invaded and colonised one another if you go far back enough in time. Are we going to start blaming the Italians for Caesar massacring the Celts and the Gauls? When do you want to stop? 50, 100, 500, 1000 years?

> I suspect your xenophobia is a personal foible, not a British sensibility

When did I claim I had a problem with people having another flag up? I didn't say that. I said the labourers in the pub tend to and it has nothing to do with xenophobia (which is you basically euphemism calling them/me racist btw).

If you re-read my comment I actually said that someone would just claim it was racism and not actually try to understand what the real issue is. You did exactly that and you didn't even direct it at the right person. You can never have a sensible discussion about these issues because mid-wits will scream racism almost as it were some Pavlovian reaction.

BTW I am actually a xeno-phile. I actually have lived all over the globe and have only recently come back to the UK.

Flop on the field all you want, no one called you racist. Your insistence that foreigners can't continue to identify with their own culture while also embracing a new one is aptly described as xenophobia. If you want to have a sensible discussion, lets start by engaging with what is actually said instead of what we wish was said.

You actually implied it heavily by calling me xenophobic. You know full well they are synonymous. I am not stupid, so don't play silly games with me please.

> Your insistence that foreigners can't continue to identify with their own culture while also embracing a new one is aptly described as xenophobia.

Nope. I never insisted that at all. I never even mentioned foreigners. You keep on twisting what I am trying to explain and trying to pervert it into something you wish it to be.

I said that this sub dividing people in the *same nationality* by *race* is an American import to the UK (and from what some of my Belgian and French friends have told me) a import into some parts of Europe as well. It isn't typically done in the UK, France, Belgium and I suspect it is the same in many of the other European countries.

Then I said that working class labourers (not all of them white btw) don't like it when 2nd/3rd or 4th generation immigrants aren't patriotic or don't try to assimilate (like their parents did). I then said these concerns / complaints will always get hand-waived away by people as "racism" when the real problem is a feeling of disrespect. Just like you have.

It got nothing to do with xenophobia as the people I am talking about are British.

> If you want to have a sensible discussion, lets start by engaging with what is actually said instead of what we wish was said.

I do. So if you could actually respond to what I said and refrain from this behaviour (which you are now accusing me of) that would be great. Pointing the finger at me, when it is actually you is disingenuous.

Please don't post in the flamewar style to HN. We're trying to avoid that here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The whole story is flamebait. If you don't want it here you should have removed the story.

Virtually every story is flamebait to somebody, so 'why bother' arguments that justify going straight to hell can't be valid.

How HN works is that commenters need to resist provocation and focus on substantive, thoughtful discussion no matter how divisive the topic is. Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. This is something we're working on learning to do as a community. Most commenters in this thread are demonstrating that it is possible. Accounts that fuck with that process by casually setting fires or stoking them are particularly harmful, so please don't do that here.

In terms of whether an article is on topic, the criterion is not "might someone take it as flamebait", but "is it intellectually interesting and substantive enough to support thoughtful discussion". More explanation about that if anyone wants it: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so....

Read the comment again.

That's not anti-foreign culture, but it is insulting to be born in the UK and not see it as your homeland. Or would you be okay with me raising a British flag in India and claiming I was British, if my parents happened to move there before I was born?

Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar and please don't cross into personal attack.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar and please don't cross into personal attack.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Many labourers (both skilled and unskilled) see it as a slight for someone who is brought up here and have lived here their entire life to display a flag other than the Union Flag of the St. Georges Cross. I've seen a lot of guys in working man's pubs get quite angry and this sort of resentment is always hand waived away as "racism" when that isn't the problem at all.

No that's absolutely racism.

> The British reputation in Spain is complete dirt because of the disrespectful party goers and expats. It is due to them not assimilating or even bothering to respect the local culture and language.

This is also their racism.

A special place is reserved for those people who post comments on the Daily Mail complaining about how many immigrants there in England are when they're a British immigrant to Spain.

I never mentioned the race of the labourers. Many weren't white btw. But from your comments you are assuming they are. That btw is racism.

> No that's absolutely racism.

Why? Care to explain? I never mentioned the race many weren't white btw that were making a similar complaint.

> This is also their racism.

So Spanish people who are basically white are being racist against other white people? Is that what you mean? That isn't racism.

Or British (not all British people are white) are people being racist against Spanish people? Or are you using Hitler's definition of what "white" is which means Northern European.

Either way this is non-sensical.

> A special place is reserved for those people who post comments on the Daily Mail complaining about how many immigrants there in England are when they're a British immigrant to Spain.

What are you on about? Nobody said anything about that. I said there are people in Spain that are English that don't assimilate with the local population which is Spanish.

You presume a lot about me sir. I'm happy to engage in your ideas, but play the ball not the man.

I'm actually sympathetic to your views, and feel strongly that immigrants should respect and participate in the host culture as much as possible. That requires effort on both sides, of course, and the blame doesn't always lie with the host Western culture as is often unfairly characterised.

My only point was that I don't see that maintaining a link to your heritage and cultural/ethnic distinctiveness as _necessarily_ incompatible with assimilating and participating fully into the host nation and enriching it in the process. This isn't an argument for neoliberal multiculturalism by the way, which I view as mostly a policy disaster, that hurts the working classes and immigrants the most.

Their heritage has already been erased except for the genetic record and one or two holidays a year.

That sounds great, but in practice doesn't prevent people from receiving racial abuse or discrimination because of what it says in their passport. There's definitely a faction of people who think that if you're not white you're not British, regardless of what it says in your passport. And the Shamina Begum case proves that there's some support for this: the government can simply remove your British nationality if you're Bangladeshi despite her being born in London.

She joined up with ISIS not the best example to bring up. She gave it up there and then. It not like she hooked up with some bad lads and got into a bit of hijinks.

The faction of people that don't believe you are British if you aren't white has to be minority of people. Most of the people that may have brought up the subject are in their Winter years now. Pretending that Enoch Powell is still popular is a nonsense and tbh is nothing more than virtue signalling IME.

> She joined up with ISIS not the best example to bring up.

She's the perfect example. If a full on British person like Nigel Farage does a heinous crime (or make it apples to apples, he joins ISIS) would they take his citizenship away?

If she was born in the US, it would be unthinkable.

I would hope they would take his citizenship away. I don't want a ISIS member coming back to the UK.

The case went through all the legal proceeding and she is not allowed back in the UK. Good!

> If she was born in the US, it would be unthinkable.

If they were born in the US, they would have just been assassinated by drone strike instead like they did with Anwar al-Awlaki.

ISIS is bad, no one is denying this

The citizenship concept is a requirement for modern life. If a person has their citizenship revoked, what are they to do?

They are illegal where they are, and they are illegal where they go. To my knowledge, there's no processes in any country for becoming a citizen without a preexisting citizenship from another country.

Back to this specific example, if she had wanted to come back and denounce ISIS; what should the UK offer her?

What about if she wanted to come back and face trial; what should the UK offer her?

In the end, just to point out the obvious, revoking citizenship is completely unneeded. If she comes back, charge her with her crimes. If she travels, extradite her. If she stays, let the leopards eat her face.

I don't want any terrorist that has commited treason coming back to the UK. They can rot for all I care.

> I don't want a ISIS member coming back to the UK.

A lot of ISIS members came back, they faced persecution, some even death sentence but none had their citizenship stripped.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/u-k-strips-citizenship-is...

> If they were born in the US, they would have just been assassinated by drone strike instead like they did with Anwar al-Awlaki.

Yes, but the point is, is there are a legal treatment which is different for people who have been living here for generations vs those whose parents became a citizen in their lifetimes.

> A lot of ISIS members came back, they faced persecution, some even death sentence but none had their citizenship stripped. > https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/u-k-strips-citizenship-is...

Well they shouldn't have been let back in anyway. I also have no sympathy for a woman that said she felt nothing when she saw severed heads (of people executed by ISIS). Also there are claims that she enforced some of the Sharia laws and wasn't a passive member of the Caliphate.

She revoked her citizenship when she left.

> Yes, but the point is, is there are a legal treatment which is different for people who have been living here for generations vs those whose parents became a citizen in their lifetimes.

No there is a different legal treatment for people that join a rogue state which literally wants to destroy yours. I don't care about these people. Her supporters can cry racism all they want, It isn't racism. We don't want terrorists back in the country.

You keep avoiding the answer in the guise of "well I would have done X". The question is simple, how come she lost her citizenship but other ISIS fighters of British ethnicity didn't?

> She joined up with ISIS not the best example to bring up. She gave it up there and then.

While I do see your point (not British myself, but in Switzerland we had a few ISIS cases as well), I'd like to offer a different viewpoint as well: Our countries messed up at some point in their life - education, mental healthcare support, whatever; something went wrong when one of our citizens feels obliged to join something as heinous as ISIS. After all, we also feel like that with every other terrible criminal - murderers, rapists, etc.; our societies believe in their right to find the right path again, why not someone who joins ISIS?

I’m not arguing for the continued power grab of the home secretary here (who is abhorrent), but the UK does not have birthright citizenship like the US does, so the same set of rules do not necessarily apply.

Anyone born in New York is American, not everyone born in London is British.

Yes, the UK ended birthright citizenship in 1981. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Nationality_Act_1981

The empire caused all sorts of citizenships to appear; citizens of the Empire were "British" right up until the point where they actually started moving to Britain, causing that right to be taken away. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expulsion_of_Asians_from_Ugand...

The very concept of nation is quite euro-centric though. Most of the rest of the world definitely thinks in terms of ethnic and racial groups, and has done so for thousands of years.

I am in the UK, which geographically is part of Europe. That not how we think here and that is a good thing. I don't want our politics to become racialised like it is everywhere else. All it seems to do is bring division and hatred and unfortunately it has imported from America.

Where do you live in the UK where you don’t think our politics is radicalized? It’s nit as bad as the US but Brexit is a thing ...

The Troubles are within living memory in the UK and still have semi-regular terrorist attacks from it though, so I really am skeptical of this idea.

If people don't want politics to be racialised, they need to get better at shutting down the blatent racism of the press, police, and major political parties.

Some of it is imported, but the UK is quite capable of its own characteristically British racism, most recently directed against Poles and Romanians.

It may be a European concept but the concept of a nation state is a good one. When it works, it unites everyone as one group. Humans have a psycholical need for a group identity. Better to unite diverse individuals behind a flag, than to form groups based on ethnicity.

>In Europe the notion of someone being a African Frenchmen or a African English is absurd. You are your nationality.

Tell that to the Balkans.

The recent wars in the Balkans are the result of too many nationalities in too little land, and they didn't involve significant numbers of African immigrants (who typically had the good sense of emigrating to other parts of Europe).

In Europe, France and Romania are different countries, so you don't have "Romanian Europeans" living in France. "African American" isn't solely about skin color, but also about a shared history, migration path, acculturation, and regional population concentration. It's as much a valid "sub-nationality" of American as "Midwestern" or "Californian".

Remember, America and the EU are on the same order of magnitude in terms of total population and land area. If we didn't have terms for differentiating Americans from each-other, it would be like Europeans having no term to distinguish a Pole from a Spaniard.

> In Europe, France and Romania are different countries, so you don't have "Romanian Europeans" living in France.

I never claimed there were Romanians Europeans living in France. I claimed that if you were happened to be Black and British you were still seen as simply British (until relatively recently). The same is generally true in other parts of Northern Europe as well, I have discussed this with Belgians, Germans and Frenchmen online and they all tell me similar things.

I am complaining that this nonsense of saying you are a White <Nationality> or a Chinese <Nationality> or Black <Nationality> idea has been imported from America. It doesn't make sense here.

> "African American" isn't solely about skin color, but also about a shared history, migration path, acculturation, and regional population concentration. It's as much a valid "sub-nationality" of American as "Midwestern" or "Californian".

I don't care what they do in the USA. That is their business. It isn't a thing here and it shouldn't be. Just because we speak English in the UK, doesn't mean we are like Americans.

> Remember, America and the EU are on the same order of magnitude in terms of total population and land area. If we didn't have terms for differentiating Americans from each-other, it would be like Europeans having no term to distinguish a Pole from a Spaniard.

I understand this and never claimed the opposite.

> you don't have "Romanian Europeans" living in France

Thanks to EU freedom of movement, that is absolutely what you do have.

I'm sorry but I still don't get it. Why is referring to people by their state not enough? It's more or less equivalent to nationality in Europe.

Why is race necessary or useful in the same way?

> In Europe the notion of someone being a African Frenchmen or a African English is absurd.

Yes, but

> You are your nationality.

Only if you're a nationalist. Many believe in cross-national or non-national collective identities, e.g. the identity of being a wage worker.

In other cases - it's groups oppressed by the state. The Catalan and Basque come to mind; and there are the Roma ("gypsies"), who are not territorially-defined.

etc.

> Only if you're a nationalist.

Nope. That is how the law and the state sees it.

So, if I live in a monarchy, and the law and the state see my identity as a loyal subject of our glorious king, then that's what I should believe?

Wait a second. In Germany we had work related immigrants (dominantly Turkish) in the 60s. The descendants (2/3/4 generation) of these immigrants are still classified as such (and share attributes about the black community in the US). I do not remember a proper title ... but that is just my brain right now.

>White guy here

Are we at the point where we need to announce our skin colour so that can be the basis of judgment of our comments now?

GGP announced he was black. GP announced he was white.

And you chose to only call out the white person? Do I even need to point out the irony of this?

"left" indeed -- I have been a pretty radical socialist since I was 16. (Well, at least on paper, I haven't been done activist work for years) ... And I don't recognize myself in this "left" that people keep talking about. I think it's hilarious to call CNN "left" or think that anybody in GitHub leadership is "left" for relabeling git branches. Plz. It's just a proposterous strange (and uniquely American) partitioning of the world.

If you define "left" as anything "not far right" then, yeah, ok, of course it's going to include a bunch of liberals who are not interested in any real structural change in the political-economic system and so are obsessed instead with changing how people speak.

So I just don't use the word anymore if I can. I'm not "left wing", I'm a socialist... Unfortunately "socialist" also seems to mean something weird to many Americans, too. (That anybody could with a straight face call Obama or Biden socialist just boggles my mind...)

If you want to understand why Biden and Obama are called socialists, I suggest you do some reading of the Anarcho-Capitalist literature (Anatomy of the State is the most obvious) or maybe listen to someone like Peter Schiff.

I don't agree with their philosophy as I believe it to be unrealistic but their criticisms and descriptions of what the state is and isn't is valid and why some call it socialist may make more sense to you. Hans Herman Hoppe (I am sure someone will quote mine him to smear him after I've mentioned him and haven't read any of this books) even called Democracy a soft form of communism.

Biden and Obama are called socialists because Americans were trained to fear communism and socialism during the Cold War. There is nothing about their political stance that is socialist. Conservatives have just learned that they can score easy points by calling anyone left of Ronald Reagan a marxist

> There is nothing about their political stance that is socialist.

I don't know how anyone can make this statement with a straight face. What about ObamaCare?

How is ObamaCare socialist? It's just a giant subsidy to private insurance companies. It's literally the opposite of socialist health care policy.

> It's just a giant subsidy

If it is redistributing wealth, it's socialist. Taking taxpayer money from person A and paying it out as a subsidy (even if laundered through a private company) to benefit person B is socialism.

Anytime you are redistributing wealth under the threat of the government's right to licit first use of force, you're engaging in socialism.

Socialism as defined by socialists is social ownership of production.

What you're describing is socialism as defined by its libertarian intellectual opponents, and that's a pretty broad definition (any taxation followed by spending is socialism? That's pretty odd... so all military and police forces are socialist?)

So, fine, if that's what you choose to believe, but it's certainly not a policy proposal that is advocated by actual socialists. Even the soft left wing of the Democratic party found/finds the ACA objectionable.

In fact it's explicitly the kind of policy that liberals advocate in order to avoid socialist policy measures and to avoid being called socialists.

> Socialism as defined by socialists is social ownership of production

That's communism, a specific flavor of socialism.

“ Socialism is a political, social, and economic philosophy encompassing a range of economic and social systems characterised by social ownership of the means of production.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism

You should read the rest of that wikipedia article instead of just the first line.

There are many variations discussed in the article. What you should look for are the market varieties of socialism, especially the ones where the objective is to achieve socialism by following peaceful mechanisms of achieving socialistic goals instead of achieving socialism via revolution.

I am not american, so can somebody explain why this comment is downvoted? So that I can avoid such mistakes in words usage when I come to america?

The actual (socialist) American left (think AOC, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren) calls this liberalism, and complains that it is more about posturing than actual change. So this is only a criticism of the left if you are very far to the right.

It's not that big of a deal really. Just a small name change

the point is that it was identified as an area of change at all, when given the reasons for doing so it is completely vacuous and existing in the absence of other change, but being used to satisfy a checkmark of change and self-congratulate.

Absolutely. The paternalism that's shown toward black Americans by white Americans on the left is so obvious. They're treated like children. This patronizing stance toward blacks is like a continuation of the general pre-Civil War ethos of the Democrats. You "took care" of your slaves, too. They were your "property", after all. But of course, you didn't really want to help your slaves in any real way, lest they forget their place.

As a white dude, I feel really ashamed for this even though I'm not involved in this at all. Sorry man, you deserve a better world.

Isn't this the exact sentiment that is causing the issues in the first place?

I would disagree. I think the "woke" stuff is a more active movement to solve all of the 1% of the issue, while ignoring the 99% that actually effects peoples' lives (how universities perpetuate classism, living wages for people doing 'un-skilled' work, revitalizing disadvantaged communities that perpetuate historical racial injustices, etc.).

Displays of misplaced white guilt like this - while bizarre psychologically - don't really harm or help anything.

Seriously. Compared to incarceration, poverty, and social mobility statistics, none of this matters very much.

Why would you be ashamed because of your skin color?

Yes, flog yourself! Repent for your sins! If you draw enough blood on your back, the plague will stop!

I appreciate the empathy, I hope that my thoughts can help people direct energy in more productive ways.

As a white dude, I feel extremely proud because my ancestors abolished slavery.

Oh wait no I don't, because feeling shame or accomplishment for something your ancestors did hundreds of years ago that you had zero control over is a completely ridiculous concept.

I don't understand how that little line could be so misinterpreted so wrong. I'm not ashamed of being white, I'm ashamed of asshats running around gunning for cheap SJW points while ignoring the real issues. We can do better. Master/slave, blacklist/whitelist etc has no relation to race at all so it's a completely pointless act. But instead this is taking center stage just so people can post "feelgood" LinkedIn/Twitter posts to make them feel better about themselves, or company PR blog posts like GitHub and GitLab while doing nothing to change the actual status quo.

What gives you the right to feel ashamed on behalf of someone else's actions, just because you're of the same race as them? Shame on you, virtue-chaser.

As someone whose ancestors annihlated his other ancestors I'm not proud at all, nor do I feel guilt. It's a tragedy as old as human history. We can't forget those horrible things, but we can't bury them either, we are an imperfect species and we have to live with it. Burying words under a rug doesn't fix anything, only diligence and real egalitarianism will.

As an independent who has both democratic party and liberalism as my part of my makeup I have to say this overcompensation from the far left is nuts. It's some kind of white man's guilt complex. I believe everyone is created equal and we have to always be diligent about keeping that at the forefront, but the terms master/slave and their ilk (in english) were around looooong before the whole white/black slave travesty happened. The same with white/black list. Until I hear some prominent black leaders sayign the community at large has an issue with it then I don't really care what some blogger or guilt stricken white people say. It's overcompensation and cancel culture all rolled into one.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com