Comment by majormajor | Hacker News Reader

Comment by majormajor | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I think you overstate the level of lasting alienation and understate the cumulative impact that a bunch of small "trivial" changes could have over years.

For a hundred years after the Civil War, and then a solid 50 more after the Civil Rights movement, we had "white people doing nothing" plus "some still-racist white people actively trying to roll things back." Doing things, and keeping the issue in the forefront, even if the things sometime look silly to some people, is going to make us more progress than going back to doing nothing because some people think only the perfect things are worth doing.

(People getting affronted, offended, and alienated by actions that they think are "silly" is another problem entirely... You don't think it'll make a big difference? That's nice. Why are you making a big deal out of it, then? There's a virtue signalling of "look at how more evolved I am to not be fooled by your silly change, and still spot that the world still sucks after it!!")

As much as we pretend otherwise, people's attention and resources are limited. Time spent bikeshedding these inconsequential things is time not spent tackling more important issues. Each newsflash that opens with "pc culture gone mad! the word "blacklist" is being banned by radical leftists" is a newsflash that doesn't open with

"wages have been stagnant for the past 50 years despite gains in productivity"

"prices of tvs and smartphones falling, prices of housing and healthcare skyrocketing"

"statistical studies show voter preferences have near-zero correlation with effected legislation, while preferences of the wealthier 0.5% are very strongly correlated"

etc.

In short: you're alienating people that you could bring to your side, you're wasting time and effort in inconsequential changes, you're giving fuel to those who use these trivialities to distract the populace from the real issues. I see no upside here.

Each newsflash could cover those things anyway, but they choose garbage wedge issues and will continue to foment them when they cant find any: biden's dog was a recent controversy because talking about systemic problems doesn't get clicks and doesn't make people upset in the same way this type of BS does.

they choose garbage wedge issues and will continue to foment them when they cant find any: biden's dog was a recent controversy

I can't believe anyone really believes that story

Pull on every thread. This is one thread, there is no opportunity cost of this sort of thing.

We all need to get over ourselves

So let it happen quickly without complaining about it so that tomorrow we can be arguing about something else, instead of arguing about the same thing for ten straight years.

"People get pissed off even by small changes" is a MUCH bigger impediment towards real progress than "people are making small changes that won't fix the whole world" is.

I don't believe most of the people who say they're only problem is that the change is "too small." I think that's just an excuse of convenience to resist any change or challenge to the status quo. If your problem is that the change isn't big enough, the solution is to push for bigger ones yourself! But that's not usually what we see those people doing...

The problem with that is we never graduate to the real problems.

People who are after a quick, delusional dopamine hit from changing harmless terminology will just go after sillier and sillier stuff instead.

It's not "too small", it's irrelevant and selfish.

It's not the size of the change that's a problem, it's that the change doesn't address the problem at all, and that the only metric for success for these changes is how angry they make people (which, in the circles of the people proposing these changes, means the change is "working").

It's entirely possible to hire more engineers of color and pay them fairly, but it turns out that pitting workers against each other by introducing a handful of inconsequential process and standards changes is much cheaper and hinders the solidarity that enables coordinated advocacy for better working conditions.

As a Native American this comes across to me the same as how the savior complex drives people to talk down to Native Americans about their persecution.

And that's pretty much what the OP article is complaining about, people with savior complexes doing performative things that don't really fix the problem on a larger scale.

If I may ask, (why) do you prefer Native American over Indian (assuming you're talking about being a United States native and not a native of other parts of America, ie. South America)?

I have no preference, so sometimes I will say Native American, sometimes its American Indian, sometimes its indigenous... No real preference other than I tend to use one or another based on context at times. Its more clear and not mildly politically loaded to say "Native American" in this context.

I do not really like using Indian to refer to Native Americans as I work with a lot of people from India. This is a personal preference, I don't correct people who say Indian to refer to Native Americans and I will often use it in a conversation where its already being used to avoid confusion or bad vibes.

An of course, there is the confusion you noted that can happen between the super-continent America and the country commonly called America.

Do USA schools teach that America is one continent divided in north, central and south America? Or is it America=USA ? I'm from South America and we learn it's one continent

There are multiple, separate issues in the question.

As a matter of actual geological fact, North America and South America are separate continents (they have their own cratonic cores). Geographically they are considered distinct in the USA also. Central America is a cultural or political region refering to the isthmus -- it is not a continent in any sense.

Nationals of the USA are called "Americans" by USA nationals, and by people from other parts of the world, including Japan, Russia, etc (in their own phonologies). Canadians refer to USA nationals as Americans, and do not call themselves Americans.

Europeans frequently object to USA nationals calling themselves Americans, claiming that the word should refer people's of both North America and South America. People from South American nations seem to feel the same. Mexicans seem to me much more likely to refer to a USA national as "Americano" than they are "Estadounidense."

USA nationals will sometimes describe people from North and South American nations as be from "the Americas."

> Europeans frequently object to USA nationals calling themselves Americans

Many Europeans object to calling themselves Europeans.

Ex: From my travels and conversations - the English don't refer to themselves as Europeans. I asked them what continent they lived on. Doesn't matter.

In my experience, a lot of people from the United States tend to conflate "America" and the "United States of America". It's a pet peeve of mine, so I sometimes correct them. But usually people just get annoyed with me. ;-)

People from the USA often use "the Americas" in place of the sense of "America" that refers to both North America and South America.

At least from my experience, America is the US. If you want to refer to the giant landmass that makes up the majority of the land in the western hemisphere, you say "The Americas".

This blows my mind, because it never occurred to me that this would actually be taught differently. But yes, afaik, in NA we're taught that North and South America are two separate continents. In Canada however, Americans are from the USA, but we don't generally refer to the USA as America. Only they do that. We refer to the middle nation in NA as The U.S.

It's hard to recall what I was taught about Central America, but I believe it was that it's sort of a region shared between both and only a colloquially separate entity.

So you learned "there are six continents"? That's really interesting. Growing up in the US, we always learned it as seven. I never really thought about that as something that was taught differently based on location.

(Unfortunately though, I think that ignorance is fairly common for a lot of aspects of life for people raised in the US.)

Side note: I was going to say "aspects of life for Americans", but realized Americans means more than just those in the US. So I propose a new term for "people from the US". USers. :)

> you're wasting time and effort in inconsequential changes, you're giving fuel to those who use these trivialities to distract the populace from the real issues.

That's probably a valid perspective, but I see a lot of well-meaning comments like this, and this thread now has more comments on it, than github has employees. Perhaps the time "wasted" on this at github isn't as high as the time wasted discussing it.

As a software engineer, my workflow is forced to change all the time. As a software engineer, I don't complain. I've been praised for not complaining. I will work on Visual Basic code if you want me to.

Similarly, I'll change how I speak and work if it makes someone more comfortable, no problem.

I'm also desperate for there to be more conversations about unionizing, corporate lobbying, the outsized influence of the 1%.

Maybe if we both just shut up about this topic and get on with our other work, the world will be a better place?

> Similarly, I'll change how I speak and work if it makes someone more comfortable, no problem.

But does it? Is there a clamour of people demanding immediate change due to the grievous usage of... a technical word?

With regards to "main" vs "master" I honestly don't care. It might make some people feel better, and it might not. Should I care, and comment here about it?

Why?

Brilliant. (Truly!)

> Why are you making a big deal out of it, then?

Achieves nothing; breaks build scripts; imposed by faceless outsiders who have no interaction with the project.

I'd argue it doesn't just achieve nothing, it works against the cause in two ways:

* First, as others have said, it builds resentment in those that see it as not worthwhile compared to other things and who are negatively impacted like how you describe.

* Second, which I haven't really seen people bring up, by succeeding at a visible but inconsequential change, the activists who brought this about are less likely to bother with something that actually matters.

I'm not sure that I really agree with either of those.

* firstly, I expect that most actual resentment is from people who object to the change on political grounds rather than technical, and 'there are big things to do' is not a reason to not do little things. Not doing changes like this will probably not meaningfully change the amount of resentment to 'political correctness' in the world.

* secondly, the pattern we normally see is that we encourage people to make big changes by helping them succeed with small ones first

> I think you overstate the level of lasting alienation and understate the cumulative impact that a bunch of small "trivial" changes could have over years.

Not even close. Everyone I've talked to about it makes some mention about the left having lost its mind, myself included.

>I think you overstate the level of lasting alienation and understate the cumulative impact that a bunch of small "trivial" changes could have over years.

I'm a very liberal person, and have actively fought prejudice, especially the type of unconscious bias that is so difficult to stomp out, my entire professional career. I'm especially keen on the dynamics of power in conversation, it's crazy how often people from a less privilege group get interrupted, and people rarely realize the dynamic as its occurring.

But all of the PC policing and the with-us-or-against-us rhetoric has really soured me on giving a shit about any of this. While I'm privileged by being white, I was born to a lower-middle class family in a rural area and don't feel particularly privileged. I went to a backwards high school where I was bullied for being a nerd, with curriculum from 60's( graduated in ~2010 and we didn't have a single CS class, and highest achievable GPA was 4.2, while people in neighboring districts could go to the GATE high school and graduated with a 5.0). I had undiagnosed/treated mental health problems which were significantly exacerbated by my family's inability to afford healthcare (we had insurance, but couldn't afford to actually see the doctor). Despite this we were too wealthy to qualify for any student aid and I was unable to win any substantial scholarships. I was mature enough at 20 to know I wasn't doing well enough nor did I have adequate direction in school to take tens of thousands in what I understood at the time to be an undischargeable debt on the gamble that it would pay off. I remember looking for help about how to do better at the community college I was attending and basically determined that I, as a straight white atheist, didn't really have allies as when I asked people where they got e.g. counseling, it was always through a channel i didn't have access to, whether it was a church group, a family friend or some support group for people who weren't me. My parents are both 40 years my senior and were so far out of the loop that they didn't even know that GPAs went higher than 4. I also didn't know that if I saw a psychiatrist I could turn everything around, and had no access to one, so I dropped out.

>Why are you making a big deal out of it, then?

Because I, personally, find all this woke shit about race and sex from bougie whites offensive, classist, and racist. I completely support it when it is coming from the (dis)affected community in question, but when there is a dogpile of privileged people virtue signaling in a way that completely negates the actual issues (like people not having equitable access to justice, healthcare, education and housing) I find affront. I would argue most of the problems that minority communities face are also shared by poor white communities, the only difference is that those communities have virtually no actual voice in modern discourse and have privileged whites talking on their behalf instead. Admittedly a common problem generally, but I don't want people with power, and make no mistake bougie tech workers have a lot more power than the poor do, to feel they've "done something" and pat themselves on the back until they actually make poor people's lives better, changing master/slave to main/source, or whatever the fuck language change you choose is literally doing nothing to make things better for anyone but github/micorsoft. It's paying lip service, full stop.

I also find some of talk about the historic enslavement of Blacks in the US kinda weird. I can track my lineage back thru 100s of years of serfdom, my ancestors literally fleeing Europe to America during Reconstruction in 19th century to escape brutal peonage and serfdom.. and nobody cares. I'm of the "priviledged class" because people who I have no relation to but shared my skin color were of the ruling class 250 years ago when we didn't respect human rights. Sounds racist as hell to me, all things considered. I just don't get it.

I agree with much of what you've said, especially the part about the shared problems that poor minority and poor White people face. Based on what you've said I wouldn't say you were very "privileged."

But responding to one of your points, and I don't think this is taught very well in schools, the specific discrimination that Black people faced went on for a long time after the end of slavery. For example, here in what is now considered progressive Oakland, CA, Black people were kept out of many jobs through the 1940s and 50s, including as streetcar drivers. Also, they were excluded from government subsidized mortgages through the 60s, which impeded their ability to build wealth and live in good conditions. These examples of explicit racial discrimination happened well within living memory.

That was then, and this is now. To call the descendants of people who went through that period either "privileged" or "marginalized" is no different than visiting the sins of the father upon the son. It's morally reprehensible.

"Privileged" and "marginalized" are not moral judgments.

In woke cultures view of the world, they most certainly are.

The disparities in access to COVID vaccinations as of the time I’m writing this should tell you that this is still happening.

Oh I understand that completely, which is why I state that I do have privilege as a white person. but the left has a messaging problem wherein too many of the bougie whites narcissisticaly believe all of their privileges are shared amongst whites.

Even apart from your examples, (you missed Japanese interment camps/stolen wealth, probably the worst thing the US did domestically in the 20th century) racial profiling is still extremely real in this country. Which is on everyone radar, but it's really put into focus the times I've traveled cross country and consistently see POC on the side of the interstate.

>These examples of explicit racial discrimination happened well within living memory.

I mean, the way I see it, explicit financial discrimination is still happening today. Its just called affirmative action.

> I mean, the way I see it, explicit financial discrimination is still happening today. Its just called affirmative action.

Nope. Redlining, the entire history of USDA subsidies in the 20th century, the GI bill etc are far more economically impacting than any meager adjustments to the dominance of white people in business and government. White people need to STFU about affirmative action as it has not meaningfully changed the shape of leadership in our workforce.

Thank you for taking the time to write this and for thinking the way you do. The most common trait among successful (not necessarily wealthy) people in my opinion transcends race, creed, religion, or sex; it's persistence.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com