I don’t follow. Why would you be suspended for that?
I was not the one dismissed him, nor do I work at basecamp, nor am I Ryan Singer, so I can't be sure that's why he was suspended...can only guess with the same information available to you.
This is the problem with cultural Marxism / “wokeness”. It’s a sanctified, totalizing ideology that admits zero daylight between “100% agreement” and “you are a white supremacist/literal Nazi”.
In that way it functions exactly like a “state religion”: in public, you’re either a true believer, act like one or are mute and don’t give away your position. Soon they will make you mouth the words or face denunciation. Perhaps we are already there in the vanguard of coastal tech companies.
This whole thing is counter to the very spirit of liberalism.
Could you help me understand why you feel "cultural Marxism" is so, totally, totalizing?
It simply means that the ideology won’t stop until it has transformed all of culture. The progress thus far has been academia -> journalism -> tech companies. It’s coming for the rest of society. There is no area of life or society that this ideology does not claim to address.
You missed “sanctified” - the ideology resists criticism. Do you not see that this is the way religion used to be?
So let me get this straight: You're railing against an ideology that you claim has progressed through a large section of society, and you think it is bad, and you think, presumably, that society ought to not be like that, at least in these many areas. And your criticism of that ideology is that it claims to address many areas of society?
> You missed “sanctified” - the ideology resists criticism. Do you not see that this is the way religion used to be?
You missed the bit where I used the word "sanctimonious".
The irony of this whole section of the thread in the context of racism...
I call it “cultural Marxism” because unlike plain old Marxism, it has relatively little to say about the redistribution of wealth and other economic interests. In this way it’s made itself innocuous to corporate America, which would otherwise mobilize its immune system to reject the ideas outright.
Case in point: I recently sat through some corporate training on privilege that did not, once, mention wealth or economic privilege.
Cultural Marxism redefines the oppressed and oppressor along the lines of identity rather than economy. This makes it much more palatable to a capitalist society.
"That's closer to the camp of "white supremacist" or at the very least, a common defense used by white supremacist."
This kind of gaslighthing though.
"My opponent disagrees with me and is therefore a White Supremacist, or at least close to one!"
If one person says 'this org is racist because of white privilege' - it's possibly contentious, but not unreasonable to suggest that this statement is racist in and of itself.
Just because you might deny 'reverse racism' exists, doesn't mean that it's true, it's a denial, not a disagreement.
Also, indicating that 'this office is not a place of white supremacy' is not 'denying' someone else experience, or their position that 'racism exists'. It's an observation of the nature of the ostensible problem.
It's not 'wilfully ignorant' it's more like 'wilfully insensitive / disagreeable / inflammatory'
No-one likes being told they're wrong, which is why the capitol riots happened on 6 January and Trump still got so many votes despite being an abjectly horrible president, and the head of a party that does nothing for the vast majority of its constituents.
If you believe the company founders, in the face of being told they occupy their position 'due to privilege' is 'right about everything' then you're the problem.
Telling executives that they are 'denying racism exists' when they are actually only denying that it exists at the company is obviously straw manning.
If you're of the position that 'anyone who questions claims of racism is a white supremacist', then you're entitled to that position, but it's 'war language' that is driving a lot of irresponsible toxicity in the workplace.
Singer's quote:
“I strongly disagree we live in a white supremacist culture,” Singer said. “I don’t believe in a lot of the framing around implicit bias. I think a lot of this is actually racist.”
He wasn't talking about the company, he was talking about society. Unless you think he was saying they "live in" the company ...
Saying he got sacked for questioning it at the company is a spin added later by his apologists.
To the extent that white supremacy is synonymous with racism (which, at least at this point in history, I think is arguable given the fact that we live in a world dominated by the vestiges of the British empire, and that structural inequality is almost entirely against non-white people globally) then people who question the claim of racism are at the very least inadvertently advancing the causes of white supremacy.