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I'm not a cis white male and I'm not internalizing oppression
but obviously (to almost everyone) these are unfalsifiable standards that self-proclaimed far left extremists have created to invalidate everyone's thoughts but their own
if anyone hasn't been exposed to this experience, the people that want corporations to "use their platform" for things unrelated to revenue are also believing that all aspects of life are political for people that aren't "cis white males" and if you're any combination of minority/woman/LGBT and disagree with that then you're "internalizing oppression" because to them we can't have independent thoughts. For me, these "allies" are worse than the silent apathetic people as well as the overtly prejudiced/racist people. Primarily because they're unpredictable and even more reactionary to having their world view challenged.
> these "allies" are worse than ... overtly prejudiced/racist people.
I disagree. By my reckoning, there just isn't a comparison, by almost any metric of societal damage. Of course, it doesn't have to be a contest. That's not the important thing.
The aforementioned "allies" are dangerous like bear-traps. Ostensibly they exist to deal with the bears. But they lay hidden in the brush ready to take off the foot of anybody who missteps, bear or otherwise. And you probably won't notice one is around until somebody steps on it.
This is an apt analogy.
I would wager there are more non-overt racists out there than counter-productive allies.
Funny how you're taking this gripe up with me, not the commenters above mine to whom I am responding. I did not set the scope of this branch of conversation, yet you insinuate I am responsible for it. Buzz off.
At some level of activism, the remaining non-overt racists will be less harmful than the obsession to root them out.
Companies already pay a ton of money for sensitivity and diversity trainings that either do not work or even worsen the atmosphere of the workplace. This money could have been used for a better purpose than lining already fat pockets of Robin diAngelo and her peers.
[[Citation Needed]]
The rural poor have plenty of power on both a federal level (each California House representative is responsible for 65 times as many people as each North Dakota representative; numbers are similar for Wyoming, Montana, and plenty of other rural areas) and state levels (thanks to the magic of gerrymandering.
There are all sorts of racist rich people. I grew up in a well off suburb in Michigan that was significantly more than 90% white (though adjacent to a more diverse larger city) and full of overt racism, to say nothing of the more subtle forms.
So what? This is the result of a compromise established in 1776 to keep states with lower populations from unilaterally deciding to leave the Union when they lack representation. Do you propose ammending the constitution?
Personally I would be happy with making house seats exactly proportionate to actual population and adding one senator for every 5 million residents.
So North Dakota with fewer than 800k people gets 2, Washington State with 7.6M gets 3, California with 39M gets 9. This still gives ND 1 senator per 400k while CA has to settle for one per 4M but this is better than one per 20M.
The original "compromise" is that each State gets at least 1 seat in the House, and equal representation in the Senate (2 seats). That is separate to the 3/5ths "compromise" related to the voting franchise.
The house of representatives was always supposed to grow with the population. This changed in 1929 due to an Act of Congress to limit the total to 435. Unsurprisingly, it was done because a Republican Congress would lose representatives otherwise. [1]
What has happened is that by artificially limiting the size of the House to 435 representatives, areas of greater population density are now under-represented.
In a rough approximation:
1. The House is supposed to represent the people
2. The Senate is supposed to represent the States
3. The POTUS is supposed to represent the nation to other nations.
Due to the now unrepresentative nature of the House, the people are under-represented in that balance.
The fix would be to expand the House membership, effectively by using the minimum size of a seat (eg the smallest State is guaranteed at least 1 seat in the House and seats cannot cross state lines).
That size could be used to determine the number of seats in total.
Based on that, the number of seats would be somewhere around (US population / Wyoming) = (328m/578k) = 567 seats.
We have turned our poorest, most vulnerable populations into the enemy. We did it in the 80s/90s with young black men, then in the 2000s with Muslims and we’re doing it again but this time it’s “racists”. Because we have to have an enemy.
This is not a defense of racism, but it is a defense of the people being made into the target.
I've spent plenty of time in Appalachia. You can only help people who want to be helped. The Obama administration wanted to retrain coal miners to new.jobs to help them and they (and.the politicians they elect) rejected it out of hand. They've had decades to change and have actively opposed it. This is fundamentally on them at this point, just like a good chunk of the rust belt suffering is because states and people had decades to try to diversify into something other than automobiles and decided not to.
Educated and well off people might have a superiority complex and they can be both racists and classists. And poor people can be ignorant, even more so when isolated, which is a catalyst for racism.
This is part of what I'm talking about, the inability to understand neutral people. It presupposes they already agree with the concept, same as original sin from religion: You need to have already bought in to these concepts before the preaching means anything other than "you're stupid/evil", and the preachers don't understand why the nonbelievers don't like being called stupid/evil.
Twitter is a pain to use because of this behaviour, I wouldn't want the culture in my workplace to be like it.
I've never had to deal with shitty people or shitty behaviour on Twitter. How do I do it? The unfollow button. I also don't look at replies to famous or controversial people's tweets.
Also, with the algorithmic field based on likes, even if I am not following someone, someone I follow might like tweets from a new crusade happening and they enter my feed. It seems like there are one or more groups out with their pitchforks on some issue. While I support activism for causes, when the activism is such that it hounds out any divergent viewpoint, it becomes toxic and I would rather not see it.
For example, one of the last things the Labour party, who're the more left-wing of our two main parties, did when they had power here in the UK was write a special exemption in anti-discrimination law to deny trans women access to rape and domestic violence services at the request of a feminist lobbying group. (As in this was literally the stated purpose according to the official guidance accompanying the law when it was proposed.) Any discussion of how this happened or the lobbying group behind it was explicitly forbidden in the left-wing and feminist publications and communities with any reach. The press only turned on the Labour-linked lobbying group in late 2019, over a decade after the original law, when they started lobbying the Conservatives over the same anti-trans cause. The discussion of this has been so warped that the established social justice left view on the whole thing is that it shows transphobia is a right-wing thing and proves any attempt to equate the left with them (not just over transphobia, but any attempt to claim they're comparably bad in general) is a dangerous false equivalence.
Allies and racists both exist on a continuum, do they not? A single individual will take actions that are both helpful and harmful in different measures to other people and groups in society.
Some racists are going to be net benefits to society. Their racist views may be limited, unintentional, unexpressed, or any combination of the above. While their works may be helping minority groups directly.
That's just one example of the presented framework breaking, but there are many more permutations. Hopefully this is enough for us to agree that a blanket statement like
> these "allies" are worse than ... overtly prejudiced/racist people.
is, if not inaccurate, so imprecise as to be meaningless.
The “internalizing oppression” thing is such a disgusting accusation. It’s just a way for the activists to trade on the moral authority of pretending to speak for their group, even when they don’t represent the views of their identity group: https://www.slowboring.com/p/yang-gang
When Reddit hired an admin with repeated links to child molestation, moderators of trans communities like r/LGBT staunchly took the position of the admin and called anyone speaking out against it transphobic. (The admin is trans).
It kinda feels like law enforcement. The good apples aren't speaking out about the bad apples. If you see activists using your group to advance an agenda you disagree with, eject them. Don't just let them do their things.
Their comments are greyed out, at the very bottom of all the threads, invisible, collapsed, flagged and otherwise censored
And this is also one of those moments, so just add it to your generalizations so that you don't come to the same broad conclusion
Or is that not a 'progressive' line? (In which case, why the hell haven't we gotten it yet?)
I think the likely explanation for this conundrum is that people don't support <whatever strawman of the week is used to attack a caricature of a position>.
If you’re asking “do black Americans want police reform”, then probably yes considering 90+% of all Americans favor police reform of some kind. So to answer your other question:
> Or is that not a 'progressive' line? (In which case, why the hell haven't we gotten it yet?)
Not uniquely, no. Why we haven’t gotten it yet: probably because our politics are broken by intense partisanship among other things. Frankly this isn’t a corporate issue (beyond some shallow virtue signaling), so it just doesn’t become a legislative priority.
> I think the likely explanation for this conundrum is that people don't support <whatever strawman of the week is used to attack a caricature of a position>.
This is a well-documented dodge. Leftists have been very clear that they want the police abolished. The media tried to make that message more palatable in advance of the recent presidential election by suggesting it was a euphemism for moderate police reform, and leftist activists clarified that they literally want to abolish the police. This is very explicitly not a caricature.
Citation _very much_ needed.
In my experience this is not a position of the left, beyond maybe some fringe <0.1% groups.
Stating that as a "position of the left" as a fact merely reinforces what the GP said: "I think the likely explanation for this conundrum is that people don't support <whatever strawman of the week is used to attack a caricature of a position>. "
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abol...
Less than half of black people support defunding or reducing the police presence but that conversation has smothered all discussions of more realistic and popular reform.
No, most aren't crazy enough to think that abolishing the police is better than what we have.
Instead, they ask to "defund" the police, and then redefine "defund" to mean that many of their daily services should be given to others more qualified for peaceful resolutions, without carrying weapons, and police should be available for backup of those situations.
I personally remain unconvinced, and I think we'd see a lot of the people doing those services injured because they went into dangerous situations without adequate protection. But I can't deny that the police have shown a lot of poor judgement over the years, so something needs to change.
I’m so tired of these rhetorical games. It’s dishonest and we need to stop accepting it as a legitimate form of discourse. No respect for people and politicians who do this.
Lazy rhetoric will always let one down in a big way. At the very least, as one is making broad, sweeping generalisations, one will totally miss what the real issues are, and the real problems.
Is it really a strawman when a non-negligible number of people in your political camp espouse a position without so much as a hint of irony or exaggeration? Denying the existence of the radicals won't win you any credibility with fence sitters and moderates.
But, like with the democratic primaries, voting tends to collapse the bubble. Concrete example of this. Progressive Asian organizations attacked Andrew Yang for his normal Democrat take on the police: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/activists-andrew-yan.... But of course Yang is the overwhelming front runner among actual Asian voters in NYC.
Another example is NYC Pride banning the NYPD from marching in Pride: https://www.gaycitynews.com/nyc-pride-overrules-membership-v...
> Less than a week after Heritage of Pride (HOP), or NYC Pride, announced a ban on police contingents through 2025, the organization’s members voted on May 20 to allow the Gay Officers Action League (GOAL) to march armed and in uniform — but HOP’s executive board subsequently stepped in and set their own policy.
Progressive activists really do believe the things they say. Usually they don’t get their way because it’s a democracy and actual voters don’t support those things.
As to “straw men”—I was rankled last year when my law school faculty declared themselves “gatekeepers of white supremacy” in a school townhall meeting: https://jonathanturley.org/2021/05/27/brandeis-dean-declares.... People told me, “well most liberals don’t think like that.” I suspect that’s true, your average Biden voter doesn’t. But there’s 14-15 elite law schools in the country, and the faculty of at least one of them does think like that.
This activist mindset isn’t widespread, but it’s often concentrated among people who have significant platforms. A lot of faculty, young political staffers, etc., do think like that. It’s not straw-manning to call out that behavior.
Biden is probably median in terms of economic issues. You have to distinguish between what Biden says he wants and where the U.S. is currently. The US is obviously significantly to the right of Europe on economic issues as a starting point. But Biden’s proposal for a 28% tax rate (closer to 35% factoring in state taxes), or his proposals for major hikes in the capital gains rate, are well to the left of where Western Europe is right now.
Look at ratings for national sports (MLB, NBA especially) lately. This year's Oscars had the worst rating in history. Coca-Cola's sales plummeted after their "woke" employee training was exposed. Same for Disney. Same for Delta. Parents around the country are descending on their local school boards demanding that Critical Race Theory be abolished.
On the opposite end, when the left tried to "cancel" Goya for supporting Trump, it backfired. Sales went through the roof.
These people are a tiny minority of the population made to seem much bigger and more accepted than they really are by media, politicians and (most unfortunately) Universities - which have become Socialist re-education camps.
One example: https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2020/08/11/901398248...
3% of US Latino adults use the term "Latinx". 20% do not use it, and 76% have never heard of it. Anecdotally, in Latin American countries, most people either mock it or have never heard of it.
But this doesn't stop anglophone woke activists from trying to impose this word on Latinos.
South and Central America have bigger fish to fry than worrying about prudish neovictorian attitudes.
Maybe you should ask some of the indigenous peoples oh wait the colonizers pretty much wiped them out didn't they
North America remained available so late to colonization because the Spanish saw it as worthless as it didn't fit at all with their latifundial industry, precisely because it lacked the population and the farming that could easily be converted over to estates.
A significant part of North America is also Latin America, and vice-versa.
> There were large populations of agrarian peoples used as a workforce by the Spanish.
Therr were large populations of people virtually (and sometime precisely) enslaved by the Spabish as agrarian workforce; they weren’t always specifically agrarian (any more than any other preindustrial population, including the colonizers) before that.
And, yes, through enslavement and other mistreatment, they, and even moreso their pre-conquest identities and cultures, were often wiped out. Sure, there are some remnants and admixture with the colonizers and other imported subject populations; that’s true of the native subjects of genocide in the parts of North America colonized by the British and French, as well.
Latinx is a term invented and used by US cultural colonialists, that's both subjugating and xenophobic.
I don't think changing the language is necessary, but if we're adding regex to English. COUNT ME IN!
Latine seems to be more popular outside North America. So Latinx is an English word mostly. And I think it became popular in writing before anyone much thought about pronunciation. A bit like Latin@.
I have a very hard time believing that this was invented by people who speak a Romance language as their first language. Do you have a source?
>Probably it was influenced by spellings like folx and womxn.
Which is ... also a Germanic construction. Those words are not pronounceable in Spanish, Italian, or French. Is the idea that you just "imagine" that the word is spelled correctly when you pronounce it and this is just a thing you do when writing it?
> I have a very hard time believing that this was invented by people who speak a Romance language as their first language.
Children of Hispanic immigrants often feel more comfortable with English than Spanish yet many will still identify as “Hispanic”. So the word is more understandable if you see it as a product of a predominantly Anglophone Hispanic subculture
Who is using this term if it is not people who it is ostensibly used to describe? I can venture a guess.
"Latinx" is a sophisticated word from and for sophisticated people (such as the mentioned LGBT activists, who are often ready to adopt neutral replacements of masculine and feminine words); its usage should be considered an indicator of such sophistication (do you find it proper or silly?) and social contexts (who would you call "Latinx"? What would they think of you if you did?), all quite orthogonal to people's identity.
But I suspect there are many people who consider anyone smarter than them "elites" regardless of their actual social standing.
Many Hispanic people are natively bilingual. Many speak English primarily.
Folx sounds like it looks. Womxn sounds like woman or women usually. Latin@ depends on the speaker. Latinx rhymes with Kleenex.
It was supposed to rhyme with "thinks" from its inception.
I went to CU-Boulder and a part of the Latinx community, trust me, this is a quite hurtful anglo-ization of our tribe.
Three consonant endings do get routinely pronounced in full in English though, e.g. "thinks".
...which is probably a big reason why it doesn't gain traction. It doesn't make sense as a word in any language. It feels like a foreign object pushed into the language by someone who is obviously out of touch. One could easily come up with something that at least reads and sounds like a word: Latinoa, Latinem, Latines...
Another big reason is that it doesn't solve a problem that most people have. If you look at Urban Dictionary, you see that many "up-and-coming" word creations are solving actual semantic problems, gaining traction organically, from the bottom-up. This is how language changes naturally.
On the other hand, the hypothesis that "generic masculine" forms are harmful is borne out of academia. It is entirely speculative and for practical purposes, unfalsifiable. Most people have to be told that the "moral" position is to comply with such language changes "from the top", for some perceived "greater good". Appropriately, have a word for this: newspeak.
I'm not a language elitist or anything, but it's not a secret that language evolves towards easier and quicker pronunciation. And enforcing the opposite for ideological reasons is not just a bad idea, it's also doomed to fail.
What I find pretty funny about this whole discussion is that German is a language that seems very tuned to allow for additions of language. Meaning, if you want to "invent" a new word, the German language has a lot of tools to allow you to do that. Which probably explains the root cause here for why "Latinx" exists at all.
(I don’t really understand how “Latina/Latino” came to be used for this purpose to begin with.)
To be fair, English is extremely accustomed to etymological chimeras. A large portion of it is made of Old French, Latin and to a lesser degree Greek stems with English and Norse affixes/suffixes. Which is a perfectly valid way to import words while preserving the overarching grammar.
The problem with Latinx specifically is that it's closer to a regular expression than English.
What's the proper pronunciation for those words?
That’s not surprising, since it’s purely a product of “woke” culture in the USA, and the only people who use it are either multiple generations removed from their “ancestral” country, or have degrees in social sciences from Ivy League universities (or both).
r/LGBT basically got taken over by shitty mods, all they really have going for them at this point is their easily searchable name.
I ultimately had to move out of SF as I felt incredibly out of place simply for not being far left. I'm no conservative, and I've seen plenty of hate for being gay from the right. But the last 5 or so years, much of that hate is coming from the far left now.
If you're concerned about climate change and resource constraints but you don't see a problem with migrating or bringing seven billion people up to American consumption and carbon emission standards, I don't know what to tell you.
Neoliberalism has infected every progressive movement and it's disgusting.
I am a member of a minority group (disabled), and I see it very often that activists pull "me" into other activism simply because they are also catering for a minority group. I am expected to support them all, just because I am disabled. This is so weird and patronizing, it killed my remaining sympathy for the left in the last 5 years. I used to vote for the left. Watching the fallout of political activism has made me a non-voter.
This, and the "If you're not with us, you're against us" attitude both disgust me. And I've yet to meet someone like that that didn't cherry pick some "other" group to vilify, making them hypocrites.
But I do wish you'd vote. Please look beyond the left/right politics and vote for someone who you think will do the most good. That said, I fully understand if every single candidate looks like they'll do more harm than good, and you just can't bring yourself to support any of them.
Now that viewpoint is consider radical right and will get you all the unpleasant labels.
The problem is that candidates are becoming more extreme to cater to the more extreme parts of the electorate. That doesn't really moderates a real choice when deciding on whom to vote for.
People like John McWhorter have described wokeness as a religion. That's a characterization that I agree with, and a religion isn't countered by being a Democrat, Republican, Independent or apolitical.
I found the walk-away movement appealing when it first started. I agreed with the criticisms of the left. But the movement turned into switching uniforms ... walk across the field from the Dem side to the GOP side. It was more political than helpful.
One of McWhorter's suggestions is that more of us need to tell the people in the religion, "no."
You are asking why minority groups don't speak against dominantly rich, white and male majority?
No. You've lost the train of conversation being developed in the replies.
To paraphrase gp, he was saying : "So why don't people in those [minority] groups speak out against [others in their minority group with extreme views]?"
See that context of minority identity group criticizing their own group from the prior comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27401731
The minority groups often have totally different values then the activists ( who share the dominant value system and consider themselves and the minorities they represent the losers of that system ).
The other problem is that the media narrative is controlled by white progressives who amplify the activists. Nobody invites my dad on CNN to express his view that he’s faced remarkably little racism living in America since 1989, most of that time in a red state. Nobody has my mom on TV defending Trump’s law and order stance and complaining why it took Biden so long to condemn rioting. Instead you have talking heads with degrees in cultural studies subjects that my parents wouldn’t even have allowed their kids to major in. FFS, 40% of men voted for Trump. When was the last time you ever saw one on TV?
It’s been nice to see some normies speaking out about this. Zaid Jilani, who grew up as a Pakistani kid in the south, is one example: https://mobile.twitter.com/zaidjilani. Wesley Yang is great, and Matt Yglesias has been willing to broach the subject as well. Every now and then Fareed Zakaria on CNN chimes in with a take, like during last summer when he noted “hey immigrants actually love America and think it’s pretty good.”
But center-left whites people need to defend their turf. The progressive left tries very hard to act like they’re speaking for all “people of color” and draw moral authority from that. They will amplify and retweet a handful of say Asian activists, and because there are so many more white people that really skews the perception of what Asians actually think and want. I think often times center-left white people are too scared of being labeled conservative to push back on that.
As a center-right white person who was abandoned by the Republican party years ago, I wish the center-left good luck with that.
My wife insists that I vote, so in national elections, I vote for a moderate in the primary that has zero chance at winning, and then a third party candidate that has zero chance at winning (my state and congressional district vote over 10pts more Democratic than the national average, so no need for strategic voting).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_consciousness
FWIW, I'm optimistic that it's a generational cohort thing. Plenty of boomer activists know what's best for other people and will selflessly nail themselves up on a cross for your benefit. Why aren't you grateful? Sure, others do it too, but it's somehow different. Feels more like oversteer than preaching.
The new hotness in activist circles is empowerment, helping people find their own voices, making the space for them to be heard.
Change is painful, slow. But it's happening.
Have you heard that some people call this the white savior complex? Crazy right?
I can’t imagine what it’s like to be such an ideologue that you have to project on other people.
People on the side of The People always ended up disappointed, in any case. They found that The People tended not to be grateful or appreciative or forward-thinking or obedient. The People tended to be small-minded and conservative and not very clever and were even distrustful of cleverness. And so the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn’t that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people.
The current state of social discourse is essentially landmines in the form of Kafkatraps[1]. Once there's any form of discussion on an unfalsifiable topic, it provides the leftist with a false sense of justification, simply because it was discussed...even if the leftist's reasoning made no sense and they lost the debate. Then they use the false justification to trick low-intelligence people into believing it's actually justified.
This has led us into a race towards the bottom within society, catering to the loudest complainer in the room. Crabs in a bucket.
Seems like the only real way to counter these unfalsifiable arguments is to call the person a fucking clown and tell them what a kafkatrap is.
[1] https://www.thedailybell.com/all-articles/editorials/wendy-m...
It's one of those concepts that everyone understands, but there wasn't really a word for. It still kind of hurts by brain how no one can come up with a solid rebuttal to the situation (this is what the article's comment thread touches on). Which leads me to believe this is somewhat of a forefront in human understanding/psychology.
It's no different than the far-right unfalsifiable standards that were enforced for centuries, more often than not with religious overtones. Let's not pretend this is a left/right thing, so much as it's just an extremist thing. Only now, the leftist is using the outrage tactic just as effectively as the right, which has lost a lot of its moral high ground on most social issues.
For now I’m satisfied with the reversion to the mean of not talking politics at work
“Reversion to the mean” is probably a good thing insofar as it means “moderating ourselves”.
Not sure what you mean. Examples?
I wouldn't say it's an extremist thing, considering the Kafkatrap setup tactic is being actively used by people with different degrees of leftness. It applies to any topic where one person/group claims/claimed to be a victim in any way/shape/form. My source article explains in detail.
We can argue about how genuine / common these threats really are, but at the end of the day I think it's fair to say at the absolute minimum that activists genuinely believe they are threats.
This seems like an odd thing to say. Is it meant as sarcasm?
Everyone has heard of the Cuban Missile Crisis, so I won't say anything about that.
But have you heard of the Sino-Soviet crisis of 1969? Allegedly (I'm neither a historian nor any other kind of authority on it) the USSR was going to launch nuclear missiles at China during a border dispute, and asked the Nixon administration to remain neutral.
Instead, Kissinger replied that the US would nuke hundreds of Russian cities in response.
This story appears to be reflective of the official Chinese Communist Party historical account.
https://www.scmp.com/article/714064/nixon-intervention-saved...
You may be mistakenly equating nuking of hundreds of cities with planetary destruction.
There were hundreds of atmospheric nuclear weapon tests during the cold war. If that had been the end of the world, we wouldn't be talking about it.
There's a wide spectrum of human behavior and responses to these issues, and this takes a tiny sliver of that and tries to pain the rest with the same broad stroke.
> Examples?
In just the last few decades? We have immigration, women's propriety and reproductive rights, civil rights, and the LGBT movement to name a few. The outrage comes mostly from one side, which has their own arsenal of rhetorical devices to paint opposition as morally bankrupt reprobates. Support same-sex marriage? Closeted gay or un-Christian heathen, destroyer of families. Won't pledge allegiance to the flag? Must be a commie. Women deserve equal pay? What a beta simp.
Both sides do and say stupid shit in their own stupid ways.
The sad and hilarious thing is that both sides are often wrong in what they advocate, but often right in their criticism of the other side. It's probably easier to recognise bullshit in others (than in oneself and) than to get stuff right oneself.
Since the "Kafka trap" thing isn't something he advocates but something he criticizes his opponents for using, I'd start from the assumption that it's among the (increasingly rare) things ESR is right on.
> things ESR is right on
Except he's not. The entire existence of "kafkatrap" is to paint an enemy and argument that doesn't exist, taking some random train of thought to it's logical extreme. Considering his bigoted comments on women, Islam, and African American's, I have very little confidence that he's coming from a good place.
> creates a “not safe work environment.”
On the contrary, calling for censorship and heated nonscientific, political discussion on the workplace, esp. against conservatives, creates a non safe work environment. It also cripples science.
Formerly they were called out as religious zealots, not leftists.
I think a better strategy is to avoid engaging them in the first place.
I don't agree with this. Anyone who has been following politics has noticed the growth in the left's base, mainly from the college educated. A lot of these activists seem to be motivated by the (ironically) paternalistic notion that they know better than the groups they advocate for.
So in answer to your bullet points:
1) Veena Dubal
2) Uber drivers (I mean, I could be mistaken. Perhaps this professor of law moonlights as an Uber driver. If so, I would continue to argue that this is not her main vocation.)
3) She wants Uber drivers to be classified as employees
4) The majority of Uber drivers
5) Nothing and I never said they hadn't consulted. In this case, quite clearly they have consulted with the groups but have not listened.
Now, in the podcast, Dubal goes on to dispute the polling methodology of the various polls. Well okay, re-poll with your questions and present the data. The point I'm trying to make is that you don't ram through legislation before convincing the people you're going to affect the most that it's good for them. Educate and convince them first.
[1]: http://rationallyspeakingpodcast.org/255-are-uber-and-lyft-d...
[2]: https://www.uchastings.edu/people/veena-dubal/
[3]: https://www.investopedia.com/california-assembly-bill-5-ab5-...
[4]: https://thehill.com/policy/technology/513506-uber-poll-drive...
mainly from the college educated
What would you call going $200,000 into debt for a non-STEM degree?
College education is no sign of intelligence, it’s often the opposite.
it doesn’t matter to me that 99% of people already match that adjective which wasn't previously known or necessary
So yes, I'm "cis". I don't like the word, and I probably would not have managed to come up with it on my own. But "straight" doesn't describe the situation and "not trans" is inherently negative, where no negativity is desired.
I'll fully agree that I don't follow a lot of the stereotypes for my gender, but there are a lot I do follow, too. Nobody is 100% stereotypical. And Cis- and trans-gender isn't even about that. It's about how you feel and who you feel you are, not about following stereotypes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_long_march_through_the_ins...
Also see this article from 1999 when all this was getting started:
That makes me feel a lot better about the viability of any of this
Can I ignore it if I stop noticing and caring about politics and modern inclusitivity pushes?
I have my doubts but I’m willing to try! Its just other people shoving it in my face that I don't get to inherit American dreams because I’m not a cis white male and keep reminding me, not that I would want to be. Any accomplishment I have must be broadcast! Any setback must be broadcast as well! Doesn't feel like privilege. I dont want to be a role model I just want to blend in and make money and enjoy the same vices as everyone else.
They're not at all ineffective, they took hold in school and accademia and produced a generation of person deeply sensible to the topic of equity and social issues, which outrage quite easily and can be brought to bear to a wide range of causes from truly important battles to cancelling people for a shirt a friend gifted them.
The delay you see is not because of the technique not being viable, it is because in culture wars you need quite literally to grow your army, as people get entrenched in their ways after a while.
Interesting article, though.
On a personal note, this war on words has turned me off from most debates because hollow sophistry is deemed a virtue by the loudest voices. Excluded middle, and all that.
How does this explain their stance on issues like gay marriage, trans rights, abortion, and criminal justice? We really have to stop saying that American conservatives are primarily motivated by small government.
This is a very popular cliché, and while the conclusion might hold, the logic doesn't, in my opinion.
If the US did have true conservatives, then they would be conserving what is in the US, not Europe.
And I think it's widely considered that the existing order in the US has more elements of economic liberalism.
On the other hand, the Republicans who like that sort of thing seem increasingly marginalized anyway, so as I said, the conclusion may still be correct.
The reason I would raise an issue with most conservative “think tanks” as sources for fact claims is that I read, and have for years read, their output extensively. The same is true with center-right (liberal) and progressive think tanks in general (there arr a very few exceptions in each category.)
If you are using them as fact sources, you might need more outlets that aren’t ideological propaganda mills in your own reading.
"Entryism (also spelled entrism or enterism or called infiltration) is a political strategy in which an organisation or state encourages its members or supporters to join another, usually larger, organization in an attempt to expand influence and expand their ideas and program."
If the framework gives you direct power over other people, you want the framework applied everywhere: work, private life, politics, etc. The people at the forefront of these frameworks use the rest of the group as a stepping stone to their personal power and the framework to enhance their importance (any other positive and negative effects of the framework aside, those I don't want to judge).
People can be very comfortable sitting on an unbalanced rock, until it tips.
The US is in a bad state today because people have forgotten how to speak to each other respectfully, they don't agree to disagree, they violently disagree. Fear mongering and labeling will only make things worse.
Both sides need to stop explaining, justifying and funding their bad apples by pointing to the other.
In medical terms, stop tying to cure an infection with another infection of your own.
40 years ago the right wing decided to build its platform on a combination of white people, Christianity, and conservative social and sexual mores.
This went swimmingly for a while but none is the fastest growing religion, white people are headed to be the largest minority instead of a majority by 2040s, and more liberal perspective on sex is becoming increasingly common.
https://www.pewforum.org/2019/10/17/in-u-s-decline-of-christ...
https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2015/cb15-tps...
https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2020/06/25/global-divide-...
To be specific we have gone from half of people believing homosexuality should be accepted to 72% in the last 20 years. White people are slated to become merely the largest minority by 2044, and Christians went from 77% to 65% in 14 years.
If your bread and butter is white people, who have strong feelings about sexual mores and jesus by 2044 you are going to be looking at 10% of the population down from closer to 50% in 1980. Hell leave out the sexual mores and white Christians are sliding from 64% heading towards 25%. The republican party hasn't had anything like an acceptable game with any other group in decades.
They are losing the country because they built their house on sand and they are freaking out about it instead of making a coherent plan half their party is already off the deep end and wont be dragged back.
Also consider that many politicians in power (especially at the national level) won't be alive in 2044. It's worth it to the conservative ones to slow the rate of change a bit, even if they know that some changes are inevitable.
Trump's record with Hispanic voters was actually fairly good, though not great. Many Hispanics do not even consider themselves people of color and Democrats cannot take this fairly huge group for automatically granted.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/five-myths/five-myths...
Hispanics and Black Vote for Republican Party
2020:32% 12%
2016:28% 8%
2012:27% 6%
2008: 31% 4%
2004: 44% 11%
2000: 35% 9%
1996: 21% 12%
1992: 25% 10%
1988: 30% 11%
1984: 34% 9%
1980: 37% 14%
Trumps record with Hispanics is only average even grading on a curve and life isn't graded on a curve. Objectively 32% is garbage. Trump got only an average of 25% of nonwhite voters and 58% of white voters in 2020.
Once you have as many nonwhite voters as white you need 43% of the non white vote plus 58% of the white vote to win the popular vote.
"The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC) is an agreement among a group of U.S. states and the District of Columbia to award all their electoral votes to whichever presidential candidate wins the overall popular vote in the 50 states and the District of Columbia."
https://www.nationalpopularvote.com/
This is the crisis for the republicans not the fake crisis of perpetual riots, BLM, or hordes of brown people crossing the border.
The best republican performance in history with with nonwhite voters was 39% in 1956 and its just not good enough.
> 2020:32% 12%
> 2016:28% 8%
Am I the only person who sees these two lines as a tremendously stinging rebuke to the Democratic Party and the progressives in particular given what an utterly deplorable individual the incumbent and those who surrounded him were? Sounds like a growth opportunity for the Republicans more than a crisis, which speaks volumes about how the progressive message is being perceived among minorities they are claiming to be helping.
This isn't a stinging rebuke of the progressive agenda its just an example of a certain percentage either buying what Trump or Republicans are selling or prioritizing conservative values like sexual or reproductive issues over other concerns. It was and is inevitable.
The thought process that if an odious man like Trump can garner 32%/12% then a more reasonable person could do better isn't I think correct.
Half of the grand old party has gone off the deep end. A more reasonable person will never make it through the primary in the first place because the crazies wont let it happen and if they did then for every thinking mans vote they obtained they would lose 2 crazy. Take a look at Donald Trump you are looking at peak Republican. If you wanted to make a monument to Republican presidents you could start the tour with Lincoln and end with Trump because he is either the last Republican president or the father of the first dictatorship.
Much as I would be happy about the end of the Republican party, thinking that they're finished or don't know what they need to do to win again is fantasy. The Democrats need to distance themselves from antagonistic progressiveism that is driving voters into the arms of the Republicans immediately or they stand a pretty good chance of losing future elections. That is what the minority voting numbers of 2020 show.
I assume you mean to ask this rhetorically, as if the notion is absurd. But this is pretty much the gist of the paradox of tolerance. What would you suggest doing about intolerant people when reason fails?
However, I also think to a first approximation, virtue ethics has better consequentialist outcomes than naive consequentialist ethics does.
So I don't have an answer to the PoT; I just don't think it's a slam-dunk argument against tolerance at all. I espouse tolerance first and foremost for the sake of its ideal, and I hold that ideal because I prefer its generalized outcomes.
In other words, I can't help but notice that the Paradox of Tolerance is largely used as a tool to justify plain intolerance.
In other words, the Nazi ban is one case where the dialog went like this:
"Come on, this is pointless, they can just use other symbols and dogwhistles. You'll fall into an escalating spiral of swatting down new Nazi symbols, negatively affecting pretty much everyone but Nazis."
"Yeah but look, we won't fall into an escalating spiral of free speech restrictions. Because they won't change their symbols, ever."
And they were right. I don't entirely understand why, but clearly they were right. My standing theory is that Nazis are either really dumb or in some sort of symbiotic relation with the constitutional protection office where going to jail is actually their goal. Works for me.
Tl;dr: my rule-consequentialist ethics don't have a problem with "liberalism, except where Nazi paraphernalia and holocaust denial", since those modifications have clearly demonstrated their worth and limited character.
You are seriously suggesting that "nobody else" is ever going to attempt what the Nazis did, ever? We've got billions of years until the sun makes Earth uninhabitable. History clearly shows us these things are cyclical. Also, your point about symbols is wrong, they are constantly looking for new dogwhistles and using them.
It seems like you're either lost in the weeds or have some obtuse agenda. This 'intellectual' sophistry is meaningless to 99% of your fellow humans. I don't see how anything you've said negates the paradox of tolerance-- there is a line to be drawn or fascists win, it's that simple to me and I cannot imagine an argument that would convince me otherwise.
The issue at hand is that the evidence is picked at contextual extremes, and then extrapolated.
You need way more verification that the intolerant have the power you think they have; there is v often a silent majority that would step in if things escalated.
And what "reason" might that be and how did it fail? :-)
Just this week the local school cancelled a vaccination clinic because people believe covid isn't real and that the vaccine is there to put chips in you. That "the lord Jesus" is their immune system. These people will change the law from underneath you if you let them. They don't care about the truth.
Try listening to people you want to convince before trying to convince them. This approach doesn't have a 100% success rate, but it has a higher chance of success than your current approach has. The catch is you have to be open for them to convince you that your closely held beliefs are wrong. If you're not, and you dismiss everything they say out-of-hand, how can you expect them to be open to your ideas?
They cannot be convinced despite a plethora of opportunities given, not due to a lack of them. That's how I know quite well that they don't care about the truth. If you were to argue with these people you'd be eaten alive, as would anyone else.
This isn't chess, they make up the rules and knock over the pieces as they go. Again, no care for the truth. You cannot change that. The only thing we can do is outnumber them.
Your religious right may have been a real national force in 1980, but not now. It’s just a boogie man.
This is only true if you expand “religious” to mean “based on moral axioms regardless of source”, but then, any argument for or against doing (or allowing, or prohibiting) anything would be religious.
> From what I’ve seen on American media, almost all of it is religiously motivated.
OTOH, yes, the American anti-abortion movement is almost entirely a product of politically weaponized Christian conservatism.
> It doesn’t matter that fundamentalists don’t identify themselves as fundamentalist.
While the religious groups involve overlap with Fundamentalism (which is a particular subset of Protestantism), they aren’t all Fundamentalist.
Based on the moral axioms you’ve chosen. Axioms are, by definition, unsupported and unsupportable.
> Unless your moral axioms are fundamentally flawed, which is what I’ve described above.
No, what you described above was belief that was “religiously motivated, or based on non- religious logical fallacy.” Axioms are the roots from which logic works, they aren't based on logic, fallacious or otherwise. And there's no reason moral axioms that conflict with abortion need to be religiously motivated, either.
Sure, you might view any moral axioms thst disagree with yours as “fundamentally flawed”, but that doesn’t salvage your earlier description.
1. There is a secondary organism (life) within the womb upon conception.
2. That life will become a human being. Therefore:
3. That life must be given the same rights to not be killed that other (fully grown) human beings have.
Where is the religion or logical fallacy in that line of thought?
We even see aspects of this logic applied within common law, in that a pregnant woman (regardless of the length of pregnancy) that is murdered is considered a double-homicide.
I think it's unhelpful to approach a highly-contentious subject with the thought that the people on one side have absolutely no logical reason for believing what they do. I say logical, because the implication that something is religious is a way in modern rhetoric to defuse the opposing view by implying that the person holding it is not approaching from any sort of empirical worldview, but instead only deriving their argument from some ancient document of (whichever) religion.
> these are unfalsifiable standards that self-proclaimed far left extremists have created to invalidate everyone's thoughts but their own
How do statements like this fit HN's guidelines?
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.
Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
EDIT: Perhaps the thing to do is to write to the mods at hn@ycombinator.com.
A perspective.
You chose one of several from the article.
These are related controversies. The opposite of unrelated.
I don't understand what that quote represents to you. Do you think the word "culture" necessarily refers to the 'culture war' kind? The word describes many other things, and corporate culture is a long-standing, well-known management concern.
> A perspective.
> You chose one of several from the article.
The effect on union activity seems to me to be by far the predominant reason presented.
I find it congruent that some former/current employees find that memo to be the catalyst, as their perspective matches other catalysts in other companies
It just goes to show you that everyone is different, and there's no such unified thing as "what gay people believe" or "what black people believe". Some like that their employers make business decisions based on the personal ethics of those in leadership positions, and some don't like that. That's just life, I guess.
I like your conclusion: it isn't unified. There is a lot of pressure to conform to certain buckets and it also still can be an absurdity to do so.
That's like using the term "Black Crow" to describe the vast majority of crows, simply because a "Blue Crow" [1] exists, yet consists of a very tiny fraction of all crows.
Let's say 99% of crows are black. Then there's no need to call them "Black Crows" as there's a very low probability you'll need to point out the color of the crow.
Just say "Crow". Or "male" / "female". No need to throw in "cis" unless you're simply trying to demonstrate your conformity to the new fad of wokeism.
In which case, ya lost me as someone who will take you seriously.
If I were talking about black crows, in a conversation referring to blue crows, it might be relevant to be specific and say "black crow".
Regardless, why would you dismiss someone's entire opinion based on something so insignificant as that?
"I want to buy a widescreen TV" "You idiot! 99% of TVs are widescreen, let's stop talking now as I can't take you seriously."
Also your stats are wrong. According to the census, it's more like 8-9% of US citizens self-reporting as homosexual/queer [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_demographics_of_the_Unite...
In this narrative, the CEO is playing the role of far-left extremist? I'm confused, please clarify.
>I’m tired of being told to change my views by white people who think they’d make better Black men than me
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/donald-glover-cancel-cu...
I'm so tired of these smug oppressive clowns who claim to represent progressives, the left, minorities, and the oppressed.
As someone who is far-left (and not cis-white), virtually none of us proclaim ourselves extremists. Progressives, yes, perhaps even militant around organizing around a cause, but I fail to see how this part of your comment can be read as anything other than political straw-man flamebait.
It will be interesting to see which model wins.
I don't entirely disagree that politics is not needed in the workplace, but people spend almost all their time at work now and so it has become their defacto social space. If you spend 8 hours a day there it is important to make sure it's comfortable.
That increase in diversity is a direct result of talking about the issue of intolerance in the workplace, making it more comfortable for different people to work there.
You can be a hard working closer and tolerant of others all the same.
A new drama every week, dealing with bad press from a resigned "activist" employee every other month. Even with sympathy towards those people, I probably wouldn't want to touch them with a ten foot pole when money and livelihood of all my employees are at stake. I'd probably just try to help their cause by other means but would not try to torture them in an environment where they'll inevitably suffer and be unproductive. Their utopia does not exist in planet earth (yet), is it reasonable to expect that to exist in a company working environment?
From a certain perspective, more is wrong with the world than right, and it is impossible to provide an environment that is "right" when most of the world is wrong. When you are the employer, you take the implicit role of building miniature model of that world in their working environment and I reckon that is impossible, at the very least very very expensive.
This is why any smart employer should start aggressively filtering such candidates out of their hiring pipeline.
My stance is, we pay you to be an engineer, so I hire people devoted solely to engineering.
I see this claim made a lot every time the "politics in the workplace" conversation happens, but really? "Almost all their time"? Isn't a normal person supposed to work 8 hours a day, sleep 8/10hours at night and spent 8/6 hours doing something else? If my math is correct that's not "almost all their time".
If some people are incapable of having a life outside of work, well balanced people shouldn't have to pay the price of their obsessions.
All cultures are not compatible. Not everyone will not be comfortable in a particular culture. Not everyone will not be wanted in a particular culture. [0]
The left call this immoral, believing that any exclusion or disparity is the result of circumstances that enslave humanity, from which humanity should be liberated [1]. The result of this thinking is the limiting and constricting of various liberties, and a push towards the formation of a soulless, foundationless, conglomerated monoculture.
Instead of fighting to produce this horrible monoculture, we should accept that people don't get along, and then find a way to allow all cultures to thrive.
[0] https://mobile.twitter.com/ByronYork/status/1283372233730203...
This argument also ignores inherent imbalances in society, like the fact that professions are largely chosen by interest. The same male-female inequality that exists in tech also exists in nursing, construction, hairdressing, etc.[1] I hope that we can one day accept that this is OK and not the result of some huge conspiracy and systemic discrimination (not that this doesn't exist, but that it's not the main cause for the imbalance).
I don't want actual politics at work. I don't want to be debating politically contentious events at work. E.g. (to pick a contentious topic that was in the news recently) a long winded debate on the palestine/israel conflict is not something i want to have at work. That doesn't mean i don't have opinions on the subject or that in a different context i wouldn't want to debate it, work is just not the time to get into it.
However that doesn't mean i think racism/bigotry/etc is acceptable at work.
I don't see these two things in conflict.
Sounds some kind of perverted game. The big ones are allowed to do whatever they want, the small ones should obey the rules of the big ones.
So should perverted games be allowed to the workplace? Another interesting question.
But this is the attitude of business to be the next king or emperor without any legal binding. Chaos and anarchy, oppression and boasting. The evolution clock goes back 10^{5} years.
Do you discriminate between bananas and durian?
Do you discriminate between the man who beat you up and your spouse/partner?
Some common sense applies. Selling services to a mainstream politician isn't really political in any major sense.
Selling services to terrorists/neo-nazis/etc is something different.
Yes, you can make grey examples that are unclear, but in practise i dont think its usually that ambigius of an issue most of the time.
an unincorporated sole proprietorship is better for having no customers and hosting workshops on trending topics
I have a coworker who does almost no work, but is on four different organizational diversity committees so is basically bulletproof. They've caused major rifts in the team. My only solution is to find a new job, which is what I'm working on now.
When your workplace empowers those sorts of behaviours in the name of progressive benevolence, just ducking your head down only works for so long.
Why hire a black, hispanic, or LGBT person, if you have no ability to fire them without being labeled, canceled, or sued. Safer to just hire the white straight guy.
I live in Eastern-European, one ocean away from the States, I'm curious about these workshops, do they really happen as often as people say they happen? (let's say once a month or so, which I would consider "often" for this type of meetings).
I'm asking because they do look to me like pretty much resembling the communist party indoctrinations work-place meetings my dad had to attend in the 1980s (my dad's workplace was in the business of building stuff inside a steel mill factory, so nothing intrinsically political about it), those communist party meetings seemed to be taken seriously by absolutely no-one and were seen just as a huge loss of one's time.
I've not grown up in eastern Europe, but yeah probably right. Everyone thinks it's bullshit waste of time, but will anyone speak up? No, you sit through because it's easier than dealing with the consequences of denouncing the indoctrination.
if the yardstick is Marx and his manifesto + Das Kapital series, then practically nobody was a Marxist - not even Marx himself later in life and certainly not Lenin, Stalin or Mao
since Gramsci the mainstream of Marxism replaces material determinism with a hybrid of cultural hegemony and social gatekeeping, with things like religion, race, feminism being much more central than they were for Marx - and this has been the mainstream of Marxism for 100+ years, so hardly a new development in this particular respect
Homie, that’s just an indication of how far left you are.
HN doesn’t “skew pretty right” on anything. That’s just perspective for you.
The book 'White Fragility' was used as a reference. You just sit through it and at the end say you found it enlighening or whatever. Box ticked.
Sorry, job quit.
I would NEVER allow myself to be forced into a room to listen to some racist “anti racist” nonsense and then consent to agreement on any of it even implicitly.
I’d consider that only a small step above willingly kneeling before my executioner.
Citation needed.
It really is as simple as that.
You may have never seen this in the workplace but it is increasingly common in some of the most coveted (or formerly so) employers like Google, Basecamp, Medium, etc.
Oh, wait... that's right these activists don't care too much about THAT violence.
Ideas are not the same thing to people - some ignore it, some don't, some abuse it, some change it for different purposes.
This is just "support my pet cause" with some added rationalization. The line of what constitutes as "being complicit" always conveniently ends where the majority of activists lie. You're bad if .1% of your company's revenue comes from a contract with a government organization, part of which enforces illegal immigration. However, if you sign this petition, your sins will be forgiven.
You presented your idea of the supporter of the quoted opinion and it turns out to be almost the opposite of the supporter you responded to.
Sure, if i went around saying that hitler was just misunderstood, i would probably get in trouble. And i'm totally ok with that.
Wear a Trump hat to work and see how long that lasts. Just tell people you voted for him, see if “you’ll be asked to condemn anything”.
“I’ve never had any problems with the people I work with“… probably just means you are aligned with them.
Silence is violence rings pretty hollow when your company deals in the loud explody kind of violence.
to take the example from the article:
"In July 2019, for example, Medium chose to publish a series that included a profile of Trump supporter Joy Villa with the headline “I have never been as prosecuted for being Black or Latina as I have been for supporting Trump.”"
When you're in the business of news publishing, on an incendiary and relevant political event at that, and your decisions have a real chance to influence public discourse, even engineering decisions, how is it realistic to think you're not involved in politics, or even can get away from it?
Tech, in particular media and communication platforms directly sit at the intersection of politics, news and technology. Those copmanies build the platforms where moderation and editorial decisions are made that have huge impact.
Tech is extremely un-diverse, but it somehow seems to attract much more vocal and activist types compared to the above. For example, I have never read about such incidents in the Navy or the Marines... Is it simply my ignorance, or does the military have an established way of dealing with such things?
FWIW, I'm sick of the politicization and invasion by SJWs of the discourse in our little bubble in the Bay Area. I'd heartily appreciate the day when I can spend a whole day at work with absolutely no discussion of politics and religion at work. Even private home life is not impervious to this nonsense (even talk at the dinner table often comes down to this, much to my dismay). Do others share a similar sentiment? Just like there are 'no-cellphone' train compartments, perhaps we can have 'politics/religion-free' zones at home and the office!
And of course Marines are the one that invented the term fragging.
The problem with activism in the west is lack of feedback for being obnoxious. So they can get away with it.
A very popular meme is how in june all corporations turn their profile pictures rainbow in all social media accounts except in the legit homophobic and conservative countries.
So it is activism entangled with safetysm. We protest where we know people will pay the dane geld.
Tech has these "intelligentsia" activists that want to show they have the right ideas and opinions. Go to a welding shop or mechanic or marines or whatever, and everyone can have different opinions about something and nothing bad happens. People might laugh it off and call someone an idiot, that's about it.
That depends on the "something". Everyone has views they consider unacceptable. Try telling a marine about how 9/11 was actually justified. I highly doubt he would just laugh it off.
While there are exceptions, the military is one giant shared challenge. When people go through hell together and their lives depend on each other, they figure it out.
A big issue is different people have different definitions of these terms.
For example, say a very religous conservative doesn't want to use a trans persons preferred pronouns as they consider said pronouns to be untrue and sinful. They are otherwise polite and nondiscriminatory (e.g. they will listen to and implement ideas from the trans person and don't bring up their opinions of trans issues). Is this bigotry?
Or say some people in the company want to run a BLM donation drive and a conversation then ensues where someone states that they don't think racism has anything to do with USA police killings of blacks and it's actualy down to problems in the main african american culture. Is this racism?
Prioritizing made-up, vague and abstract ideas of "sins" and refusing to respect the identity of a fellow human? Yes, that is bigotry.
> Is this racism?
Yes, because there's plenty of research that's been done that says racism within police departments is responsible for the killing of black people in the USA. Not to mention countless videos of innocent black people being shot down by cops.
Believing something stupid doesn't excuse your bigotry or racism.
"racism within police departments is responsible for the killing of black people in the USA"
Secondly, what is the evidence for this? I've read evidence of racism in US police departments against Blacks, but not specifically in the context of police killings.
For every 10,000 white people arrested for violent crime, 4 are killed"
https://twitter.com/LeonydusJohnson/status/12674663458447400...
Consider also that there are towns such as Jackson, Mississippi which have police departments that are >90% black [1] but still have all the same problems as police forces in America generally:
https://www.jacksonfreepress.com/policeshootings/
Not posting this to change your mind, I don't think that's possible through a single comment, but if you seriously think that there can be no other good-faith, legitimate opinion than your own, then consider that you might not be thinking about this rationally.
"“He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that." John Stuart Mill
[1] https://www.governing.com/gov-data/safety-justice/police-dep...
Woah, so disagreeing with particular research is racist now? I've heard it all.
It is apparent to me that you are the stupid in this thread.
> I don't want actual politics at work. I don't want to be debating politically contentious events at work.
Frank and Kate is sitting at the lunch table. They are discussing "Israel's ongoing massacre in Gaza" and how awful it is. Your opinion is contrary to theirs. Do you feel that you have the right to make them not talk about this topic because you don't want "actual politics" at work? I'm curious to know where you think the line should be drawn. Suppose you are an atheist and you just got a warning from your manager because a Christian employee overheard you saying to a colleague that "all religions are such bunk." Should you not have been allowed to express that "controversial" opinion?
This means: water cooler discussion about Middle East conflict? Perfectly fine. "Bomb Israel Activism Day (with free cake in staff room)" organised by the company? Not okay.
I am sick of receiving corporate emails inviting me to "x pride/awareness/celebration" activities that have nothing to do with work, and that are not neutral topics. I am happy for people to have different opinions with me, and talk about them, and even debate with me about them, but I don't want "mandatory fun" events where the "fun" is eating a cake with icing colored in whatever way symbolizes the current woke topic, and being forced to stand around and pretend I care.
Wouldn't that mean that certain tech companies' bans on politics is a form of involvement in political activities and discussions?
> I am sick of receiving corporate emails inviting me to "x pride/awareness/celebration" activities that have nothing to do with work, and that are not neutral topics.
Interesting, can you give some examples of any such activities that you have been invited to?
Note that the agent compelling you to attend these events is the company you work for - not the "woke crowd". Since if pays you for your time it most certainly has the right to order you to attend to these mildly political events (gay pride, that you have as an example, isn't very controversial).
The company pays me to perform the duties in my contract and job description. It includes nothing about attending any events unrelated to those duties.
> Williams wrote that while counterperspectives and unpopular opinions are “always encouraged” to help make decisions, “repeated interactions that are nonconstructive, cast doubt, assume bad intent, make unsubstantiated accusations, or otherwise do not contribute to a positive environment have a massive negative impact on the team and working environment.”
>He added: “These behaviors are not tolerated.”
That doesn't sound like an unbiased removal of politics from the workplace to me. I think I would be out of the door, too.
Why, do you "assume bad intent" and "make unsubstantiated accusations"? Do you want to, or do you want to work with people that do? I don't think anyone who quits because those "behaviours are not tolerated" will be missed by their former colleagues.
However, I think lots of people wondered why in the quote you included a few things that don't seem to be anything aside from objectively bad, such as "assuming bad intent" and "making unsubstantiated accusations."
How did someone simply asking you about it "crush" you into silence?
Yes: https://offices.depaul.edu/diversity/education/presidents-bo...
> Attributes of a successful antiracist > 1. Stop saying, “I am not racist.” > 2. Admit racism exists and is ascribed to you.
You're conflating two different things.
You're the conflating one.
Either they hop on the wagon fully or do something against it, but looking the other way means that real power within the community of employees will snowball to the most effective organizers of new call-out campaigns. Who may or may not have the best intentions, but their incentives do not really align with that of the corporation.
This is really a case of "everything can be overdone". Most people want to have the ability to protest against big outrages such as a KKK-themed party in the workplace. But calling out everything that someone on Slack finds offensive is an overkill that polarizes the community and diverts attention from the actual job tasks that need to be done.
Constant culture wars are, among others, a giant waste of energy and time. Most private sector institutions cannot afford to join them full time.
The Soviet space program was somewhat kneecapped by having its management shift with the political winds as people fell into or out of favor and having good people stuck in marginalized roles because of their political history.
I'd bet good money on the winner being the the model that doesn't care what people believe on topics not related to work.
(There's a bit of inherent Great Man Fallacy in figuring out the contributions of the Nazis, because while on the one hand von Braun did lead the design for the rocket that got NASA on the moon and the Soviets failed miserably at their equivalent, on the other hand, the Soviet rocketry lead who was behind their two previous successes died in 1966. There's an argument that they would have pulled it off if he had survived, but more generally, there's an argument that people other than von Braun were perfectly capable of competently building rockets, and in particular that they could do better work than the Americans while under Soviet-style politics.)
To be replaced with "merit doesn't matter, only group identity"?
> “diversity is our strength.”
That's rich coming from an ideology that actively depersonalises and reduces people to a group identity. Merit, intelligence, accomplishments, effort, passion - these things don't matter. Personal choice when it contradicts the narrative - seen as misguided, not respected!
What diversity is that, when they ignore exactly what makes one different from another in the same group? How is it fair when it proposes group guilt and punishment, to ignore all personal circumstances except race, gender and a few more attributes? It's diversity meant for group identities, not for people.
The ugly thing is that identity politics emphasises differences while being silent about cooperation. We all benefit from the work and advancement of the other groups, we cooperate more than we fight each other. There's more value in being together, but that's uncool to praise for them.
For reference take a look at how guilting and punishing for ideological motives and based on group identities went in the French Revolution. They started with an absolute monarchy and ended with an absolute dictator, in the meantime any wrong think could send you to the guillotine.
It would be interesting to compare productivity before and after the exits.
This realization is basically how the "NPC" meme was born. It predated the "no inner voice" study, that's just how most people seem to have come across the idea because the study half-jokingly caused a "wait a minute, we were right?" moment.
The problem is that the US is an aggressively authoritarian country, and the default tone is violent narcissistic bullying.
Unlike other authoritarian countries this isn't explicitly state sanctioned.
It's more of a continually dramatised and modelled mode of relationship which is so ingrained in so many public interactions - from school to work to "self help" to corporate culture to mainstream media to social media to large parts of elected government - that it sinks into the background as a kind of unavoidable noise.
It would be deafening if you'd never experienced it before. Because it's so common it's tuned out consciously, but still dominant unconsciously.
The "woke" part isn't the problem. It's the copying of the dominant emotional ideology that leads to both left and right extremism, and also justifies excess corporate power and other horrors.
It's all part of the same issue, but both left and right are only looking at small parts of it - and getting angry about those while missing the underlying issue.
If you ask a religious person "what do you think is the chance that god exists?". A rational person will never say 100%, because objectively you cannot be 100% sure.
But a religious person is wired in a way were they are unable to admit this fact. It is a lie people tell themselves because somehow they think it benefits them.
Now whether it really benefits them or not, I'm not sure. But I would think nothing can beat the objective truth, and that truth might include probabilities.
Besides, aren't all your actions based on beliefs that are are less than 100% certain? I don't know that the line of code I'm writing is going to compile, or that the company I'm working for isn't going to go under tomorrow, or that the relationships I'm investing time into are going to last forever, but I'm certain enough that I proceed with them. Believing in God isn't so different.
Beliefs are a house of cards.
This religious person can. I am not 100% on anything via reason, I just don’t think reason is the only way of knowing. I can’t be certain that my dad loves me via reason but I know he loves me via human faith because I know my father, I don’t simply know about him. Authentic Christian faith in God is similar to that.
Thankfully not all non-religious people are wired to make such sophomoric sweeping generalizations as you.
I gave up on Christians specifically when I discovered that Christians all believe different things. I would literally ask in chat rooms for a group to define one thing they all agreed on, and then watch as fights broke out - because when pushed they all disagreed violently on core ethics and dogma, and yet they also believed they were right and other people with different views "Weren't real Christians."
It turns out there is no real content to that kind of religion. It's all meta-justification for a person's existing moral leanings, and meta-interpretation of a "sacred text" which is broad enough to rationalise pretty much anything, including some appalling and terrible things. (History has plenty to say about that.)
The only true common belief is that religious self-justification is a valid and respectable process. That was the one thing they had in common.
Specifics and details were wildly variable window dressing, and heavily customised to personal taste.
There is a vibrant and ancient school of Christian moral teaching that still permeates to the core of western law and governance. Talking to strangers in chatrooms is not a serious confrontation of this reality nor any basis for dismissing it all.
> interpretation of a "sacred text" which is broad enough to rationalise pretty much anything, including some appalling and terrible things. (History has plenty to say about that.)
Interestingly, those Christians who did appalling things used the same cherry picking strategy with Scripture that you use with history.
Good people will justify their deeds through their religion, and bad people will justify their deeds through religion.
So I'm guessing you are Christian because you were raised in an environment like that.
If you were raised in Pakistan, you would have been a Muslim.
So how much chance would you give each religion to be the correct one? Because they all contradict each other, and believing in one basically states that the other can't be true.
Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Atheism & others.
Naturally, I was one of the non-religious people and therefore better. Instead of defining what I believed in, I could just attack the things I didn't believe in. It was easy. I never had to play defense. I might not win every time but I could never lose. I could rattle cages but had no cage of my own.
The way you're describing yourself is how everyone thinks. Faith and doubt are two sides of the same coin. I consider faith worthless without doubt.
Don't worry about it if some members of a group you self-identify with are assholes. It's a problem when most of them do, and then you have to disassociate yourself with a different label.
Hell, I'm atheist, and I still call out other "atheists" who tell others "your god doesn't exist", or who refuse to wish others "Merry Christmas", etc.
If too many atheists are militant about others' belief system, I'm going to stop calling myself atheist and identify as something else ("Member of the religion of 'We don't care who is up there or if they exist'", although that's quite a mouthful).
Me: I'm an agnostic.
Atheist: So you believe there might be a god?
Me: Not at all!
Atheist: So you're an atheist! Just embrace it!
Me: You're right! The Abrahamic God almost surely [1] does not exist. I am an atheist!
Atheist: What do you mean almost surely?! What's with the equivocation?
Me: It's a mathematical term. Probability converges toward 1.
Atheist: You think there is a remote possibility Santa Claus exists, too?
I'm a Christian and have no problem with Atheist's or what have you. There's a strong chance that there isn't a heaven/hell/72 virgins/what have you waiting "on the other side". I can still be confident in the tactile important parts (IE: Do unto others, love they neighbor, etc) without having my worldview destroyed by a "might" or a "maybe".
It amazes me when someone can say with 100% confidence that it does or doesn't exist.
All societies function on the 10 commandments without them being explicitly written. Convergent evolution of the concept of society leans towards that. Lying, coveting, and laying all result in the same outcomes.
As with any ideology, there are of course those who wish to exploit it to their own ends, which is where we get the atrocities that have happened through human history.
I hope we can survive as a species long enough to figure a solution.
"Police are infallible!" is now "police are infallible?", thanks to activists and media attention on the very real problems faced by minorities in the US. The people who were previously sitting very comfortably and safe on top of the pile are feeling their position threatened, so of course they're afraid of the world becoming more equitable. That's just too bad for them.
The extremists will move to another cause or mellow out, but that spark of activism is needed to effect real social change.
You didn't notice hundreds of millions in damage in multiple states? I think the number may be in the billions... Court houses destroyed... people killed... ran over.. 4 years of violence. Flash mobs against people who go against the Woke tenants and Woke Crusaders to burn the heathens at the stake.
Overblown? Violence and destruction continues by "peaceful activists" as they spread Love and Tolerance by destroying those who disagree.
"Police are infallible" thanks to people willing to lie and destroy to get their ways. And while the violence escalates and police get more "infallible?"... people around the country are more unsafe than ever... the cities that are defunding police are seeing spikes in violence, murder, robberies, etc.
Because idiots focus on a couple bad apples and ignore the millions of good interactions and positive things police provide.
"too bad for them" I like how your basic premise is "they aren't violent or intolerant" yet it's fear and violence that are making "them" scared.
Too bad for them? Too bad for the hypocrites that use hate to fight hate and racism to fight racism and violence to support lies.
Do you think it might be possible, at all, that those who fear the woke might know some things about which you are unaware? Incidents, details or facts that, if you yourself knew them, would change your mind? Yes, no...?
I also tend to follow JBPetersons line of thinking in that "religion" is a result of hundreds of thousands of years of "evolution". "religions" codify, as you've said, the important parts of life (Don't steal, kill, that's not your wife, etc).
There is physical truth - an apple weighs this much, an atom has these parts, etc.
And then there is Truth - don't lie. Don't steal. Don't screw your neighbor or your neighbors wife. Those aren't "true" like the weight of an atom is true... but it is true as in life is better if you live with those "rules".
Religions give a basis of reference - and yes, that comes with some of the baggage (IE: Catholic priests, holy rollers in churches getting caught in bath houses, etc). It is hard - and at times impossible - to separate the Church from the Truth at the core.
Like you said, all religions have similar cores... but there ARE differences - Jesus was a carpenter... Muhamad was a warlord. Buddha was a scholar. Their cores are very similar but there are differences in and out of the religions.
Bit of a ramble as it's hard to pack a complicated conversation in a few paragraphs.
(This is cleanly visible if you try to transform probabilities to log-odds representation - of the extremes, one becomes undefined, and the other infinite.)
My belief is that human understanding of the cosmos is much more limited than we generally understand it to be. Relative to what (I believe) the cosmos contains, human beings have no more, and no less, capacity to understand it than any arbitrary animal. We can explain only that which is important and relevant to ourselves, and vast arenas are foreclosed even to our perception.
(Yes, I'm also in camp "philosophically, no probability estimate can ever be exactly 0 or 1" ;-)
Everything regarding the real world is 'almost surely'. I 'almost surely' have a job, a house, a brother and two cats. Any of those might be falsified at any time, but it's a pointless waste of time to faff about it and pedantically make it explicit how I'm pretty sure I'm still employed, but I can't exclude the possibility that maybe I'm not anymore.
I get why you would make an unqualified rejection of the concept of a Sky Daddy. In practice I do, too. We human beings have so much ahead of us, and arbitrary lifestyle demands and fevered imaginings of desert nomads dead over 2000 years don't have a place in our present, much less our future.
Of the infinite set of all possible assertions about the nature of the cosmos, Sky Daddy is almost surely wrong. But then, I believe all assertions about the nature of the cosmos are all almost surely wrong.
> [They]...are not only attempts to fill the emptiness left by the decay of Christian theology and Christian dogma. They are themselves a kind of substitute theology. They are systems of belief and argument which may be savagely antireligious (...) but whose structure, whose aspirations, whose claims on the believer, are profoundly religious in strategy and in effect.
> (...) Those great gestures of imagination, which have tried to replace religion in the West, and Christianity in particular, are very much like the churches, like the theology, they want to replace.
> The convinced Marxist, the practising psychoanalyst, the structural anthropologist, will be outraged at the thought that his beliefs, that his analyses of the human situation, are mythologies and allegoric constructs directly derivative from the religious world-image which he has sought to replace. He will be furious at that idea. And his rage has its justification.
> Something must be understood: I do not mean that these people’s ideology is “like” a religion. I seek no rhetorical snap in the comparison. I mean that it actually is a religion. A naïve anthropologist would see no difference in type between Mormonism and this new form of antiracism.
https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/the-elect-neoracists-po...
1 Culturally, at least, if not really religiously. I'm about as much of a Mormon as Larry David is a Jew.
EDIT: the article linked does partially answer my question:
> There is what we could think of as a triple-Testament tome, consisting of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me, Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility, and Ibram Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist. A box set of the three would take its place on coffeetables and mantlepieces nationwide.
I don't think the heart of a religion is a belief in a Prophet. Hindiusm is a religion, no one will dispute that, but that Hindus don't have the concept of a Prophet (big 'P'). Same goes for many other commonly accepted religions.
The only thing that all religions have in common is "A core set of beliefs, agreed upon among their followers".
What is the core set of beliefs agreed upon by Woke adherents?
From the outside of the asylum, it looks like:
"Discrimination against $GROUP_THAT_IS_NOT_MALE_AND_NOT_WHITE is active and alive and is the most important fight we have".
Maybe there's others, but I'm not part of the religion so it's difficult for me to tell why the followers hold the beliefs they do, because I don't share their beliefs.
And when the truths change, you have to remember that we were never at war with Oceania?
You can just read McWhorter, he draws a lot of parallels between Woke as a religion and Christian religion. It is somewhat amusing as an allegory. He's actually a fairly level headed critic.
Of course, if conservatives were more welcoming to atheism this wouldn't be an issue to begin with.
If one were to talk about religion in general, the definition would probably be close to encompassing nation states and corporations too: an intersubjective idea, that exists as long as people believe in it, and that evolves independently of any individual or group of believers.
Now that's a useful insight. Needs more thought before replying further.
Faith is realizing existence.
Who is the "woke" party in this case?
Counterpoint: As a non-white, oppressed person who grew up in Apartheid South Africa, these 'Woke' people resemble the Apartheid rulers way too much for my liking[1].
As bad as the situation is, as presented by BLM for blacks in America now and in the recent past, it's nowhere near as bad as having laws on the books, that courts had to enforce, that made you less of a human than white people.
[1] The animals looked from Pig to Man, and Man to Pig, and they could not tell the difference, roughly paraphrased from Orwell.
> I live in South Africa. DeGroot and his ilk were nothing like "woke". They were monsters that dehumanized citizens and murdered with impunity. You should know that, which makes your comment suspect.
But I do know that they dehumanised citizens, because I specifically said:
> it's nowhere near as bad as having laws on the books, that courts had to enforce, that made you less of a human than white people.
Why did you ignore that? Is there something about that comment that makes it hard to read, or hard to understand?
I never claimed that the Woke followers were murdering others with impunity, I said that I see a resemblance between them and the apartheid rulers. I never specified what the resemblance was, but since you appear to assume that "murder" was the resemblance, let me clarify that I did not intend to claim that the Woke followers were murdering people.
The resemblance I see is the dehumanisation of non-Woke followers (not dehumanisation of just the Woke-opposed, but of anyone who may even be neutral).
"Oh, these leftists seem like Adolf Hitler"
"Fuck you"
"Hey, hey, I didn't specify _how_ they're like Hitler, I just meant how he dehumanises people, not _any_ of the things almost everyone in the world knows him for"
This is why I hate the anti-woke, just incredible levels of smug, trolling styles of communication, constantly saying inflammatory bullshit and then pulling back and acting "attacked" and calling people "close-minded" for not asking you to elaborate on obvious "veiled" insults and bile.
How much do they resemble the Apartheid rulers? They look quite different to me. When I think of the Apartheid rulers, the key defining features I think of are people operating a state that actively dehumanises large groups of people and sentences them to life as second-class citizens lacking rights and opportunities, and who are made to fear violence of the state, and so on.
These woke people seem quite different to that. So when you say they're too similar for your liking, how similar is that? In what ways, that you don't like, are they similar?
Part of me honestly considered getting a job at some Woke Megacorp because I figured I'd have at least a couple extra hours to myself everyday where other folks were involved in internal forum wars.
They have a clear story for other wokists then: fired for just existing. If they spend all day saying the company is Xist, then when they get fired they'll make it look Xist, just like they said.
Pay me to be your official DEI officer, or else.
See how easy that was? Just make shit up like that? It's sure one of us being bizarre and illogical.
The shared challenge with people different from yourself is a great way to remove biases. Unfortunately, there are fewer avenues for that type of challenge today, and fewer still as people retreat into their homogenous bubbles.
It just made me question the value of the HR department-- Here I am with a ton of pressure on me to build a product.
And the HR department is organizing a very non-work related politicized event, using company resources?
I was disgusted-- not about people attending an online, non-work related drag queen event-- Fine, people can do whatever they want in their off hours-- it's none of my business.
But I was disgusted simply that company resources were used to organize peoples' attendance to an event that promotes drag queens. It was the last straw, decided to quit soon after.
I don't understand what is political about a drag event. It's a form of performance a la theater, comedy, dance, etc. Can you explain what would bother you about drag queens being promoted? Perhaps drag performances disturb you for some personal reason but to another person a workplace craft whiskey club with a bit of funding from the company to buy a bottle once a month would be disturbing because of the life experience of having an alcoholic as a father or loved one. But I wouldn't expect every event a workplace to put on to appeal to every employee. If that is the goal that is how you end up with the pizza party and that's about it.
It's one thing to have diversive opinions and comely discussing them... And another to be emotionally overinvested and dumping you issues onto your coworkers.
Steve Jobs was a raging asshole, until it caught up with him. Turns out you can't bully cancer into submission.
Gates was involved in some seriously shady stuff and under his rule, Microsoft ruined a whole lot of companies, some of which thought they had a profitable agreement. And not by some sort of honest competition, but some very underhanded tactics.
Gates seems to have a much better reputation as of late, but he used to have a Borg style icon on slashdot for a reason. Lots of people didn't like him at all back when he was running the show.
You really think that though both Bill and Steve were assholes at the beginning of their careers, but the fact that Bill gentrified himself is why he hasn't died of cancer and Steve did?
Gates while an asshole in the business sense, from accounts that I've heard is a genuinely extremely intelligent person and has great technical understanding. While medicine is not his field from what I heard he seems to take well considered positions in that regard, and I think it's doubtful he'd sabotage his own chances of recovery in such a way.
But: coffee breaks with a group involving people of two opposite views are always a sight to behold.
In my humble opinion, there is a place for expressing/speaking up about the things you care about, but workplace is not one of it. You have no locus standi.
Where are people working where the vast majority of their waking hours, for decades, are spent at work? At least be honest, these articles about bringing politics to work are talking about people in comfy tech jobs working 8 hours a day, not wage slaves in coal mines and factories working 12 hour days.
It's... pretty lame, honestly. All these modern conveniences and we're working more than ever these days (in the US, at least).
Also not really sure where all these "comfy tech jobs" are; every tech job I've worked in the past 15+ years often has people working ~10 hour days. I'm not aware of many people in tech who work 9-5 and that's it.
I’m a pretty productive employee (when I want to be and feel incentivized) and am paid well enough to be in the 1%.
I still agree with what you said. Just want to say that these jobs exist. It’s up to the employee to fight for it though more than anything. Many employees in tech are a bit of pushovers though. (Or are afraid of losing their visa)
Some people have made these things part of their core identity.
I think the notion that companies should only care about their bottom line is the thing that needs to end. Returning profits for shareholders isn't enough. Employees have started to think that who they work for should reflect their values. And why not?
Because employees don’t all have the same values.
How do you know? Do you think everyone is being honest with you when they appear to state their opinions, knowing that saying the wrong thing could get them canceled? Are you naive enough to believe all humans are truthful?
Someone may support active efforts to address inequality in the workplace (eg better interviewing procedures, bias training, inclusive language in products), but be against anything that's political, such as supporting black lives matter or taking a position on middle east conflicts at work.
It doesn't mean they disagree with the latter. They just want it out of work, they might even support it.
It's a kafka trap to name your organization with political goals some obviously positive name, and then declare anyone who does not support your organizations methods or particulars of its agenda as a hater of that positive name.
It's so transparent we're just in an age where being honest is rare, and people will convince themselves obviously untrue things - 'they don't have a platform' but they removed their 'what we believe page' including being against the nuclear family https://nypost.com/2020/09/24/blm-removes-website-language-b... .
It's a weird sort of denial of reality to just insist things don't exist, like an organization (which BLM is) with a formal agenda (which BLM has, even if they tried to obfuscate after being criticized for it's more radical and harmful ideas).
Then this is perfect, they can leave and find a job that does reflect their values. They should've quitted right when they realized their values weren't aligned but I guess they valued a severance package more. Still, win-win.
I think it’s a bad argument to say that those who aren’t activists are also those are who better at their jobs because those who don’t do activism must be spending their time honing their craft. Just because you’re doing one not doing one activity doesn’t mean you’re doing one other. The set of activities that exist is not (activism, honing craft) - it is a much bigger set of possibilities.
The correlation is around 0.3-0.5.
That's evidence that it's used actively as a tool to gain either social status or something else.
On the flip side, why should you? Companies and cultures are made of people and they change as people change. Why should you just quit before trying to institute change?
When I hire people, I generally look for people who don’t accept the status quo as inherently right and try to solve problems.
There are limits to this aren’t there? I too am a fan of contrarianism, but at some point — depending entirely on the context and the role of the employee — self-indulgent contrarianism becomes counterproductive.
It's not a question of how difficult it is. Their goal is literally the opposite. Everything is a platform for political discussion, identity, etc. Work, culture, art, etc.
It's totally possible to have a workplace you describe, but when people view everything as a platform for activism they don't want that. They want the platform.
> Medium said that 52% of departures were white, and that one third of the company is non-white and non-Asian.
The story here seems to be Medium is struggling to turn a profit, and there are a lot of people reading which direction the wind is blowing and getting out. Mass resignations are a sign of poor job security and general management problems, not people seeing red over vague and not-much-quoted-here memos.
Medium are right to “enforce good vibes”. Nobody wants to come to work to constantly defend themselves from ideological harassment.
It is openly conceded in the piece that the critics know that Medium leadership didn’t write anything unacceptable, and that those critics are leaving owing to their understanding/interpretation of leadership’s implicit message that while philosophical diversity is acceptable, harassment of colleagues is not.
Good for Medium.
As an European reader, it's incredible to read such a statement. USA has a skin colour / racism problem.
America has a lot of problems, but we TALK about them. Europe is at least 20 years behind the curve. You guys would be happy with pedophile priests if we hadn’t exposed them.
How dare they not base their identities around talking about it.
I fear you are correct. If current political trends continue, in 20 years race relations in Europe will be as harmonious as they are in America today.
Educate yourself; Stay in your lane; etc
Keep on convincing yourself its normal.
"It's funny how [a tiny percentage of very vocal] Americans think that"
From how I see the word 'race' being used in the USA, I can't see the difference to the German word 'Rasse'. For me, the racism in the USA begins with the insistence of separating people according to their 'race' and this race based thinking has permeated their entire culture. Doesn't matter where you look, old school liberals vs woke, republicans or democrats, they all divide people according to their race. It's even on their ID card.
And yet some claim 'race' is a totally different concept compared to 'Rasse'. I don't buy it, not one bit. The USA will never overcome racism, until they stop thinking in races.
That is a necessary but not sufficient condition. You also have to (a) somehow stop the people who like discriminating based on race ("racists"), and (b) do something about the systems that were intentionally setup to discriminate based on race ("systematic racism").
Since you say you're not from the USA, I'll give you some context which is that your talking point is frequently used by people here to argue against addressing (a) and (b). And often it is particularly brought up by people accused of discriminating based on people's race, as though pointing out that someone is being racist is worse than actually being racist.
Agreed. I don't believe you can achieve that continuing to use race as concept. The important divide is between socioeconomic classes. Identify people in need of support, help them. People in poor neighborhoods will receive the same help, no matter their skin color. With that, you'll have widespread support for the measures, at least as far as that is possible for such measure in the USA. Bring race into the mix and you introduce another point of division, as neighbors with the same socioeconomic class would be treated differently for racist reasons.
Abandon race as concept, identify people in need of help by socioeconomic metrics and provide support to them.
After the article came out, it actually had a big effect on our group. Our leaders talked to us about the article and about morale. We instituted a "happy hour" which basically ended the workday early (earlier than usual) on Fridays. We opened a little snack pit in our area with free food and drinks. We started doing irregular team building exercises.
This moment, with the NYT article, was actually the only time I recall seeing noticeable changes to our day to day work. Leaders came and went. Teams changed. But everything was more or less the same. Then, one day, this article comes out of nowhere. I didn't identify with it at all, our group was much more mild than anything the article talked about, and suddenly we were making all of these changes - almost instantly.
I liked and appreciated the changes but it always perplexed me why it took a story in the NYT to get them to come about. Either the NYT knows our internal morale better than our leaders did, and our leaders didn't react until they saw it in the NYT - or, the NYT didn't know our morale and our leaders overreacted based on third hand reporting about it.
It's very odd to me. I've seen people directly telling leadership that we are overworked, that schedules are impossible, that we need to work on group morale, etc - and it very obviously meant nothing to the leaders. You could almost see the words washing over them and leaving nothing behind and indeed, nothing ever came from complaints or feedback like that (so far as I could tell). And yet, if a NYT reporter writes a single article, instant and dramatic reaction.
All this is to say that whenever I see articles like this one, I have to wonder first, if the average Medium employee is going "That's weird, I didn't know there was a culture war going on here." And second, what the reaction to something like this article would be. Are the leaders at Medium going to start suddenly doing different stuff because of the "Techcrunch article"? Would it need to be from a media company with more cachet to make a difference?
1 - https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-...
If management wants to raise the average morale, they need everyone to do morale-raising efforts, even managers who don't think their particular groups needs it. Hence why your team got the changes even though it was previously fine.
Regardless of whether or not it was true, now they have to take action against the perception to be in equilibrium.
If he wants good PR he will do anything, even buy a newspaper.
Go talk to the employees and bring their feedback to the managers. The employees have been trying to tell them the whole time.
This shouldn't really surprise you. Mass media are essentially the arbiters of morality. Whether what they publish is factually true or not, the perception will change accordingly. Your "leaders" and co-workers don't have that kind of power.
I was done with my project, and it was a super tight deadline, and had to finish her part and worked weekends for a couple of months. At the end, I barely got a thank you from my manager.
The red flag would have been when I joined the company, as my team had a good-bye party for a lead engineer, who had been there for barely a year. During that lunch I learned that he left as he was burnt out, after just a year. And, yes, that was a very successful project and product at Amazon. That was a sign, that even if you product/project succeeds and does really well, amazon doesn't reward you but still treats you like being expendable.
Anyway, your experience might not reflect many others in the company
Because no one likes seeing their dirty laundry aired in public, and reputational harm can make it harder to hire new and retain existing talent.
Activism is not a job. I see many people who think it is. "Pay me to change your values and judge you". Thanks, but I can get that for free.
The greatest value that I provide in my work is that I am me: I am a person, with human needs and concerns and thoughts and inspiration and creativity. I leave some of myself in my work.
It surprises me when people have the attitude that you have expressed, that you are just there to get the work done. Is your job in high tech really to robotically do the task?
It makes it seem, to me, like you are greatly underselling yourself.
I see people who think the actual work is incidental.
You say you don't even do activism at work, and even less activism first. So how do you imagine you disagree with me?
Unless you have a super low qualification job where you're hired to be a warm body, you're actually hired for the traits you mention, so that is the job. That is actually the "get the work done".
Ah, ok.
Then, I imagine that you really think it's fine for people to do politics, as long as it's politics that you agree with.
You simply see politics that you don't agree with as an "activism first" attitude.
So you say you're not an activist at work. So do I. Then you say that I'm an activist.
And you're kinda implying that you are, too.
> “repeated interactions that are nonconstructive, cast doubt, assume bad intent, make unsubstantiated accusations, or otherwise do not contribute to a positive environment have a massive negative impact on the team and working environment.”
I've had experiences where different levels of management within the company (macro level) or project (micro level) have been making what appear to be less than ideal choices. Often this is because they aren't listening to all or the right workers, which could mean they might not understand all of the issue, or possibly that they don't know all of the options/solutions.
Of course, the workers might not understand all the aspects that management does either (which might relate to the quote in the article: "even tough feedback can and should be delivered with empathy"). However, this won't stop the workers that feel wronged or otherwise justified from voicing their discontent to their peers, and so the problem of negativity quickly snowballs. And so a naive solution is to send out a memo with a sentence like my first quote.
But it's a bit of a chicken or egg scenario, because if the management were achieving better results, the workers wouldn't feel negative in the first place.
Anytime corporate-speak includes the word "clarity", you can be sure it is anything but clear.
It's the same broken idea that Basecamp implemented.
There's nothing wrong with wanting a certain culture within your company. It's healthy to have a shared vision, and shared idea of how you should behave and present yourself. It gives people a sense of belonging and a community around their work. That culture needs to be implemented with actions, and by the leadership behaving according to that culture, not by sending out a memo.
If the problem is that some people are aggressively pushing a certain politic or behaviour not tolerated by the company, then you deal with those individuals directly.
Trying to manage by memo is like being back in school when your teacher would complain endlessly about those students who doesn't show up. You just end up sitting there an wonder: "Is he complaining about my behaviour? Am I suppose to do something?" and then you get angry, because you have to listen to someone going of about something you have no control over.
Sadly a tendency to avoid interaction with "assholes" and just blasting out a message and expecting the assholes to understand that they are the target of the message. It's not working and it provoking the rest of us, pushing us to a point where we stop careering.
I think the memo saves a lot of people a lot of time and frustration. By actions you mean "not tolerated" in the sense that someone is fired or reprimanded for a set of behaviours then that would raise a lot of questions about what else doesn't fly when working there. It is better that they published a memo.
But writing down what that idea is and sending out a memo about it, that's bad?
https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/24/22349175/medium-layoffs-u...
I'd ask the same for far-right too.
Are these platforming issues?
An example would be that an old school democratic socialist since the 80ths or whatever shouldn't be seen as an extremist now just because the window has shifted so far to the right with Trump etc.
For instance, I've seen people deride someone for "being too woke" when the issue at hand was sexual harassment. This is clearly absurd, since we have laws about sexual harassment, and it can't be simply "woke" people who respect laws.
On the flip side, things like "let's not name our principal branch 'master'" are, to me at least, clear examples of excessive wokeness.
This word, "woke", has become a smokescreen. People who use the same word may not be remotely talking about the same things. They only seem to be agreeing, but neither one actually knows what the other is saying.
"Woke" is a pointer, whose pointed at memory location has wildly varying values for different people.
When the Latinx community at Medium spoke to leadership about discomfort in the headline, they claimed that executives from editorial didn’t do anything about the headline until it was mentioned in a public Slack channel. One editor asked anyone who had gone through the immigration process or was a part of the Latinx community to get in a room and explain their side, a moment that felt diminishing to this employee. The headline only changed when employees posted in a public Slack channel about their qualms."
I'm not empathetic with the employees.
I despise Trump, it's unconditionally within bounds to publish something like this.
If you want to work for a political organization, or a 'far-X' organization please do that.
Medium already tilts very strongly in one direction and their political orientation is well known.
If people are being actually mistreated, there should be a discussion but this is getting out of hand.
2. I am a professional and I offer my skills, experience and expertise in exchange for money. I might really like the job or not at all, makes no difference because work is to be done.
3. I am not interested in playing a social justice hero or promoting politics of current world affairs at my workplace, nor am I interested in a culture, mentality or values. If I wanted to join a cult I'd join one where they have drugs and naked ladies, not your company.
I am getting sick of people pretending to try and change the world through their jobs when they only speak up as long as their jobs are secure. I see this often in my company that is trying really hard to be as liberal as possible while burning investor money where people keep raising political questions such as doing business with China not understanding that their roles will likely be cut if the company loses those Chinese contracts. Goes without saying topics regarding sex and sexual orientation are always hot, but others such as the Palestinian genocide are frown upon. You can't be selectively X, that just makes you a hypocrite.
I am currently looking for a new job because I refuse to work in an environment where people are more preoccupied with non-work related problems than they are with the actual work itself. We all have interest in moral issues as individuals, but there is a time and place to discuss those issues. A workplace is not it. For the same reason I am removing myself from LinkedIn.
How is this connected to politics at the workplace? You don't have to choose between a Steve Jobs-style CEO or a company openly declaring most people quitting have a certain skin color. Those are both not desirable imho, and neither need to be a part of the job.
Then WTF is enough? Because it seems like you're trying to change my mind so that I have to agree with you.
"listening is merciful and really caring...that is not enough."
China keeps looking better.
Latinx employee group outraged / changes made employee who wrote article fired?
Engineer complaining about the article says they were attracted to medium because of free speech which is gone so now leaving - referring to free speech to complain about the article
Isn't some of this contradictory
Can someone explain it to me like I am five?
I fit this bill to a t, medium sounds like a great place to work.
The progressive left is slowly finding out that the general left doesn't give a shit about them and is finally starting to wake up to the fact they don't have to put up with be called a racist trump supporter for simply disagreeing with the woke left on any of its insane ideas.
Employees should not be playing musical chairs with employers as a form of protest. If you’re willing to quit, better to stay until you get fired striving for real change instead of hoping that quitting will make management realize they were in the wrong. It rarely works.