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).
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 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?
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.
I can’t imagine what it’s like to be such an ideologue that you have to project on other people.