Hacker News Reader

Comment by philmcc | Hacker News Reader

The number of people complaining about “woke culture” are statistically disproportionately members of groups that are not traditionally insulted in media.

Furthermore, this “take” requires a level of historical naïveté that borders on pure narcissism. A lot of social “fixing” looks like an “over correction” in the short term, but in the long term that’s just how things get dealt with.

As a loose metaphor, If you put your hand on a stove you don’t lift it a millimeter off the heat source, right? That would “fix” it.

Surprising no one, I couldn’t find a single essay from this concerned citizen about the death of George Floyd, or anyone else for that matter.

But he found plenty of outrage and cultural commentary for the temporary death of the commercial viability of his outdated sense of humor.

That IS funny, actually.

View on HN

It's not "overcorrection", it's pressure to not wrongthink. The method is the problem.

Why is he obligated to write something about George Floyd? This touches on compelled speech.

He’s not obligated to at all.

You required him to do so before being able to express himself.

> I couldn’t find a single essay from this concerned citizen about

So basically: you are in front of a phenomenon of corrupt police and its relative systemic acceptance, all of which is rooted in mental pauperty, and your idea of «fixing» is to restrict artistic expression?

And would be a duty of any creator to write articles about any occurrence or phenomenon!?

«outdated»!? Masterpieces and milestones get «outdated» in which sense? Do you mean "then rejected by some society" for some reason outside inherent quality? Arbitrary filters of cultural contribution, according their special state and needs?

I reread my post several times and couldn’t find the section where I suggested that the solution is to “restrict artistic expression” so I stopped reading your post beyond that as it was surely a response to someone else.

So what are the examples you propose instancing that «over correction»?

He is a comedian talking about comedy. He makes some good points you might agree with or not, but I cannot understand why it matters how many essays he has written about George Floyd's death. If that is the new low bar to talk about something, the hand is already kilometers away of the stove. It's cold in there.

By your own rhetoric, your sense of humor will become outdated too one day and you’ll just have to live with it because progress.

Yes! And it's worth getting comfortable with change and learning from it, instead of being weird and reactionary about it.

I find it funny (pun intended) that you consider this learning, when on a basic level it's the opposite of that.

If anything can be deemed offensive (and it will be, because there are people who profit from scolding others), and nothing is ever forgotten in the internet age, the eventuality of your mentality is no one being allowed to communicate about anything at all.

What's worth doing is making fun of you, ironically. Because making fun of people like you is, historically, how flawed ideologies are cast aside.

Are you confusing "making fun of" with "offensive", or "punching down"? These are not the same things.

Try to describe the difference to a woke mob, then

> Try to describe the difference to a woke mob, then

Exactly.

I'm not confusing anything, it's you who has a basic misunderstanding of how this all works.

You don't get to determine the rules and context of communication for other people, you only get to determine them for yourself. I don't mean rules and context in a modern political and/or cultural sense, I mean them in a basic interpretive sense.

The text is in the eye of the beholder. Not in the eye of the mob who didn't read the text.

>are statistically disproportionately members of groups that are not traditionally insulted in media.

are you sure? In regards to HN, are there no negative stereotypes of nerds, geeks, computer programmers out there? How about those with autism, or ADHD - I mean I find myself insulted quite a lot in life, never mind in just the media.

Do you have any evidence that the majority of autistics are complaining about "woke" culture? As an autistic it's my understanding that if anything we tend to be overrepresented in "social justice" causes online because we tend towards systems thinking and systemic critique tends towards leftism and liberalism whereas conservatives usually emphasize "personal responsibility" and individualism.

There are many cases of people using autism as a justification for reactionary behavior but the people I see most loudly attacking them for it are other autistics.

Shows like The Big Bang Theory which undeniably make fun of autistic traits usually also carry a lot of other messaging progressives find distasteful (e.g. in this case, misogyny framed as "charming" and "dorky" because the characters are portrayed as unthreatening or downright impotent). Nerd culture especially of the late 90s and early 00s is also rife with sexism, racism and ableism while especially nowadays also undeniably having extremely progressive spaces within its subculture (e.g. TTRPGs in particular are a space for experimenting with identity and gender expression which can make them especially appealing to queer people).

The negative treatment of nerds, geeks and programmers in popular media (which has btw massively declined since the 1980s and especially within the dot com era) in my experience also doesn't come from "woke progressives" but rather neatly follows anti-feminist ideas of masculinity, ridiculing these groups for failing to satisfy gendered expectations. "Woke" critique usually focusses on the sexist, racist and generally bigoted attitudes often still present in wide parts of those cultures but even more so in gaming (which is so widely acknowledged even within gaming culture that "heated gamer moment" has become a popular phrase to refer to someone openly spouting bigotry).

>>are statistically disproportionately members of groups that are not traditionally insulted in media.

>Do you have any evidence that the majority of autistics are complaining about "woke" culture?

You're right that is probably the weakest part of my response, since I don't have any particular evidence.

On the other hand the disproportionate members of groups seemed specifically in reference to people on HN who are likely to be in the group of nerds, geeks, programmers group. So if those groups are among the ones on HN complaining about wokeness, then I guess it doesn't really matter that the parts of the media they are getting insulted in are parts getting attacked as non-woke.

The original argument was that groups (on HN) complaining about wokeness are comprised of people not insulted by media. I suppose there are people on HN who find wokeness distasteful even if they are among groups that might be helped by it in some contexts.

That's not true. Jewish-, Italian-, German-, Irish-Americans have any number of bad characters and slurs applied to them in Hollywood movies (many of the "intellectual dark web" are Jews!).

"Zucker" is also a Jewish name, so his ancestors will have experienced a fair share of racism.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com