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Comment by Avshalom | Hacker News Reader

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodomy_laws_in_the_United_Stat...

just sayin'. maybe 1985 sucked a lot for a lot of people that weren't paul graham.

Totally. I have no idea about Paul Graham's upbringing, but back in the 80s and 90s I was a "fag" threatened with violence just for being a slightly effeminate nerd obsessed with computers and weird music, etc.. One didn't even have to be gay to be subject to homophobic hate and intolerance. I have teenagers now -- one self-identified queer high schooler and the other a middle schooler in a tiny rural school not unlike where I grew up -- and today's society is an amazingly tolerant dream compared to what I grew up with.

The following generations claimed that insult but its power has been given back by many that didn't understand the subcultures that moved beyond it.

The idea is to make things not suck. Not to make them suck in the same way for different groups of people.

Have you considered the possibility that oppressing gay people and firing people with unpopular opinions are both wrong and should be opposed?

One still happens today and has received zero essays from PG, despite it still being an issue in the tech community, and the other doesn't actually happen.

> In 2020, Shor was fired by Civis Analytics after tweeting a summary of an academic study about protests by Omar Wasow, a black political scientist at Princeton University. Shor's tweet read "Post-MLK-assasination race riots reduced Democratic vote share in surrounding counties by 2%, which was enough to tip the 1968 election to Nixon.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Shor

There’s one example of many of a thing that supposedly “doesn’t actually happen”.

"In 2020, 8.9% of employed LGBT people, including 11.3% of LGBT employees of color and 6.5% of white LGBT employees, reported being fired or not hired because of their sexual orientation or gender identity."[1]

Your dude david who "serves as head of data science with Blue Rose Research" is barely a blip.

[1] https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/publications/lgbt-wor...

Shockingly low considering it’s self reported. I would expect far more people to latch on to any excuse for getting fired or not hired besides “I wasn’t that good at my job”.

The article was about heresy, not attitudes to gay people. I'm not sure why people are trying to conflate the two.

We're not conflating, we're providing context. Western culture had/has a sickness of violence and intolerance that decades of activism is chipping away at. Some people perceive this activism as "intolerance to heresy" when to others it's "intolerance to intolerance."

I'm not in an oppressed group, and I've done my fair share of foot-in-mouth. But my sympathies are with the ... subaltern..., not generally with people claiming to be treated as heretics because they got censured (not censored) for using their public or corporate positions to pick on people or support picking on people.

Yes, there are excesses. I don't support them. But I'm glad I'm living through an era where it's becoming less acceptable to be a prick in public.

Yup. Paul Graham doesn’t seem to have a very accurate memory of historical conditions.

Even if people may disagree about the specific year, the initial upward and currently downward trend is unmistakable and visible also all over Western Europe.

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