Comment by john_moscow | Hacker News Reader

Comment by john_moscow | Hacker News Reader

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Well, such things are always driven by demand. And unfortunately, there is a strong demand in our society for policing words, renaming formulas and issuing apologies all while:

* Property ownership is becoming out of question for an increasing fraction of Americans

* Any kid of retirement (as in not having to work and enjoying life off your savings) has become a pipe dream

* Having a single-income family with one parent dedicated to raising the children has become unaffordable.

* Even if you managed to put enough effort to teach your kids the values of hard work and setting long-term goals, the public education system is set to confuse them and kick them off that path, so they will never be competitive with those who received education abroad.

At the same time, the media oligopoly [0] keeps ignoring the problems and pushing the narratives how addressing short-term emotional problems is the top 1 priority, and anyone who wants real prosperity instead of taking a part in the never-ending mutual comforting game is the enemy of the people.

I wonder if people will ever realize they are being manipulated into poverty before it's too late.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31077525

The elites of America use "inclusivity" and race as bait to distract from the very issues you describe.

Notice how we, as a society, spent relatively little time discussing the 2008 Mortgage Crisis and Occupy Wall Street.

Meanwhile news outlets have been beating the "inclusivity" / race / gender drum for _years_.

Time to wake up, folks.

Pretty interesting that there are people who legitimately believe the megacorps are 'the good guys' because of stunts like this.

What? The 2008 Mortgage Crisis was the biggest news story for at least a year.

Comparing that to "inclusivity" is also strange because inclusivity is not an event. A single event has a natural decay of relevance, the further into the past it gets.

> What? The 2008 Mortgage Crisis was the biggest news story for at least a year.

It was an event that absolutely decimated MANY people in America financially. And for many of those people, their only fault in the whole thing was, I guess, being ignorant enough to be taken advantage of.

We spend a lot more time discussing things that are a lot more irrelevant than that.

> Comparing that to "inclusivity" is also strange because inclusivity is not an event. A single event has a natural decay of relevance, the further into the past it gets.

OK, then instead compare the general theme of the 2008 Mortgage Crisis / Occupy Wall Street. Specifically: how much time do we spend talking about a small group of powerful elites pulling the financial strings in this country? And how does that compare to how much we talk about "inclusivity"?

The money and power concentrated into the hands of relatively few is an issue that is _several_ orders of magnitude larger than the "inclusivity" stuff we're fed much more often.

That's not a mere coincidence.

I dunno, you're not providing any evidence to back up the assertion that "we" talk way more about inclusivity than "powerful elites." Who is "we?"

HN? Are you talking about in the news? A specific news outlet?

The imbalance of power between the ultra-wealthy and the rest of us is in the news all the time, at least that I watch and read.

Ever heard of Rojava?

What I don't understand is, where is this perceived demand coming from? I think it is an extremely small minority that happens to be extremely loud on social media and in corporate circles, so the perception of how important this issue is has become grossly exaggerated. I don't think this is purposeful malice on anyone's part, I think it is just a product of social media amplification and the elites desire to constantly virtue signal to each other that has led to this absurd loop in our culture.

Unfortunately, there is a very solid explanation for it and it doesn't yield a good prognosis:

1. There is a small minority of people who truly believed in it in the first place.

2. Then there are people who exploit the system by charging hefty sums for diversity trainings (and calling any opponents to such spending racist).

3. Then there are people who sold the #2 group the student loans and gave the degrees where all you need to graduate is to repeat a fairly basic set of dogmas.

4. There are people who are disillusioned about the whole thing, but are now stuck with the student loans and no other way to make comparable money.

5. There are entrepreneurial people that want to make a change, but since most business niches are occupied by the corporations, the only outlet they have found is to join the diversity & inclusion effort.

6. There are people that want to get rid of their competitors. And since being not inclusive enough is now a firable offense, they are stuck competing who can say more things they don't really believe in.

Ironically, it reminds me of the political situation in Russia, where many people support the war despite suffering economically from it, despite having their children slaughtered, despite losing the rest of civil freedoms in the past months. The mechanism is the same: if you don't play along with the narrative, the competition will eat you alive. And it you overplay it in a clever way, you can get a promotion or a government contract.

I wish sociologists actually studied such phenomena rather than being another echo chamber for the same narrative as everyone else.

This is an example of where the Twittersphere has outsized influence.

May I ask what the items in your enumerated list have to do with “policing words?”

He's pointing out that focusing on issues that don't have real impact is starving us of our ability to focus on broader, more serious issues. The shrinking of the middle class is a tangible problem. Words being insufficiently inclusive is not.

The items on the list are the problems relevant to most Americans. Except, the human brain has a limited capacity for "currently tracked" problems and tends to pick them proportionally to the amount of attention paid to them.

So the media is abusing it by spamming people's attention with disproportionately exaggerated problems that don't cost the elites anything to solve, so that people won't have any time left solving the problems that would look bad on the corporate bottom line.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com