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Comment by neonsunset | Hacker News Reader

Reality check I got after being accused of having anti-minority opinion while arguing for protection of all categories of people, just without double standards and without giving priority to some over others.

This got me instantly banned from a community I had professional interest and participation in, which made me realize the damaging effects of culture wars that are about to get worse for major corporations.

Without accountability checks, people can and will use the positions of power to police the companies, communities and whatever they can to further their own agenda regardless if it hurts everyone else involved in the process.

It's important we start valuing maturity and ability to exercise nuance in thought process lest it will all go south.

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I think there are two points: first, 'all lives matter' is a typical dog whistle for a lot of people who are racist, even if you are not. If you're going to argue that line, you have to try and put some clear water between you and them.

The second point is that, in an unjust society, not accounting for the effects of that injustice on people (say candidates for a job position) compounds that injustice. So like, if you were an employer in post-abolition America, and you refused to employ ex-slaves because they had no history of employment, on the one hand, it's formally fair, because that's a criterion you can apply to all applicants. It is still, however, materially discriminatory. That's the observation at the root of a lot of affirmative action stuff.

That's the core of the issue. Instead of addressing rhetoric at a face value, people put their projection of disagreement into your words and judge you by that.

After all, what is the difference between people who use "all lives matter" as a thinly veiled excuse for discrimination and people who use "it's a pride month and you're homophobic" as an excuse to attack you when asked to stay on technical topic?

Addendum: I believe "affirmative action" is a major step towards dismantling freedom of speech.

It is until after I got better at English and started immerse into the Western medium of discourse, that it became apparent that my beliefs of equality by judging people upon their virtues/vices are considered wrong by many who prefer to insist on categorizing people only by their superficial features and use that as a basis of the debate.

> It is until after I got better at English and started immerse into the Western medium of discourse, that it became apparent that my beliefs of equality by judging people upon their virtues/vices are considered wrong by many who prefer to insist on categorizing people only by their superficial features and use that as a basis of the debate

Don't confuse mostly American language and culture with "Western". The UK sometimes follows some of these things, but not always, and the rest usually don't. For instance in France It's forbidden for government entities to categorise people by how they look. There are no quotas or statistics per skin colour. There's still racism here and there of course - be it in some police actions/accidents, or political parties, or whatever. There are poor neighborhoods (which tend to be prevalently with immigrants or close descendants of immigrants, be they from Africa, Asia or Eastern Europe), and there are efforts to help the people living there ( improve schools, provide jobs, etc.), not "people from Arabian/Western African descent living there".

France just narrowly avoided voting in the daughter of a noted neo-nazi, running the nationalist party that neo-nazi founded. It's also got a hijab ban, which puts it in the company of places like Russia, or Xinjiang in China, not noted bastions of tolerance and diversity.

> France just narrowly avoided voting in the daughter of a noted neo-nazi

She's drastically less neo-Nazi than her father, just an empty far-right populist. But yeah, not great.

> It's also got a hijab ban, which puts it in the company of places like Russia, or Xinjiang in China, not noted bastions of tolerance and diversity

It's more complicated than that. The hijab ban isn't coming from intolerance or to force conformity. France has a long and proud history of laïcité, separation of church and state and irreligiousness in public life ( you don't get politicians doing photo ops with bibles or praising Jesus, thank god). Outright religious symbols, especially ones that are a symbol of religious subjugation for many ( many women, especially the young ones, are pressured/forced by family/husbands to be "modest"; plenty of others do it for themselves) have no place in irreligious public places. Religion is a private matter you practice however you please as long as you harm noone. And the ban isn't for hijabs, it's for face coverings, so a Catholic nun is also included; and it only covers public places like post office, town hall, schools ( not sure about that one).

But the gist of it is - religion has no place in public life, especially its (often) intolerant parts.

> Religion is a private matter you practice however you please as long as you harm noone

I think the chinese make this argument in Xinjiang much more convincingly, after all, unlike the french, they do not have large, bell-ringing churches and cathedrals in the centers of literally every settlement, all of which are blazoned with symbols of the faith.

It's also the argument they make in Germany, where you're not allowed to have religious symbols in public offices, but they still manage to have a crucifix behind every blade of grass, public or otherwise, in Bavaria.

The other problem with the hijab ban is that modesty (which is what hijab means) makes no sense in private. So it ends up making women choose between their religious self-expression, and taking part of public life. I'm sure that some muslim women are oppressed by some muslim men, but I can say for certain that every muslim woman, whether they wear the headscarf or not, is oppressed by having this choice taken out of their hands.

I love the french universalist tradition, but it feels like mobilizing that in order to restrict the freedoms of a relatively poor and disenfranchised minority is a shameful betrayal. I would find it credible if there was also a general crucifix ban, and the French state, as the soviets did, was turning churches into community centers or tearing them down. Since no such idea is even proposed, it just seems like yet another classic of the european tradition: abstract equality, concrete discrimination.

> I can say for certain that every muslim woman, whether they wear the headscarf or not, is oppressed by having this choice taken out of their hands.

Game theory is complicated. Sometimes having a choice taken away from you is good for you... for example if it is a choice you never really wanted to take, but your environment would punish you for avoiding it voluntarily. When the choice is taken away, the punishment would not make sense.

Children do not choose their religion; it is chosen for them, and sometimes the punishment for breaking the rules or trying to leave the religion is death. I am pretty sure there are girls born in muslim families, who are happy for the opportunity to feel the fresh air.

Alternatively, literally every white woman I know has told me they find the pressure to appear presentable, to look in a certain way, oppressive and stressful. We live in a society that makes it easy for men to oppress women, in public or in private. Tackling domestic violence, exclusion of women from public spaces, women's wages, would make it much easier for women pressured by families or husbands to take the freedoms that are actually important to them, which may or may not include choices about head wear.

> Alternatively, literally every white woman I know has told me they find the pressure to appear presentable, to look in a certain way, oppressive and stressful.

Yes, it is oppressive and stressful, but the stakes are dramatically different, and so is the reason -- intrasexual competition.

In case of covering your face for religious reasons, the penalty for disobeying, in worst case, is death. Specifically, a murder, usually by your relatives, for reasons that are typically translated to English as "honor", although the meaning clearly is not the same.

A white woman who refuses to use make-up, will miss some opportunities in her life. Another woman will take the partner she wanted, or the promotion she deserved. She may get bullied by other women, especially at high school. Those all are impacts that reduce her quality of life.

But how is it related to domestic violence? I have never heard a serious suggestion that the real cause of domestic violence is lack of being presentable.

Similarly, what are the public spaces that exclude insufficiently presentable white women: streets? parks? cinemas? universities? trains? Okay, I am sure there are some parties where only the pretty girls are invited, but those probably exclude most men, too.

Anyway, I think that "you may be skipped for a promotion" and "someone quite likely will slit your throat" are not the same category of threat. Both can feel oppressive and stressful, but I am sure way more women would trade their problems in one direction than in the other.

My observation is that, in households where sexism is a real problem, the public-facing stuff isn't likely to be the meat of it. Nobody who has a husband who might murder them considers religious attire as the worst thing about their relationship. The worst thing is having a husband who is controlling and homicidal.

The point is, both muslim and non-muslim women face that in most countries around the world, because most countries are systematically patriarchal and domestic violence is largely normalized. In every country in europe, domestic violence makes up the vast majority of violent crime, and murders are most likely, especially for women, to be committed by family members.

So by focusing on the hijab and the makeup thing, you're missing my broader point: that muslim women face oppression as women, and not as muslims, except insofar as they are the targets of racial discrimination. The mechanisms that allow partners to coerce muslim women are the same as those that allow partners to exercise coercive power over white women.

The point is to do both, acknowledging that certain people have inherent (dis)advantages, and that established perspectives are usually the perspective of the establishment, which isn't representative of the whole

I think it's important to separate the ideas/words/meaning of "X lives matter" from the political movements that underlying them.

"So like, if you were an employer in post-abolition America, and you refused to employ ex-slaves because they had no history of employment, on the one hand, it's formally fair, because that's a criterion you can apply to all applicants. It is still, however, materially discriminatory. That's the observation at the root of a lot of affirmative action stuff."

I think we're so far removed from that, that it isn't straightforward anymore. We're seeing discrimination against certain minority groups simply because they're overrepresented in some areas (look at the recent issue/cases regarding Asians and education). It's one thing if we're making exceptions for disadvantaged people (ethnicity alone is not an indicator for this) that corrects and injustice, but it's something completely different when we are using blanket policies that aren't actually fixing anything and might actually cause more issues in the future.

> is a typical dog whistle for a lot of people who are racist

How do you know this? Do you associate with racists? Or did somebody tell you that racists profess basic unitarian universalist values? If so, why were they telling you?

It's a known thing and questioning common knowledge is generally the tactic of a contrarian or a manipulator with the intent of diffusing the conversation.

The whole dogwhistling accusation tactic is a well-known method of derailing a conversation

I mean, there's nothing I can say or do to ever convince a person to see my viewpoint once they have decided that someone's race decides their value.

There are no magic words, no sudo "be a kinder person" command, no entreaties, no begging, no threats, no guile that can convince someone on the internet who has decided to take a confrontational stance to stand down, or reconsider.

If you act racist on the internet then you are racist. If it quacks like a duck, it's a duck. Where there's smoke, there's fire.

It is a safe assumption that they are here to try to rile people up and make people upset and have no interest in speaking fairly or changing their position under any circumstances.

I am no more interested in the feelings of either racist people or the people who choose to act like them than I am with the quality of your coworker's friend's pet's bowel movements.

If you enjoy making people upset on the internet by spewing racist rhetoric then I hope your conversations constantly get derailed.

> If it quacks like a duck, it's a duck.

Things get more difficult if an online mob compiles a database of thousand different sounds that ducks allegedly make, and says "if it makes one of the sounds in this database, it's a duck".

"Known things" and "common knowledge" are specific to your context of existence.

The tactic to weave in the threads of logical statements or irrefutable facts together with person's/organization's agenda is used by everyone from radical individuals to sects to popular political parties.

However, you cannot turn this argument on its head by saying that a reasonable statement shared by "bad" people makes it bad or invalid by association.

Also, did you know hitler too would agree that sky is likely blue?

Godwin's Law, "if you mention Adolf Hitler or Nazis within a discussion thread, you've automatically ended whatever discussion you were taking part in."

You should address the other points made in my response. And yet, you choose the last one and conveniently avoid everything else.

By the way, Godwin’s law[0]: “Godwin’s law is the proposition that the longer an internet argument goes on, the higher the probability becomes that something or someone will be compared to Adolf Hitler.”

[0]: https://www.dictionary.com/e/memes/godwins-law/

I feel like this is a classic case of American exceptionalisms. Americans have an absolutely bonkers relationship with race and often assume that other Westerners around the world feel the same way.

The _only_ reason the phrase "All Lives Matter" has any remotely political juice to it is because of the riots that occurred in America two years ago; the phrase itself is entirely innocuous and is really something most reasonable people can get behind.

It bothers me to no end when people imply that the rest of the English speaking world should try to update their lexicon and tread carefully around certain words simply to appease a tiny minority of Americans.

I'm pretty ignorant of this, but was the phrase "All Lives Matter" really out and about in normal use for a long time? Or did it rise in popular use after "Black Lives Matter"?

If it's the first one, yeah I agree w/you. If it's the second, well...

No and yes, respectively. OP is just being coy; they fully know this and tipped their hand by referring to the demonstrations as riots.

> If it's the second, well...

Would you not classify them as riots? What word would you use?

I'm Canadian but was living in Seattle at the time. Businesses were burned, cars were flipped, statues torn down. I'm not trying to downplay the importance of what was being protested, but to pretend it was a peaceful demonstration is laughable. Riot is a perfectly reasonable word to describe it.

At issue is your word choice and how that goes to the answers of ant_li0n’s questions for you.

It was full scale riots to the point that rioters actually looted. Don't push your propaganda on Hacker News, please.

If you're pretty ignorant of the topic, then why do you know about the fact that "All Lives Matter" phrase only rose to prominence after "Black Lives Matter" movement in the US?

This is a pointed question led with dishonesty. It's important to ask oneself what was the motivation behind trying to manipulate other readers' perception instead of just dropping the "I'm pretty ignorant of this, but..." part in the first place.

No, I really was asking a question. I don't know, was the phrase "All Lives Matter" in common circulation, before "Black Lives Matter" came around?

I really do not know, that's why I asked

"All Lives Matter" was not in common circulation until "Black Lives Matter" entered the scene, because the phrase is used as a rebuttal to "Black Lives Matter." That's why it's commonly understood to be a dogwhistle. When person A says "Black Lives Matter" and person B says "All Lives Matter", person B is really saying "NO. All Lives Matter" the un-spoken "NO" is their disagreement with "Black Lives Matter." If they agreed that "Black Lives Matter" they would not have had to come up with a rebuttal to counter it.

Whether it had much use prior to 2020 I'm unsure, the point is that Americans (like the charming one I'm trying my best to be patient with below) will now forever associate their country's own racial backstory with those three words, and for some reason expect others around the world to do the same.

>It is still, however, materially discriminatory

The problem with this is that this is applying a fix in the wrong place, making the effects of original injustice exist in a different form for a vastly longer period of time. In your example, the society can pay for the livehood, training and education of such ex-slaves, and help them fit back.

But blindly giving them positions that require experience and skill is going to sound nice, but ultimately your whole society is going broke. And people will once again start associating low quality and untrustworthiness with the very same people you wanted to uplift in the first place..

>a typical dog whistle

The "magic words" used to silence critics and shut down discussion.

How is this even relevant to tech work? Minority, inclusion,etc... do you work in HR, legal or PR? If not how does writing code or engineering systems include that subject? Honestly curious.

There is nothing in the question that seems to imply that we should keep it strictly about tech work, and various answers do not seem to be about it either.

Fair enough, I assumed wrong since this is HN.

HN is tech + everything else that's interesting. That basically includes "everything possible" (under quotes because it needs to have some basis in science / empirical knowledge)

> "Honestly curious, wink-wink"

A follow-up comment in the response above addresses your question. It's a situation online, not in a workplace.

However, it is similar to what I tend to notice at work more and more, with a small number of employees having major negative impact while the majority stays silent and does nothing.

Humans are good at dealing with crisis when it's apparent and happens quickly as it triggers our fight or flight response. This crisis I think is slow, which we are notoriously bad at mitigating (case in point: climate change). This means that we could expect seeing major resistance once the situation becomes intolerable even to otherwise agreeable people. My fear is when this happens, irreversible damage to fundamental freedoms will already be done and we'll be back to the cycle of bad times -> struggle -> good times.

No idea what you are talking about. Did you reply to the right comment?

It was on Reddit, was not it? I got banned from a sub just because of having opinion that contradicted OP, when I asked which rule did I broke, My account was suspended on whole Reddit... I have been member since Digg exodus and never had any problem till that day.

Unfortunately Reddit is ruled by moronic mods who can perma-ban your account, and admins can't be bothered. If your opinion is not in line, your IP is going to get blacklisted, so either you are extremely left wing, or you are out.

and it is sad, because I really liked the forums, discussions and occasional memes here and there, now they are just pushing ideas that can't be discussed, which is propaganda.

It was Discord but the behavior matches the one you've described about Reddit. Unfortunately, it's not used for in-depth technical discussions relevant to my sphere and you can't use WayBackMachine on Discord to preserve knowledge which is unfortunate.

It's funny that while discussing the incident, some other people would get agitated when you mention that unjust bans are by all means should be evaded.

Never understood people who ready to jump on anyone disobeying the law in letter but could never care less about actually following it in spirit.

> your IP is going to get blacklisted

This is easily circumvented by resetting your router and starting fresh with an account. Who cares about "karma" anyway?

> so either you are extremely left wing, or you are out.

Or don't participate in political/culture war subreddits that encourage idiots on two sides to sling text feces at each other all day.

It's not that easy. My ISP assigns static IP. As for not participating in subreddits - you can't really know which subs will popup on your frontpage, one might argue that you only use subs you are subbed to, but that destroys the point of forums as a principle. Where not forums designed to facilitate discussion rather than echo-chambers of propaganda?

It get's weirder than that, one of the top subs actually asks for your... SKIN COLOR https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/08/us/reddit-race-black-peop... otherwise bot removes your comment instantly.

> Who cares about "karma" anyway?

Until you can't post in your favorite subreddit because it has a minimum threshold.

Which one?

I haven't used reddit in a while, but it wasn't uncommon to make a throwaway for some additional level of psueo-anonimty, authoring a post, submitting and then instantly getting a message saying you don't have enough karma.

Iirc it's more common in large subreddits, or really anything that has a decent amount of traffic and a somewhat organized moderation approach.

Many providers assign IP addresses statically. In my country, many ISPs give you public static IP by default.

I think it's probably too late for this and you're better off bracing for the inevitable conflict.

I am. That's why these messages are posted :)

It's important to not stay silent thinking conflict is pointless because it means that tolerance to things you consider harmful only invites more of that in the future.

Naturally, pick your battles and all, but voicing your opinion encourages other people agreeing with you to do the same. And, in the end, you are no longer alone in your protest.

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