Comment by Spivak | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Spivak | Hacker News Reader

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It's wild to see someone say inclusion, intersectionality, and equity as fundamentally bad that it really feel like they've just become buzzword type "words liberals use" completely divorced from their meaning.

Like there's a lot of talk from right-ish folks about "identity politics" and how it reduces people to a few different categories and ignores the enormous complexity of the individual experience but that's literally what the framework of intersectionality is there to do. Looking at totality of an individual as a white light and identifying and understanding all the colors that contributed to it.

Equity is the reason for rural broadband initiatives, for the electoral college that gives proportionate voice to people who don't live in major cities, for farm subsidies, for seeded sports brackets for handicaps in golf and chess, for taxes based on percentages rather than being flat, for letting the short people at a concert stand in front. Everyone, even the staunchest libertarian believes in equity.

And it's the same with inclusiveness, being inclusive is why you don't talk politics at thanksgiving, why you stop swearing around your family's children, why guys instinctively behave more cordially around women, why tall buildings have elevators for the elderly, why you make an extra dish for your vegetarian friend, why you're more tolerant of bluntness from your autistic friends or forgetfulness from your adhd friends.

I didn't say they were bad - I answered the question. Do you think that it conforms to centrist views of diversity equity and inclusion? Or right-wing views of the same?

> Everyone, even the staunchest libertarian believes in equity

What? No, not even slightly. You've just listed off a bunch of highly contentious and often unethical things and then acted as if they're unassailable.

Farm subsidies have been disastrous and should be massively overhauled or done away with. A desire for a flatter tax structure is a fairly mainstream, though minority political opinion. I don't believe I've ever seen people queue up for a standing-room concert and then give up their front row position to a shorter person who arrived later.

"Equity" is probably the worst weasel-word in contemporary America, in order to give favor to some people at the expense of others and to create systems where different rules apply to different people. Fairness, justice and equal rights would be for more universally held opinions.

"Equity" is a dog-whistle to treat people unfairly and unjustly.

See now you're doing it, you've defined fairness as equality when different rules for different people is how most people behave by default without any provocation. I don't give everyone on the street $20, I give money to the homeless. I don't normally hold the door for people but I do for older folks with canes and walkers. And yes, when I'm at concerts tall people let me go in front. You water the plants that are dry, if you give equal water to all your plants they die except the ones that thrive at the level you chose, usually the white ones if you're in the US.

Pour one out for the goalie if you gave equal padding to the people on a hockey team. Football is the most fair when different positions have different rules that apply to them.

People who strongly believe that equality is the one true way need an escape hatch when equal isn't equitable which is usually called "equality of access." Equal application of a rule that treats different people differently is just equity. Surely you would see through if I tried selling you "equality of outcome" as the most fair because it's equal after all. We means test our social safety net and even BI or negative tax rates that is designed to appeal to "equality" folks is just equity in disguise.

Most of the time equal is equitable, but when it isn't we do mental gymnastics to make it fit rather than just say equity is the thing we want.

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