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Comment by Mistletoe | Hacker News Reader

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I don't think the "be nice to everyone" is the thing people are annoyed with, rather it's the "you will be canceled if you step out of line even once" that comes along with it.

what's an example here of unfair cancellation that you are thinking about? I feel that most of those who have been "cancelled" have been so because of fairly egregious stuff like sexual assault, clearly racist speech, etc.

The irony being of course, that the current wave of performative anti-woke articles from PG, Zuck et al is based mostly on fear that they'll be cancelled by the incoming administration if they appear to be too kindly disposed to minorities...

That is pure speculation on your part (flamebait speculation at that). You can't prove it nor even offer compelling evidence for it.

I mean, it'd be a remarkable coincidence if firms queuing up to renounce their DEI initiatives and argue that the President's new bestie was doing a great job of promoting free speech were doing so without regard to the imminent inauguration date of a President who's never exactly disguised his loathing of such things and his desire to make life miserable for people he sees as "woke" (or his fondness for recalcitrant critics for that matter). Even PG himself is busy observing (on Twitter) the trend of removing pronouns from profiles. In fairness to PG, unlike Zuckerberg he's not actually rolling back anything he's been doing for most of the past couple of decades, but it'd be a helluva surprise if he'd just forgotten who was in charge when he got suspended from Twitter in his haste to lavish praise on the president's right hand man for doing such a great job of removing censorship from Twitter

The incoming administration has never been unkind to minorities. If they have been unkind to criminals, yes, but minorities, never. If you conflate that with minorities, then that kind of demonstrates who you protect: Not the minorities.

It’s all words anyway. Wokes hate white people with passion, and that’s why they are not getting half the USA against them.

And yet we're not observing a trend of CEOs rushing to talk about crime in their haste to accommodate the new regime, we're seeing them rush to update their moderation guidelines to stress that "gays are freaks" and "immigrants are grubby, filthy pieces of shit" must be understood as valid political commentary and not abuse, delete pronouns from their profiles and shut down their diversity programmes.

You're clearly passionate about social justice. But pretending it's just 'being nice' and everyone who disagrees is evil? That's exactly the kind of oversimplified thinking that stops real progress and actually causes evil.

Movements for social change are messy. They involve hard trade-offs, heated debates about methods, and yeah, sometimes people on 'your side' screw up or take things too far. Pretending otherwise doesn't help anyone.

And the history is just wrong - 'stay woke' wasn't forced on anyone. People chose it proudly before it became contentious. You're rewriting history to avoid engaging with actual criticism.

You can fight for what you believe in without pretending you're in a morality play where the good guys are pure and the bad guys twirl their mustaches. Real life is more complicated than that.

You have it backwards. People who had old conservative views were told they were wrong and got upset. So they started to believe they were being targeted and persecuted when in reality, if you count how many went to jail or got fired, it was people where were brave enough, woke enough, to fight for change.

There's much more ideology attached to "wokeness" than just "be nice" and "be respectful", such as the concepts around gender and neurodiversity spectrums.

Just using the word itself evokes immediate reactions from those aligned with particular political "sides". I've formed this opinion after my many, mandatory DEI trainings at work.

I think all good people can agree that being nice and being respectful of people who aren't hurting others is a no-brainer.

Edit: Note that this comment is being downvoted to oblivion and illustrates my point.

>as the concepts around gender and neurodiversity spectrums

The concept that these people exist and they should be treated as people?

Again, it goes beyond that. Respecting a person and demanding people adopt certain beliefs[1] are two separate things.

And yes, these people exist and should obviously be treated with respect as people. that doesn't necessitate an alignment in beliefs, however.

1. Eg. what is a man/woman?

There's also a great deal of sanctimony attached in many cases, which is the thing people hate the most in my experience.

It reminds me of when I was getting breakfast with my wife one day, and there was a guy who had just come from some kind of feminist protest. He was wearing a shirt that said (paraphrasing) that the only two reasons to not call yourself a feminist are that you are unaware it just means "treat women like people", or that you're an asshole. He seemed genuinely unaware that the sanctimonious hostility his shirt expressed is a huge reason why people don't call themselves feminists.

"Woke" is like that. I'm quite certain that there are a lot of good people who really do just want to respect everyone. However, there are also a lot of petty jerks who are using an ostensibly good cause to bully people. Unfortunately for the former people, the latter people taint the movement and make it unattractive to those outside it.

I think even the people you would call the most woke hate mandatory DEI training. The idea is fine in theory, there's three main parts that seem to be common to them.

* Here's some genres of people you might not have interacted with in your personal life before that you might run into at work, and here's the broad strokes of how each of those groups would describe themselves and some cultural differences you might want to keep in mind.

* Here's a baby's first introduction to intersectionality and some situations where that lens might be relevant at work.

* Stop sexually harassing your coworkers, Jesus people.

But the implementation is unbelievably patronizing and presented with so much "sensitivity" that the overall experience is an hour of what feels like walking on eggshells. It's exhausting.

Agreed. But while pretty much everyone hates mandatory training, there's a large group of people who's beliefs align closely with that ideology. In other words, it's a real ideology, regardless of what one thinks about it.

My mental model here is to avoid labeling or lumping people into buckets and just forming opinions of them as an individual, for purely selfish reasons (not missing out on learning from that person).

From my perspective as a white person who grew up in very poor black and Latino communities, where we were often the only white family for several blocks, DEI training has been a super weird experience. I now live in an area where white is >90% of the population. I can't quite pin down why, but it feels really patronizing and disingenuous. I find myself often thinking about something that is taught in the training that my friends would find racist or offensive.

This is why I'd prefer they just stuck to kindness and respect. We're all flawed humans. That is our beauty.

I don’t know about “be nice” - Personally the expression I equate it with is “live and let live” (or maybe “quit being an asshole”)

It’s a reaction to discrimination. If there wasn’t racism and sexism and discrimination there would be no “wokeness”

So congrats righties, you got what you asked for

I don't understand this wokery-as-politeness argument. Politeness obviously has a place, but if you're trying to solve real social problems while also being unable to discuss the actual problem, because speaking frankly about it is impolite, then clearly is counter-productive if your goal is to solve actual social problems. As far as I can tell, wokery functions as a straight jacket on language that is designed to make only one solution to a given problem (generally the solution that blames white people) even sayable.

I don't think it is politeness, I think its a political power play to control language that sounds nice to first-order-thinking left wing types.

Western urban monoculture.

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