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Comment by oblio | Hacker News Reader

> "decolonizing" a curriculum or "centering" marginalized voices

Can you expand on this?

Those are just examples of academic/progressive jargon that I hear often in the Bay Area and in progressive circles. "Decolonizing," could mean for instance changing world history curriculum to cover non-western civilizations. "Centering" seems like maybe it just means focusing on, but there is a whole academic apparatus for designing curriculum around say, indigenous practices, and centering is the word used for that entire concept, which includes specific techniques.

I think to get the full meaning of both, you'd need to be fairly steeped in a world that uses those words all the time AND it is often used to identify people who "get it" from those who don't.

What you write is true but it is also a bit dishonest. You are culling the questionable ideas being signaled out of your explanation. Really no different from MAGA folks who claim Trump is playing 4D chess or people who defended Hans Reiser because he wrote a really great filesystem. People don't tend to believe things that they don't want to be true (even if they are). Specifically, the fact that people who use this jargon actively oppose meritocracy (and thus aren't actually liberals) but instead want a demographically based quota system for all jobs and positions. This is why they abuse statistics and reasoning so badly in their analysis.

If these people weren't able to influence local governmental policies, then it would be fine to leave out the details. However, they are and so leaving out the bad parts of the policies they push is just dishonest and why the other side's propaganda is working so well right now. The biggest problem with that is that it makes politics more extreme (in both directions) and this is generally bad for the rest of us. So next time, don't leave out the actual practical effects of this type of politics and its messaging.

There's a chance this comment is what the user would have described as an incoherent but outright attack.

The user was claiming they didn't really understand the terminology but seemed to be trying their best when asked of another user to elucidate. You led with calling them dishonest.

You then said they were functionally MAGA and brought up some presumably racist German dude that I suspect few of us know about. You then had a diatribe on some view that had never been brought up in this thread and are now somehow discussing local governmental policies and propaganda.

I have no clue what I just read or how it connects to the post they made. I've tried to read in best effort but as best I can tell you maybe responded to the wrong person.

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